The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear friends,

We will obtain a deeper view of the total human being if we go a little further into the matters we have been considering. In particular, we should see from such symptoms how important the transition is from health to illness. I therefore would like to speak further about something that lies between certain pathological trends that are developing in human evolution and a kind of natural initiation that constitutes another stream in human evolution. This phenomenon lies midway between the pathological tendencies of human nature and the stream of initiation; it relates as much to one as to the other.

Typical of such a path of development are such personalities as St. Teresa. One can observe much more than I described if one makes a study of some of these individuals. With them there is a kind of appearance of the spiritual world at the threshold of perception. Naturally this is difficult to describe, because the words one has to use to characterize these abnormal conditions do not have such meanings in our everyday speech. What appears at the threshold of perception is the first stage for such people and is called by them “entrance into the first dwelling place of God.” In the first stage this is perceived only as “a presence.” These people experience the presence of some spiritual being, but they have no precise vision of the being. If the experience comes to a definite conclusion, they have a clear feeling that the being was there with them. That is the first experience: an indefinite experience of a presence, of being together with some spiritual being. As long as they are in this stage of development, these people are even annoyed when someone else tells them of a vision, because these people think their own experience is much more inward, much more intimate, more genuine. This has been such a moving experience for them that they have the feeling: human beings are not allowed to see the super-sensible world, but I have been given this vague experience of its reality.

Then these people reach a second stage. They tell of actual, shaped perceptions of the spiritual beings that were present. First they tell of the feeling of being touched, of having spiritual hands laid upon them, even of their forehead being touched or something similar, without yet having any visual experience. Then the condition is raised to vision that is like optical perception. It can be so enhanced that they see Jesus, for instance, standing before them as a real person. That is the usual second stage. It is a peculiar fact that those advancing from the first to the second stage have only the vaguest feeling that earlier they had become angry when others told them of their own experiences in this second stage. Memory does not clearly connect the two stages. These people live very intensely in the respective single stages.

The third stage they experience is remarkable. Their description of it is highly colored in every detail. They tell how when it comes upon them they are seized by tremendous pain. And indeed it is obviously intense, for at these moments they can be heard groaning; other reactions can be observed such as occur with pain originating in the physical and etheric bodies. But the strange thing is that they want this pain. They want it because they regard it as natural that they should have it; they feel that they will only reach the subsequent experience properly if first they suffer this pain.

Then they reach the stage where they transform the pain within themselves. This is extraordinarily interesting, for actually the pain remains exactly the same, but now it is enhanced into a feeling of joy, of bliss. The pain comes, its objective condition is still there, but now the spiritual awareness goes further. If one were suddenly to pull such people out of their spiritual state, they would feel the pain as sick people feel pain—and indeed do so when they return from this highest stage of the experience. At this highest stage they no longer have the feeling that spiritual beings come to them, but that they themselves have risen into the spiritual world. At this stage the pain is transformed—one might say subjectively, but the expression is not quite exact—into a feeling of bliss. Then begins a symbolic objectifying of the pain. When they come out of this experience and have a memory of it (and in most cases there is a very clear memory of it afterward), then they describe how a seraph or a cherub stood beside them, and the seraph or cherub had a sword that he plunged into the their intestines, which caused excruciating pain. When the spiritual being pulled out the sword he pulled the intestines out too, and then there came immediately an experience of profound bliss in the presence of God.

As a rule these three stages follow in succession. We can understand them clearly through our anthroposophical knowledge. After the preparatory condition I have described, the first stage consists of the ego organization drawing the astral body to itself, so that they are united without penetrating the physical and etheric bodies as deeply as they normally would. Something, therefore, is happening for such persons that can never happen in ordinary consciousness: in half-waking or quarter-waking or three-quarters waking condition they have conscious experience in their ego organization and astral body, while at the same time experience in their etheric and physical bodies continues with a certain independence. Thus parallel experiences are there: a spiritual experience in the ego organization and astral body, and at the same time a separate experience of the etheric and physical bodies. This is never the case in normal consciousness: there, all four members of the human being are bound closely together. In normal consciousness there is no such thing as experiences of consciousness running parallel. In this experience I am describing, such people feel themselves, know themselves in the most eminent sense to be entirely united with what they are experiencing. They know this first of all, the inherent being-one-with the happening. When the astral body is drawn to the ego organization and experiences spiritual beings, these people experience them as simply a presence, as something that is there. They experience this as one experiences one's own body. One does not differentiate in the latter experience. One does not feel one's body as something outside: one feels it as part of oneself. That is the first stage: the experience of “a presence.”

Now let us go to the second stage. First, these people have all kinds of feelings of being touched. Naturally these can be confused very easily by ordinary pathology with familiar psychiatric symptoms, but they are not the same. Then they advance to actual visions. This is the stage where the ego organization and astral organization draw the etheric body out to be united with them. So again there is a parallel experience: the ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body are all raised somewhat out of the physical body; at the same time the physical body carries on its processes separately. Something special comes about through this situation. In ordinary life, when we see, we are stimulated by light from without and we receive the stimulus into ourselves. It goes as far as the etheric body, and the etheric body creates the conscious experience. That is how it is, for example, with the eyes. When you see, the external stimulation occurs first in the ego; then it penetrates the astral body and penetrates the etheric body. It is then the etheric body that communicates the whole conscious experience to you by pushing in every direction, in a certain sense, against the physical organization. The conscious experience lies in this pushing. That is the exact process. If presented in a diagram, it would look like the drawing below.

A stimulus is exerted. First it affects the ego, then it goes to the astral body, then to the etheric body; in the etheric body it pushes into the physical body in every direction, to all sides. The physical body pushes back, and the pushing back, the repulsion by the physical body, is your actual eye experience. It is a constant play between the etheric body and the choroid and retina. What the etheric body does in the choroid and in the retina is what appears to ordinary consciousness as optical experience. This happens similarly with every other sense perception. To anyone who understands these things, the entire explanation in today's psychology textbooks, or even in epistemology, is terribly childish.

But now, with such people as I am describing, the etheric body is seized directly in this experience. The experience sits in the ego, astral body, etheric body, and does not push out to the senses, but pushes from within to what is the nerve-sense system—pushes first, actually, into the glandular system, then into the nervous system, and finally from there streams into the senses. So the senses are taken hold of in a way that is just the opposite of the way it happens in ordinary life. Instead of the experience of consciousness being stimulated through the senses, it is colored, intensified, made vivid by the fact that it streams from within to the senses. That is how the feeling of being touched comes about in a sensation of the nerves: by the streaming from within outward. This is then raised to vision. Now you know the whole inner process.

If there is a further development, it proceeds in the following way: the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body take hold of the physical body from quite another direction than would normally be the case. The physical body is accustomed to being taken hold of from without, but now it is taken hold of from within. Now it is taken hold of in the midst of life—the very process that otherwise only happens when the human soul-spiritual entity comes down out of the soul-spiritual world into the physical body, three weeks after conception. This event cannot otherwise happen in ordinary life, because normally the etheric body is connected with the physical body. But in this case the etheric body has been raised out by the ego organization and taken hold of by the astral body. It is like birth, when the human being takes possession of a physical body, but now the procedure is more complicated, possessing this physical body from quite another direction. And that causes pain. For as a matter of fact, all pain—in cases of illness, too—consists of the fact that the body is grasped hold of from some other direction than the usual one. That is what happens at the moment when the third stage is reached.

Now you need not be surprised that this third stage is objectified. It penetrates the physical body and the physical body repels it. A physical body cannot be so seized except in regular initiation; in any other situation the physical body exerts opposition, and this causes pain. It pushes away in pain what it is experiencing. That is the first part of the experience of the third stage. The physical body exerts resistance and the resistance is experienced as pain. And what enters through the pain? The real spiritual world. It comes through the pain. The spiritual world comes from the other direction. Ordinary sense perception and ordinary thinking grasp hold of the physical world. The spiritual world is grasped in the opposite way. The way to it is through pain. The moment the physical body exerts resistance, intense pain is there. But the moment the pain is taken hold of by the spiritual world, the moment the spiritual world enters, the pain is transformed into ecstasy. It is really so. First there is pain in the organism; then the spiritual world penetrates the pain, streams through the pain: a cherub or seraph appears (this is what the imagination presents), the cherub plunges his sword in, draws it out, and draws the intestines out with it. This means that the person becomes independent of the physical body, of the ordinary connection to it. The person has no experience in the lower organs and is led beyond it to an experience of the spiritual world. The physical pain is transformed to bliss. Such people speak of the presence of God, or if they make distinctions, of the presence of the spiritual world.

This last stage is experienced by individuals who are strong enough in their etheric body to endure the entire happening. They have the foundation for it in their karma. For instance, think of St. Teresa. She had an earlier incarnation in which her soul became especially strong. She incarnates as St. Teresa. But before she incarnates in the physical body, she takes possession of her etheric body very forcefully, and this etheric body becomes inwardly stronger than is the case with the usual human being. She has brought it with her into this life, this etheric body that is inwardly strong. Then this strong etheric body leaves the physical body and unites itself firmly with the astral body and ego, which are also especially strong from an earlier incarnation. And that is why illnesses then appear, at least a certain variety of illness: because the etheric body is not staying in the physical organs and providing them with its nourishing, vitalizing forces. With the individuals I am describing, the moment they enter the third stage they become really ill. At the same time their strong etheric body enables them to overcome the illness as it is developing. The illness begins to develop and immediately an automatic therapy arises within them from the strong etheric body. The entire process is a latent illness and healing. This is one of the most interesting phenomena in the realm of human evolution.

Precisely in the case of St. Teresa you see in the final stage of her development a continual status nascendi of illness and the continual cure. This alternation, this wonderful swing of a pendulum between the beginning of illness and the caring of it, is not a natural happening in the physical world, for it is not brought about in the physical world: it takes place in the spiritual world. We know that the etheric body is formed before the earthly incarnation. And it is into that pre-earthly moment that such a person as St. Teresa returns. When the pathological condition starts, when it is in statu nascendi, she “swings” into the world where she was before birth, into the spiritual world. The pendulum swings between the physical body and the spiritual world. Spiritual world—physical world—spiritual world—physical world, but experiencing the physical world as an exact opposite—such as normally human beings only experience when they are just incarnating into it. This inner process of healing, this therapy coming from the cosmos, is so intense that its effect can spread to sick people who are in the neighborhood of such people, if their illness lies somewhat in the same direction. In fact, the most wonderful cures can take place around such a person.

Indeed the influence can extend much further. In the former, better days of the church, these things were used in a careful, esoteric way. Later this degenerated to a superstitious worship of relics and belief in magic. But it is a fact that in better times of religious evolution, vivid biographies of such individuals, including their own imaginative descriptions, were given to the faithful, so that they could live through the experiences of such people in their own imagination. And it could then happen that when thoughtful pastors had the opportunity, they would simply put such a biography into the hands of someone in ordinary life whose illness was going in a certain direction. Perhaps also they strengthened the effect by their own words, and this was able to start curative processes. Directing the sick individual's mind to the life of such a saint could have a therapeutic effect.

You can see that studies that go so deeply into the human being will always lead from health to illness, but also to states of super-sensible experience. If therefore you advise someone in some connection or other to do exercises to gain entrance into the super-sensible world, the exercises must be so oriented that they strengthen the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. Such a path as I described, given to individuals simply through their karma, will in fact take its course properly. What takes place in initiation itself can be learned by studying these processes, which border so closely on the pathological. Therefore it is not unimportant for physicians to take the time to study the lives of such people. Physicians will find in them what can only be called a paradox: the healthy counterpart of a complex of pathological symptoms that they are accustomed to meet here and there in everyday life. And for physicians, that is the most beneficial thing possible: to see the healthy counterpart of a pathological condition. That, more than anything else, will help physicians to make thoughtful, conscientious decisions about their therapy. Moreover if physicians have some knowledge of the substance that can be used as a remedy because of its affinity to certain etheric forces—forces that automatically become active in the self-healing of these abnormal individuals—they will know how St. Teresa's etheric body developed its forces when her illnesses appeared in statu nascendi. And if physicians learn to know the healing power to be found in the piercing activity of antimony, then they will have learned the right therapy from Nature herself.

I would like to point out that in examining such experiences as these, one encounters a remarkable paradox: one sees illness from another side. One sees illness being treated not by human beings but by spiritual beings. One kind of treatment is the kind human beings evolve: that is, treatment from the aspect of the earth. It consists of restoring the previous condition through some therapy that breaks up the illness. The spiritual beings that have to do with humanity treat illness differently. They weave an illness into the fabric of karma. That is their task—a task that doesn't pile things together as they are piled together here on earth by pathology. Here a seventeen-year-old who is ill is not always cured by forty-five. But with the way karma is formed, an illness in some incarnation, whether it is cured or not, may be woven into the human being's karma three thousand years later. Time is measured quite differently in the spiritual world. But one learns very much from those developments in which, from a spiritual point of view, something can happen in the spiritual world and then can also stream down into the physical world.

Take, for example, such a form of karma as I have been describing. Perhaps it is completely in the ordinary course of evolution in three thousand years. Let me show by this line (see drawing above) that something that happens to a person today is so shaped by spiritual beings that the other part belonging to it, the balance, the compensation, appears in three thousand years' time. That is the normal course. You see, in ordinary life people don't have a true knowledge of time. How do they think of it ordinarily? As a line running from past infinity through the present into the future. That is approximately how time is imagined—and indeed, the line has to be thick—perhaps not even a line, but a thick rope, because it contains everything that is perceived at any given moment in the whole world. That's the way people think of it if they think of it at all—and most people don't think of it at all. From a spiritual point of view time is not like that. And one finds little understanding for spiritual development—which, after all, is present in all physical evolution—when time is thought of in that conventional way. In reality, time is different. The line I drew on the board can be tangled up into a ball (see drawing). The entire line of time is in that ball. Three thousand years are in that ball. Time can be all tangled up; and if it is tangled up for some development or other in evolution, then the tangle can be found in the life of some individual. In the case of St. Teresa, a tangled ball of time was present in her earthly life. We come upon a true mystery—that things that in someone's karma would seem to be widely separate for some reason become entangled.

You see from such an example how a study of the inner spiritual, karmic development must link up with the external pathological and therapeutic inquiry. You can see how the pastoral care of some person by priests, who are basing their view of the person on the karmic connections, the spiritual aspects, can relate to what is seen from a medical view alone. For a comprehension of these things requires not only theoretical knowledge but really living into the things. Physicians must live into them on the pathological, physiological side that opens up for them. Priests must live into them in the theological and karmic views that open up for them. And the harmony will come from their working together out of these two different fields, not from interfering in each other's field in a dilettantish fashion. This must be stressed again and again.

You must still see something else that is connected with these things, particularly in our epoch. You know how distasteful it is to some people to accept the idea of free will even though it is perfectly obvious to an unbiased person. The philosophers deny its reality because their intellect can't make a connection with it. I said just now in regard to sense perceptions that the explanations in physiology and psychology textbooks are absolutely childish to someone who understands these things. But the chatter over free will is far worse. For you must remember: a decision of free will is at every moment an act of the whole human being—the whole human being—no matter how they appear in this impulse: healthy or ill or half ill or abnormally healthy. The whole human being is involved in an impulse of free will—and, all that can be known of the whole human being, all the complications. One only learns to know human nature when one learns to know it with all its complications. And please notice, something that in an abnormal person shows too strong a color in one or another direction is neutralized, harmonized in the ordinary human being. There's a trivial expression, but it's true: A cherub can make friends with you, but the devil can too. And those processes where the devil can squeeze in—we're going to study them too! This is all to be found in the ordinary human being, but opposing forces are neutralized, because they develop equally strongly in every direction. If there's an angel in every human, there's also a devil. But when the angel and the devil are equally strong, they neutralize each other.

Now take a look at these scales (see drawing). There is one spot, one point right here. You can lay weights there or there and then you have put the scales into movement. But this spot always remains still. It has a name: the hypomochlion. It is not affected by what you lay on the scale at the left, or what you lay on the scale at the right. Of course, the scales must be built so that this spot will not need to be disturbed. Now in the human being a similar spiritual hypomochlion is created by the opposing forces. Therefore you can study human nature and you will never be able to call human beings free, for by their very nature they are causally conditioned in all respects.

If you study the nature of human beings from the viewpoint of materialism, you do not come to the idea of freedom. You come to causal conditioning. If you study human beings from a spiritual viewpoint, you come to the determination of the will by God or by spiritual beings; you do not come to free will. You can be a blockhead of a materialist and deny freedom and do research on the natural causality of the will. Or you can be a sophisticated person like Leibnitz and gaze out at a spiritual universe—and you come to determinism. Naturally, as long as you are considering the scale at this left end of the beam, you have to reckon with movement; so long as you are considering the scale at this right end of the beam, again you have to reckon with movement. And it is the same with human beings: whether you consider them from the point of view of nature or from the point of view of spirit, you do not come to freedom. Freedom lies in the middle at the point of balance between them.

That's theory, of course! In practice you have to decide when people come to you with difficult life situations whether you can make them responsible for their actions. Now this becomes a practical question: whether they can or cannot exercise free will. How are you going to decide this? You decide by judging whether their spiritual and physical constitutions are in balance. And in this the physicians and the priests are equally involved. Therefore both physicians and priests must be trained to understand the conditions under which a person is either in balance or not in balance between spirit and nature.

Whether an individual has this sense of responsibility can only be decided out of a deep knowledge of human nature. The problem of freedom in connection with responsibility is one of the deepest problems imaginable.

Let us continue tomorrow. We will see what from one side leads to health and from the other side leads to pathological conditions.

Dear friends,

Today I would like to insert into our studies a chapter of anthroposophy that we need for our examination of healthy responsibility and pathological irresponsibility as the physician and the priest must know them.

First of all it is important that we look into the question: What is really inherited by a human being? What is not inherited and must come to the human being in some other way? In evaluating healthy and sick individuals, a great deal depends upon whether one can differentiate between these two ingredients. Human beings come out of the spiritual, super-sensible worlds into the sense world: that means, they combine what is given them by heredity with what they bring from earlier earth lives and from life between death and the new birth. Then we see how they develop as a children, from day to day, from week to week. But if one does not perceive that they are four-membered beings, with physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization, one is not in a position to understand their development, for one does not see what part each member is playing in this development. They have different origins; they come from different worlds.

First, human beings have their physical organism. The most striking phenomenon in the physical organism is that in the first period of life they have what we call “first teeth,” which last until the time we call “change of teeth.” The teeth are only the most obvious thing that is changed at this time. For the fact is that human beings only keep the physical substance they received at birth until the change of teeth. They are constantly stripping that physical material from their form.

The process is, of course, more complicated than is implied in the brief statement that in the course of every seven or eight years a person pushes off all physical substance and replaces it. The truth is near to that, but one need only look at the change of teeth itself to realize that this picture must be modified somewhat. For if this abstract assertion were correct, we would have new teeth every seven years. We get new teeth only once. The teeth are changed once and do not undergo any other renewal. They belong in this category in the most extreme sense. As a matter of fact, the course of human life is such that the older one becomes, the more one retains of old physical substance. A replacement of by far the greatest part of the substance does indeed take place in seven- to eight-year periods; but we must distinguish what remains behind. At the seventh year it is only the adult teeth that remain. After each subsequent period there remain also certain parts of the substance that are not replaced, although the greater part is indeed replaced in the course of seven or eight years. Thus a basic statement can be made for the first seven years. Human beings strip away all the physical substance they had when they were born, keeping none of it, keeping only the forces that have lived and worked in it during those years. These forces have so appropriated the fresh new substance that was constantly being aquired that at seven the physical body has been completely renewed, even to the teeth. And from that statement the understanding must follow that the principle of heredity as our current natural science conceives of it really holds good only for the first seven years of life. Only for those first seven years is it true that a person's characteristics come from parents and grandparents. The physical body of those first seven years provides, in a certain sense, a kind of model from which the artist working in the human being (who consists now in these years of etheric body, astral body, and ego) fashions a new physical body. We see how what we bring down from spiritual worlds—our individuality, our own being—and what we receive from heredity work together in artistic reciprocal activity. If a human being is an inwardly strong individual and brings an intensely strong inner astrality and ego nature, which in turn makes the etheric body strong, then we will see a young person shooting up who from inner strength keeps very little to the model, only copies it for the general form. Naturally, the universal human model must be preserved, and therefore an affinity is already there for the inherited human form; features of it definitely remain beyond the change of teeth. Still, to thoughtful observation it will be apparent that in the case of inwardly strong individuals important changes come after the change of teeth because such individuals follow only slightly the model they inherited.

If we investigate such an individual as St. Teresa, we find that these particularly strong individualities resemble their parents very closely in the first seven years, but then in the ninth and tenth years they develop in surprising ways. Then the real individual is emerging. In the strongest sense of the word, heredity only holds good for the first life period. What seems to appear later as heredity is not really heredity but must be recognized as a copy of the inherited model. The copy may be more or less exact; even so, it is not heredity; it is a copy of the inherited characteristics. The ordinary natural scientist considers this to be simply the principle of heredity carried further. But someone who really studies the nature of humanity will perceive that there is a complete qualitative difference between the resemblance to parents before the change of teeth and the resemblance after the change of teeth. Before, the forces of heredity are active. After, the forces that copy the model are active. To be exact, one can no more say that a human being has inherited what is carried between change of teeth and puberty than one can say of an artist copying the Sistine Madonna in the Dresden Gallery that the painting has caught the qualities of the Madonna through heredity!

You can see the particular kind of work the etheric body has to do. For in the years up to the change of teeth, the astral body and ego organization participate very little. The etheric body forms a new physical human body in accordance with the model. Why? Because, like the child during the first seven years, it is not yet able to receive other than a very special kind of impression from the outer world. Here we come upon an important secret of human evolution, a secret that answers the question: What does a child really perceive? The answer lies far away from present-day ideas.

We live, shall we say, between death and a new birth (or conception) in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world we are surrounded by realities very different from those found here in the physical world. We come out of that world into the physical world and continue our life in a physical body that we receive. Now in this physical world the same forces work further, although they are hidden from human sense perception. If you look at a tree, the same spiritual forces are working in it as those you encounter between death and new birth, only they are covered over, veiled, by the physical material of the tree. Everywhere in the physical world in which we live between birth and death, spiritual forces are active behind the sense-perceptible physical entities. We can think of the activities of the spiritual world continuing into this world in which we live between birth and death.

Now in the first seven years of life the child's whole being cannot unite with anything except this spiritual reality in all the colors, all the forms, all warmth, all cold. The child is fully aware when entering this physical world of the continuing spiritual activity. This awareness gradually diminishes up to the change of teeth. A sense impression is quite different to a child than to an adult. This fact is never recognized. To a child the sense impression is something entirely spiritual. For this reason if a child's father has a fit of anger, the child is not conscious of the angry gestures but of the moral state behind the gestures. It is this that passes into the child's body. During this time, therefore, the child is working with the forces that build a physical body in accordance with the child's own model—the body that will now be the child's own—and during this time is turned entirely toward spiritual foundations and works out of spiritual forces.

What does that mean? What is really working when spiritual forces are working? Obviously colors, forms, warmth, cold, roughness, smoothness work upon the sense perceptions. But behind all that, what is the fundamental force that is working? In reality, whatever has to do with an ego nature. Only invisible spiritual beings make an impression on the child, beings who have something to do with an ego nature, above all, beings of the spiritual hierarchies higher than human beings, but also the animal group-souls, and the group-souls of the elemental beings. In reality, all this is working upon the child. And out of these spiritual forces, out of these mighty spiritual dynamics the child forms a second body from the original model. It grows and is finally present as a complete second body when the change of teeth takes place. This is the body that the human being has built for itself since birth, the first body that is it's very own, a physical body built out of the spiritual world.

Thus we have in this first life period very special laws working within all that activates the child, in all the awkwardness and uncertainty that are in the soul and with which it moves. They come from the fact that constant adjustment is having to be made to the physical world, since the child is still dreamily and half-consciously immersed in the other surrounding world: the spiritual world. Someday when medicine reaches a proper spiritual outlook, this interplay between the spiritual and physical worlds during the first seven years of life will be seen as the true cause of the so-called “children's diseases.” Then we will have the explanation for a problem that today is solved in the medical books by empty words and formal elucidations that do not lead to any reality.

The etheric body has a great deal to do in these first seven years of life. It works quietly and steadily to develop the faculties that it will possess in the second seven-year period: independent faculties of memory leading toward the intellect. Whoever has an eye for it can see the greatest transformation in the child's soul-life when the first life period goes over into the second. The etheric body is now relieved of the work it had to accomplish—in the full sense of the word—to build the second body. It is relieved, freed. How it is freed, one can only realize if one perceives that at fourteen years not only the teeth remain but still more that had to be renewed, like the teeth, in the first life period. This now remains in the physical-material substance. What remains frees the etheric body—itself becomes free in the etheric body. Quantitatively it is a small thing, but qualitatively it is something of tremendous importance. It is what now becomes tremendously active as soul attributes, soul characteristics. What the human being saves by not having to create a third set of teeth (and much else that is taken care of by evolution in the same way as the teeth) enables something of the etheric body to be “left over.” What flowed during the first seven years into the physical development and is now “left over” from the physical development works now purely in the realm of soul, its nature depending upon the individual. With the faculties upon which you call as a teacher in school, the faculties you train, the child accomplished the great change from milk teeth to second teeth, and much else. With the forces that are saved by not having to form a third set of teeth, the child begins to develop soul faculties. This takes place in the depths of human nature. During the first seven years these soul forces had been entirely embedded in the physical development. We have to comprehend physical development as a soul-spiritual activity just as much as a physical activity. We see a spiritual entity active in the body in the first seven years of the human being, in the fullest sense of the word.

How does this relate to general human evolution? Those forces with which the human soul works in the first seven years of life are in the cosmos; they are sun forces. It is not only physical-etheric rays that stream down from the sun: in those physical-etheric sun rays, forces are streaming down from the sun that are identical with the forces by which our etheric body renews our physical body in the first seven years of life. It is the Sun Being (Sonnenentität) that works there. Look at the child—how the child works at a second physical body, copying from the model! The child is absorbing pure forces from the sunshine. One must understand that—how humanity stands within the cosmos! And when the child has certain etheric forces released at the change of teeth, they then work back upon the astral organization and ego organization. Then in the second life period human beings have access to what could not reach them at all in the first period. They now have access to the moon forces.

The etheric forces in the first seven years of life are sun forces. At the change of teeth we have access to the moon forces; these are identical with the forces of our astral body. Thus at the change of teeth human beings move from the sun sphere—in which, however, we also still remain, for it remains active in us—into the moon sphere. And now between change of teeth and puberty we work on ourselves with the moon forces. With the moon forces we now build our second own body (the third earthly body), in which not so much is replaced as in the first life period, but even so a great deal. Again forces remain behind, but they are now of an astral nature, and they are now transforming the soul. They were freed from their work on the body when we reached puberty. We have now reached a period in which we manifest certain forces that are now free in the soul, forces that had to work in the physical body between the ages of seven and fourteen.

So we work entirely in the first life period with what comes to us from the sun. And with the school child between change of teeth and puberty, it is sun forces that have now become free for soul activity. That is the great powerful fact we find in human evolution, that if one is educating a child's soul between change of teeth and puberty, one has to do purely with sun forces. The child-soul is so intimately related to what lives in the sunshine! One's heart can rejoice in such knowledge. The knowledge really sheds light on the relation between humanity and cosmos.

Moon forces are active in this second life period in the bodily development; they are not yet freed for the soul-life. They become free at puberty, and then they join the work on the soul. The change that takes place in the soul-life at puberty is caused by the fact that moon forces are now impressing themselves into the soul-life. So what a young person does in all kinds of behavior after the onset of puberty is a working together of sun and moon forces.

Thus we see into the depths of human evolution. We will stay clear of speaking of heredity in the crude sense in which natural science speaks of it. We will look in the opposite direction, to see what lives in the human activity of the child. It is the sun that lives in all the human activity of the child, and in the child's human thinking.

It is the sun that streams to us from the stone—for a stone has no light of its own, it can only reflect the sun's light to us. The natural researcher grants you that fact—but that is the very smallest, the most abstract detail! The child also reflects the sun forces back to us, between the seventh and fourteenth years. Just as we can designate the light reflected from the stone as sunlight streamed back to us, so we can designate what the child does in the second life period as “sun.” Sun is not merely there where it seems to be concentrated. This physical notion, that the sun is only there is like the notion of someone who looks at the soup in a soup bowl and sees a blob of fat floating on the top of it and thinks that the blob of fat is the soup.

Yes, our physical ideas are often very childish, and if one uncovers them and shows them for what they are, then people laugh. One could wish there were the same reaction to much that is happening today in the name of science, because it is pretty laughable. When someone takes the blob of fat to be the soup itself, that's the same as when that gold ball up there above us is regarded as the entire sun. In reality the sun fills the whole world.

Now let us look into the connection between the moon forces and the forces of reproduction. The forces of reproduction now gradually form the child's own second body that is built up between the seventh and fourteenth years and is finished when puberty begins. The human being takes in the reproductive forces during this time; this is plainly moon activity. These forces relate entirely to moon activity. They are the result of moon activity.

And now we reach the life period in which we must form our own third body (the fourth when counted from an external view), the time from puberty to the beginning of the twenties. The division of time in the later years is no longer so exact as the time between change of teeth and puberty. Now there is always more physical substance remaining behind; it stays fixed in the human being, it becomes permanent structure. Gradually a great deal of permanent structure accumulates. The older a person becomes, the less material is stripped away from the bones and replaced. Also in the rest of the organism certain parts need a longer time to separate off. And one can see a simple fact in connection with the teeth: that once one has got one's second set of teeth, whether one still has them later depends upon how long they last—just as with a knife, one only has it as long as it lasts. The knife can't renew itself. Teeth can't renew themselves either, really.

Obviously everything is in flow: there is renewal in the first place, but then it goes over into the state of nonrenewal. The teeth maintain their life process at a much slower tempo than the rest of the organism, so far as intensity is concerned. But therefore in reverse, the tempo is faster so far as quality is concerned, for they actually become bad before the other parts of the organism—for the reason that the other parts can always renew themselves. If the teeth were subject to the same laws as many other parts of the human organism, there wouldn't have to be any dentists. On the other hand, if the other parts of the organism were subject to the same laws as the teeth, we would all die young in this modern civilization of ours.

But now to go on. We are active in our organism in the first seven years of life with the forces of the sun, in the second seven years with the forces of the moon. In this second period the sun forces remain and the moon forces combine with them. In the third seven-year period, from puberty into the twenties, much more delicate forces are taken in, coming from the other planets. These other planetary forces appear in the human growth process, and because they work much less strongly than the sun or moon, their influence is outwardly much less visible. They had been working in the body between the fourteenth and the twenty-first years. Now at twenty-one, although it is hardly noticeable, they begin to work in the area of soul and spirit. Whoever has insight can see this remarkable change. Up to that moment only sun and moon have spoken out of human deeds. Now planetary forces modify that sun and moon activity. Actually people's coarse methods of observation afford very little capacity for grasping this change. But it is there.

Knowledge of these connections is necessary for someone concerned with the human being in health and in illness. For what do we really know of a human being, shall we say in the eleventh or twelfth year, if we don't know that the moon forces are working there? After that period, even though there are continually fewer parts to be renewed, the person must still renew them. Up to the twenty-first or twenty-second year, the sun, moon, and planets are working in succession into human growth. Then from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the constellations of the fixed stars work. To be sure, this escapes ordinary observation. Only mystery wisdom tells of the entire zodiac playing into the human being between the beginning and the end of the twenties. Then the world becomes severe. It no longer wants to work into a person; it becomes harsh. Of this strange new relation of the human being to the world in the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth year—that the world hardens toward us—of this, today's science hardly knows anything. Aristotle taught it to Alexander when he told him that we push against the crystal heaven and find it hard. Thus “the crystal heaven,” beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, acquires meaning for human comprehension. And one begins to realize that when we come to the end of our twenties, we find no more forces in the cosmos for our own renewal. Why do we not die, then, at twenty-eight years? Well, the surrounding world does in fact let us die at twenty-eight. It is true. Whoever sees humanity's relation to the world, whoever looks consciously out into the world, must say, “O world, in reality you sustain me only until my twenty-eighth year!” Only when one realizes this does one finally begin to understand the real nature of the human being.

For now what happens when the world withdraws its formative forces—forces that previously we had always been free to use to build ourself up? At this remarkable moment, when in the twenty-eighth year we begin to show clearly that the earlier forces of growth are now completely gone, some people begin to die off. Some hold on a little longer to the forces of growth that are flowing away. But even Goethe had grown smaller when he measured himself carefully. This was when he began to work again on the second part of Faust. Earlier he had already begun to fade. From the moment when the world deserts us, we have to manage our renewal ourselves, out of forces we have received up to that moment. Certainly when the parts of our organism that can be renewed are becoming fewer and fewer, we cannot work to give ourselves a new body in the same glorious measure that children use up to the change of teeth, when they are forming their first very own body from the model. But we have collected many, many forces from sun and moon and stars which we are carrying within us and which we need when at twenty-eight we have to begin to renew our physical-material body ourselves. This is the moment in earth-life when we find that we are now given complete responsibility for our human form. This moment of our life when we are put entirely on our own is the point of time toward which we have been striving, and from which we must go on. (Plate III, middle) We strive from childhood when we are receiving many cosmic forces, strive more and more toward a point lying at the end of our twenties, when we no longer build our growth out of cosmic forces. Whatever we do after that moment, we do from forces out of our own body. In the middle is the point at which we stop working with cosmic forces and begin to develop forces out of our own body.

We often find a premature activity happening in some child from forces out of the child's own body. We become aware of it from certain pathological symptoms the child shows from the bones, for instance, becoming brittle, and particularly from becoming fat. But the connection between these things is not easily seen. In every moment of life a person is either striving toward this twenty-eighth-year point or away from it. You must realize that it is a kind of zero point, a kind of hypomochlion, a zero moment in time when we stand between ourselves and the world. Always in our inner dynamics we are striving toward it or from it. Whatever is happening in us is a striving toward a zero or away from a zero, something we do toward or away from nothingness. We are striving toward the point where the world is no longer active and we are not yet active. Between the two conditions is a kind of zero. There is something in us that is oriented toward nothingness. It is this that makes us free beings; that is why we can hold responsibility. It is rooted in the human constitution that we are responsible free beings, because at the moment of transfer from the world to ourselves we go through a point of zero. Just as the beam of a pair of scales goes through a point of zero from right to left, from left to right, and that point does not follow the laws to which the rest of the scales is subject. You can think when you have a pair of scales, (Plate III, right) here the mechanical laws you have learned are in force; this gives the scales an exact form—either this above and that below or the opposite. That is the law of scales, the law of leverage. You can carry the scales around; their relation remains the same everywhere, subject always to those mechanical laws wherever you take them—except at this point. This point is free. You can carry the point around as if it were not connected to a pair of scales: the scales remain unchanged. And so it is, when you take hold of yourself in your soul experiences at that point toward which first you strive, from which afterward you strive away: first the world is active, afterward you yourself, and here nothing is active. With the tendency toward and the tendency from, here where a hypomochlion sits, here can live freely that human capacity which is determined neither by nature nor by the world. Here is the point of origin of human freedom. Here is where responsibility is born.

If, therefore, one wants to be able to judge the degree of responsibility in, for instance, a person thirty-five years old—and I mean professionally, not merely a layman's opinion, or that of a dilettante—then one must ask oneself, has too much, perhaps, worked over from this person's abnormal development up to the point at the end of the twenties? Is the point moved more toward youth or more toward age? A person is properly responsible if the point is normal, if judging the whole individual from external life one can decide that the point is normal. If it lies too far back toward youth—that is, if the world ceased too soon to give its forces to some person—one may perhaps find that the person suffers easily, even though to a small degree, from compulsive ideas. The soul is becoming rigid and cannot be held fully accountable for its deeds.

If the point comes late, the question will be whether that person is hindered by his or her inner nature from developing complete freedom of soul and is too rigid physically, and for that reason cannot be held fully responsible. The physician and the priest are the ones who are competent to form this judgment, in the finest sense of the word. They will know that they can judge pretty accurately from people's appearance what their development has been, whether they are in balance, whether their life-hypomochlion is at the right spot, that is, at the right point of time, or is too early or too late. We will discuss physical appearance later, for even an intensive study of physiognomy belongs to pastoral medicine.

These are things that in the old mystery wisdom were regarded as very important for judgments of human life. They are things that have been forgotten and that must be brought again into our knowledge of the human being if that knowledge is to have any beneficial influence, if it is to be active in the right sense in medical and pastoral activity.

More about this tomorrow.

Dear friends,

We must now go on from the knowledge we have gained in one direction, of individuals who, although not exactly having intuition, do develop a perception of the spiritual world and who show certain aspects of behavior that to a physician may seem to be pathological but are in fact something quite different, something more. For as you have seen, the pathological condition remains with them in statu nascendi and there is continuous healing coming from the spirit. This is the case with such personalities as St. Teresa and Mechthild of Magdeburg,⁵ as well as with male visionaries.

When we study these individuals, we find that as a first stage the ego organization separates from the rest of the human organism. It then draws the astral body closely to it, in a certain sense away from the physical-etheric organism. This is in the waking state. What is the consequence of this? You can easily see that this puts the individual into a kind of dream condition. From a spiritual-scientific point of view the ego, by drawing the astral body to itself, is not allowing it to enter the physical and etheric bodies completely, and this brings about a kind of dream condition. But because of the special karmic density, both ego and astral body are strong, and they bring into the dream condition receptivity for the perception of the spiritual world. Dream is transformed into a state in which the individual is really able to see into the spiritual world and to feel the presence of spiritual beings.

Now let us look at the extreme opposite condition. Here the ego is weak, and the astral body draws it down too strongly into the rest of the organism—again in the waking state. Then there is not illumination, as with visionaries like St. Teresa, but the opposite: a darkening, a clouding, a lowering of consciousness—in the waking state—to a dream condition.

One cannot learn to know this second type of person in the way I have indicated for the first type. Individuals who feel the presence of spiritual beings, who come to such final stages as St. Teresa or Mechthild of Magdeburg, are much more numerous than one would think. One learns to know them if one has some particular opportunity or if one has cultivated the corresponding faculties. One learns to know them best by letting them tell about their conditions. They talk more interestingly than our ordinary contemporaries. Their narratives are much more interesting; above all, they speak of things one does not encounter in everyday life. So they are already interesting in the first stage.

The opposite individuals, those whose astral body is drawing the ego down, are also interesting if one lets them talk about themselves. To understand the first type of person requires the soul depth of the priest. To understand this second type of person—who often is even more interesting than the usual visionaries, who do not develop very far—really requires the sensitivity of a physician who comprehends the world with a good intelligence and a fair amount of intuition. For it is a matter of understanding what they do not tell one: what they do tell one is of little value. It is a matter of grasping what they say or do in such a way that one can think of it in relation to the human organism. Such persons, if one asks them a question, show a certain amount of stupidity, also unwillingness to answer a question. They begin to talk about something quite foreign to what one is asking. But if one catches hold of what they say about themselves—and some of them talk endlessly—one sometimes has the feeling that they possess an inner source of speech that gives them a special association of ideas such as the ordinary person does not have. They'll tell you if you let them ramble on—you mustn't ask questions, you must just snap up what they tell as it were by chance—For example a man might say: “Sure, ten years ago I was in a farmer's house and the wife gave me some coffee. The cup had red roses painted on it. She couldn't give me the coffee right away because she'd forgotten the sugar was in the kitchen and she had to go and get it. And she forgot the milk. She had to get the milk from down in the cellar. And then she poured almost half a cup of milk into the coffee. And she said, ‘My coffee is very good.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I think so too, farmer lady.’” And so he goes on and on. He tells incidents from far in his past, and goes into the most unbelievable details. You think, “If I only had a memory as good as his!”—forgetting that if you did have as good a memory you would be just like him! Now of course I'm telling it this way to portray a type, and to show a typical outcome. You must then think of the corresponding lighter variations that you meet in life, which the physician especially meets. I'm picturing an extreme case so that you can see the chief characteristics.

So when the astral body draws the ego organization in, there comes about a kind of power for reproducing details of memory as though automatically. It is always ready to repeat them; it is indifferent to logical connections and just tells things one after another. As a result one can't help wondering why the person hits upon one thing at one moment and another thing at the next. His tale can go on like this, for instance: “The farmer lady went to get the milk and while she was gone I looked in the corner of the room and there was a Madonna picture and it was the same one I'd seen thirty years earlier in another place but there I didn't have coffee but a very good soup.” It can happen that he comes entirely away from the first part of his narrative, but it can also happen that he returns to it again. One sees that this is not a logical memory but a space-and-time memory, extraordinarily exact, with a compulsive desire to tell everything. It is a memory in which, when one studies it more closely, one sees something very remarkable—one sees its deeper foundation. One notices that the person enjoys the sound of certain words he had associated with certain events while he was experiencing the events themselves, and now he takes pleasure in sounding these words again. He is in fact going back to speech that was kept in his memory while thoughts were pushed out—not completely, but almost so.

One also notices changes in the sphere of the will. To these one must pay attention, for now the beginning of real pathological conditions can be found. One will encounter the following—again, one must pay attention, for nothing much can be acclomplished if, for instance, one approaches such people to do this or that in order to observe them. For they become amazingly stubborn, they don't want to cooperate, won't answer questions, won't do anything. But if one can obtain an earlier case history and put those things together with what can be learned from the person's neighbors or a similar source, then one discovers, for instance, that such a person feels a terrific impulse at a definite time of the year to go wandering off somewhere. Often it is to the same region each year. And this inner impulse of will works so strongly that if one tries at such a moment to counteract it, just to discover what state the person is in, one can, for instance, notice the following.

Take a gourmand (there are gourmands even among such people as these!). Catch up with him while he is wandering and sit him down to a wonderful meal or two—to what gives him his greatest joy in life. You'll find that he will only stay put the first day, possibly a second day if he is still a good distance from the place he is heading for. He becomes restless, for he would love another fine meal, and he knows that the next place he'll reach has frightful food. He knows that, for his memory is unusually well developed. He becomes anxious. He wants to go on, for he cannot adapt his will to sudden external suggestions. Just as on the one hand he cannot adapt himself to immediate sense impressions but brings out every possible gem from his speech coffers, so on the other hand he cannot adapt himself to the necessity of surrendering his will-limb system to life's external circumstances. He wants just to follow his own will-impulses, which drive him from within in a very definite manner. One sees that he has almost completely lost the faculty of the ego organization that unites a human being with the outer world. His senses are dulled; his will-impulses prevent him from having a normal relation to the world, and he wants only to follow these will-impulses. This is the consequence of the ego being drawn down into the astral body.

So you see, such people could be helped very much if our medical understanding and the loving devotion of the theologians would work together—not, however, by some instant therapy, but in the following way. With these people one can observe a very definite situation. First we have to consider their life between the change of teeth and puberty. In that period, from a superficial point of view usually nothing abnormal is to be noticed. Everyone loves to see how clever these children are, how frightfully clever, what clever answers they can give, “just like an adult!” But one should be alert to this clever answering between the seventh and the fourteenth year. The children who are so excessively clever at this age are receiving something in this period before puberty that they should only have for their development after puberty. That is how the condition that I have just been describing comes about. The astral body should only be drawing the ego down after puberty, so that then the ego can completely unfold by the beginning of the twenties. With these children the astral body has already drawn the ego down after the change of teeth or in the ninth, tenth, eleventh year. We observe the abnormal cleverness and are delighted by it. By the time the late teens come, the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth years, the ego is stuck too deeply in the astral body. Then the condition is present that I have described, along with the symptoms that I indicated. So now if a child worries us in those early years by premature cleverness, it is a matter of giving certain kinds of treatment. First of all, there will be situations where physician and priest will have to confer with the teacher, so that the teacher will realize what should be done for that early life period. When we have finished this general characterization, we will make several detailed suggestions of what can actually be done. But first I'd like to carry this further, to indicate certain clear connections between the various themes we've been discussing.

Now the following can happen: the etheric body on its part can draw the astral body and ego in too strongly, so that they snap to an excessive degree into the physical and etheric bodies—again in the waking state. Then we have the situation that, seen from within, there is too much astrality in the organs; it cannot unite properly with them. This condition is the pathological mirror-picture of a visionary state such as, for instance, that of St. Teresa, such as her “first stage” as I described it, when she felt the presence of spiritual beings. We had there the bringing of waking-sleep into clear consciousness. And now in such persons as I am describing we have the opposite: dreams are carried over into waking life, with the accompanying symptoms I have mentioned. For it really happens in waking life: dreams do not appear, but an active “dream” life that discloses itself in the kind of speech I described, and in that extreme turning inward of the will impulses. That is the pathological mirror-picture of ordinary dreaming. Activity is there instead of the passivity that is the normal condition of dreaming.

Then we have the second stage, the drawing down of the ego and astral organization by the etheric body. The individual snaps too strongly with the ego, astral body, and etheric body into the physical organism, and the physical organism is not able to receive them into its single organs. Every possible organ has excess astrality that could not unite properly with the organ. Now we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we learned was the second stage for the individuals in whom sense impressions were in a certain sense stimulated from within. The direction was from within out to the senses. Now in this mirror-picture the direction is the opposite: it goes inward to the organs, it takes hold of the physical organism. And conditions appear that always appear when a physical or etheric organ is flooded by the astral body and ego organization and they cannot unite so that it could be called a proper saturation of the physical body by the etheric and astral bodies. Something is left over in the physical organs from the higher members of the organism. What in the other type of individuals poured into visions similar to a sense perception, with colors like a sense perception, visions that revealed the spiritual world, is in this case pouring itself inward, wanting to seize a physical organ. In the former situation there was a reaching out more externally, to the spiritual world beyond the sense world. In this case there is a reaching inward to a physical organ, manifesting in so-called “seizures,” all the different forms of real epilepsy or epileptoid symptoms (“temporal lobe seizures”). It can be explained as the snapping down of the ego and astral organization too strongly into the physical organism, which then succeeds in drawing the etheric body to itself. We see how the first condition advances to this second condition.

Hereby we see something in modern life that could be prevented if a real pastoral medicine would come about. People do not realize that the first condition is pathological; they simply find it interesting. And they only become aware of the second condition when seizures or other epileptic symptoms appear. The memory is now no longer expanding into detail, and the inner will-impulses are no longer increasing: now, since the astral and ego organizations are being pulled inward, and therefore the astral organization is failing to relate properly to certain organs, we find the memory is extinguished. Instead of the memory clinging to details as in the previous condition (details with no logical relation, that were just a running stream of unassociated pictures), now we find the memory disrupted, collapsed, a memory with gaps in it. This can become so extreme that the person lives in a kind of double consciousness. For instance, the memory clings to the upper organs—for the whole human being participates in memory—it takes hold of the upper organs, deserting the lower organs. Then this is reversed: the upper organs lose the memory activity and the lower organs receive it again. There is a rhythmic alteration. Such things can happen. And so these people have two streams of consciousness flowing parallel to each other. In one stream they remember everything that occurs when they are in the one condition; in the other stream they remember all the other things. And they never know in one condition of consciousness any of the content of the other condition of consciousness. Thus the memory deteriorates to a pathological level.

There we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we found in the second stage of the saint. Let us use that term, for modern medicine has no word for such a thing. Saints have a world around them that is visionary but that has a spiritual content. They reach into the spiritual world and receive inner impressions of it. People with pathological conditions—because their karma has given them a weak personality—are drawn down into the physical body. Instead of receiving visions of spiritual things they have epileptic conditions, empty gaps in consciousness, a lack of coherence in daily waking life, and so forth.

But now there can be still a third stage. This is the stage at which for karmic reasons the physical body has become even weaker, along with all the other members, so that earlier karmic forces no longer operate sufficiently in the physical body. With such a person it now comes about, not that ego, astral, and etheric body are pulled in by the physical body, but that something quite different happens. I shall have to describe it in the following way.

Think how it is with those who are extremely sensitive in the other direction, in the direction of the senses, that is, in the direction of the ego organization. How painfully sensitive they can be to all that flows in through the senses, to strong colors, lively sounds. Now precisely the opposite is the case with those whose physical body is weak from karmic causes. Such people are not hypersensitive from within outward, but are insensitive to their physical body and yield to an excessive degree to everything from the other side, the side of the will, that is, from the outer physical world. They succumb to heaviness, warmth, cold. All of this affects them not as it normally affects organic beings, but as it affects inorganic things. This then stifles the expression of the astral body and ego. They are hemmed in by the world and because of a weak physical body they cannot confront it with the necessary intensity; they are like a piece of the outer world although they are still inside their physical body. This is clearly the exact opposite of what we described as the third stage for the saint. The saint goes through pain that is then transformed into bliss, and then further to an experience of the spiritual world in its pure spirituality. This is called “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.”

But people who develop in the way I am now describing do not come to “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.” They come, although they are not conscious of it, to rest in the hidden occult forces of the physical world, forces against which they, as human beings, should actually be maintaining their independence. They develop the pathological mirror-picture of the third stage of the saint: the condition called idiocy, in which the human personality is lost, in which a person rests in outer nature, that is, in the hidden forces of nature. They can no longer manifest as a human being. They live only in the natural processes that go on within them, in what is a continuation of external natural processes, vegetable processes—eating food, digesting food, moving about in whatever way digestion and the food substances give an impulse to move. It is a complete waking sleep given over to the bodily functions, which are not under the control of the weak physical body but are active as processes in the outer world are active. Naturally, since these processes are working in a human being they do give human-like impulses. But these people are isolated from the normal human world because they are pushed into the physical world to too great a degree. Here we have to do with everything that is a pathological mirror-picture of the “rest in God.” We can call it “rest in Nature.” It has to do with the various paranoid states, with what in everyday life is called idiocy, while the previous conditions would be called mental retardation.

So we have seen the progression in the case of the saint from feeling the presence of spiritual beings to a third stage, being present in the spiritual world. And we have seen the opposite pathological states: first, psychopathological impairment as the first stage. We can be particularly aware of this stage when we encounter an abnormal wanderlust, as I described, connected with a memory that lacks logic. We see this progress to states of insanity, of which the early stage will still allow a person to pursue certain activities in external life. Then we see this progress to the third stage—which could also have been present in early childhood in statu nascendi.

The second stage can be due to the fact that no one has been able to recognize and counteract certain conditions in the first life period, between birth and change of teeth. Occasionally young children show, not exactly an excessive cleverness, but rather an unusual desire to learn things—something that should only appear after the change of teeth. This characteristic is normal between change of teeth and puberty. When it appears in the first life period, however, we should be concerned and we should find the means—physical, soul, and spiritual means—to cure what is already pathological. It is of utmost importance to investigate how certain capacities can be prevented from shining down into the first seven years of life that should really only emerge during the second seven years.

The third stage can reveal itself in two ways. In most cases a person brings it along as his or her karma—as you have seen from my descriptions. Already at birth, the person is in an abnormal condition because of some unusual stress in putting together the etheric body before entering the physical body. An etheric body was formed that does not want to penetrate the physical body completely, does not want to enter heart and stomach in the proper way but wants to flood them: in other words, an etheric body that carries the astral body and ego organization too strongly into the various organs. Already at birth or very soon after, we see facial or bodily deformities that can give us deep concern. This is called congenital mental retardation—but there is no such thing! There is only karmic mental retardation, related to the child's entire destiny. We will also speak about this more fully, so that you will see how an incarnation spent in such mental dullness can, under certain conditions, even have a beneficial place in a human being's karma, although it may mean misery in that one incarnation. There is need, after all, to regard things not merely from the point of view of finite life, but sub specie aeterni from the point of view of the immortal life of a human being. Then we would have a compassionate charity (caritas) and a wise one as well.

On the other hand, the second stage I have described can progress to the third stage in the following way. If in the first life period, between birth and change of teeth, not only the second life period shines in but also the third—the period between puberty and the twenties, when our organization should work into our organism—then we see a child in their fourth or fifth year with capacities that often delight the people. They say, “This child talks or acts like a twenty-year-old!” But this is what is happening: the ego organization is developing too early and is overpowering the physical body and making it weak. Idiocy will then appear in the latter part of the person's life. In this case it is not brought on by karma but has been acquired in this very life, and can only be balanced out karmically in later lives. If we observe life intelligently and have a good pastoral medicine to support us, we will be able to prevent it simply by providing the proper education for such a person's early childhood.

Whoever is vocationally drawn to observe such things should do so not only as individual symptoms—where, naturally, they should be studied with special love—but should also cultivate an understanding for them as a general phenomenon. Such a person should also develop an understanding for how these things are brought about.

We have seen how much of the pedagogy of former decades that a healthy pedagogy, such as the Waldorf school pedagogy wants to be, must definitely oppose. Yet these things have become extraordinarily precious to people. Sometimes our Waldorf school education must address certain things with tremendous severity, for instance, the Froebel kindergarten work, which is taken not from life but out of the intellect. Before the change of teeth it occupies children with activities that are not an imitation of life but are invented out of people's heads. This is putting into the child's first years of life something that should not be there until the next period, between change of teeth and puberty. This brings on the first stage of a pathological condition, a mild state of illness that often is not yet regarded as pathological. Also it were better, perhaps, not to label it pathological, otherwise so much else would have to be labeled pathological, which must in any case be recognized as “cultural phenomena.” These things cannot merely be criticized, they must be understood, so that one relates to them in the right way.

What we should see in front of us is wrong education in early childhood. The second life period has been carried into the first. This is the underlying cause creating a person's automatic speech and stirring the will from within outwards without adjusting in any degree to the surrounding world. Think of a situation such as I described as the first pathological stage: a slight tendency, caused by bad education, education going the wrong way. Then what happens? Wanderlust. This impulse is not entirely pathological, but it is characterized by the desire at a certain age to follow none but one's own ideas, not to bother about the world, to get free and away from one's surroundings, to wander at will! It is connected with other contemporary phenomena that also have their origin in a pathological education, or at least an education with a pathological tinge. You can observe this right now. Look at some of these youth groups. Their very existence belongs to the lifestyle of the last decades of the Kali Yuga.⁶ There is an affinity between this slightly pathological condition and the kind of life that the Kali Yuga brought about. These things all belong together. But they must be examined from these two aspects. If you look, you will easily see tinges of what I have been describing. They reveal themselves clearly in wanderlust, but that is an extreme symptom. Listen once in a while to their conversations! One despairs at their indifference to what one says to them. They repeat details eternally, details they describe as their “experience”; they come back again and again to the same thing.

Please don't misunderstand me! I'm certainly not pointing to any of these things in a trivial sense. My intention is to show you that such phenomena can only be really understood if one grasps clearly the connection I've been pointing to during these few days: that there is always a step into spiritual life and its extreme opposite—a step into the physical body. A further step into the spiritual world for the saint; a further step into the body, into seizures, for instance, for the psychopath. And so on. That is the relationship. If you consider how in the external world, in electricity and magnetism, one pole is always dependent upon the other, you will realize that in life too there can be such a relation between two poles of human development.

This, of course, cannot be seized upon clumsily, as happens today so often with the materialistic worldview. This fact, that there are polar opposites here and that there is a connection between the two poles, must be approached with delicacy. Then one will begin to see what can develop in the one and the other direction. One will finally learn in this way to see into the nature of the human being.

We will continue tomorrow.

• 5 . Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210–1286?). Cistercian nun. Her chief work was The Flowing Light of the Godhead.
• 6 . Kali Yuga, “the Dark Age,” reckoned from 3101 B.C. to A.D. 1899 in Steiner's esoteric chronology.

Dear friends,

So far we have been chiefly concerned with discovering how far a human being may deviate in one or the other direction from what can be called “normal”: toward a pathological condition or toward a connection to the real spiritual world.

Today I would like to go beyond the single earth-life to show—with the help of a rather obvious example—how the karma that a human being carries through repeated earth-lives must sometimes relate itself to entirely contrasting conditions, such as, for instance, a capacity to reach into the spiritual world and, in the same human being, a need to reach down into the bodily, natural realm.

If physicians want to practice not only with good external measures and with intelligence but with their whole heart, with all their human capacities, they need to stand within the spiritual world and look at this physical world from a spiritual point of view. The human being journeys through successive earth-lives; causes reach over spiritually from one earth-life and evoke consequences in a later one. Therefore karma cannot remain a mere word to us. We must learn how to relate our healing activity to karma. For this, we must first be fully aware of how karma works in relation to pathological conditions and also to visionary capacities.

If priests want to enter into their parishioners' life situations in the right way, if they want to be a real pastor to the souls in their care, they also need to appreciate the spiritual significance of what confronts a human being in everyday life on this earth. Only then will they be able to care for humanity properly from the standpoint of the spirit.

In this connection we should consider something for a moment that some with a modern, more “enlightened” point of view may regard with derision. If we, too, presumed to take such an attitude, our descendants would surely magnify it a hundred-fold in their estimation of us! For they will view us in future centuries as anyone living today in our so-called scientific culture views our ancestors. You will see at once what I mean.

In the course of human evolution a complete reversal has taken place in the conception of illness. This became particularly obvious at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. If you go back two thousand years or so to the early times of the Old Testament, you find a universal conviction that illness comes from sinfulness, that illness has its original spiritual cause in sin. This was a serious belief. There had to be a spiritual error or failure somewhere as the true cause when a physical illness appeared. This idea was carried further. It was believed of a person in whom the spiritual fault lay causing the illness, that the individual harbored some elemental spiritual force that did not belong there, that somehow the person was “possessed.” In those times all illness signified that a person was “possessed” by some spiritual entity as the consequence of spiritual error or fault. Therapy was created accordingly. It was based on finding the means to bring out of the ill person the alien elemental spirituality that had entered through a spiritual offense. Basically this was the belief that one does not understand an illness unless one knows its cause.

Now consider the belief that came later, pronouncing exactly the opposite view—before psychoanalysis intervened in such a frightfully dilettantish fashion. The new belief said that every sin can be traced to illness. People were convinced of it. If there was a criminal, a “sinner” somewhere (the concept “sin” was defined rather superficially, according to the legal code) they saw to it that in some way or other they got hold of the brain after death, and could thus examine the physical organism. They were looking for the defects. And they did find defects in many instances. In this respect they have advanced quite a little. Clever, well-trained scientists have adopted the view that a person who has a perfect physical organism doesn't sin. A person sins if there is some bodily defect. Sin comes from disease. That's how evolution goes—not in a straight line but by way of opposites. And the people who have now reached this last view (not everyone today admits to it, but it is often fundamental even for those who do not totally subscribe to it) look back with pity to olden times when it was believed that illness comes from sin. For they know they themselves are right, that sin comes from illness. And they know with absolute certainty that in the sick person there is some material process or other that they have to combat, have to neutralize, have to get out of the organism. In earlier times the healers worked to remove a host of elemental spirits. To someone who sees the matter from a broader point of view there is really not very much difference. From an inner standpoint there is no great difference between the health spas that materialistic medicine considers correct and Lourdes. In the latter a person is cured through religious beliefs, in the former through materialistic beliefs. These things must simply be looked at without prejudice.

Influenced by such shortsighted ideas, one certainly will not perceive real connections. Therefore I would like to describe a concrete case. It should reveal to you the deeper connections to be found in this matter of human health. A certain person lived in the nineteenth century. I'll speak of him presently as he was in the nineteenth century, but first I want to take you back to one of his earlier incarnations that had important consequences for his life in the nineteenth century. This person was incarnated in a southeastern region of Asia where the people were extraordinarily fond of animals. You know that oriental teachings include a great reverence and love for animals; they extend what they call love of humanity and love of things, particularly to love of animals. In ancient times it was natural for people in this region to love animals intensely and to take very good care of them. But the man of whom I am speaking was no friend of animals. There in the midst of an animal-loving people was a man who treated them cruelly. Even as a boy he tormented them, he was mean to them; in later life he tortured domestic animals in every possible way to an incredible degree. This aroused violent anger in the people among whom he lived. He also experienced a deep conflict between this compulsive mania (today, in materialistic terms, we would call it perversion of the will) and on the other hand the spiritual teachings of the people. He took these up with great fervor. He was able to relate himself to them completely; he had a fine sense for everything the religion of that area taught. But he became involved in violent conflicts with the most religious individuals around him because of his torture of animals. It was especially the animals in his own house that he tortured, first among his relatives, and later when he became a kind of farmhand. Orientals lavish particularly good care on domestic animals, considering them as part of the family. These were the ones he tortured most shockingly.

This man lived again in our age, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in this incarnation (which in a wider sense belongs to our own time) he was born as an extremely fearful person, so that he chained dogs to himself. One could say this was now a symptom of illness, this abnormal relation to animals. It did have an aspect of disease about it through the fact that he did not develop any special love for the dogs, only a feeling that he had to have them near him. It is clearly fantastic, the way he related himself to them. It reveals an inner karmic compulsion from an earlier life.

At the same time in this incarnation the man is extremely talented, carrying over from his earlier life everything he had experienced of the oriental spiritual teachings, as well as his own religious devotion. This is not just a feeling in him: it becomes his life practice. In the course of this life he develops not only an astonishing capacity for spiritual fantasy, but the ability to put into poetic form correct visionary images that come to him in a matter-of-fact way. His poetry is about ordinary physical human life into which elemental spiritual beings constantly play. He is a distinguished poet. Moreover one may truly say he is the dramatist whom we Europeans would compare most seriously with Shakespeare. He is Ferdinand Raimund⁷ —with his fantastic personality, his giant talent—whose dramatic poems show how he has brought from earlier incarnations his ability to portray spiritual things, to put spiritual happenings into human life. One need only look at Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (“The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope”) to be able to liken him to Shakespeare. First of all, he is an important actor; this comes from his impulse to bring both trivialities and non-trivialities from spiritual realms to the stage. On the stage he is an incomparable actor, full of humor; in life he is completely overwhelmed by the consequences of the animal torture that he formerly perpetrated. Genius and a pathological condition are thoroughly mixed in him: the genius impelling him to create with soul-spiritual dramatic instinct and Shakespearean power, the pathological condition impelling him to inject a fantastic element into his external life.

Now we must look at a singular trait in Raimund. The animal torture had been a “necessity” to him in that earlier incarnation; he experienced a kind of lust, he did it for secret pleasure. During that earth-life he was not aware it was bad. He came to that realization only after he went through the gate of death. Now the experience one has when one goes through the gate of death and then further into the life between death and a new birth is in the subsequent life expressed foremost (in a wide sense) in the head organization. There lies the impulse one brings with one as talent. This, Raimund brought with him in rich amount. But here also something is working that appears in the rhythmic system, particularly the upper rhythmic or respiratory system. For the human being is built like this (see drawing): metabolic-limb system, rhythmic system, nerve-sense system. What comes from an earlier earth-life works over into the nerve-sense system of the new life; what comes from the time between death and a new birth works over into the rhythmic system; and what comes from the new earth-life works alone in the metabolic-limb sytem.

So all that this individual who is now Ferdinand Raimund experienced of bitter remorse, of deeply crushing insight was working continually after that earlier incarnation, in his life between death and a new birth, affecting his coming rhythmic system. It worked right into the physical body. For in the physical organization of the head we have the after-effect of the previous earth-life; in the physical organization of the rhythmic system we have the after-effect of the life between death and a new birth. These facts are obvious when one studies embryology even externally.

In Raimund's case, in his breathing system, the upper rhythmic system, we see working in him all the bitter remorse and insight he had experienced when he went through the gate of death from that previous earth-life. This experience led inevitably to breathing irregularities in this life, to a meager intake of oxygen and a strong saturation of carbon dioxide. Breathing irregularities—from a physical point of view—bring on a variety of states of anxiety; they can be the carriers of elemental beings of anxiety. The breathing irregularities do not allow the proper balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the breathing process, and this draws in anxiety elementals. You can see all this in The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope. It was well developed in Raimund; he was predisposed to a breathing system that would be a carrier for anxiety elementals.

Such elemental beings are not simply anxiety elementals. If at the same time there is something such as Raimund had in his head system from earlier earth-lives, namely, soul-spiritual ideas—which make his dramas so interesting—one sees that the presence of these anxiety demons causes karma to develop in a very definite direction. One sees clearly how they push in an unhealthy way to bring about karmic effects. They stream into fanciful imaginations that even achieve visionary content—and Raimund's dramas are built on such content. They stream into his visionary activity; they also impel him to develop a fantastic element in his daily life. In this way a karmic stream pushes through his life, a tremendous gift of genius that has to come to expression. One branch of the stream flows in a special kind of spiritual creation. The other branch flows parallel in a kind of life-fantasy that is not expressed externally but is directed inward. For it lies in the rhythmic system, which is of course half inward, but which also works in the lower organs in such a way that it affects a person's external life, and then in turn influences the inner life again. So Raimund's genius is accompanied by a truly pathological tendency. And this pathological tendency, which expresses itself through the anxiety demons, is the vehicle for the fulfillment of his karma.

One can see Raimund's karma quite clearly. He has to keep a dog. He is a fantastic person. He does what other men wouldn't do. One can understand that. One can even sympathize with that. Indeed when I remember how some of our worthy citizens have gorged themselves at court banquets when they were being given distinguished titles, I have a certain sympathy for Raimund, with his wry humor as he sits on the floor and eats with the dog out of the dog's bowl. You see how karma plays in from the animal torture of his earlier incarnation. You see how this deed comes from the animal torture and the remorse after death and is done as a fantastic atonement. But the atonement has to be still more severe. Immediately after this, the anxiety demons appear and take part in the playing-out of his karma. Raimund becomes obsessed by the thought: the dog has rabies, I have been eating with him, now I am infected! Raimund is terrified. While at other moments he can do the most talented things on the stage, the moment he withdraws from his external life he succumbs to the compulsive fear that he is infected with rabies.

Now he undertakes a journey with a friend. They go from Vienna to Salzburg, and there the fear of madness so overwhelms him that he must return at once to Vienna to get treatment. It is a tormenting journey both for him and for the friend. One sees his pathological state always following at the heels of his genius. For now he is well taken care of: people are delighted to entertain Ferdinand Raimund. Gradually he abandons the rabies idea. Something like a cure takes place through life itself, through pleasure, through the kindness he receives on every side—which he doesn't really want to accept because he is still a hypochondriac. And the anxiety demons torment him; if not with one trouble, then with another. So he is always swinging back and forth between Raimund the humorist and Raimund the hypochondriac. But at least he has given up the idea that he might go mad. That fear had obsessed him for years. Even so, he is still bound to animals. After ten years he gets another dog, and now see what happens: he plays with the dog and the dog really bites him. Again the thought of it overpowers him. He is standing there, he is bitten by the dog, and the dog has rabies! (Actually, it was established later that the dog did have rabies, but it was a very light case.) Now Raimund travels to Pottenstein, shoots himself in the head; the bullet lodges in the posterior cavity, far back. It can't be operated on. Raimund dies from the shot after three days.

You see how Raimund had freed himself from the first obsession, but karma continued to work. This is an example of karma working itself out completely, in a remarkable way. For only think! Subjectively, it is not precisely a suicide, for Raimund could not be called a fully responsible individual. Objectively, it is also not precisely a suicide, for if they had been able in those days to operate on that part of the head, Raimund would have been saved. At that time the operation was not possible and they had to leave the bullet in the head, so that after three days death was inevitable. So it is not a pure suicide, either subjectively or objectively. Thus one cannot say there will be consequences in the karma because of suicide. The karma does not continue: it was balanced out by what Raimund experienced in this incarnation up to his death, up to the way his suicidal intention was carried out. One sees clearly how karma from his earlier incarnation rises up and strikes him in this incarnation. One sees it reach across the span of time to strike with strength.

So now, first, we have seen that there are individuals whose ego, astral body, and etheric body develop, either suddenly or by stages, in such a way that they break into the spiritual world with a visionary capacity: St. Teresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and many others. There are such individuals who show an abnormality in one direction, the direction of spiritual awareness. They have been given some karmic gift—which we are only considering from the aspect of this particular earth-life. With these individuals we do not need to enter into karmic details. Naturally it is a fulfillment of karma. But one can understand the case from a single earth-life.

Then there are the individuals turned in the other direction. They develop abnormally in their physical-etheric organism; they sink down into their physical body and become pathological cases, as I showed you, in three stages. Their pathological condition is induced by their karma. But one only needs to look at the general picture. With such personalities as St. Teresa the individual became especially strong in earlier earth-lives, while in the pathological cases the individual became especially weak, causing the higher being to be drawn down into the lower organism. Again one needs only to look at a few general characteristics of an individual, one need not examine the karma in detail.

But now in Ferdinand Raimund we have an unusual personality. He developed not only in the visionary direction but in the opposite direction also, and at the same time. We have the two opposites constantly pitted against each other throughout his life. Both the genius and the psychopath are in his personality; they play into each other, wonderfully and tragically. Thus this case obliges us to study the concrete details of his karma. We have to perceive how his karma works to create the two extremes, how it holds them apart, sometimes letting them work into each other. You will find countless places in Raimund's dramas where you can say his spiritual vision is active and at the same time something is working in from the anxiety demons. Sometimes you see it in the structure of the drama itself.

If we study human character in this way, we come inevitably to a consideration of karma. And we must see on the one hand the one-sidedness of that abstract teaching from certain ancient streams of civilization—namely, that illness comes from sin—which means that only abnormal spirituality is active in the human being. Naturally certain ideas can be expressed in this abstract way, but they remain theories even if one treats people in accordance with them. The opposite assertion is just as abstract and just as one-sided: that sin comes from illness, and that there are physical substances and processes in some people to be combated. First of all we have to investigate the concrete details of the total human organism, how its upper members relate to each other, whether they are separated from each other, whether they distance themselves from the lower members. Likewise, we must be able to see how karma is working in such an interplay of genius and pathology as was the case with Raimund. Those who achieve an understanding of these things will find opportunities in life to add something more to what they are already accomplishing in the work of physical healing, to add words that will make the healing process complete. They will reach the moment when they are no longer bound merely to a physical healing process, seeking the why and the wherefore of physical healing alone, for they will perceive how necessary it is in many cases to add a moral dimension to it. This does not mean one becomes sentimental and goes calling on a patient with all kinds of trifling consolations. Usually such things have little effect. Sick people haven't much energy left for weepy callers—or for hearty jollities either! They do have an amazing amount of energy left for what lies in natural human relations, not the “what” of words but the “how” One finds a way instinctively in such situations if one is able to express a view of the world and of life in a way that relates them to spiritual connections—as it can if one takes seriously such examples as I have described.

Spiritual activity cannot consist of talk, much less of religious tirades. Spiritual work must relate to facts. If it takes hold of facts, then it will be useful first of all to make the necessary connections with human beings. Then it can be used for healthy people and sick people. One will develop an instinct for orienting oneself to any illness with this or with that symptom. You will see that this extends to physical illnesses as well. But we must first open up the way to see that these things apply to physical illnesses. You will come to this if you study various examples of them, also the biographies of many geniuses. But not from the standpoint of that arch-philistine Lombroso! What is so disturbing about Lombroso's theory—his own great genius has to be acknowledged—is the fact that he is a thorough philistine, that on every page you read commonplace opinions. Science has fallen to that level! If one refuses to accept assertions from that kind of standpoint, if one directs one's activity from a really thoughtful perception of the world—that is, of physical and spiritual life—then if one needs to offer comfort to a sick person, one will offer the comfort of religion with a true spiritual aura. But not without clear understanding behind it. Whether one gives communion to sick people in the right way, so that they begin to improve, so that during their convalescence their soul is in no way injured, depends upon one's having an understanding for these things.

For certain convalescents, their physical healing will not be complete without the sacrament of communion, so that what had been brought into disarray in their karma can be put in order again. If one does not know that, one cannot carry it into the aura of the sacrament. But if physicians also understand these things, if they recognize karma working through the illness while keeping professional command of the healing process, they will be able to relate themselves to it in the right way. They must observe these things with their whole being from a broad worldview. Then something objective will happen for them, if they work consciously with their whole soul to help the karmic processes developing in the patient. Their healing mission will be the other half of divine service; it will have a religious dimension. They will learn to regard themselves as partners of the priests, standing beside the priests and administering the other half of the divine service. Healing then becomes a divine service. Things that the materialistic world conception has turned into nature worship—to dancing around the golden calf—these things must be returned and transformed to a divine service, through proper anthroposophical understanding. To transform everything in life and art and religion into the service of God: that will be the ultimate task of a comprehensive pastoral medicine that can be practiced within the anthroposophical movement. But a beginning must be made. It must be initiated here; at least the indications must be given for it to those who will carry the impulse forward, out of spiritual foundations, for the two sides of a true divine service.

That is why pastoral medicine is first being presented to priests and physicians within the anthroposophical movement. Those individuals will then find possibilities, with their knowledge of nature and spirit, to pursue pastoral medicine further. But they will also be able to use it to penetrate the specific regions of life that lie within their mission.

• 7 . Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836). Viennese dramatist. Wrote Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (“King of the Alps and the Misanthrope,” 1828).

Dear friends,

If one had no other means of investigation than that provided by modern science, one would never attain an understanding of the human being. Certainly it is not my wish to belittle the accomplishments of this science in its own areas, for as far as its methods allow it to go, it brilliantly explores whatever can have the slightest relevance to it. But one cannot reach the human being by this means, because in human life in its present form, physical-etheric body and soul-and-spirit are interwoven. Present earth processes reach into the physical-etheric body from every direction. With modern science we follow these physical-chemical processes of outer nature, that is, of nature outside the human being. Comparatively speaking, this science is good for the world outside us. People have simply accepted the idea that just as these chemical processes occur in a physics or chemistry laboratory, or in some piece of the world that we are able to observe as our immediate environment, so approximately they are also then continued within the human being. For instance, combustion is described as the combining of some substance or other with oxygen; then the thoughts about this are continued unchanged when speaking of the process within the human body, and combustion is still described as happening the same way within us. But one should know that this is not possible. For the process in a human being that is analogous to combustion is related to external combustion precisely as something living is related to something dead. Combustion in the external world is inorganic, lifeless, while within a human being we have a combustion that has become living. This fact is important for all of science. External combustion, so far as the substance it affects is concerned, is definitely subject to conditions of warmth. According to science, there is a definite so-called flash point, and the heat of combustion always relates to this external condition. This does not continue in the same way within the human organism. Externally, given a certain temperature, any substance can combine with oxygen and produce combustion. Within the human being the same temperature is not needed for that to happen; other laws prevail. This is important for external science, because external science sets up hypotheses that appear to be perfectly plausible. Earlier conditions are assumed from the conditions that now exist on the earth. Preyer, the famous Jena physiologist,⁸ has done just that. He found the ordinary Kant-Laplace theory too stupid, so he went back to certain dynamic fire processes from which evolution was supposed to have originated. He also took it for granted that these must have happened at temperatures that today are necessary for similar fire processes to happen. That was not necessarily so. One can of course go in thought from the inorganic fire processes of this present age to similar processes in this age in the human organism, although actually these latter happen at an essentially lower temperature. But on this basis, even for a hypothetical view of original earth conditions, one would get quite different results.

You can see that the ideas that become fashionable are particularly important when one wants to acquire a comprehensive picture of the world. In short, with the means that modern science provides it is not possible to gain an understanding of the external world, either in its evolution or in its present state. Naturally this causes difficulties if a certain attitude prevails.

I can speak of these difficulties because I myself have experienced them with particular intensity. Truly, through my whole life there has been one foremost characteristic—you will find it mentioned in my autobiography.⁹ I can only describe it as the greatest possible respect for modern natural science. My respect has never changed. Never at any time would I have criticized in a trivial sense—which would be so easy to do—what natural science was bringing forward, whether in the field of external chemical, of mechanical or physical research, or of medicine. And yet at the same time evolution stood there before my eyes as a spiritual vision. And the need arose to bring what was opening up for me spiritually—for instance, the Atlantean time, or the Lemurian time, or something still further back, or further forward—to bring that into harmony with what natural science was giving out. This has not been too difficult with what natural science says about the immediate present. But when it begins to exceed its bounds, to “go wild,” when it advances hypotheses that reach from the present age to a time lying far in the past, we encounter the most severe conflicts if we want to bring what we have seen spiritually into harmony with what science is saying. We come into conflict with science just when we would like to be in accord with it. Spiritual science would never choose to be in disagreement with natural science. For surely one would not be so unintelligent as to oppose facts! All the more, then, one comes into conflict with opinions. As long as natural researchers talk, that is good. As soon as they begin writing, they really “go wild,” and then one can no longer go along with what they say. This is a serious situation, and it must be reckoned with by anyone who has to relate in any way to what modern science is able to give.

Natural science simply does not reach as far as the human being. Human beings have a soul nature and a spiritual nature, and do not have just a physical organism with physical processes that can be investigated externally—even to such phenomena as those of aerodynamics or thermodynamics. We also have living in us our karma from earlier earth-lives; we see it manifesting in our personality. We found this plainly evident in such a person as Ferdinand Raimund. But there is no possibility of exploring such connections if we only have the means of modern science at our disposal.

We must indeed advance to a new level. We must begin from the side of spiritual science to look at what manifests as external human processes and relate them to what we see as spiritual processes. We will be going in the right direction, for instance, if, holding fast to the physiology of breathing and circulation as we already know it from current natural science, we proceed further to examine how physical life is connected with spiritual life.

Let us look at human inhalation. It consists of our taking in external gaseous substance. But this is not just a passive happening, something being taken in by a human being in a completed condition and elaborated within. It is not just changing over from one process, inhalation, to another process, exhalation—from the inhaling of oxygen to the forming of carbon dioxide. The inhalation process shows itself in reality to be continuously creating the human being, working continuously to build the human being, from without inwards. In the inhalation process we find there is a constant building up, proceeding inward from the cosmos. Human beings do not merely inhale amorphous oxygen. In the oxygen that we regard, mistakenly, simply as a gaseous substance we inhale formative forces appropriate to our own being. If sometimes we have shortness of breath, some alien elemental is lying across the path of our breathing. That occurs in abnormal breathing. But in normal breathing, there is always a human being coming into being. Continuously a human birth is occurring out of the macrocosm; an air-human is being born into the human. The entire process is an activity of the astral body. We must picture it in this way: We inhale. The inhaling is activated by the astral body. The entire process is a continuous being-born. It takes place in the element of air, in everything that is air within us. We have a perpetual human birth in the element of air in the inhalation process.

But now we also breathe out. We breathe out carbon dioxide. At the conclusion of other organic processes carbon dioxide is, in a certain sense, collected for outbreathing. That too is commonly presented as a kind of passive reaction, or something similar. People simply do the research they are able to do in this field with physical means, and they don't arrive at a clear conception. Now the exhalation also is activated. It is not just some passive human process. There is activity in it: activity of the etheric body. The entire process occurs in the fluid element, the element that in earlier times was called water, when everything that was fluid was called water. We can continue to use the expression. This process takes place in the element of water.

Now there should come an important question: how is it during sleep? In sleep the etheric body is first and foremost within the human organism; therefore for exhalation there is no problem. But how can we inhale during sleep if the astral body is outside? Well, the fact is that during sleep actually only the microcosmic part of the astral body goes out of the physical organism; the macrocosmic astrality is all the more active at that time. All the astrality of the macrocosm enters during sleep. Our breathing activity during sleep is for this reason very different from our breathing activity while awake, because it is regulated by the activity of the macrocosm. So there is an essential difference between inhalation while awake and inhalation while asleep. The control of our inhalation during sleep comes from outside. When we are awake we control our inhalation ourselves through our astral body, from within outwards. While we are asleep the cosmic astrality enters our organism to do this for us. Here you have an important clue by which to approach questions of pathology. The cosmos has this remarkable attribute. You find that it holds a healthy relation to earth conditions if you go far enough above the earth. Close to the earth there are all kinds of influences through climate and other circumstances that can make the cosmic astrality abnormal. Similarly, through other processes that we have yet to learn about, the inner astrality of the human being can become abnormal. There we have the source of a certain kind of pathological condition, but the source is within, in soul and spirit. That is an essential fact.

Now let us go further. The breathing process is comparatively coarse. We breathe gaseous substance in and we breathe gaseous substance out. The whole process is coarse as compared to all the other processes that occur in us as well as in the macrocosm—for instance, those that have to do with the fluctuation of heat, with the element of warmth inside and outside the human being. There are differentiations of warmth inside the human being and differentiations outside the human being. We can think away air, water, earth, and hold before us only these differences in warmth. To physicists this makes no sense, because they regard warmth only as a condition of a material substance. But spiritual science knows that in warmth one has to do with a separate element. We can speak of warmth as an independent active element. Now fundamental to our entire human life there is a receptive process that is finer than the breathing process. It is the warmth process. When we examine the human lung region, when we study the organization of the lungs, we are looking at the coarse breathing process in the element of air. But when we come up higher to the region centered primarily in the head (although it is present to a smaller degree in the entire human organism), we come to a finer breathing process that occurs not in the element of air but in the element of warmth. Therefore we can say: higher up, we come to a finer process consisting of an extraordinarily fine reception of warmth from the macrocosm, breathing-in of warmth and breathing-out of warmth. But now this is what we must see: in the coarse inhalation-exhalation of the lungs, the human being is participating in an active exchange with the outer world: breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, in, out, in, out. The process I am now describing is not like that. There is indeed an “in,” but there is not an “out” in the same sense as in ordinary breathing. In this warmth-breathing the exhalation actually takes place within the human being; it is an inner process. What is exhaled by the nerve-sense system becomes united with what is being inhaled by the lungs. Thus the nerve-sense system carries on a very fine breathing process of which the inhalation is indeed a taking-in from outside, but what is taken in is not released again to the outside. It is given over to the coarser breathing process of the lungs, to the air inhalation, and is then by way of that air inhalation carried farther into the organism.

We can perceive the following process: The cosmic warmth enters the human organism by way of breathing. But not only warmth. The warmth carries with it light, macrocosmic chemism, and macrocosmic life, vitality. Light ether, chemical ether, and life ether from the macrocosm are carried by the inhalation of warmth into the human organism. The element of warmth carries light, as well as the chemical and life elements, into the human being, and gives them over to the air-inhalation process. This entire process, which lies over the air-breathing process and which appears as a refined (or even metamorphosed) breathing process, is not studied today in a real sense. It is lacking entirely from physiology—well, a bit of it falls into physiology and works there as a foreign body. This is an example of how one gets nowhere if one works separately from the spirit on one side and from nature on the other. It is something entirely foreign to the physiology of the senses as the latter is commonly presented, with the various senses—seeing, hearing, sensation of warmth—totally differentiated. In reality, they are only the limbs, the outer shoots of this other process that, to begin with, is the taking-in of warmth and with it light; chemism, and life. This is different from the sense process. As it is now, people know only the peripheral aspects of the sense process, not this central activity; that's why the current physiology of the senses is like a completely foreign body to them. Physiologists dabble around in the separate senses and treat them in a dilettantish fashion. And they pile hypothesis upon hypothesis. Of course this is bound to happen because they are looking at the single, separate processes of seeing, hearing, and so forth, and are completely missing the fact that all the senses flow in together, stream in together into the human being. No one sees that all this flows in, is taken in together with the taking in of warmth and the light, chemism, and life that warmth carries in with it from the macrocosm. Only after that does one come to the breathing of the lungs.

There will only be a real physiology of the senses when the physiologist is able to say: I follow the physical, physiological processes of the eye to the nerve, which then carries the process inward; I come gradually to the path of the breathing, out of the paths of the senses and thinking to the breathing. Then it will be understood how yoga could come about in earth-life: that is, by disregarding the sense life that takes its course at the periphery. In the practice of yoga, activity goes entirely into a conscious inhalation process; what lies behind it, namely, sense perception, is made the object of consciousness through the breathing activity. You see, in earlier world conceptions, such things were known and put into practice instinctively. But modern science will surely encounter riddles everywhere, because it is not able to see facts and make the connection between them. It observes eye and ear; then it begins to speculate wildly about what happens inside. And if it notices that the hypothesis it attempts as it follows eye and ear inward leads to a blind alley—because it will not accept as fact the finer breathing process that I have presented—then it says, “Why, of course, what goes on inside is simply paralleling what goes on outside.” Parallelism—the processes occur at the same time! Well, that's a very convenient way out!

This should provide firm ground for both priest and physician in connection with contemporary knowledge, for they will no longer have to reject this knowledge. The physiology of the senses has gathered tremendous treasures from all sides, but it is like a man who has collected the most excellent building materials for a beautiful house and carries them to a place and arrange them in an enormous pile, but then he can't build the house. He can't possibly build the house. Everything that occurs in the senses has been gathered together and arranged in a great pile, but no work starts. To start the work, what goes on inside the human being has to be added to what has already been researched externally. Inquiry must be made into the process of the finer breathing that takes place in the etheric and astral bodies. From there one can go on to build the house. Naturally, when the house can be built one would be a fool to say: The first thing we have to do is to get rid of this great pile of building materials lying here. We will certainly not say that. Now that it is all there, we can begin to build the house.

It would be just as foolish to do what many people do today who look at things in a dilettantish way—that is, criticize natural science from the ground up and reject it. It does not have to be rejected. Every piece of the building material can be used, it is all valuable, and there will be a fine result if all that is given out today by the physiology of the senses is used. But as it is now, it is just a pile of material. So we can say: We extend our view from what takes place in ordinary breathing as the continuous creation of present-day human beings to the finer breathing process that takes place higher up in the element of warmth, into which the entire cosmic etheric world plays. That is what we see if we study the upper human being.

But we can also look below in the air-breathing and study the lower human being. Then, just as we reach in air inhalation a higher, finer process, so now in air exhalation we reach a lower, coarser process. Below we gradually go from the inner activity of forming carbon dioxide to the process of digestion. Above, we had to connect air inhalation with that finer nerve-sense process that becomes a spiritual activity. Below we have to connect air exhalation with the digestive process, where the human activity gradually becomes purely physical, becomes altogether a metabolic activity of the physical body—which is a modified exhalation. In a certain sense, the activity that exhalation leaves behind within us is the metabolism. Just as what breathing takes in of nerve-sense spirit activity becomes inner activity, so what remains behind of inner activity from exhalation becomes the sum of forces forming metabolism. The metabolism is active in the element that in earlier epochs was called earth, the name for everything in the human organism that tends toward solidity. (Plate IV)

If we now study the entire process more closely, we find it has four parts. We have the process that we have just characterized, of which we can say that exhalation really goes into the human being. If we look at our ordinary external inhalation, we see a union of what is inhaled with what comes down from above. With exhalation, we have to say the opposite. Exhalation leaves forces behind for metabolism. It does not take something up; it gives something away. So we have an inner inhalation as well as an inner exhalation. The union of this inner inhalation with what the physical body does is the actual metabolic digestive process.

And now if you look carefully at this fourfold differentiation, you will see the human being in a new light, for the following facts also appear: (Plate IV) Here is the path of the warmth element coming into the human being and bringing light, chemism, and life. It connects itself with the breathing and gives chemism and life to it. But it does not give light to the breathing. It holds that back. The light stays behind and floods the human being as inner light, becoming thought activity.

Also, as inhalation and exhalation proceed, the macrocosmic chemism is given off and becomes inner chemism—which is something different from the chemistry with which we are acquainted in our ordinary laboratory work. Macrocosmic chemism is introduced into the human being by this extension of the inner breathing process. So we can say that here chemism is introduced. Also the life ether goes in and is taken up by the human being through the interplay of exhalation and metabolism.

So if we follow the process from above to below, we have light coming in by way of the warmth ether, and then coming to a stop. Where the breathing enters, it comes to a “stop!” for the light. The light spreads itself out. It is not carried farther by the human organism; it can spread out as light. We carry within us a pure light organism, a light organism that thinks.

We follow the process farther inward to where inhalation borders on exhalation; and we find the chemism is carried in to that point through the nerve-sense process. Now the chemism comes to a stop. It is an inner chemism, a chemical organism in us that feels.

Now let us go down further to where exhalation leaves the digestive-metabolic process behind—not the external metabolic process of food consumption, but the inner metabolic activity. There it is “stop!” for the life ether. The life ether forms a human organism that wills. Thus thinking, feeling, and willing come about.

We can now follow the entire process as it is reflected in our physical body. Take everything that is above: within, it manifests as thinking, but thinking is unsubstantial. Behind it lies all I have described to you that happens along the nerve paths. They are the external, physical paths for thinking.

Now go to the next process. You have this, the uppermost process in the human being, taken in through the breathing; it manifests in physical reflection as the arterial circulation. The arterial circulation is the second kind of path.

Then we come to the third process, which takes place between exhalation and metabolism. This also has its own path, the veins. So the third path is the venous circulation.

Now if we go still farther into the human being we find the process that provides a path for itself from below, from outside. It is the process by which the life ether is taken up. It must provide the life ether for itself from outside, from below. We find the physical projection of this in the lymph formation and the lymph system. (Plate IV)

So now you have the relation between outer and inner. Very much lies behind the nerve-sense inhalation. It is an incoming activity, and in what lies behind it there is much that remains unknown to us. Karma is active there, karma from the previous earth-life. It is not perceptible, but it streams in. Karma streams in. If with spiritual vision one investigates the nerve paths, if one investigates how they are formed in relation to the senses, one finds on these paths: karma. Karma streams in. On the other hand, in the lymph formation one does not only find a physical process: the fact that lymph enters the organism by the lymph vessels lets one see how lymph goes into the blood and takes care of us in that way Johannes Müller, the well-known physiologist,¹⁰ has already said, “What is lymph? Lymph is blood without any red corpuscles. And blood? Blood is lymph with red corpuscles.” This is, of course, a broad statement, but it is correct in a certain way. We see in lymph everything that has not yet become blood; we see in it also the living-weaving of developing karma. In the lymph process new karma is forming. The lymph vessels are the beginning of the paths of future karma. (Plate IV, right side)

So as you approach the human being from the world of spirit and perceive that macrocosmic light, chemism, and life are brought on paths of warmth, as you come from the light to the life paths and see the general cosmic life flowing in, you perceive more and more the flowing-in of karma which then becomes active in the human being's earth-life between birth and death. It works its way in through the nerves; it moves forward through the modified arterial process, and then is held back, dammed up in the venous process. When it reaches the venous process it pushes itself in on mysterious waves. And as we form venous blood we get this piling-up of karma within us, and then we act from karmic impulses.

A change in the blood can merely mean anger. On the other hand, what piles up there because the past is not allowed down into the venous process leads to actions that bring about the shaping of karma.

What the lymph does not allow to go over into the blood gathers deep in the subconscious. It forms a seed in the subconscious, a seed that we carry out with us through the gate of death when we throw off our physical body. It is the karma-to-be, the karma still to be developed.

Above, in the breathing process one perceives the karma that comes out of the past. Below the exhalation, in the circulation where the lymph has not yet become blood, one sees the latent karma. It stays in the lymph. So one can say (Plate IV, left, yellow) that karma flows into the human arterial process and stays behind; the venous process is formed and karma comes into being again. We have here the borderline where karma begins to pile up in the nerve-sense-arterial process.

Below, corresponding to the process that goes from lymph to veins, we have incoming karma. When we look with spiritual eyes at the lymph that has not yet become blood, we see outgoing karma. Thus we have the connection between physical and spiritual. Above, the human being qualitatively comes close to the spiritual and touches karma. In between, the present life is dammed up. Below, in the lymph not yet become blood, we see the new karma arising, beginning to be formed. Between past karma and karma that is forming, in between stands the human earth-life, which—looked at from this point of view—is a damming-up between the two. Thus we can follow the procedure right into the physical process.

We will speak further about this tomorrow. You can realize that we are coming more and more to see the spiritual working in the physical. Only this will perfect our practical work.

• 8 . Wilhelm Preyer (1811–1897). Professor of Physiology. Wrote Hypotheses Concerning the Origin of Life in Scientific Facts and Problems (1880).
• 9 . Rudolf Steiner, Autobiography (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1999).
• 10. Johannes Müller (1801–1858). Berlin physiologist.

Dear friends,

Yesterday we examined the human constitution as far as it can be seen in human beings themselves or in connection with their immediate environment. Now we must go out beyond humanity. For everywhere humanity stands in some relation to the forces in the universe, and one can only understand these various relations if one explores the immense diversity of the universe itself.

Just think, dear friends, how manifold the forces in the universe are! Look at a growing plant, for instance. Follow the growth of its stem upward from the earth's surface, and the growth of its root downward. Right there are two opposite tendencies within the plant: a striving upward and a striving downward. And if today we were far enough along in scientific research—so often used for less important matters—to use it for such a thing as the growth of a stem upward and the growth of a root downward, we would find the connections in the universe that would then finally explain the totality: humanity and the world, microcosm and macrocosm. For we would find that everything connected with the stem's upward growth has some relation to the unfolding of the sun's forces in the course of the day, in the course of the year, even beyond the year. And we would find that everything connected with the root's downward growth has some relation to the moon's forces and the moon's changes. If therefore we look at a plant properly, we already come to see through its form a relation between sun and moon. We have, so to speak, to extract the simple image of a plant from the whole universe, from all the forces in the universe.

Someone who is really observant will never see the root other than striving downward into the earth and at the same time rounding itself. The root rounding itself into the earth—that is the picture of the root that one must have, the rounding form pushing into the ground. (Plate V, left) We must see the stem differently as it unfolds in an upward direction. Someone who combines sensitivity with observation will have the definite feeling that the stem strives to stream out as a line. The root wants to unfold in a rounding, circular direction; the stem wants to unfold in a linear direction. That is the archetypal form of the plant. And in the linear striving upward we must see the presence of sun forces on the earth. In the root's striving toward roundness we must see the presence of moon forces on the earth.

Now let us look further. We think of the sun as being at a great height and of the plant as streaming to reach it. But the plant does more than just reach upward; it reaches out in width, it creates peripheries. And we find within its upward striving that something else is active, at first just at its top in the blossoms we find the forces of Venus working with the sun forces. Then as blossoms unfold below, as leaves come, moving inward from the periphery, we find the forces of Mercury working. On the one hand if we want to understand the structure of the plant as it pushes toward the Sun, we must see that the sun forces are helped by the forces of Venus and Mercury.

On the other hand we must realize that these forces alone would not be able to form the plant. With them alone, the plant-being would in a certain sense only attain a compact, solid form. For it to unfold as one sees it, for instance, in the most extreme example in a tree, there are forces working everywhere counter to the Venus and Mercury forces: namely, the forces of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus in addition to the basic polarity of sun activity and moon activity, there is also the activity of all the other planets in the universe. (Plate V, left)

In the plant you have the entire planetary system in front of you. It is right there on the earth. And perhaps it is not so ridiculous that a scholar—a half or three-quarters scholar as Paracelsus¹¹ was—made such a statement as this: “When you eat a plant you're eating the entire planetary system. For all those forces are contained in it.” Paracelsus said it like this: With the plant you eat the whole heaven.” The world is indeed formed in such manifold variety that one does have in one's immediate environment the forces of the entire macrocosm—in growth, in structure, in the disposition of all living things.

Now let us get back to the human being. We showed yesterday that one can go from the area of lung breathing to a higher area where there is a finer inhalation. And we discovered that this finer inhalation carries karmic streams in from the past. We can go still further. If we have working into the human being what I would like for the moment to call a refined breath stream, (Plate V, right) we can say the following: If one would unfold only what lies in the astral body and ego, one would never reach the sun, with the human constitution as it is at the present time. When one is in the ego and astral body during sleep, one does not reach the sun sphere. There is only darkness. If one were to live in the astral body and ego without any connection to the etheric and physical bodies, one would not come to the sun. How, then, does this happen?

Let us consider first what the situation is when the astral body and ego approach the etheric body. In clairvoyance one can bring this condition about fairly easily, by strengthening thinking—strengthening it by very thorough, energetic meditation. Then it is easy to come to this condition; it is the beginning of initiation. One slips down into the etheric body but is not yet able to take hold of the physical body; one remains in the etheric body. In this condition it is possible to think very, very well. One sees nothing, hears nothing, but one can think very well. Thinking is not in the least extinguished, but seeing, hearing, and the other sense activities are suppressed. At first, thinking remains the same, except that one can think more than previously. One can think such thoughts as we are expressing here, for instance thoughts about the macrocosm. Thinking becomes wider. One knows clearly: “now I am in the etheric world.” Thus when one is in the etheric body, one is truly in the world ether. One has the clear experience of this: “I am in the spiritual world out of which the sense world comes.” But one is not able to differentiate between spiritual world and sense world, one is beyond a differentiated sense world. The sun no longer shines, the stars no longer shine, there is no moonlight. There is no longer a clear distinction between the kingdoms of nature on the earth. A person only has that faculty when down in the physical body in normal life or in a higher stage of initiation. But in exchange for the blurring of the contours of the sense world, there is a general spirituality, the weaving life of the spirit.

If one goes further, if one takes conscious hold of the physical body and begins to live in the organs, the perceptions that had become dim or had vanished begin to emerge again (with the exception of earthly forms) as spirit entities. Where earlier in ordinary consciousness one had seen the sun and then it had become dark, foggy, but had still been within the general weaving spirituality, now there appear beings of the second hierarchy. Now one can differentiate in the spiritual world. Moon and stars appear again, but in their spiritual aspect: they are now spiritual colonies—they can be called that, or something similar. Now one understands how in ordinary everyday consciousness humankind sees the sun, for instance, in its physical form, and the same with other things, but when someone has entered consciously into a physical body, and has actually taken hold of it in its spiritual dimension, the sun is seen as a spiritual being, and the same with the whole world. Now we know that with each sun ray shining down upon us during the day, spirit is also entering us. Through every sense experience spirit is entering us. We have therefore to regard the higher, finer breathing as a breathing that is continuously impregnated by spirit. And we perceive that the sun is living in every sense perception that streams into us. It is indeed the spirit of the sun, or the spirits of the sun. The sun is present in every sense perception. In our finer breathing the sun force, the sun life is streaming straight into us.

So you see the relation humanity has to the sun. When a ray of light streams into your eye, the sun spirit is streaming in with that ray of light. The spirit of the sun is the substance of the finer breathing. With our sense perceptions we breathe in the manifold ingredients of the spiritual sun. You have there an important view of the human being from one direction. As one unfolds in an etheric body, (Plate V, yellow) one develops in the etheric body thinking—the thoughts of the universe. These thoughts of the universe in which one finds oneself when living consciously in an etheric body are at first devoid of warmth or cold, devoid of tone. They are a kind of vague feeling in which one's feeling of self merges with one's feeling of the macrocosm. But if now one takes hold of the physical body, one enters into the spirit of the sense perceptions. And the thoughts are infused from various sides: through the eyes, the sun essence—thought—that is breathed in is infused with color; through the ear, thought is tinted with tone; through the organ of warmth, thought is tinted with warmth or cold. There you have the cosmic relation of thought to sense perception. Thought must be understood as preceding the sense experience; then the sense experience comes through infusion, tinted by the sun.

Humankind simply does not realize that the sun-being streams into us with every sense perception. And on the path of the sun, past karma streams in too. It is by no means a childish image to think of the sun as a receptacle of past karma. If we understand the human head properly, we must say the spiritual sun rays stream in invisibly and are transformed as they stream in into something physical, which then appears as merely a physical attribute in the world of color, tone, warmth. And at the same time, on the path of these sun rays that slip in through the senses into the nerves, karma enters into us. That is one side of the human being.

Now let us look at the other side. Karma goes out at that place in the organism where the lymph is, the place where everything is alive and active that has not yet been drawn into the blood. There we find outgoing karma. What are the paths of outgoing karma? To know that, we must acquaint ourselves through spiritual science with the moon forces.

And now if we gradually come from the etheric world to which we have become accustomed and take hold of the physical body in its periphery, the area of the senses, then all the life streaming in from the sun and bringing our past karma with it appears to be bringing reproach, and to be doing much to disturb us. But far more important than the disturbing elements in our karma is this knowledge, this insight that we can attain. It is by virtue of our past that we have become what we now are. The life of our inner being is enriched by the perception of the sun entering on the paths of the senses and nerves. If we can separate ourselves from our karma and concentrate on the instreaming forces of the spiritual sun, we will experience an infinite happiness as we receive them. We will wish that the sun element were in us perpetually; we cannot help longing for it. The sun element enters into us lovingly if we wish it; it is what we know in physical life in a weaker form as our active human love. This is the interplay of sun activity with the human inner world, the loving penetration of the sun into humans and into everything that wants to sprout and grow and thrive in humans. The living sun rays enter lovingly. Here love is not merely a soul-spiritual force: it is the force that calls everything physical to germinate and sprout and grow, everything that can be beneficial to humans in every way when they value it. This is the force of which a human being is aware through direct outer vision.

Now if one takes hold of the physical body in the other direction, in the direction of the forces that develop the lymph and prepare it for entering into the blood, one becomes aware of the activity of the moon. This is of quite a different character. On the one hand we can say the spiritual sun is active in the way we have indicated; on the other hand the moon is active. When we work to grasp the process of the lymph-blood formation inwardly, we find we are entering into the activity of the moon. And we have the constant feeling that the moon wants to take something away from us, to lift something out of us. With the sun we had the feeling that it wants continually to give us something. With the moon we have the feeling that it wants continually to take something out of us. And if we are not alert while we are observing the moon's activity, when we have consciously taken hold of the physical body and are engrossed in the lymph-blood formation, if we are not absolutely alert and in complete control of our vision, suddenly the continuity is broken and standing there before us is a spiritual being similar to ourselves but distorted, almost a caricature of ourselves, a being we have brought to birth. We would miss this emanation if we were not alert. But it does not seem particularly strange to us as it separates from us and confronts us. It is hardly more than an enhanced view of ourselves in a mirror. When we look at ourselves in an ordinary mirror, that is the physical world. When we see ourselves reflected in the etheric world by the moon forces, that is a higher kind of mirroring.

Let us review the whole process. There is nothing particularly amazing about it. But it shows us that we are indeed connected with the universe. That the moon is continually separating forces from us, which then it makes independent, forces that were living in us and that then go out into the spiritual world, streaming out into the macrocosm, constantly carrying images out of us into the macrocosm. But now think how it could be if such an image, which the moon forces are continually producing in humanity and which then they want to take out of us to carry into the distances of the world, if such an image were held back in the human body and kept there. And not merely an image, an abstraction, but a form permeated by forces.

How could such a form be retained in the human being? We have the moon forces continually striving to pull and draw the human image out. How could this form be held back? It can remain in humans if the sun forces are brought in deeply enough from another side. Then the form remains in the human being; then an embryonic life begins. Fructification consists of nothing else than that the sun forces are drawn down to where the moon forces are active in the lymph. Thereby the image that would otherwise go out takes hold of physical matter in the human body. What otherwise is a mere image now takes on physical form. For this to happen, sun forces combine with moon forces in the lymph system of the human organism. (Plate V)

Let us look at the other side. We can also investigate the moon forces higher up: then we find that the opposite happens. Then the human being is not formed again in the human body, but the sun macrocosm is given form in the human. Now we have a different view of the macrocosm. When the embryo is formed, a physical world arises within the human being that must come out. When on the other hand the moon forces activate their desire nature—they want to capture and draw down the sun forces—then the spirit in the universe comes into being within the human. The spirit of the universe is engendered, a spiritual embryo. Then the possibility is given for forming what must come in from the spiritual world, what has been in the spiritual world up to the time of a new earth-life and now comes in as spirit embryo. Then, the union of the two takes place in the human being.

If we explore these things, we come to see that they are completely interwoven. Then we have the true explanation of the human being's relation to the universe.

Now help comes from every direction. The sun activity that is uniting here with the moon activity has the help of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What, then, are the tasks of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn? Recall, dear friends, what I said yesterday. When the sun forces are going in, first they must stop for the light; second, they must stop for the macrocosmic chemism; third, they must stop for the life. The Saturn forces bring about the stop for the light, the Jupiter forces in their wisdom bring about the stop for the world chemism, the Mars forces the stop for the life. There you have in detail the drawing-in of the sun forces modified by the forces of the so-called outer planets.

From the opposite direction you have the moon forces modified. When they work alone in their full strength, they bring about the formation of the embryo, that is, the physical formation. When they are less strong, they do not enter into physical matter but stay in the direction of the spirit, combining with the Venus forces of soul love. They can be still weaker—when they unite with what comes from the other side, the forces of Mercury, the divine messenger, who in ordinary everyday earth-life leads the lower forces up to the higher.

Look at the two diagrams, right and left. (Plate V) If we look out at the plant world spread as it is around us, we find the sun, moon, and stars everywhere. If we look within the human being, the sun, moon, and stars are there too, in exact correspondence. When something within is not in order, there is some trouble in the inner collaboration of sun, moon, and stars. If we as therapists want to restore it to order again, we must search in outer nature for a corresponding Saturn activity, for instance, that will work therapeutically on an unhealthy moon activity—and so forth. It is all out there. You see people will begin to have confidence in medicine again when they see that in the inner constitution the human being comprises the whole world. This is the knowledge we would like to bring to medicine again, knowledge it once had. The world will only have its trust in medicine restored when these things are once again understood.

But now let us look at the other side. Look first at the moon activity in human beings. See how it is striving continually to draw the human element out, to carry it into the universe. Let the picture stand before us—the human being striving to get out, wanting to be carried into the universe. This must not be presented to humanity as an abstraction, this shattering secret, but in picture form—the moon working continually to lift human beings out of themselves, to show them their relation to the macrocosm. The human being comes into earth-life as an embryo within another human being. But when this moon activity is enhanced by Venus and Mercury activity, then the human being is born not physically, but spiritually. If we add to the physical birth what we can invoke of Mercury and Venus activity, we bring about a spiritual birth. The human being is then born spiritually, outside, in the universe. We baptize the human being.

The working of the physical sun is always present in human beings. We can add to that perception a consciousness that the spiritual sun also is active in us, that on the paths of the physical-etheric sunlight, the light rays, chemical rays and life rays, the spirit is also pouring in. Spirit enters humans by way of the same paths that the physical-etheric sun activity enters: through the senses. In the same way that human beings perceive in everyday physical life the physical-etheric activity of the sun, we enable them to perceive the soul-spiritual activity of the sun. We give them communion.

Going out from the communion, we find on the one hand what is related to the help the sun is given: the darkening that relates to the light, the constant nearness of death to life. We go to the outer planets that are connected with the sun, and we add to the communion at the proper moment the anointing.

Or we go into human beings, and before they have any thought of the macrocosm, we hold them fast in their inner life, wanting not merely to give them their place as human beings in the macrocosm, but wanting to plant the macrocosm in them—in picture form, so that it becomes a seed developing in them. We give them confirmation.

If individuals receiving the sacraments live in them with full consciousness, they will be continually healed by them—healed of the universal illness to which they succumb, or are in constant danger of succumbing in statu nascendi simply by reason of their having incarnated in the physical material world. This is the priest's task.

It can also happen that an individual is by nature continually in statu nascendi of wanting to be free in the spiritual world, wanting to get out of the physical world, yet is obliged to remain in it during earth-life. And this causes in the organism not a state of unspirituality but a state of superspirituality, that is, illness. Medical measures must be prescribed, the opposite pole to the sacraments, when illness appears. This is the physician's task.

Thus we see on the one side the spiritual healing of the priest, and on the other side the priestly attitude of the physician, the physical healer. If we recognize how their tasks can be coordinated, we have grasped the significant connection between pastoral work and medical work. Then pastoral medicine is not just a theory, but embraces the working together of human beings.

• 11. Paracelsus (1493–1541). Swiss physician and alchemist.

Dear friends,

You have seen how necessary it is to relate a state of illness in a human being to his or her spiritual life and experience. The understanding that should be brought to illness by the two groups of people who have especially to do with pastoral medicine can really only come from such a point of view. Therefore I would like once more to consider the actual state of illness in connection with a person's spiritual life, this time from a standpoint that I think will throw greatest light upon the nature of illness.

As human beings we alternate between waking and sleeping. You all know in general what can be said from our perspective about these two conditions.

Today let us hold clearly in our minds what really happens in the human being during sleep. The physical body and etheric body are by themselves; the astral body and ego are also by themselves. Turning first to the physical and etheric bodies, we know that by virtue of what these bodies are, certain processes go on that during the person's sleep are independent of the activity of the astral body and ego. In the human organism we find processes going on that are not at all suited to it in the way they must play themselves out. The physical body has to do with physical processes. Physical processes take their course outside in the mineral kingdom; they are suited to the mineral kingdom. They are not at all suited to the constitution of the human physical body. And yet while it is asleep this human body is, so to speak, subject to these physical processes in the same way that the mineral kingdom is. We must be aware of this contradiction in the human being precisely during sleep. During sleep the human being ought to be a world of physically active forces and substances, but this is something that really cannot be. That is why processes that go on in the physical body during sleep—unless they are brought into balance—cause illness.

The general assertion that sleep is healthful is correct in a certain sense, but only under certain conditions. And it must not prevent us from examining the true situation without prejudice. Physical processes in the human physical body can only be healthful when the ego and astral organization are down in the physical body, as is the normal condition during waking life. It is constantly interrupted by the sleep condition. Normally, however, even during sleep the catabolic process is still always going on in the physical body; it must be there so that the soul-life and spiritual life as a whole can really unfold. For the spiritual life is not connected with anabolic processes, only with catabolic processes. During sleep, therefore, there must be just as much of the catabolic processes as a person needs for waking life to unfold the next morning. If too many catabolic processes are there because of some unhealthy sleep condition, a residue of these processes piles up in the human organism, and then we have the inner cause for an illness.

If we extend our investigation to the etheric body, we find that during sleep only the processes can take place in the etheric body that can otherwise take place in the plant kingdom. During daytime consciousness, when the astral body and ego are in the etheric body, these processes are always raised to a higher level. But from the moment of a person's going to sleep to the moment of waking, they take their course in the same way that they do in the plant kingdom. Thus they too are not suited to the human organism; they need to be balanced by the astral body and ego. If they create a residue, this too is cause for illness. So we can say that sleep can show us how causes of illness really originate in the human organism. For they are fundamentally the normal sleep processes; at the same time they are the basis for human soul-spiritual life. And that points to a secret of this world—that whenever one penetrates to reality, one finds it has two sides! On one side, in the sleep condition of the human physical and etheric bodies we find the basis for spiritual development; on the other side, in the very same processes we find the basis for illnesses. Thereby illness is brought into direct connection with human spiritual development. Thus if we study what is active during sleep in the human physical and etheric bodies, we find the fundamental causes of illness.

Now let us consider from this point of view those who during waking life do not go down deeply enough into their physical and etheric bodies—which is what we have found to be the case in the mentally retarded or the psychopath. With such people the soul and spirit enter into processes of illness and live with them. Special value should be laid on this knowledge, that psychopaths and the so-called mentally disturbed are always closely involved in their inner lives with the causes of illness. You see, one has to look at such things carefully.

But now let us go to the outer world. Let us start from the human physical body (Plate VI, left) and consider the outer mineral world that relates to it. During sleep we have processes in the human physical body from which the ego is missing. They go on without really any inner working “motor.” But there is ego out there in the world in all those mineral processes. In them is what we can call world-ego. So we have on the one hand within the processes of the human physical body a condition of non-ego, a sum of processes that are egoless, processes that lack ego. And we have on the other hand in our outer environment a sum of mineral processes and mineral substances that are permeated by ego—that means, by all the hierarchies who are to be identified with ego. Mineral substance has ego.

Therefore let us assume that we observe in some person's physical body a process that should not be there, a sick process. It lacks ego. What can we do if we want to cure this condition? We can search outside in the mineral kingdom for that part of the ego that the person lacks, to cure what is too much asleep, to cure what is still continuing to sleep during waking life. Then we have the right remedy. If you give the substance that has an affinity to the sick organ, the ego-force that the organ lacked is brought into the organ. This is the principle underlying our search in inorganic nature around us for medicinal remedies for the physical body of the sick person. We have to find the corresponding substance that has ego-force; then it has a healing effect. Thus the transition from pathology to therapy rests upon a correct insight into the relation between the processes of the human physical body and the outer mineral world on the one hand, and the relation of the human etheric body to the plant world on the other. If we observe too exuberant a growth in the etheric body, we realize that the etheric body is lacking proper penetration by the astral body. Then we must search in the plant kingdom for the proper corresponding remedy. This is the direction our work must take.

One must recognize the spirit in nature, the spirit that is in the mineral and plant kingdoms of the world. It is the spirit, not the substance, that one must know, because in reality one heals the human being through the spirit that is in the mineral and in the plant. In its nature substance is not truly governed by spirit, but even so it has spirit in it. And those who want to heal without recognizing the spirit in stones and plants can only grope their way through traditional theory. They can try one thing or another and see whether it helps, but they will never know why it helps—because they will never know just where the spirit is in possession of some mineral or how it is in possession of it. To be a healer requires first and foremost a spiritual outlook on the world. And indeed this is the greatest anomaly of our time: that it is medicine itself that has the frightful disease of materialism. Medicine is seriously ill with materialism. It has become blind and is falling asleep, and this is creating harmful soul substances in science. It really needs to be healed. One can indeed say, the sickest entity of our time is not Turkey,¹² as was the case in nineteenth-century Europe, but the medical profession. This is a fact that physicians should know—as well as the theologians, for then perhaps the secret will remain among those to whom it has been entrusted!

Let us look at these things more closely. There are certain persons who are not psychopathic or insane in the sense in which one is justified in using those terms, but who nevertheless illustrate what I have been talking about during the last few days. They descend into their physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they acquire a certain perceptible connection to their sick condition, to sick processes. These are sleepwalkers, whose peculiar state is not make-believe; it has often been described to the general public, and every initiate knows it well. While they are in their somnambulistic condition, they describe their illnesses. They go down into their physical and etheric body. Now the normal human being in waking life has the physical and etheric bodies completely saturated by the astral body and the ego. In the case of these sick individuals, the ego and astral body do not combine with the etheric and physical body in accordance (figuratively speaking) with their exact atomic weight. Some of the ego and astral body is left out; it has not entirely sunk down. But then it is this element that is able to perceive. Only that part of the ego and astral body perceives that has not sunk down into the etheric and physical body. When some of the astral body and ego is superfluous in such a person, then there is this inner perception, and the person can describe his or her own illness.

But now there is another condition—a condition of the opposite kind, in which the normal sleep condition is disturbed. In this case, when the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric body and things happen in the ego and astral body that do not belong in this soul-spiritual entity (as the things I was just describing did not belong in that physical-etheric body), when too much spirit is experienced by the ego and astral body during sleep (as too much nature was experienced in the opposite condition by the physical-etheric body), then a clairvoyance comes about that borders on a pathological state. The individual carries into sleep a certain power to perceive spiritual things, then afterward carries back memories of spiritual perception into waking consciousness. In particular, these abnormal spiritual perceptions appear in lively dreams. And then, as every initiate knows, we observe that the dreams have the following content.

Suppose the sick person, the physically sick person, is in the former condition I was describing and dips down with the spirit and soul into the physical-etheric body and then experiences the illness in a somnambulistic condition. The sick person experiences a strong catabolic process going on in the physical-etheric body, a kind of reverse process of nature. But now suppose the person is outside the physical body with the astral body and ego. Then the person has experiences of the spiritual aspect of external nature. Suppose the person experiences a sick organ inwardly—sick because it allows some outer process to occur in an unhealthy way. This is experienced in the somnambulistic state, and the inner process is described. If the person is in the opposite condition, the somnambulism works into the ego and astral body when these are farther out of the physical and etheric body. If the spiritual, elemental life of nature comes into dreams, the person experiences what is spiritual in the minerals. And what does the person dream about? The person dreams of the medicinal remedy. Here you have the connection between many aspects of somnambulistic life. The somnambulist alternates between two conditions, as I have described. In one condition dreaming of the illness, in the other condition dreaming of the remedy. And generally speaking, that is the way pathology and therapy were explored in the old mysteries.

In those times there was not so much experimenting as there is today. The sick person was brought into the temple and put into a kind of somnambulistic condition by trained temple priests. This condition was increased to the level at which the sick person could describe the process of the illness. Then the opposite somnambulistic condition was brought about, and the temple priest was told the dream that contained the therapy. This was the manner of inquiry in the oldest mysteries; it led from disease to cure. And so it was that medical science was cultivated in olden times, by seeking knowledge of humanity through the human being itself.

We don't have to go back to those old methods. We have to move forward to methods by which we are able to follow the course of an illness through imaginative experience, and by which we are able to experience the healing process through an intuitive activity that leads not into the human being, but outward. What has formerly been a kind of experimentation in this field will now have to become careful observation. You see the direction in which we are turning. In olden times external physical science was a purely observing science; then it began to experiment and more and more substituted experiment for pure observation. That was right. But medical science did the same thing in imitation, and that was not right. It experimented on human beings with the temple research. We must find the way to change over from experimenting to observing, to an observation of life that is sustained by spiritual knowledge and enriched by scientific research. For whoever really looks at life can catch a view of illness everywhere. In the simplest form of everyday life that has deviated only to the slightest degree from so-called normal, something can be seen that will lead—if considered properly—to a recognition of complicated disease processes. One has only to understand how things relate to one another.

But this shows us that physicians must more and more become really practical individuals—again, the exact opposite of what recent materialistic development has made them. They have gradually become pure scientists. And that makes no sense. A physician should always be able to cope with natural laws in a living way, and not just know them abstractly. With abstract knowledge of them one has not yet even begun to work with them. That's the situation from one side.

Let us look at the other side, the side that the priest must see. We think of the priest's mission as guiding human beings in their approach to the spiritual world, in everything that will help their ego and astral body to find their way in the spiritual world. If it is the physician's task to inquire into the nature of humanity from a spiritual point of view, to explore pathological conditions from a spiritual point of view, then what must the priest look for? The priest has to find what can lead human beings toward the spiritual world; their attitude toward the spiritual world, whether they love the spiritual world, how much they are permeated by the spiritual world—insofar as these things are apparent in normal life. The priest must deal with all the normal or abnormal symptoms that the human soul manifests in this regard in everyday life. For the priest we have to point out the opposite course to that of the physician. We told the physician that if somnambulists are allowed to describe their sick organ, they will also describe the medicinal remedy for it from out of their dreams.

Let us look again at the priests in the ancient mysteries. They were not primarily interested in discovering medicinal remedies, although of course they were intensely interested in healing, for they were first and foremost a friend of humanity. But they did not stop at healing; they were interested in more than that. They were interested in the following: They saw that the somnambulist found his or her own remedy in dreams while in the spiritual world with the ego and astral body. The priests paid particular attention to this soul while it was in the spiritual world, and followed it back again into the body. And what was found? Of course they found themselves again confronting the sick organ. But now, from what they had perceived of that soul while it was out of the body, they knew how the astral body and ego would work in this organ if it were healthy. Upon returning again to the sick organ, they knew what the situation would be under healthy conditions. Now they realized how the astral body and ego out of their divine-spiritual powers take hold normally in the human organism, how they sit normally within it. The priests learned to know them in their healthy normality through the dreams in the spiritual world, and learned how they relate to the physical world when they descend into the physical body. From this, the priests learned to know the inner relation of humanity to the spiritual world.

This knowledge should influence priests as they enact the sacrament in which they are carrying back the spiritual world. For the spiritual world is present in the sacrament through the establishment of the ritual. The ritual unites spirit with physical substance by virtue of deep insight into the relation of spirit to matter. Inspirited physical substance is led back into human beings, and the relation is established in them that unites their astral body and ego within their physical and etheric bodies with the divine-spiritual being of the world. Everything in this relation depends upon the priest's celebrating the sacraments with such an attitude. Everything depends upon our permeating ourselves with such thoughts. For instance, the relation between experience in the body and experience out of the body; secrets of pathology from observing the body when it is left; secrets of therapy from observing abnormal life in the spiritual world as compared to normal perception in the spiritual world. What was established in ancient times in secret temple procedures by prominent somnambulists must now be again established by human beings developing spiritual perception in themselves and observing the connections. In this area, experiment must give way to observation.

Now it is important that the physicians and priests in the anthroposophical movement are already united in their knowledge of such facts as these. That is what really binds us together. We are permeated by a different kind of knowledge from what others have. By contrast, the idea that some sort of union or association or group should be formed is just an abstraction. What really binds us together is the possession of certain knowledge. Those who possess this knowledge obviously belong together, and should feel closely united to one another. Any external association should be an expression of the inner union created by this knowledge.

Our time suffers very much in this respect. For instance, often when I speak today to, say, a youth gathering, even though I fully appreciate their endeavor and even though I myself have the very best intentions, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience their response to the concrete truths that should be filling their souls. It is difficult when I hear them say, “The first thing we must do is to join together!” Well, indeed, everything in these last decades has been “joined together”—ad infinitum! People have gone on and on joining together, but they've never yet got anything real for a result by tacking zeros onto one another indefinitely—00000000 and so on. One empty consciousness to begin with, joined to another empty consciousness, joined to a third consciousness, again empty—that all adds up to nothing. By contrast, you only have to assume a content—a content that is, after all, the basis of all zeroes: one. Then you have something. It doesn't have to be a human being, but it has to be some genuine content. Interestingly enough, this assumes that there is something there to begin with. It doesn't even have to be a human being. It can be real, living knowledge. These are things we should think about in our time. For usually people are much too comfortable to search for the concrete; they are content simply to put abstractions together. Joining together is all right, of course, but it will come of itself if something concrete is there first.

Perhaps this is something that should be understood before anything else by those who work among modern humankind as physicians and priests. Today two conditions can be observed throughout the world. Generally speaking, our ego and astral body do not find properly our physical and etheric bodies, whatever our waking condition may be. Also, truly, for those observing the world as it evolves, materialistic views don't really worry them unduly! Let the monists and the others fight with one another. Nothing is accomplished thereby. But that is certainly not the fundamental evil in the evolution of humanity. If one is observing the evolutionary process, one is not particularly interested to participate in these discussions of worldviews. For actually, whether one thinks this or another thinks that, opinions are frightfully thin little things in the human soul! They're just bubbles in the reality of this world. If one bubble hits another, if one bursts, if another becomes a bit thicker from the bursting of another, none of it matters. What does matter, what should be clearly realized, is that one does not ever becomes a materialist if one is sitting with one's ego and astral body properly in the physical and etheric bodies. In other words, to be a materialist means in a finer sense to be ill. One must fill one's whole being with this knowledge. And it is not surprising in the least that when others, those who are sitting properly inside their physical and etheric bodies, encounter the sick materialists, they turn away to exactly the opposite pole—to all the vague mist of spiritualism.

Here we come to a difficult area, because these things do not take place in those parts of the world that still have a connection with one another; they happen where the world has been thrown into chaos and its pieces lie scattered about. One thing no longer reveals itself as a healing remedy for another, for they are falling away from each other. So long as sick people speak of what is going on in their organs, their dreams will still reveal the corresponding healing remedies in the outer world. But in our present time people who are ill from materialism will not be describing sick inner organs; they have broken free of their organism; they want to describe the external world, as a materialist naturally would. Then they find not remedial dreams but the opposite—false spiritualism, which is certainly not a remedy. On the contrary, it brings on the illness more strongly than ever.

And so we find today in our time—if I may draw an analogy between medical work for individuals and cultural pathology and therapy—we find that spiritualism does not by any means offer a remedy for materialism, but corresponds to the somnambulist's dream revealing his sick organs. Now sometimes a process that properly should have taken hold of a person's inner organism pushes through the organism to the periphery, to the outer world; there is then the pathological condition called a “rash.” This corresponds exactly to what I've been telling you about. One sees with one's own eyes that what had been inside and is now outside is nothing healthy. It is an aberration. The physician should see clearly that materialism is a rash and needs to be regarded as a medical problem.

This will build a bridge to the priest's observation on the other side. The priest sees the symptoms that rise out of sick human souls, out of their need, out of their feelings. Spiritualism is just such a symptom. One comes to realize that in the widest sense sick life wants to sink down into the world, that all the disease in the present world outlook does indeed work itself out fully—insofar as it rests on the will—by working into people and sickening their inner life.

In the present epoch of human evolution it is impossible to see something that could be seen clearly in former times, because people in those days had different characteristics. We cannot see how a false direction of the will, a false worldview, a false view of life—all of which were designated in olden times as sin—cause illness in the organism. For they do not do so immediately in the ordinary way. We are only aware of the connection in the rarest cases, cases that are an intermediate stage between the sin and what can obviously be diagnosed as the resulting illness. These intermediate stages may simply develop into morbid conditions. But in this modern epoch the sin and the real illness are so detached from each other that now they even occur in separate incarnations. In earlier epochs they were able to appear in close connection as cause and effect, but as humanity developed they became separated so that sin appeared in one incarnation, illness in a subsequent one.

Here, then, begins the domain of the priests. Priests may no longer merely continue traditions of olden times, speaking of sin as the cause of illness. But if they have knowledge of repeated earth lives, they can speak of sin from that point of view; then they will again be speaking from the standpoint of truth. Much that priests in the world today say about these things is no longer true; it no longer corresponds to fact. These teachings originated in olden times, and today no one is interested in changing the teachings to accord with what is demanded in our time.

We have to relate ourselves to all this. Then it will be possible to make our study of pastoral medicine fruitful in both directions.

My intention is to give two more lectures for this course: tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. I am announcing this now so that you can make your plans accordingly.

• 12. “The sickest entity ...” This refers to a European expression, “the sick man of Europe,” applied to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

Dear friends,

There is something that is always overlooked in this present age, something that has to do with the working, and the wanting to work, of the spiritual world. It is this: that total spiritual activity must include the creative activity to be found in human thought and feeling. What really lies at their foundation has been completely forgotten in this age of materialistic thought; today humankind is fundamentally entirely unaware of it. That is why in this very field a kind of evil mischief is perpetrated throughout our present civilization. You surely know that from every possible center, whatever it may be called, all kinds of instructions go out to people telling how they can enhance their thought power, how their thoughts can become powerful. In this way seeds are strewn in every direction of something that in earlier spiritual life was called—and still is called—“black magic.” Such things are the cause of both soul illnesses and bodily illnesses, and the physician and priest must be aware of them in the course of their work. If one is alert to these things, one already has a clearer perception of the illnesses and symptoms of human soul-life. Moreover one can work to prevent them. This is all of great importance. The intent of instruction about thought power is to give people a power they would otherwise not possess, and this is often used for pernicious reasons. There is every possible kind of instruction today with this intent—for instance, how business executives can be successful in their financial transactions. In this area a tremendous amount of mischief is perpetrated.

And what is at the bottom of it all? These things will simply become worse unless clear knowledge of them is sought precisely in the field of medicine and in the field of theology. For human thinking in recent times, particularly scientific thinking, has come enormously under the influence of materialism. Often today people express their satisfaction over the fact that materialism in science is on the decline, that the tendency everywhere is to try to reach out beyond materialism. But truly this is slight satisfaction for those who see through these things. In the eyes of such people, the scientists or the theologians who want to overcome materialism in a modern manner are much worse than the hard-shell materialists whose assertions gradually become untenable through their very absurdity. And those who talk so glibly about spiritualism, idealism, and the like are strewing sand in people's eyes—and it's going into their own eyes as well.

For what do Driesch¹³ and others do, for instance, when they want to present something that is beyond physical-material events? They use exactly the same thoughts that have been used for hundreds of years to think about the material world alone, thoughts that indeed have no other capacity than to think about the material world alone. These are the thoughts they use to think about something that is supposed to be spiritual. But such thoughts do not have that capacity. For that, one has to go to true spiritual science. That is why such strange things appear and today it is not even noticed that they are strange. A person like Driesch, for instance, recognized officially by the outer world but in reality a dilettante, holds forth to the effect that one must accept the term “psychoid.” Well, if you want to ascribe to something a similarity to something else, that something else must itself be around somewhere. You can't speak of apelike creatures if there are no apes to start with. You can't speak of the “psychoid” if you say there's no such thing as a soul! And this silly nonsense is accepted today as science, honest science, science that is really striving to reach a higher level. These things must be realized. And the individuals in the anthroposophical movement who have had scientific training will be of some value in the evolution of our civilization if they don't allow themselves to be blinded by the flaring-up of will-o'-the-wisps but persist in observing carefully what is now essential to combat materialism.

Therefore the question must be asked: How is it possible for active, creative thinking to arise out of today's passive thinking? How must priests and physicians work so that creative impulses can now flow into the activity of individuals who are led and who want to be led by the spirit? Thoughts that evolve in connection with material processes leave the creative impulse outside in matter itself; the thoughts remain totally passive. That is the peculiar characteristic of our modern thought world, that the thoughts pervading the whole of science are quite passive, inactive, idle. This lack of creative power in our thinking is connected with our education, which has been completely submerged in the current passive science. Today human beings are educated in such a way that they simply are not allowed to think a creative thought—for fear that if they should actually entertain a creative thought they wouldn't be able to keep it objective but would add some subjective quirk to it! These are things that must be faced. But how can we come to creative thoughts? This can only happen if we really develop our knowledge of the human being. Humans cannot be known by uncreative thoughts, because by their very nature they themselves are creative. One must re-create if one wants knowledge. With today's passive thinking one can only understand the periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being.

It is important that we really understand the place humanity has been given in this world. Today therefore, let us put something before our souls as a kind of goal that lies at the end of a long perspective, but that can make our thoughts creative—for it holds the secret for making human thought creative.

Let us think of the universe in its changing and becoming—say in the form of a circle. (Plate VII) We may picture it like this because actually the universe as it evolves through time presents a kind of rhythmic repetition, upward and downward, with respect to many phenomena. Everywhere in the universe we find rhythms like that of day and night: other, greater rhythms that extend from one Ice Age to another, and so forth. If first we confine our inquiry to the rhythm that has the largest intervals for human perception, it will be the so-called Platonic year, which has always played an important role in human thoughts and ideas about the world when these were filled with more wisdom than they are now.

We can come to the Platonic year if we begin by observing the place where the sun rises on the first day of spring, the twenty-first of March of each year. At that moment of time the sun rises at a definite spot in the sky. We can find this spot in some constellation; attention has been given to it through all the ages, for it moves slightly from year to year. If, for instance, in 1923 we had observed this point of spring, its place in the sky in relation to the other stars, and now in 1924 observe it again, we find it is not in the same place; it lies farther back on a line that can be drawn between the constellation of Taurus and the constellation of Pisces. Every year the place where spring begins moves back in the zodiac a little bit in that direction. This means that in the course of time there is a gradual shift through all the constellations of the starry world; it can be seen and recorded. If we now inquire what the sum of all these shifts amounts to, we can see what the distance is from year to year. One year it is here, the next year there, and so on—finally it has come back to the same spot. That means after a certain period of time the place of spring's beginning must again be in the very same spot of the heavens, and for the place of its rising the sun has traveled once around the entire zodiac. When we reckon that up, it happens approximately every 25,920 years. There we have found a rhythm that contains the largest time-interval possible for a human being to perceive—the Platonic cosmic year, which stretches through approximately 25,920 of our ordinary years.

There we have looked out into the distances of the cosmos. In a certain sense we have pushed our thoughts against something from which the numbers we use bounce back. We are pushing with our thoughts against a wall. Thinking can't go any further. Clairvoyance must then come to our aid; that can go further. The whole of evolution takes place in what is encircled by those 25,920 years. And we can very well conceive of this circumference, if you will—which obviously is not a thing of space, but of space-time—we can conceive of it as a kind of cosmic uterine wall. We can think of it as that which surrounds us in farthest cosmic space. (Plate VII, red-yellow)

Now let us go from what envelops us in farthest cosmic space, from the rhythm that has the largest interval of time that we possess, to what appears to us first of all as a small interval, that is, the rhythm of our breathing. Now we find—again, of course, we must use approximate numbers—we find eighteen breaths a minute. If we reckon how many breaths a human being takes in a day, we come to 25,920 breaths a day. We find the same rhythm in the smallest interval, in the human being the microcosm, as in the largest interval, the macrocosm.

Thus the human being lives in a universe whose rhythm is the same as that of the universe itself. But only the human being, not the animal; in just these finer details of knowledge one finally sees the difference between the human and the animal. The essential nature of the human physical body can only be realized if it is related to the Platonic cosmic year; 25,920 years: in that span of time the nature of our physical body is rooted. Take a look in An Outline of Esoteric Science at the tremendous time periods, at first determined otherwise than by time and space as we know them, through the metamorphosis of sun, moon, and earth. Look at all the things that had to be brought together, but not in any quantitative way; then you can begin to understand the present human physical body with all its elements.

And now let us go to the center of the circle, (Plate VII) where we have the 25,920 breaths that, so to speak, place humanity in the center of the cosmic uterus. Now we have reached the ego. For in the breathing—and remember what I said about the breathing, that in the upper human it becomes a finer breathing for our so-called spiritual life—we find the expression of the individual human life on earth. Here, then, we have the ego. Just as we must grasp the connection of our physical body to the large time interval, the Platonic cosmic year, so we must grasp the connection of our ego—which we can feel in every breathing irregularity—to the rhythm of our breathing.

So you see, our life on earth lies between these two things—our own breathing and the cosmic year. Everything that is of any importance for the human ego is ruled by the breath. And the life of our physical body lies within those colossal processes that are ruled by the rhythm of 25,920 years. The activity that takes place in our physical body in accordance with its laws is connected with the large rhythm of the Platonic year in the same way that our ego activity is connected with the rhythm of our breathing. Human life lies in between those two rhythms. Our human life is also enclosed within physical-etheric body and astral body-ego. From a certain point of view we can say that human life on earth lies between physical body-etheric body and astral body-ego; from another point of view, from the divine, cosmic aspect, we can say human life on earth lies between a day's breathing and the Platonic year. A day's breathing is in this sense a totality; it relates to our whole human life.

But now let us consider from the cosmic standpoint what lies between human breathing, that is, the weaving life of the ego, and the course of a Platonic year, that is, the living force out in the macrocosm. As we maintain our rhythm of breathing through an entire day of twenty-four hours, we meet regularly another rhythm, the day-and-night rhythm, which is connected with how the sun stands in relation to the earth. The daily sunrise and sunset as the sun travels over the arch of heaven, the darkening of the sun by the earth, this daily circuit of the sun is what we meet with our breathing rhythm. This is what we encounter in our human day of twenty-four hours.

So let us do some more arithmetic to see how we relate to the world with our breathing, how we relate to the course of a macrocosmic day. We can figure it out in this way: Start from one day; in a year there are 360 days. (It can be approximate.) Now take a human life (again approximate) of seventy-two years, the so-called human life span. And we get 25,920 days. So we have a life of seventy-two years as the normal rhythm into which a human being is placed in this world, and we find it is the same rhythm as that of the Platonic sun year.

So our breathing rhythm is placed into our entire life in the rhythm of 25,920. One day of our life relates to the length of our entire life in the same rhythm as one of our breaths relates to the total number of our breaths during one day. What is it, then, that appears within the seventy-two years, the 25,920 days in the same way that a breath, one inhalation-exhalation, appears within the whole breathing process? What do we find there? First of all we have inbreathing-outbreathing, the first form of the rhythm. Second, as we live our normal human life there is something that we experience 25,920 times. What is that? Sleeping and waking. Sleeping and waking are repeated 25,920 times in the course of a human life, just as inbreathing and outbreathing are repeated 25,920 times in the course of a human day. But now we must ask, what is this rhythm of sleeping and waking? Every time we go to sleep we not only breathe carbon dioxide out, but as physical human beings we breathe our astral body and ego out. When we wake, we breathe them in again. That is a longer inbreathing-outbreathing: it takes twenty-four hours, a whole day. That is a second form of breathing that has the same rhythm. So we have a small breath, our ordinary inhalation-exhalation; and we have a larger breath by which we go out into the world and back, the breath of sleeping-waking.

But let us go further. Let us see how the average human life of seventy-two years fits into the Platonic cosmic year. Let us count the seventy-two years as belonging to one great year, a year consisting of days that are human lives. Let us reckon this great cosmic year in which each single day is a whole human life. Then count the cosmic year also as having 360 days, which would mean 360 human lives. Then we would get 360 human lives x 72 years = 25,920 years: the Platonic year.

What does this figure show us? We begin a life and die. What do we do when we die? When we die, we breathe out more than our astral body and ego from our earthly organism. We also breathe our etheric body out into the universe. I have often indicated how the etheric body is breathed out, spread out into the universe. When we come back to earth again, we breathe our etheric body in again. That is a giant breath. An etheric inbreathing-outbreathing. Mornings we breathe in the astral element, while with our physical breath we breathe in oxygen. With each earth-death we breathe the etheric element out; with each earth-life we breathe the etheric element in.

So there we have the third form of breathing: life and death. If we count life to be our life on earth, and death to be our life between death and a new birth, then we have the largest form of breathing in the cosmic year:

1. Inhalation-exhalation, the smallest breath.
2. Sleeping-waking, a larger breath.
3. Life-death, the largest breath.

Thus we stand first and foremost in the world of the stars. Inwardly, we relate to our ordinary breathing; outwardly, we relate to the Platonic year. In between, we live our human life, and exactly the same rhythm is revealed in this human life itself.

But what comes into this space between the Platonic year and our breathing rhythm? Like a painter who prepares a canvas and then paints on it, let us try painting on the base we have prepared, that is, the rhythms we have found in numbers. With the Platonic year as with smaller time rhythms, especially with the rhythm of the year, we find that continual change goes on in the outer world. Also it is change that we perceive; we perceive it most easily in temperatures: warmth and cold. We need only to think of cold winter and warm summer—here again we could present numbers, but let us take the qualitative aspect of warmth and cold. Human beings live life within this alternation between warmth and cold. In the outer world the alternation is within the element of time; and for so-called nature, changing in a time sequence from one to the other is quite healthful. But human beings cannot do this. We have, in a certain sense, to maintain a normal warmth—or a normal coldness, if you will—within ourselves. We have to develop inner forces by which we save some summer warmth for winter and some winter cold for summer. In other words, we must keep a proper balance within; we must be so continually active in our organism that it maintains a balance between warmth and cold no matter what is happening outside.

There are activities within the human organism of which we are quite unaware. We carry summer within us in winter and winter within us in summer. When it is summer, we carry within us what our organism experienced in the previous winter. We carry winter within us through the beginning of spring until St. John's Day; then the change comes. As autumn approaches, we begin to carry the summer within us, and we keep it until Christmas, until December 21, when the balance shifts again. So we carry in us this continual alternation of warmth and cold. But what are we doing in all this?

When we examine what we are doing, we find something extraordinarily interesting. Let this be the human being (see drawing below).

We realize from simple superficial observation that everything that enters the human being as cold shows the tendency to go to the nerve-sense system. And today we can point out that everything that works as cold, everything of a winter nature, works in the building up of our head, of our nerve-sense organization. Everything of a summer nature, everything that contains warmth, is given over to our metabolic-limb system. If we look at our metabolic-limb system, we can see that we carry within it everything summery. If we look at our nerve-sense functions, we can see that we carry in them everything we receive out of the universe that is wintry. So in our head we always have winter; in our metabolic-limb system we always have summer. And our rhythmic system maintains the balance between the one and the other. Warmth-cold, warmth-cold, metabolic system-head system, with a third system keeping them in balance. Material warmth is only a result of warmth processes, and material cold the result of cold processes. So we find a play of cosmic rhythm in the human organism. We can say that winter in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human nerve-sense system centered in the head. Summer in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human metabolic-limb system.

This way of looking into the human organism is another example of the initiatic medicine of which I spoke when I said it has a beginning in the book¹⁴ that Dr. Wegman worked out with me. The beginning is there for what must more and more become a part of science.

If we climb the rocks where the soil is so constituted that winter plants will grow in it, we come to that part of the outer world that is related to the organization of the human head. Let us suppose that we collect medicinal substances out in the world. We want to make sure that the spiritual forces appearing in an illness that originates in the nerve-sense system will be healed by the spirit in outer nature, so we climb very high in the mountains to find minerals and plants and bring them down for medicines for head illnesses. We are acting out of our creative thinking. It starts our legs moving toward things we must find in the earth that correspond to our medical needs. The right thoughts—and they come out of the cosmos—must impel us all the way to concrete deeds. These thoughts can stir us without our knowledge. People, say, who work in an office—they also have thoughts, at least they sometimes have them—now they are impelled by some instinct to go off on all sorts of hikes. Only they don't know the real reason—but that doesn't matter. It only becomes important if one observes such people from a physician's or a priest's standpoint. But a true view of the world also gives one inspiration for what one has to do in detail.

Now again, if we have to do with illnesses in the metabolic-limb system, we look for low-growing plants and for minerals in the soil. We look for what occurs as sediment, not for what grows above the earth in crystal form. Then we get the kind of mineral and plant remedies we need. That is how observation of the connection between processes in the macrocosm and processes in man lead one from pathology to therapy.

These connections must again be clearly understood. In olden times people knew them well. Hippocrates was really a latecomer as far as ancient medicine is concerned. But if you read a little of what he is supposed to have written, of what at any rate still preserved his spirit, you will find this viewpoint throughout. All through his writings you will find that the concrete details relate to broad knowledge and observation such as we have been presenting. In later times, such things were no longer of any interest. People came more and more to mere abstract, intellectual thinking and to an external observation of nature that led to mere experimentation. We must find the way back again to what was once vision of the relation between the human being and the world.

We live as human beings on the earth between our ego and our physical body, between breathing and the Platonic year. With our breathing we have a direct relation to the day. What do we relate to with our physical body? How do we relate physically to the Platonic year? There we relate to totally external conditions in the evolution of large natural processes—for instance, to climatic changes. In the course of the large natural processes human beings change their form, so that, for instance, successive racial forms appear, and so forth. We relate qualitatively to what happens in the shorter external changes, to what successive years and days bring us. In short, we evolve as human beings between these two farthest boundaries. But in between we can be free, because in between, even in the macrocosm, a remarkable element intervenes.

One can be lost in wonder in pondering over this rhythm of 25,920 years. One is awed by what happens between the universe and the human being. And as one contemplates all this, one realizes that the whole world—including the human being—is ordered according to measure, number, and weight. Everything is wonderfully ordered—but it all happens to be human calculation! And at important moments when we are explaining a calculation—even though it is correct—we always have to add that curious word “approximately.” For our human calculation never comes out exactly right. It is all absolutely logical; order and reason are in everything, they are alive and active, everything “works,” as we say. And yet there is something in all of it, something in the universe that is completely irrational. Something is there so that however profound our awe may be, even as initiates, when we go for an afternoon walk we still take an umbrella along. We take an umbrella because something could happen that is irrational. Something can appear in the life of the universe that simply “doesn't come out right” when numbers are applied to it. And so one has had to invent leap years, intercalary months, all kinds of things. Such things have always had to be used for the fixing of time. What is offered by a well-developed astronomy that has deepened into astrology and astrosophy (for one can think of it in that way) is all destroyed for immediate use by meteorology. This latter has not attained the rank of a rational science; [This lecture was given in 1924.] it is more or less permeated by vision, and will be, more and more. It takes an entirely different path; it consists of what is left over by the other sciences. Modern astronomy itself lives only in names; it is really nothing more than a system for giving names to stars. That is why even Serenissimus came to the end of his knowledge when newly found stars had to have names. He would visit the observatories in his country and let them show him various stars through the telescope, then after seeing everything he would say, “Yes, I know all that—but how you know what that star's name is, that very distant star, that's what I don't understand.” Yes, of course it's obvious, the standpoint you've adopted at this moment when you laugh at Serenissimus. But there's another standpoint: one could laugh at the astronomers. I'd rather you'd laugh at the astronomers, because there's something very strange going on in the world as it evolves.

If you want to inquire into the old way of naming things, Saturn and so forth, you should think back to our speech course,¹⁵ and recall that in olden times names were given from the feeling the astrologers and astrosophers had for the sound of some particular star. All the old star names were God-given, spirit-given. The stars were asked what their names were, because the tone of the star was always perceived and its name was then given accordingly. Now, indeed, you come to a certain boundary line in the development of astrosophy and astrology. Earlier they had to get the names from heaven. When you come to more recent times when the great discoveries were made, for instance, of the “little fellows” (Sternwichten), then everything is mixed up. One is called Andromeda, another has another Greek name. Everything is mixed up in high-handed fashion. One can't think that Neptune and Uranus are as truly characterized by their names as Saturn was. Now there is only human arbitrariness. And Serenissimus made one mistake. He believed the astronomers were carrying on their work similarly to the ancient astrosophers. But this was not so. They possessed only a narrow human knowledge, while the knowledge of the astrosophers of olden times, and astrologers of still older times, came directly out of humanity's intercourse with the gods. However, if today one would return from astronomy to astrology or astrosophy, and thereby have a macrocosm to live in that is rational throughout, then one would reach Sophia. Then one would find too that within this rationality and Sophia-wisdom meteoronomy, meteorology, and meteorosophy are the things that “don't come out right” by our human calculation, and one can only question them at their pleasure! That's another variety of Lady! In ordinary everyday life, one calls a lady capricious. And the meteorological Lady is capricious all the way from rainshowers to comets. But as one gradually advances from meteorology to meteorosophy one discovers the finer attributes of this world queen, attributes that do not come merely from caprice or cosmic emotion, but from the Lady's warm heart. But nothing will be accomplished unless in contrast to all the arithmetic, all the thinking, all that can be calculated rationally one acquires a direct acquaintance with the beings of the cosmos and learns to know them as they are. They are there; they do show themselves—shyly perhaps at first, for they are not obtrusive. With calculations one can go further and further, but then one is getting further and further away from the true nature of the world. For one is only reaching deeds from the past.

If one advances from ordinary calculation to the calculating of rhythms as it was in astrology for the harmony of the spheres, one goes on from the calculating of rhythms to a view of the organization of the world in numbers, as we find them in astrosophy. On the other hand one finds that the ruling world beings are rather shy. They do not appear at once. First they only present a kind of Akasha photography, and one is not sure of its source. One has the whole world to look at, but only in photographs displayed in various parts of the cosmic ether. And one does not know where they come from.

Then inspiration begins. Beings come out of the pictures and make themselves known. We move out of “-nomy” - but just to “-logy.” Only when we push through all the way to intuition does the being itself follow from inspiration and we come to Sophia. But this is a path of personal development that requires the effort of the whole human being. The whole human being must become acquainted with such a Lady, who hides behind meteorology—in wind and weather, moon and sun insofar as they intervene in the elements. Not just the head can be engaged as in “-logy,” but the whole human being is needed.

Already there is a possibility of taking the wrong path in this endeavor. You can even come to Anthroposophy through the head—by coming from anthroponomy, which is today the supreme ruling science, to anthropology. There you just have rationality, nothing more. But rationality is not alive. It describes only the traces, the footprints, of life and it gives one no impulse to investigate details. Yet life really consists of details and of the irrational element. What your head has grasped, you have to take down into the whole human being, and then with the whole human being progress from “-nomy” to “-logy,” finally to “-sophy,” which is Sophia.

We must have a feeling for all this if we want to enliven theology on the one side and medicine on the other through what can truly enliven them both—pastoral medicine. But the essential thing is that first of all, at the very outset of our approach to pastoral medicine, we learn to know the direction it should take in its observation of the world.

• 13. Hans Driesch (1867–1941). Scientist and philosopher.
• 14. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Extending Practical Medicine (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996).
• 15. Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Drama (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

In the last lecture, I spoke of a former view of life from which the modern scientific view has evolved. It still combined the qualitative with the form-related or geometrical elements of mathematics, the qualitative with the quantitative. One can therefore look back at a world conception in which the triangle or another geometrical form was an inner experience no matter whether the form referred to the surface of a given body or to its path of movement. Geometrical and arithmetical forms were intensely qualitative inner experiences. For example, a triangle and a square were each conceived as emerging from a specific inward experience.

This conception could change into a different one only when men lost their awareness that everything quantitative—including mathematics—is originally experienced by man in direct connection with the universe. It changed when the point was reached where the quantitative was severed from what man experiences. We can determine this moment of separation precisely. It occurred when all concepts of space that included man himself were replaced by the schematic view of space that is customary today, according to which, from an arbitrary starting point, the three coordinates are drawn. The kind of mathematics prevalent today, by means of which man wants to dominate the so-called phenomena of nature, arose in this form only after it had been separated from the human element. Expressing it more graphically, I would say in a former age man perceived mathematics as something that he experienced within himself together with his god or gods, whereby the god ordered the world. It came as no surprise therefore to discover this mathematical order in the world. In contrast to this, to impose an arbitrary space outline or some other mathematical formula on natural phenomena—even if such abstract mathematical concepts can be identified with significant aspects in these so-called natural phenomena—is a procedure that cannot be firmly related to human experiences. Hence, it cannot be really understood and is at most simply assumed to be a fact. Therefore in reality it cannot be an object of any perception. The most that can be said of such an imposition of mathematics on natural phenomena is that what has first been mathematically thought out is then found to fit the phenomena of nature. But why this is so can no longer be discovered within this particular world perception.

Think back to the other worldview that I have previously described to you, when all corporeality was regarded as image of the spirit. One looking at a body found in it the image of spirit. One then looked back on oneself, on what—in union with one's own divine nature—one experienced as mathematics through one's own bodily constitution. As a work of art is not something obscure but is recognized as the image of the artist's ideas, so one found in corporeal nature the mathematical images of what one had experienced with one's own divine nature. The bodies of external nature were images of the divine spiritual. The instant that mathematics is separated from man and is regarded only as an attribute of bodies that are no longer seen as a reflection of spirit, in that instant agnosticism creeps into knowledge.

Take a concrete example, the first phenomenon that confronts us after the birth of scientific thinking, the Copernican system. It is not my intention today or in any of these lectures to defend either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system. I am not advocating either one. I am only speaking of the historical fact that the Copernican system has replaced the Ptolemaic. What I say today does not imply that I favor the old Ptolemaic system over the Copernican. But this must be said as a matter of history. Imagine yourself back in the age when man experienced his own orientation in space: above-below, right-left, front-back. He could experience this only in connection with the earth. He could, for example, experience the vertical orientation in himself only in relation to the direction of gravity. He experienced the other two in connection with the four compass points according to which the earth itself is oriented. All this he experienced together with the earth as he felt himself standing firmly on it. He thought of himself not just as a being that begins with the head and ends a the sole of the feet. Rather, he felt himself penetrated by the force of gravity, which had something to do with his being but did not cease at the soles of his feet. Hence, feeling himself within the nature of the gravitational force, man felt himself one with the earth. For his concrete experience, the starting point of his cosmology was thus given by the earth. Therefore he felt he Ptolemaic system to be justified.

Only when man severed himself from mathematics, only then was it possible also to sever mathematics from the earth and to found an astronomical system with its center in the sun. Man had to lose the old experience-within-himself before he could accept a system with its center outside the earth. The rise of the Copernican system is therefore intimately bound up with the transformation of civilized mankind's soul mood. The origin of modern scientific thinking cannot be separated from the general mental and soul condition, but must be viewed in context with it.

It is only natural that statements like this are considered absurd by our contemporaries, who believe in the present world view far more fervently than the sectarians of olden days believed in their dogmas. But to give the scientific mode of thinking its proper value, it must be seen as arising inevitably out of human nature and evolution. In the course of these lectures, we shall see that by doing this we are actually assigning far greater value to science than do the modern agnostics.

Thus the Copernican world conception came into being, the projection of the cosmic center from the earth to the sun. Fundamentally, the whole cosmic thought edifice of Giordano Bruno,³² who was born in 1548 and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, was already contained in the Copernican world view. It is often said that Giordano Bruno glorifies the modern view of nature, glorifies Copernicanism. One must have deep insight into the inner necessity with which this new cosmology arose if one is to have any feeling at all for the manner and tone in which Giordano Bruno speaks and writes. Then one sees that Giordano Bruno does not sound like the followers of the new view or like the stragglers of the old view. He really does not speak about the cosmos mathematically so much as lyrically. There is something musical in the way Giordano Bruno describes the modern conception of nature. Why is that? The reason is that Giordano Bruno, though he was rooted with his whole soul in a bygone world perception, told himself with his outward intellect: The way things have turned out in history, we cannot but accept the Copernican world picture. He understood the absolute necessity that had been brought about by evolution. This Copernican world view, however, was not something he had worked out for himself. It was something given to him, and which he found appropriate for his contemporaries. Belonging as he did to an older world conception, he could not help but experience inwardly what he had to perceive and accept as knowledge. He still had the faculty of inner experience, but he did not have scientific forms for it. Therefore although he described them so wonderfully, he did not follow the Copernican directions of thought in the manner of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, or Newton.³³ Instead, he tried to experience the cosmos in the old way, the way that was suitable when the world cosmos was experienced within one's being. But in order to do this, mathematics would have had to be also mysticism, inward experience, in the way I described yesterday. This it could not be for Giordano Bruno. The time for it was past. Hence, his attempt to enter the new cosmology through living experience became an experience, not of knowledge but of poetry, or at least partially so. This fact lends Giordano's works their special coloring. The atom is still a monad; in his writings, it is still something alive. The sum of cosmic laws retains a soul quality, but not because he experienced the soul in all the smallest details as did the ancient mystics, and not because he experienced the mathematical laws of the cosmos as the intentions of the spirit. No, it was because he roused himself to wonder at this new cosmology and to glorify it poetically in a pseudo-scientific form. Giordano Bruno is truly something like a connecting link between two world conceptions, the present one and the ancient one that lasted into the fifteenth century. Man today can form scarcely any idea of the latter. All cosmic aspects were then still experienced by man, who did not yet differentiate between the subject within himself and the cosmic object outside. The two were still as one; man did not speak of the three dimensions in space, sundered from the orientation within his own body and appearing as above-below, right-left, and forward-backward.

Copernicus tried to grasp astronomy with abstract mathematical ideas. On the other hand, Newton shows mathematics completely on its own. Here I do not mean single mathematical deductions, but mathematical thinking in general, entirely divorced from human experience. This sounds somewhat radical and objections could certainly be made to what I am thus describing in broad outlines, but this does not alter the essential facts. Newton is pretty much the first to approach the phenomena of nature with abstract mathematical thinking. Hence, as a kind of successor to Copernicus, Newton becomes the real founder of modern scientific thinking.

It is interesting to see in Newton's time and in the age that followed how civilized humanity is at pains to come to terms with the immense transformation in soul configuration that occurred as the old mathematical-mystical view gave way to the new mathematical-scientific style. The thinkers of the time find it difficult to come to terms with this revolutionary change. It becomes all the more evident when we look into the details, the specific problems with which some of these people wrestled. See how Newton, for instance, presents his system by trying to relate it to the mathematics that has been severed from man. We find that he postulates time, place, space, and motion. He says in effect in his Principa: I need not define place, time, space, and motion because everybody understands them.³⁴ Everybody knows what time is, what space, place, and motion are, hence these concepts, taken from common experience, can be used in my mathematical explanation of the universe. People are not always fully conscious of what they say. In life, it actually happens seldom that a person fully penetrates everything he says with his consciousness. This is true even among the greatest thinkers. Thus Newton really does not know why he takes place, time, space, and motion as his starting points and feels no need to explain or define them, whereas in all subsequent deductions he is at pains to explain and define everything. Why does he do this? The reasons is that in regard to place, time, motion, and space all cleverness and thinking avail us nothing. No matter how much we think about these concepts, we grow no wiser than we were to begin with. Their nature is such that we experience them simply through our common human nature and must take them as they come. A successor of Newton's, Bishop Berkeley,³⁵ took particular notice of this point. He was involved in philosophy more than Newton was, but Berkeley illustrates the conflicts taking place during the emergence of scientific thinking. In other respects, as we shall presently hear, he was not satisfied with Newton, but he was especially struck by the way that Newton took these concepts as his basis without any explanation, that he merely said: I start out from place, time, space, and motion; I do not define them; I take them as premises for my mathematical and scientific reflections. Berkeley agrees that one must do this. One must take these concepts in the way they are understood by the simplest person, because there they are always clear. They become unclear not in outward experience, but in the heads of metaphysicians and philosophers. Berkeley feels that when these four concepts are found in life, they are clear; but they are always obscure when found in the heads of thinkers.

It is indeed true that all thinking about these concepts is of no avail. One feels this. Therefore, Newton is only beginning to juggle mathematically when he uses these concepts to explain the world. He is juggling with ideas. This is not meant in a derogatory way; I only want to describe Newton's abilities in a telling manner. One of the concepts thus utilized by Newton is that of space. He manipulates the idea of space as perceived by the man in the street. Still, a vestige of living experience is contained therein. If, on the other hand, one pictures space in terms of Cartesian mathematics, without harboring any illusions, it makes one's brain reel. There is something undefinable about this space, with its arbitrary center of coordinates. One can, for example, speculate brilliantly (and fruitlessly) about whether Descartes’ space if finite or infinite. Ordinary awareness of space that is still connected with the human element really is not at all concerned with finiteness or infinity. It is after all quite without interest to a living world conception whether space can be pictured as finite or infinite. Therefore one can say that Newton takes the trivial idea of space just as he finds it, but then he begins to mathematize. But, due to the particular quality of thinking in his age, he already has the abstracted mathematics and geometry, and therefore he penetrates spatial phenomena and processes of nature with abstract mathematics. Thereby he sunders the natural phenomena from man. In fact, in Newton's physics we meet for the first time ideas of nature that have been completely divorced from man. Nowhere in earlier times were conceptions of nature so torn away from man as they are in Newtonian physics.

Going back to a thinker of the fourth or fifth century A.D.—though people of that period can hardly be called “thinkers,” because their inner life was far more alive than the mere life in thoughts—we would find that he held the view: “I live; I experience space along with my God, and orient myself in space up-and-down, right-left, and forward-backward, but I dwell in space together with my God. He outlines the directions and I experience them.” So it was for a thinker of the third or fourth century A.D. and even later; indeed, it only became different in the fourteenth century. Thinking geometrically about space, man did not merely draw a triangle but was conscious of the fact that, while he did this, God dwelled within him and drew along with him. His experience was qualitative; he drew the qualitative reality that God Himself had placed within him. Everywhere in the outer world, whenever mathematics was observed, the intentions of God were also observed.

By Newton's time mathematics has become abstracted. Man has forgotten that originally he received mathematics as an inspiration from God. And in this utterly abstract form, Newton now applies mathematics to the study of space. As he writes his Principia, he simply applies this abstracted mathematics, this idea of space (which he does not define,) because he has a dim feeling that nothing will be gained by trying to define it. He takes the trivial idea of space and applies his abstract mathematics to it, thus severing it from any inward experiences. This is how he speaks of the principles of nature.

Later on, interestingly enough, Newton goes somewhat deeper. This is easy to see if one is familiar with his works. Newton becomes ill at ease, as it were, when he contemplates his own view of space. He is not quite comfortable with this space, torn as it is out of man and estranged completely from the spirit. So he defines it after all, saying that space is the sensorium of God. It is most interesting that at the starting point of modern science the very person who was the first to completely mathematize and separate space from man, eventually defines space as God's sensorium,³⁶ a sort of brain or sense organ of God. Newton had torn nature asunder into space and man-who-experiences-space. Having done this, he feels inwardly uneasy when he views this abstract space, which man had formerly experienced in union with his god. Formerly, man had said to himself: What my human sensorium experiences in space, I experience together with my god. Newton becomes uneasy, now that he has torn space away form the human sensorium. He has thereby torn himself away from his permeation with the divine-spiritual. Space, with all is mathematics, was not something external. So, in later life, Newton addresses it as God's sensorium, though to begin with he had torn the whole apart, thus leaving space devoid of Spirit and God. But enough feeling remained in Newton that he could not leave this externalized space devoid of God. So he deified it again.

Scientifically, man tore himself loose from his god, and thus from the spirit; but outwardly he again postulated the same spirit. What happened here explains why a man like Goethe found it impossible³⁷ to go along with Newton on any point. Goethe's Theory of Color is one particularly characteristic point. This whole procedure of first casting out the spirit, separating it from man, was foreign to Goethe's nature. Goethe always had the feeling that man has to experience everything, even what is related to the cosmos. Even in regard to the three dimensions Goethe felt that the cosmos was only a continuation of what man had inwardly experienced. Therefore Goethe was by nature Newton's adversary.

Now let us return to Berkeley, who was somewhat younger than Newton, but still belonged to the period of conflict that accompanied the rise of the scientific way of thinking. Berkeley had no quarrel with Newton's accepting the trivial ideas of place, space, time, and motion. But he was not happy with this whole science that was emerging, and particularly not with its interpretations of natural phenomena. It was evident to him that when nature is utterly severed from man it cannot be experienced at all, and that man is deceiving himself when he imagines that he is experiencing it.

Therefore, Berkeley declared that bodies forming the external basis for sense perceptions do not really exist. Reality is spiritual through and through. The universe, as it appears to us—even where it appears in a bodily form—is but the manifestation of an all-pervading spirit. In Berkeley, these ideas appear pretty much as mere assertions, for he no longer had any trace of the old mysticism and even less of the ancient pneumatology. Except for his religious dogma, he really had no ground at all for his assertion of such all-pervading spirituality. But assert it he did, and so vigorously that all corporeality become for him no more than a revelation of the spirit. Hence it was impossible for Berkeley to say: I behold a color and there is vibrating movement back of it that I cannot see—which is what modern science justifiably states. Instead, Berkeley said: I cannot hypothetically assume that there is anything possessing any corporeal property such as vibratory movement. The basis of the physical world of phenomena must be spiritually conceived. Something spiritual is behind a color perception as its cause, which I experience in myself when I know myself as spirit. Thus Berkeley is a spiritualist in the sense in which this term is used in German philosophy.

For dogmatic reasons, but with a certain justification, Berkeley makes innumerable objections against the assumption that nature can be comprehended by mathematics that has been abstracted from direct experience. Since to Berkeley the whole cosmos was spiritual, he also viewed mathematics as having been formed together with the spirit of the cosmos. He held that we do in fact experience the intentions of the cosmic spirit insofar as they have mathematical forms, for that we cannot apply mathematical concepts in an external manner to corporeal objects.

In accordance with this point of view, Berkeley opposed what mathematics had become for both Newton and Leibnitz,³⁸ namely differential and integral calculus. Please, do not misunderstand me. Today's lecture must be fashioned in such a way that it cannot but provoke many objections in one who holds to the views prevailing today. But these objections will fade away during the ensuring lectures, if one is willing to keep an open mind. Today, however, I want to present the themes that will occupy us in a rather radical form.

Berkeley became an opponent of the whole infinitesimal calculus³⁹ to the extent that it was then known. He opposed what was beyond experience. In this regard, Berkeley's feeling for things was often more sensitive than his thoughts. He felt how, to the quantities that the mind could conceive, the emergence of infinitesimal calculus added other quantities; namely, the differentials, which attain definition only in the differential coefficient. Differentials must be conceived in such a way that they always elude our thinking, as it were. Our thinking refuses to completely permeate them. Berkeley regarded this as a loss of reality, since knowledge for him was only what could be experienced. Therefore he could not approve of mathematical ideas that produced the indetermination of the differentials.

What are we really doing when we seek differential equations for natural phenomena? We are pointing to something that eludes our possible experience. I realize, of course, that many of you cannot quite follow me on these points, but I cannot here expound the whole nature of infinitesimal calculus. I only want to draw attention to some aspects that will contribute to our study of the birth of modern science.

Modern science set out to master the natural phenomena by means of a mathematics detached from man, a mathematics no longer inwardly experienced. By adopting this abstract mathematical view and these concepts divorced from man, science arrived at a point where it could examine only the inanimate. Having taken mathematics out of the sphere of live experience, one can only apply it to what is dead. Therefore, owing to this mathematical approach, modern science is directed exclusively to the sphere of death. In the universe, death manifests itself in disintegration, in atomization, in reduction to microscopic parts—putting it simply, in a crumbling into dust. This is the direction taken by the present-day scientific attitude. With a mathematics detached from all living experience, it takes hold of everything in the cosmos that turns to dust, that atomizes. From this moment onward it becomes possible to dissipate mathematics itself into differentials. We actually kill all living forms of thought, if we try to penetrate them with any kind of differential equation, with any differential line of thought. To differentiate is to kill; to integrate is to piece the dead together again in some kind of framework, to fit the differentials together again into a whole. But they do not thereby become alive again, after having been annihilated. One ends up with dead specters, not with anything living.

This is how the whole perspective of what was opening up through infinitesimal calculus appeared to Berkeley. Had he expressed himself concretely, he might well have said: First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you fit its differentials together again in integrals, but you no longer have a world, only a copy, an illusion. With regard to its content, every integral is really an illusion, and Berkeley already felt this to be so. Therefore, differentiation really implies annihilation, while integration is the gathering up of bones and dust, so that the earlier forms of the slain beings can be pieced together again. But this does not bring them back to life; they remain no more than dead replicas.

One can say that Berkeley's sentiments were untimely. This they certainly were, for the new way of approach had to come. Anyone who would have said that infinitesimal calculus should never have been developed would have been called not a scientific thinker but a fool. On the other hand, one must realize that at the outset of this whole stream of development, feelings such as Berkeley's were understandable. He shuddered at what he thought would come from a infinitesimal study of nature and had to do with the process of birth but a study of all dying aspects in nature.

Formerly this had not been observed, nor had there been any interest in it. In earlier times, the coming-into-being, the germinating, had been studied; now, one looked at all that was fading and crumbling into dust. Man's conception was heading toward atomism, whereas previously it had tended toward the continuous, lasting aspects of things. Since life cannot exist without death and all living things must die, we must look at and understand all that is dead in the world. A science of the inanimate, the dead, had to arise. It was absolutely necessary. The time that we are speaking about was the age in which mankind was ready for such a science. But we must visualize how this went against the grain of somebody who, like Berkeley, still lived completely in the old view.

The after-effects of what came into being then are still very much with us today. We have witnessed the triumphs of just those scientific labors that made Berkeley shudder. Until they were somewhat modified through the modern theory of relativity,⁴⁰ Newton's theories reigned supreme, Goethe's revolt against them made no impression. For a true comprehension of what went on we must go back to Newton's time and see the shuddering of thinkers who still had a vivid recollection of earlier views and how they clung to feelings that resembled the former ones.

Giordano Bruno shrank from studying the dead nature that was now to be the object of study. He could not view it as dead in a purely mathematical manner of thought, so he animated the atoms into monads and imbued his mathematical thinking with poetry in order to retain it in a personal sphere. Newton at first proceeded from a purely mathematical standpoint, but then he wavered and defined space (which he has first completely divorced from man through his external mathematics) as God's sensorium. Berkeley in his turn rejected the new direction of thinking altogether and with it the whole trend towards the infinitesimal.

Today, however, we are surrounded and overwhelmed by the world view that Giordano Bruno tried to turn into poetry, that Newton felt uncomfortable about, and that Berkeley completely rejected. Do we take what Newton said—that space is a sensorium of God—seriously when we think in the accepted scientific sense today? People today like to regard as great thinkers those men who have said something or other that they approve. But if the great men also said something that they do not approve, they feel very superior and think: Unfortunately, on this point he wasn’t as enlightened as I am. Thus many people consider Lessing⁴¹ a man of great genius but make an exception for what he did toward the end of his life, when he became convinced that we go through repeated earth lives.

Just because we must in the present age come to terms with the ideas that have arisen, we must go back to their origin. Since mathematics has once and for all been detached from man, and since nature has been taken hold of by this abstract mathematics that has gradually isolated us from the whole of nature, we must now somehow manage to find ourselves in this nature. For we will not attain a coherent spiritual knowledge until we once again have found the spirit in nature.

Just as it is a matter of course that every living man will sooner or later die, so it was a matter of course that sooner or later in the course of time a conception of death had to emerge from the former life-imbued world view. Things that can only be learned from a corpse cannot be learned by a person who is unwilling to examine the corpse. Therefore certain mysteries of the world can be comprehended only if the modern scientific way of thinking is taken seriously.

Let me close with a somewhat personal remark.⁴² The scientific world view must be taken seriously, and for this reason I was never an opponent of it; on the contrary, I regarded it as something that of necessity belongs to our time. Often I had to speak out against something that a scientist, or so-called scientist, had made of the things that were discovered by unprejudiced investigation of the sphere of death. It was the misinterpretation of such scientific discoveries that I opposed. On this occasion let me state emphatically that I do not wish to be regarded as in any way an opponent of the scientific approach. I would consider it detrimental to all our anthroposophical endeavors if a false opposition were to arise between what anthroposophy seeks by way of spiritual research and what science seeks—and must of necessity seek in its field—out of the modern attitude.

I say this expressly, my dear friends, because a healthy discussion concerning the relationship between anthroposophy and science must come to pass within our movement. Anything that goes wrong in this respect can only do grave harm to anthroposophy and should be avoided.

I mention this here because recently, in preparing these lectures, I read in the anthroposophical periodical Die Drei that atomism was being studied in a way in which no progress can be made. Therefore, I want to make it clear that I consider all these polemics in Die Drei about atomism as something that only serves to stultify the relations between anthroposophy and science.

• 32. Giordano Bruno: Nola 1548–1600 Rome. Dominican, 1563–1576, a great traveler. Main works developed at the English court at the time of Elizabeth I. After he returned to Italy he was imprisoned because of heretical teachings, and was burned in Rome after 8 years in prison. See Riddles of Philosophy, and The Spiritual Guidance of Man, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 33. Isaac Newton, Sir: Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire 1642–1727 Kensington, London. Born as a dwarf-like child. Grew up on a farm and went to village and small town schools until 1661. After he was accepted at the University he was of medium talent until his “flaming” as a genius physicist, astronomer, mathematician 1663–1664. Professor in Cambridge 1669–1701, member of the Royal Society London 1662 and from 1703 until his death, its President. Main work: Law of Gravitation, Mathematically Adapted to the Law of Motion from Kepler, developed 1666, published 1687 in Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica. The idea of an infinitesimal mathematics came from Newton in 1663; three years later he had developed his differential mathematics. His Optics, 1704, put forth the division of light in color as well as emission theory.
  
  Later Newton lost all interest in physics, mathematics, and also in the destiny and consequences of his works. He turned towards chemical and alchemical experiments and studies of their old traditions. In his old age he was interested in religious-speculative studies. Before his death he compared his life with a day, in which a child is playing with sand and mussels and is not aware anymore of the cosmos at his back. Literature: J.W.N. Sullivan, Isaac Newton 1642–1727 (London 1938).
• 34. In Newton's second edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica of 1713 the definition is “But I do not define, because it is well known to all of us.”
• 35. George Berkeley: Desert Castle, Thomastown, Ireland 1685–1753 Oxford. English philosopher and Anglican missionary, Bishop from 1734. Main works: Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, 1710; Alciphron, about ethics and free thinkers, 1732; Siris, concerning metaphysical questions. See: Riddles of Philosophy.
  
  Berkeley said: “One has to do it in such a way”: e.g., as in Paragraph 113 of Principles of Human Knowledge. In the writing De Motu (From Motion) is written in Paragraph 43: “Motion, even though perceived clearly by the senses, was darkened, but not because of its own being, but far more through commentaries by learned philosophers.”
• 36. In the work Optice by Newton, which is the Latin translation of his Optics (1704), published by Samuel Clarke in 1706 and approved with additions made by Newton, the formula appears only at the end of the book at the so-called 28th Problem: “If these questions are answered in the right way, could we then not ascertain the phenomenon that there is a being, unbodily, intelligent, which can perceive the endless universe as it were with its sense organs, and which seems to look into the innermost and is surrounding it with its all-embracing presence, while that in us that is usually feeling and thinking are only handed-down pictures in which we then perceive and observe our organs?” This thought seems not only to be Newton's, but was also presented in a similar way by Henry More, the Platonist from Cambridge who was a friend of Newton.
• 37. For his polemic concerning Newton's color theory, see Rudolf Steiner, Goethe the Scientist (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950), especially the Introduction, “Goethe, Newton and the Physicists”; see also the forthcoming book, Heinrich O. Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press).
• 38. Leibnitz: Leipzig 1646–1716 Hanover. Philologist, mathematician, physicist, lawyer, statesman, priest. Mostly living at princely courts, traveling a lot. Discoverer of the Infinitesimal Calculus 1686, independently of Newton.
• 39. In his writing The Analyst (The Analyst, 1734, included in the book Writings about the Origin of Mathematics and Physics) the Table of Contents is in the form of 50 theses. No. 7, for example, is as follows: “Objections against the Secrets of Belief Which are Made Unfairly by Those who Admit Them in Science;” or No. 13: “The Rule for the Flux of Potency is Achieved through Unfair Reasoning;” and No. 22: “With the Help of a Double Mistake Analysts Come to their Truth, but not to Science, in which They do not even Know How They Came to Their Own Conclusions.” From the Polemic Dispute, which follows The Analyst, an example is: “No big name on this earth will ever cause me to take unclear things for clear ones. They think of one as if it were a crime to think one could see further than Sir Isaac Newton, even above him. I am convinced though that they speak for the feelings of many others. But there are also some ... who think and feel it unfair to copy some great man's shortcomings, and who see no crime in wanting to see further than Sir Isaac Newton, but further than the whole of mankind.”
• 40. Prepared by Mach and Lorentz, developed by Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity 1905, Common Theory of Relativity 1916. Made it necessary to revise Newton's Mechanics with the help of non-Euclidean Geometry. See also Riddles of Philosophy and Georg Unger, Von Bidden, Physicalischer Begriffe, Part 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 100–122.
• 41. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim: Kamenz/Lausitz 1729–1781 Brunswick. Dramatist, essayist, critic. Opens a new epoch in German literature and an. His last writing, “The Education of the Human Race,” (1780) finds it necessary to postulate reincarnation for the sake of the development of the human race. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 42. The reason was a controversy in the magazine Die Drei of 1921–1922, pages 1107 and 1114, as well as in the following years publication (see pages 172–330 about the reality of atoms). See Rudolf Steiner's First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977).

The isolation of man's ideas (especially his mathematical ideas) from his direct experience has proved to be the outstanding feature of the spiritual development leading to modern scientific thinking. Let us place this process once more before our mind's eye.

We were able to look back into ages past, when what man had to acquire as knowledge of the world was experienced in communion with the world. During those epochs, man inwardly did not experience his threefold orientation—up-down, left-right, front-back—in such a manner that he attributed it solely to himself. Instead, he felt himself within the universal whole; hence, his own orientations were to him synonymous with the three dimensions of space. What he pictured of knowledge to himself, he experienced jointly with the world. Therefore, with no uncertainty in his mind, he knew how to apply his concepts, his ideas, to the world. This uncertainty has only arisen along with the more recent civilization. We see it slowly finding its way into the whole of modern thought and we see science developing under this condition of uncertainty. This state of affairs must be clearly recognized.

A few examples can illustrate what we are dealing with . Take a thinker like John Locke, who lived from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. His writings show what an up-to-date thinker of his age had to say concerning the scientific world perception. John Locke⁴³ divided everything that man perceives in his physical environment into two aspects. He divided the characteristic features of bodies into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities were those that he could only attribute to the objects themselves, such as shape, position, and motion. Secondary qualities in his view were those that did not actually belong to the external corporeal things but were an effect that these objects had upon man. Examples are color, sound, and warmth. Locke stated it thus: “When I hear a sound, outside of me there is vibrating air. In a drawing, I can picture these vibrations in the air that emanate from a sound-aroused body and continue on into my ear. The shape that the waves, as they are called, possess in the vibrating air can be pictured by means of spatial forms. I can visualize their course in time—all this, belonging to the primary qualities, certainly exists in the external world, but it is silent, it is soundless. The quality of sound, a secondary quality, only arises when the vibration of the air strikes my ear, and with it arises that peculiar inner experience that I carry within me as sound. It is the same with color, which is now lumped together with light. There must be something out there in the world that is somehow of a corporeal nature and somehow possesses shape and movement. This exercises an effect on my eye and thus becomes my experience of light or color. It is the same with the other things that present themselves to my senses. The whole corporeal world must be viewed like this; we must distinguish between the primary qualities in it, which are objective, and the secondary qualities, which are subjective and are the effects of the primary qualities upon us.”

Simply put, one could say with Locke that the external world outside of man is form, position, and movement, whereas all that makes up the content of the sense world exists in truth somehow inside us. The actual content of color as a human experience is nowhere in the environment, it lives in me. The actual content of sound is nowhere to be found outside, it lives in me. The same is true of my experience of warmth or cold.

In former ages, when what had become the content of knowledge was experienced jointly with the world, one could not possibly have had this view because, as I have said, a man experienced mathematics by participating in his own bodily orientation and placing this orientation into his own movement. He experienced this, however, in communion with the world. Therefore, his own experience was sufficient reason for assuming the objectivity of position, place, and movement. Also, though in another portion of his inner life, man again had this communion with the world in regard to color, tone, and so forth. Just as the concept of movement was gained through the experience of his own movement, so the concept of color was gained through a corresponding internal experience in the blood, and this experience was then connected with whatever is warmth, color, sound, and so forth in the surrounding world. Certainly, in earlier times, man distinguished position, location, movement, and time-sequence from color, sound, and warmth, but these were distinguished as being different kinds of experiences that were undergone jointly with different kinds of existence in the objective world.

Now, in the scientific age, the determination of place, movement, position, and form ceased to be inward self-experience. Instead, they were regarded as mere hypotheses that were caused by some external reality. When the shape of a cannon is imagined, one can hardly say: This form of the cannon is actually somehow within me. Therefore its identification was directed outward and the imagined form of the cannon was related to something objective. One could not very well admit that a musket-ball was actually flying within one's brain; therefore, the hypothetically thought-out movements were attributed to something objective.

On the other hand, what one saw in the flying musket-ball, the flash by which one perceived it and the sound by which one heart it, were pushed into one's own human nature, since no other place could be found for them. Man no longer knew how he experienced them jointly with the objects; therefore, he associated them with his own being.

It actually took quite some time before those who thought along the lines of the scientific age perceived the impossibility of this arrangement. What had in fact taken place? The secondary qualities, sound, color, and warmth experience, had become, as it were, fair game in the world and, in regard to human knowledge, had to take refuge in man. But before too long, nobody had any idea of how they lived there. The experience, the self-experience, was no longer there. There was no connection with external nature, because it was not experienced anymore. Therefore these experiences were pushed into one's self. So far as knowledge was concerned, they had, as it were, disappeared inside man. Vaguely it was thought that an ether vibration out in space translated itself into form and movement, and this had an effect on the eye, and then worked on the optic nerve, and finally somehow entered the brain. Our thoughts were a means of looking around inside for whatever it was that, as an effect of the primary qualities, supposedly expressed itself in man as secondary qualities. It took a long time, as I said, before a handful of people firmly pointed out the oddity of these ideas. There is something extraordinary in what the Austrian philosopher Richard Wahle⁴⁴ wrote in his Mechanism of Thinking, though he himself did not realize the full implications of his sentence: “Nihil est in cerebro, quod non est in nervis.” (“There is nothing in the brain that is not in the nerves.” It may not be possible with the means available today to examine the nerves in every conceivable way, but even if we could we would not find sound, color, or warmth experience in them. Therefore, they must not be in the brain either. Actually, one has to admit now that they simply disappear insofar as knowledge is concerned. One examines the relationship of man to the world. Form, position, place, time, etc. are beheld as objective. Sound, warmth, experience and color vanish; they elude one.⁴⁵

Finally, in the Eighteenth Century, this led Kant⁴⁶ to say that even the space and time qualities of things cannot somehow be outside and beyond man. But there had to be some relationship between man and the world. After all, such a relationship cannot be denied if we are to have any idea of how man exists together with the world. Yet, the common experience of man's space and time relationships with the world simply did not exist anymore. Hence arose the Kantian idea: If man is to apply mathematics, for example, to the world, then it is his doing that he himself makes the world into something mathematical. He impresses the whole mathematical system upon the “things in themselves,” which themselves remain utterly unknown.—In the Nineteenth Century science chewed on this problem interminably. The basic nature of man's relation to cognition is simply this: uncertainty has entered into his relationship with the world. He does not know how to recognize in the world what he is experiencing. This uncertainty slowly crept into all of modern thinking. We see it entering bit by bit into the spiritual life of recent times.

It is interesting to place a recent example side by side with Locke's thinking. August Weismann,⁴⁷ a biologist of the Nineteenth Century, conceived the thought: in any living organism, the interplay of the organs (in lower organisms, the interaction of the parts) must be regarded as the essential thing. This leads to comprehension of how the organism lives. But in examining the organism itself, in understanding it through the interrelationship of its parts, we find no equivalent for the fact that the organism must die. If one only observes the organism, so Weismann said, one finds nothing that will explain death. In the living organism, there is absolutely nothing that leads to the idea that the organism must die. For Weismann, the only thing that demonstrates that an organism must die is the existence of a corpse. This means that the concept of death is not gained from the living organism. No feature, no characteristic, found in it indicates that dying is a part of the organism. It is only when the event occurs, when we find a corpse in the place of the living organism, that we know the organism possesses the ability to die.

But, says Weismann, there is a class of organisms where corpses are never found. These are the unicellular organisms. They only divide themselves so there are no corpses. The propagation of such beings looks like this:

One divides into two; each of these divides into two again, and so on. There is never a corpse. Weismann therefore concludes that the unicellular beings are immortal. This is the immortality of unicellular beings that was famous in nineteenth-century biology. Why were these organisms considered immortal? Because they never produce any corpses, and because we cannot entertain the concept of death in the organic realm as long as there are no corpses. Where there is no corpse, there is no room for the concept of death. Hence, living beings that produce no corpses are immortal.

This example shows how far man has removed himself in modern times from any connection between the world and his thinking, his inner experiences. His concept of an organism is no longer such that the fact of its death can be perceived from it. This can only be deduced from the existence of something like a corpse. Certainly, if a living organism is only viewed from outside, if one cannot experience what is in it, then indeed one cannot find death in the organism and an external sign is necessary. But this only proves that in his thinking man feels himself separated from the things around him.

From the uncertainty that has entered all thinking concerning the corporeal world, from this divorce between our thoughts and our experience, let us turn back to the time when self-experience still existed. Not only did the inwardly experienced concept exist alongside the externally excogitated concept of a triangle, square, or pentagram, but there were also inwardly experienced concepts of blossoming and fading, of birth and death. This inner experience of birth and death had its gradations. When a child was seen to grow more and more animated, when its face began to express its soul, when one really entered into this growing process of the child, this could be seen as a continuation of the process of birth, albeit a less pronounced and intensive one. There were degrees in the experience of birth. When a man began to show wrinkles and grey hair and grow feeble, this was seen as a first mild degree of dying. Death itself was only the sum total of many less pronounced death experiences, if I may use such a paradox. The concepts of blossoming and decaying, of being born and dying, were inwardly alive.

These concepts were experienced in communion with the corporeal world. No line was drawn between man's self-experience and the events in nature. Without a coastline, as it were, the inner land of man merged into the ocean of the universe. Owing to this form of experience, man lived himself into the world itself. Therefore, the thinkers of earlier ages, whose ideas no longer receive proper attention from science, had to form quite different ideas concerning something like what Weismann called the “immortality of unicellular beings.” What sort of concept would an ancient thinker have formed had he had a microscope and known something about the division of unicellular organisms? He would have said: First I have the unicellular being; it divides itself into two. Somewhat imprecisely, he might have said: It atomizes itself, it divides itself; for a certain length of time, the two parts are indivisible; then they divide again. As soon as division or atomization begins, death enters in. He would not have derived death from the corpse but from atomization, from the division into parts. His train of thought would have been somewhat as follows: A being that is capable of life, that is in the process of growth, is not atomized; and when the tendency to atomization appears, the being dies. In the case of unicellular beings, he would simply have thought that the two organisms cast off by the first unicellular being were for the moment dead, but would be, so to speak, revived immediately, and so forth. With atomization, with the process of splitting, he would have linked the thought of death. If he had known about unicellular beings and had seen one split into two, he would not have thought that two new ones had come into being. On the contrary, he would have said that out of the living monad, two atoms have originated. Further, he would have said that wherever there is life, wherever one observes life, one is not dealing with atoms. But if they are found in a living being, then a proportionate part of the being is dead. Where atoms are found, there is death, there is something inorganic. This is how matters would have been judged in a former age based on living inner knowledge of the world.

All this is not clearly described in our histories of philosophy, although the discerning reader can have little doubt of it. The reason is that the thought-forms of this older philosophy are totally unlike today's thinking. Therefore anyone writing history nowadays is apt to put his own modern concepts into the minds of earlier thinkers.⁴⁸ But this is impermissible even with a man as recent as Spinoza. In his book on what he justifiably calls ethics, Spinoza follows a mathematical method but it is not mathematics in the modern sense. He expounds his philosophy in a mathematical style, joining idea to idea as a mathematician would. He still retains something of the former qualitative experience of quantitative mathematical concepts. Hence, even in contemplating the qualitative aspect of man's inner life, we can say that his style is mathematical. Today with our current concepts, it would be sheer nonsense to apply a mathematical style to psychology, let alone ethics.

If we want to understand modern thinking, we must continually recall this uncertainty, contrasting it to the certainty that existed in the past but is no longer suited to our modern outlook. In the present phase of scientific thinking, we have come to the point where this uncertainty is not only recognized but theoretical justifications have been offered for it. And example is a lecture given by the French thinker Henri Poincaré⁴⁹ in 1912 on current ideas relating to matter. He speaks of the existing controversy or debate concerning the nature of matter; whether it should be thought of as being continuous or discrete; in other words, whether one should conceive of matter as substantial essence that fills space and is nowhere really differentiated in itself, or whether substance, matter, is to be thought of as atomistic, signifying more or less empty space containing within it minute particles that by virtue of their particular interconnections form into atoms, molecules, and so forth.

Aside from what I might call a few decorative embellishments intended to justify scientific uncertainty, Poincaré's lecture comes down to this: Research and science pass through various periods. In one epoch, phenomena appear that cause the thinker to picture matter in a continuous form, making it convenient to conceive of matter this way and to focus on what shows up as continuity in the sense data. In a different period the findings point more toward the concept of matter being diffused into atoms, which are pictured as being fused together again; i.e. matter is not continuous but discrete and atomistic. Poincaré is of the opinion that always, depending on the direction that research findings take, there will be periods when thinking favors either continuity or atomism. He even speaks of an oscillation between the two in the course of scientific development. It will always be like this, he says, because the human mind has a tendency to formulate theories concerning natural phenomena in the most convenient way possible. If continuity prevails for a time, we get tired of it. (These are not Poincaré's exact words, but they are close to what he really intends.) Almost unconsciously, as it were, the human mind then comes upon other scientific findings and begins to think atomistically. It is like breathing where exhalation follows inhalation. Thus there is a constant oscillation between continuity and atomism. This merely results from a need of the human mind and according to Poincaré, says nothing about the things themselves. Whether we adopt continuity or atomism determines nothing about things themselves. It is only our attempt to come to terms with the external corporeal world.

It is hardly surprising that uncertainty should result from an age which no longer finds self-experience in harmony with what goes on in the world but regards it only as something occurring inside man. If you no longer experience a living connection with the world, you cannot experience continuity or atomism. You can only force your preconceived notions of continuity or atomism on the natural phenomena. This gradually leads to the suspicion that we formulate our theories according to our changing needs. Just as we must breath in and out, so we must, supposedly, think first continuistically for a while, then atomistically for a while. If we always thought in the same way, we would not be able to catch a breath of mental air. Thus our fatal uncertainty is confirmed and justified. Theories begin to look like arbitrary whims. We no longer live in any real connection with the world. We merely think of various ways in which we might live with the world, depending on our own subjective needs.

What would the old way of thought have said in such a case? It would have said: In an age when the leading thinkers think continuistically, they are thinking mainly of life. In one in which they think atomistically, they are thinking primarily of death, of inorganic nature, and they view even the organic in inorganic terms.

This is no longer unjustified arbitrariness. This rests on an objective relationship to things. Naturally, I can take turns in dealing with the animate and the inanimate. I can say that the very nature of the animate requires that I conceive of it continuistically, whereas the nature of the inanimate requires that I think of it atomistically. But I cannot say that this is only due to the arbitrary nature of the human mind. On the contrary, it corresponds to an objective relating of oneself to the world. For such perception, the subjective aspect is really disregarded, because one recognizes the animate in nature in continual form and the inanimate in discrete form. And if one really has to oscillate between the two forms of thought, this can be turned in an objective direction by saying that one approach is suited to the living and the other is suited to the dead. But there is no justification for making everything subjective as Poincaré does. Nor is the subjective valid for the way of perception that belonged to earlier times.

The gist of this is that in the phase of scientific thinking immediately preceding our own, there was a turn away from the animate to the inanimate; i.e., from continuity to atomism. This was entirely justified, if rightly understood. But, if we hope to objectively and truly find ourselves in the world, we must find a way out of the dead world of atomism, no matter how impressive it is as a theory. We must get back to our own nature and comprehend ourselves as living beings. Up to now, scientific development has tended in the direction of the inanimate, the atomistic. When, in the first part of the Nineteenth Century, this whole dreadful cell theory of Schleiden⁵⁰ and Schwann⁵¹ made its appearance, it did not lead to continuity but to atomism. What is more, the scientific world scarcely admitted this, nor has it to this day realized that it should admit it since atomism harmonizes with the whole scientific methodology. We were not aware that by conceiving the organism as divided up into cells, we actually atomized it in our minds, which in fact signifies killing it. The truth of the matter is that any real idea of organisms has been lost to the atomistic approach.

This is what we can learn if we compare Goethe's views on organics with those of Schleiden or the later botanists. In Goethe we find living ideas that he actually experiences. The cell is alive, so the others are really dealing with something organic, but the way they think is just as though the cells were not alive but atoms. Of course, empirical research does not always follow everything to its logical conclusion, and this cannot be done in the case of the organic world. Our comprehension of the organic world is not much aided by the actual observations resulting from the cell theory. The non-atomistic somehow finds its way in, since we have to admit that the cells are alive. But it is typical of many of today's scientific discussions that the issues become confused and there is no real clarity of thought.

• 43. John Locke: Wrington by Bristol 1632–1704 Oates, Essex. Theologian, philosopher, and physician. Because raised Protestant and Puritan, he was persecuted in England and had to flee to Holland until after the English Revolution of 1689. From 1675–1689 Locke worked with many interruptions at his main work. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Originally he had planned a critical presentation of the already recognized teaching of primary and secondary sense characteristics, but then it grew to a perception theory or world view. His Essay was published 4 times in his lifetime. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom, trans. Michael Wilson (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1964) and “Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa” in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 44. Richard Wahle: 1857–1935, Vienna, Professor of Philosophy. Only valued perceptions, imaginations, and feelings, but rejected all philosophy hitherto written as theories of cognition. The “Ego” is for him “a summary of surface-like, physiologically accompanied pieces of consciousness, which are brought into being by invisible forces.” Some writings: The Whole of Philosophy and Its End, 1894; About the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life, 1906; The Tragic Comedy of Wisdom, 1915; Development of Characters, 1928; Basics of a New Psychiatry, 1931.
• 45. See Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 4.
• 46. Immanuel Kant: 1724–1804. Lived in Koenigsberg, which he seldom left. Philosopher, scientist, mathematician. Professor in Koenigsberg 1770–1794. Critique of Pure Reason, 1781. Its popular edition Dissertation on Any Future Metaphysics, 1783, his ethic Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, aesthetic and natural theology is handled in Critique of Judgment, 1790. He wrote the first mechanical cosmology 1755. It was taken up and changed by Laplace (1796) and known as the Kant-LaPlace Theory. Rudolf Steiner's exposition on Kant's theory is found in Truth and Knowledge, The Philosophy of Freedom, and An Autobiography, ed. Paul M. Alien, 2nd ed. (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, Garber Communications, 1980).
  
  E.g. in Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic, Common Remarks”: “We wanted to say that all our opinions are nothing but the conception of the appearance; that the things we look at are not actually what we take them for, nor is their relation constituted as they appear to us, and that if we would suspend our subject or even our subjective constitution of our senses as a whole, the whole constitution, all relationships of objects in space and time, even time and space itself would disappear. They would only exist in us, not as phenomena in themselves.”
• 47. August Weismann, Frankfurt A.M. 1834–1914 Freiburg. Biologist, genetic scientist. Theory of polarity between cells (soma) and seed plasma. Determinants as heredity carriers. Writing: Studies on the Descent Theory.
• 48. Goethe's recital from Faust I, Act 1, Scene 2, “Night,” Gothic Room, Wagner and Faust:
  
  “My friend, the time of past
  Is a book with seven seals.
  What you call the Spirit of Time
  Is fundamentally the Gentleman's own spirit,
  In which the times reflect themselves.”
• 49. Henry Poincaré: Nancy 1854–1912 Paris. Author of the popular philosophical writings Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905), Science and Method (1909), and Last Thoughts (1912). The lecture in question was held by Poincaré shortly before his death in a lecture cycle Conferences de Foi et de Vie printed in Le Materialisme Actuel with M.M. Bergson, H. Poincaré, Ch. Gide, Ch. Wagner, Firm Roz, De Witt-Guizotfriedel, Gaston Rion. (Paris: 1918), page 53.
• 50. Mathias Jakob Schleiden: Hamburg 1804–1881 Frankfurt A.M. Lawyer, physician, and, mainly, biologist. Developed a cell formation theory in Contributions to Phylogenesis (1838).
• 51. Theodor Schwann: Neuss 1810–1882 Cologne, biologist. Founded the cell theory with his Microscopic Examinations of the Harmony in Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants (1839).