The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If you are disappointed about what you are about to hear, I would like to say in advance that today I want to discuss very elementary things [about the fourth dimension]. Those who want to delve deeper into this question should be very familiar with the higher concepts of mathematics. I would like to give you some very elementary and general concepts. One must distinguish between the possibility of thinking in a four-dimensional space and reality. Whoever is able to make observations there is dealing with a reality that extends far beyond what we know as the sensual-real. You have to do thought transformations when you go there. You have to let things play into mathematics a little, find your way into the way of thinking of the mathematician.

You have to realize that the mathematician does not take a step without accounting for what arrives at his conclusions. But we must also realize when we deal with mathematics that even the mathematician cannot penetrate a single step [into reality], that he cannot draw any conclusions [that go beyond what is merely possible in thought]. First of all, it is about simple things, but they become more complicated when one wants to arrive at the concept of the fourth dimension. We must be clear about what we mean by dimensions. It is best to examine the various spatial structures in terms of their dimensionality. They lead to considerations that were only tackled in the 19th century by great mathematicians such as Bolyai, Gauss and Riemann.

The simplest spatial size is the point. It has no extension at all; it must be conceived. It is the fixation of an extension in space. It has no dimension. The first dimension is the line. The straight line has one dimension, length. If we move the line, which has no thickness, ourselves, we step out of the one dimension, and the line becomes a surface. This has two dimensions, a length and a width. If we move the surface, we step out of these two dimensions and we get the body. It has three dimensions: height, width, depth (Figure 1).

If you move the body itself, if you move a cube around in space, you will again only get a spatial body. You cannot move space out of itself.

We need to turn to a few other concepts. If you look at a straight line, it has two boundaries, two endpoints A and B (Figure 2).

Let's imagine that we want A and B to touch. But if they are to touch, we have to curve the line. What happens? You cannot possibly remain within the [one-dimensional] line if you want to make A and B coincide. To connect points A and B, we have to step out of the straight line itself, we have to step out of the first dimension and into the second dimension, the plane. In this way, the straight line becomes a closed curve (that is, in the simplest case, a circle) by bringing its endpoints into alignment (Figure 3).

It is therefore necessary to go beyond the first dimension; you cannot remain within it. Only in this way can the circle be created. You can perform the same operation with a surface. However, this only works if you do not remain within the two dimensions. You have to enter the third dimension and then you can turn the surface into a tube, a cylinder. This operation is done in a very similar way to the way we brought two points into coincidence earlier, thereby moving out of the first dimension. Here, in order to bring two boundaries of the surface into coincidence, we have to move into the third dimension (Figure 4).

Is it conceivable that a similar operation could be carried out with a spatial structure that already has three dimensions itself? If you have two congruent cubes, you can slide one into the other. [Now imagine two congruent cubes as the boundaries of a three-dimensional prismatic body.] If you try to make one cube, which is colored red on one side [and blue on the opposite side], fit exactly over the other cube, which is otherwise [geometrically] identical but with the red and blue colors swapped, then you cannot make them fit except by rotating the cube (Figure 5).

Let us consider another spatial structure. If you take the left-hand glove, it is impossible for you to pull the left-hand glove over the right hand. But if you look at the two [mirror-symmetrical] gloves together, like the straight line with the end points A and B, you have something that belongs together. It is then a single entity, with a boundary [that is, with a mirror plane] in the middle. It is very similar with the two symmetrical halves of the human outer skin. 2

How can we now make two [mirror] symmetrical three-dimensional structures coincide? Only if we go beyond the third dimension, as we did with the first and second. We can also put the right or left glove over the left or right hand, respectively, when we walk through four-dimensional space.

[When constructing the third dimension (depth dimension) of the visualization space, we align the image of the right eye with that of the left eye and place it over it.

We now look at an example from Zöllner. We have a circle and a point P outside of it. How can we bring the point P into the circle without crossing the circle? This is not possible if we remain within the plane. Just as one has to go from the second dimension into the third when moving from a square to a cube, we also have to go out of the second dimension here. With a sphere, there is also no possibility of entering [into the interior] without [piercing the surface of the sphere or] going beyond the third dimension.

These are possibilities for thought, but they have a practical significance for the theory of knowledge, [in particular for the problem of the objectivity of the content of perception]. If we realize how we actually perceive, we will come to the following view. Let us first ask ourselves: How do we gain knowledge of bodies through our senses? We see a color. Without eyes, we would not perceive it. The physicist then says: Out there in space is not what we call color, but purely spatial forms of movement; they penetrate through our eye, are captured by the optic nerve, transmitted to the brain, and there, for example, the red arises. One may now ask: Is the red also present when there is no sensation?

Red could not be perceived without the eye. The ringing of a bell could not be perceived without the ear. All our sensations depend on the transformation of forms of motion by our physical and mental apparatus. However, the matter becomes even more complicated when we ask ourselves: Where is the red, this peculiar quality, actually located? Is it in the body? Is it a process of vibration? Outside there is a process of movement, and this continues right into the eye and into the brain itself. There are vibrational [and nervous] processes everywhere, but red is nowhere to be found. Even if you examine the eye, you would not find red anywhere. It is not outside, but it is also not in the brain. We only have red when we, as a subject, confront these processes of movement. So do we have no possibility at all to talk about how the red meets the eye, how a c sharp meets the ear?

The question is, what is this inner [representation], where does it arise? In the philosophical literature of the 19th century, you will find that this question runs through everything. Schopenhauer, in particular, has provided the following definition: The world is our representation. But what then remains for the external body? [Just as a color representation can be “created” by movements, so can] movement can arise in our inner self through something that is basically not moved. Let us consider twelve snapshots of a [moving] horse figure on [the inside of] a [cylinder] surface, [which is provided with twelve fine slits in the spaces between. If we look at the rotating cylinder from the side,] we will have the impression that it is always the same horse and that only its feet are moving. So [the impression of] movement can also arise through our [physical organization] when something is not moving at all [in reality]. This is how we arrive at a complete dissolution of what we call movement.

But what then is matter? If you subtract color, movement [shape, etc., i.e. what is conveyed by sensory perception] from matter, then nothing remains. If we already have the [secondary, i.e. “subjective” sensations [color, sound, warmth, taste, smell] within us, we must also place [the primary sensations, that is, shape and movement,] within us, and with that the external world completely disappears. However, this results in major difficulties [for the theory of knowledge].

Let us assume that everything is outside, how then do the properties of the object outside come into us? Where is the point [where the outside merges into the inside]? If we subtract all [sensory perceptions], there is no outside anymore. In this way, epistemology puts itself in the position of Münchhausen, who wants to pull himself up by his own hair. But only if we assume that there is an outside, only then can we come to [an explanation of] the sensations inside. How can something from the outside enter our inside and appear as our imagination?

We need to pose the question differently. Let us look at some analogies first. You will not be able to find a relationship [between the outside world and the sensation inside] unless you resort to the following. We return to the consideration of the straight line with endpoints A and B. We have to go beyond the first dimension, curve the line, to make the endpoints coincide (Figure 7).

Now imagine the left endpoint A [of this straight line] brought together with the right endpoint B so that they touch at the bottom, so that we are able to return to the starting point [via the coinciding endpoints]. If the line is small, the corresponding circle is also small. If I turn the [initially given] line into a circle and then turn larger and larger lines into circles, the point at which the endpoints meet moves further and further away from the [original] line and goes to infinity.

of the [original] line and goes to infinity. Only at infinity do the [increasingly large] circle lines have their endpoint. The curvature becomes weaker and weaker, and eventually we will not be able to distinguish the circle line from the straight line with the naked eye (Figure 8).

In the same way, when we walk on the Earth, it appears to us as a straight piece, although it is round. If we imagine that the two halves of the straight line extend to infinity, the circle actually coincides with the straight line.

The straight line can be conceived as a circle whose diameter is infinite.

Now, instead of a [geometric] line, imagine something that is real and that connects to a reality. Let us imagine that as the point C [on the circumference of the circle] progresses, cooling occurs, that the point becomes colder and colder the further it moves away [from its starting point] (Figure 9). Let us leave the point within the circle for the time being, and, as it becomes colder and colder, let it reach the lower limit A, B. When it returns on the other side, the temperature increases again. So on the way back, the opposite condition to the one on the way there occurs. The warming increases until the temperature at C is reached again, from which we started. No matter how extended the circle is, it is always the same process: a flow of heat out and a flow of heat in. Let us also imagine this with the [infinitely extended straight] line: as the temperature [on one side increasingly] dissipates, it can rise on the other side. We have here a state that dissipates on one side while it rebuilds on the other.

In this way, we bring life and movement into the world and approach what, in a higher sense, we can call an understanding of the world. We have here two states that are interdependent and interrelated. However, for everything you can observe [sensually], the process that goes, say, to the right has nothing to do with the one that comes back from the left, and yet they are mutually dependent.

We now compare the body of the external world with the state of cooling and, in contrast, our inner sensation with the state of warming. [Although the external world and inner sensation have nothing directly perceptible in common,] they are related to each other, mutually dependent [in an analogous way to the processes described above]. This results in a connection between the external world [and our internal world] that we can support with an image: [through the relationship between] the seal and the sealing wax. The seal leaves behind an exact imprint, an exact reproduction of the seal in the sealing wax, without the seal remaining in the sealing wax [and without any material from the seal being transferred to the sealing wax]. So in the sealing wax there remains a faithful reproduction of the seal. It is quite the same with the connection between the outside world and inner sensations. Only the essential is transferred. One state determines the other, but nothing (material) is transferred.

If we imagine that this is the case with [the connection between the] outside world and our impressions, we come to the following. [Geometric] mirror images in space behave like gloves from the left and right hand. [In order to relate these directly and continuously to each other,] we have to use a new dimension of space to help us. [Now the outside world and the inner impression behave analogously to geometric mirror images and can therefore only be directly related to each other through an additional dimension.] In order to establish a relationship between the outside world and inner impressions, we must therefore go through a fourth dimension and be in a third element. We can only seek the common ground [of the outside world and inner impressions] where we [are one] with them. [One can imagine these mirror images as] floating in a sea, within which we can align the mirror images. And so we come [initially in thought] to something that transcends three-dimensional space and yet has a reality. We must therefore bring our spatial ideas to life.

Oskar Simony has tried to represent these animated spatial structures with models. [As we have seen, one comes] from the consideration of the zero-dimensional [step by step] to the possibility of imagining four-dimensional space. [On the basis of the consideration of mirror-symmetrical bodies, that is, with the help of] symmetries, we can first [most easily] recognize this space. [Another way to study the peculiarities of empirical three-dimensional space in relation to four-dimensional space is to study the knotting of curves and ribbons.] What are symmetry conditions? By intertwining spatial structures, we cause certain complications. [These complications are peculiar to three-dimensional space; they do not occur in four-dimensional spaces.]

Let's do some practical thinking exercises. If we cut a band ring in the middle, we get two such rings. If we now cut a band whose ends have been twisted by 180° and then glued, we get a single twisted ring that does not disintegrate. If we twist the ends of the tape 360° before gluing them together, then when we cut it, we get two intertwined rings. Finally, if we twist the tape ends 720°, the same process results in a knot.

Anyone who reflects on natural processes knows that such convolutions occur in nature; [in reality,] such intertwined spatial structures are endowed with forces. Take, for example, the movement of the Earth around the Sun, and then the movement of the Moon around the Earth. It is said that the Moon describes a circle around the Earth, but [if you look more closely] it is a line that is wrapped around [a circle, the orbit of the Earth], thus a helix around a circular line. And then we have the sun, which rushes through space so fast that the moon makes an additional spiral movement around it. So there are very complicated lines of force extending in space. We have to realize that we are dealing with complicated concepts of space that we can only grasp if we do not let them become rigid, if we have them in a fluid state.

Let us recall what has been said: the zero-dimensional is the point, the one-dimensional is the line, the two-dimensional the surface and the three-dimensional the body. How do these concepts of space relate to each other?

Imagine you are a creature that can only move along a straight line. What would the spatial perceptions of such a being, which itself is only one-dimensional, be like? It would not perceive its own one-dimensionality, but would only imagine points. This is because, if we want to draw something on a straight line, there are only points on the straight line. A two-dimensional being could encounter lines, and thus distinguish one-dimensional beings. A three-dimensional being, such as a cube, would perceive the two-dimensional beings. Man, then, can perceive three dimensions. If we reason correctly, we must say to ourselves: Just as a one-dimensional being can only perceive points, as a two-dimensional being can only perceive one dimension, and a three-dimensional being can only perceive two dimensions, so a being that perceives three dimensions can only be a four-dimensional being. The fact that a human being can define external beings in three dimensions, can [deal with] spaces of three dimensions, means that he must be four-dimensional. And just as a cube can only perceive two dimensions and not its third, it is true that the human being cannot perceive the fourth dimension in which he lives.

Today I want to discuss some elementary aspects of the idea of multidimensional space [among other things, in connection with the] spirited Hinton.

You will recall how we arrived at the concept of multi-dimensional space, having considered the zeroth dimension [last time]. I would like to briefly repeat the ideas of how we can move from two- to three-dimensional space.

What do we mean by a symmetrical behavior? How do I align a red and a blue [flat figure, which are mirror images of each other]?

With two halves of a circle, I can do this relatively easily by sliding the red [half] circle into the blue one (Figure 10).

This is not so easy in the following [mirror]symmetrical figure (Figure 11). I cannot make the red and blue parts coincide [in the plane], no matter how I try to slide the red into the blue.

But there is a way [to achieve this anyway]: if you step out of the board, that is, out of the second dimension [and use the third dimension, in other words, if you] place the blue figure on the red one [by rotating it through the space around the mirror axis].

The same applies to a pair of gloves: I cannot match one with the other without stepping out of [three-dimensional] space. You have to go through the fourth dimension.

Last time I said that in order to develop an understanding of the fourth dimension, you have to make [the relationships in] space fluid, thereby creating conditions similar to those you have when moving from the second to the third dimension. In the last lesson, we created spatial structures out of paper strips that intertwined. Such interweaving causes certain complications. This is not a game, but such inter-weavings occur in nature all the time. Anyone who reflects on natural processes knows that such inter-weavings really do occur in nature. Material bodies move in such intertwined spatial structures. These movements are endowed with forces, so that the forces also intertwine. Take the movement of the earth around the sun and then the movement of the moon around the earth. The moon moves in an orbit that is itself wound around the earth's orbit around the sun. It thus describes a spiral around a circular line. Because of the movement of the sun, the moon describes another spiral around this. The result is very complicated lines of force that extend through the whole space.

The heavenly bodies behave in relation to each other like the intertwined strips of paper [by Simony, which we looked at last time]. We have to keep in mind that we are dealing with complicated spatial concepts that we can only understand if we do not let them become rigid. If we want to grasp space [in its essence], [we must first conceive it as rigid, but then] make it completely fluid again. [You have to go as far as zero]; the [living] point can be found in it.

Let us once again visualize the structure of the dimensions]. The point is zero-dimensional, the line is one-dimensional, the surface is two-dimensional and the body is three-dimensional. The cube has the three dimensions: height, width and depth. How do the spatial structures [of different dimensions] relate to each other? Imagine that you are a straight line, that you have only one dimension, that you can only move along a straight line. If such beings existed, what would their concept of space be like? Such beings would not perceive one-dimensionality in themselves, but would only be able to imagine points wherever they went. Because in a straight line, if we want to draw something in it, there are only points. A two-dimensional being would only encounter lines, so it would only perceive one-dimensional beings. [A three-dimensional being like] the cube would perceive two-dimensional beings, but could not perceive its [own] three dimensions.

Now, humans can perceive their three dimensions. If we reason correctly, we must say to ourselves: Just as a one-dimensional being can only perceive points, a two-dimensional being only straight lines, and a three-dimensional being only surfaces, so a being that perceives three dimensions must itself be a four-dimensional being. The fact that humans can define external beings in terms of three dimensions, can [deal with] spaces of three dimensions, means that they must be four-dimensional. And just as a cube can perceive only two dimensions and not its third, so it is clear that man cannot perceive the fourth dimension in which he lives. Thus we have shown [that man must be a four-dimensional being]. We swim in the sea [of the fourth dimension, like ice in water].

Let us return once more to the consideration of mirror images (Figure 11). This vertical line represents the cross-section of a mirror. The mirror reflects an image [of the figure on the left]. The process of reflection points beyond the two dimensions into the third dimension. [To understand the direct and continuous connection between the mirror image and the original, we have to add a third dimension to the two.

[Now let us consider the relationship between external space and internal representation.] The cube here apart from me [appears as] an idea in me (Figure 12). The idea [of the cube] is related to the cube like a' mirror image to the original. Our sensory apparatus [creates an imagined image of the cube. If you want to align this with the original cube, you have to go through the fourth dimension. Just as the third dimension has to be transitioned to (during the continuous execution of the two-dimensional) mirroring process, our sensory apparatus has to be four-dimensional if it is to be able to establish a [direct] connection [between the imagined image and the external object].

If you only imagined [two-dimensionally], you would [only] have a dream image in front of you, but you would have no idea that there is an object outside. Our imagination is a direct inversion of our ability to imagine [external objects by means of] four-dimensional space.

The human being in the astral state [during earlier stages of human evolution] was only a dreamer, he had only such ascending dream images.” He then passed from the astral realm to physical space. Thus we have mathematically defined the transition from the astral to the [physical-] material being. Before this transition occurred, the astral human being was a three-dimensional being and therefore could not extend his [two-dimensional] ideas to the objective [three-dimensional physical-material] world. But when he [himself] became physical-material, he still acquired the fourth dimension [and could therefore also experience three-dimensionally].

Due to the peculiar design of our sensory apparatus, we are able to align our perceptions with external objects. By relating our perceptions to external things, we pass through four-dimensional space, imposing the perception on the external object.

How would things appear if we could see from the other side, if we could enter into things and see them from there? To do that, we would have to pass through the fourth dimension.

The astral world itself is not a world of four dimensions. But the astral world together with its reflection in the physical world is four-dimensional. Anyone who is able to see the astral world and the physical world at the same time lives in four-dimensional space. The relationship of our physical world to the astral world is a four-dimensional one.

One must learn to understand the difference between a point and a sphere. In reality, this point would not be passive, but a point radiating light in all directions (Figure 13).

What would be the opposite of such a point? Just as there is an opposite to a line that goes from left to right, namely a line that goes from right to left, there is also an opposite to the point. We imagine an enormous sphere, in reality of infinite size, that radiates darkness from all sides, but now inwards (Figure 14). This sphere is the opposite of the point.

These are two real opposites: the point radiating light and infinite space, which is not a neutral dark entity, but one that floods space with darkness from all sides. [As a contrast, this results in] a source of darkness and a source of light. We know that a straight line that extends to infinity returns to the same point from the other side. Likewise, it is with a point that radiates light in all directions. This light comes back [from infinity] as its opposite, as darkness.

Now let us consider the opposite case. Take the point as the source of darkness. The opposite is a space that radiates light from all sides.

As was recently demonstrated [in the previous lecture], the point behaves in this way; it does not disappear [into infinity, it returns from the other side] (Figure 15).

[Similarly, when a point expands or radiates out, it does not lose itself in infinity; it returns from infinity as a sphere.] The sphere, the spherical, is the opposite of the point. Space lives in the point. The point is the opposite of space.

What is the opposite of a cube? Nothing other than the whole of infinite space, except for the piece that is cut out here [by the cube]. So we have to imagine the [total] cube as infinite space plus its opposite. We cannot do without polarities if we want to imagine the world as powerfully dynamic. [Only in this way] do we have things in their life.

If the occultist were to imagine the cube as red, the space around it would be green, because red is the complementary color of green. The occultist not only has simple ideas for himself, he has vivid ideas, not abstract, dead ideas. The occultist must enter into things from within himself. Our ideas are dead, while the things in the world are alive. We do not live with our abstract ideas in the things themselves. So we have to imagine the infinite space in the corresponding complementary color to the radiating star. By doing such exercises, you can train your thinking and gain confidence in how to imagine dimensions.

You know that the square is a two-dimensional spatial quantity. A square composed of four red- and blue-shaded sub-squares is a surface that radiates differently in different directions (Figure 16). The ability to radiate differently in different directions is a three-dimensional ability. So here we have the three dimensions of length, width and radiance.

What we did here with the surface, we also think of as being done for the cube. Just as the square above was made up of four sub-squares, we can imagine the cube as being made up of eight sub-cubes (Figure 17). This initially gives us the three dimensions of height, width and depth. Within each sub-cube, we can then distinguish a specific light-emitting capacity, which results in a further dimension in addition to height, width and depth: the radiation capacity.

You can imagine a square made up of four sub-squares, a cube made up of eight different sub-cubes. And now imagine a body that is not a cube, but has a fourth dimension. We have created the possibility of understanding this through radiative capacity. If each [of the eight partial cubes] has a different radiating power, then if I have only the one cube that radiates only in one direction, if I want to obtain the cube that radiates in all directions, I have to add another one on the left, doubling it with an opposite one, I have to put it together out of 16 cubes.

Next lesson we will have the opportunity to consider how we can think of a multidimensional space.

My dear friends, today I will continue with the difficult chapter we have undertaken to take on. In doing so, it will be necessary to refer to the various things that I have already mentioned in the last two lectures. Then today I would also like to create the basic lines and basic concepts in order to [the more exact geometrical relationships as well as] the interesting practical aspects of theosophy, to make them our own.

You know that we have tried to imagine four-dimensional space in its potentiality for the very reason that we can at least create some kind of concept about the so-called astral realm as well as about the higher realms, about higher existence in general. I have already indicated that entering the astral space, the astral world, is initially something tremendously confusing for the secret disciple. For those who have not studied these things in detail, who have not even studied them theoretically, who have not even studied Theosophy theoretically, it is extremely difficult to even begin to form an idea of the very different nature of the things and entities that confront us in the so-called astral world. Let us once again point out how great this diversity is.

As the simplest thing, I mentioned that we have to learn to read every number symmetrically. The secret student, who is only accustomed to reading numbers as they are read here in the physical world, will not be able to find his way through the labyrinth of the astral. If you have a number in the astral, for example 467, you have to read it as 764. You have to get used to reading everything symmetrically, to seeing everything symmetrically (in a mirror image). That is the basic condition. This is still easy as long as we are dealing with spatial structures or numbers. It becomes more difficult when we come to time relationships. When we come to time relationships, the matter also becomes symmetrical in the astral, in such a way that what comes later appears to us first and what comes earlier appears later. So when you observe astral processes, you also have to be able to read backwards from front to back. These things can only be hinted at, because they sometimes seem quite grotesque to those who have never had an idea of them. In the astral, the son is there first and then the father; in the physical, the egg is there first and then the chicken. In the physical, it is different. In the physical, birth comes first, and then the birth is an emergence of a new thing from an old one. In the astral, it is the other way around. There, the old emerges from the new. In the astral, what is paternal or maternal nature devours what is filial or daughterly nature for the appearance.

In Greek, you have a pretty allegory. The three gods Uranus, Kronos and Zeus symbolize the three worlds. Uranus represents the heavenly world: Devachan; Kronos represents the astral; Zeus the physical. Kronos is said to devour his children.” So in the astral, one does not give birth, but is consumed.

But things get very complicated when we look at the moral aspect of the astral plane. This also appears in a kind of reversal or mirror image. And that is why you can imagine how differently things appear when we interpret things as we are accustomed to interpreting them in the physical. In the astral, for example, we see a wild animal approaching us. This is not to be understood in the same way as in the physical. The wild animal is choking us. This is the appearance that someone who is accustomed to reading things in the same way as external events has. But the wild animal is in truth something that exists within ourselves, that lives in our own astral body and that is choking us. What approaches you as a strangler is rooted in your own desire. So you can experience that when you have a thought of revenge, this thought of revenge appears to you as a strangling angel that approaches you from outside and harasses you.

In truth, everything radiates from us [in the astral realm]. We must regard everything that we see approaching us in the astral as emanating from us (Figure 18). It comes from the sphere, from all sides, as if from infinite space, it penetrates into us. But in reality it is nothing other than what our own astral body sends out.

We only really read the astral [and only then] find the truth when we are able to bring the peripheral into the center, to see and interpret the peripheral as the central. The astral seems to come at you from all sides. Think of it this way: in reality, it is something that radiates out from you in all directions.

I would like to familiarize you with a term that is very important in occult training. It appears in a wide variety of works on occult research, but is rarely understood correctly. Those who have reached a certain level of occult development must learn to see everything that is still karmically predisposed in them – joy, lust, pain, and so on – in the astral outside world. If you think theosophically in the right sense, you will realize that the outer life, our body, in the present age is nothing more than a result, an average of two currents coming from opposite directions and merging into each other .

Imagine a current coming from the past and one coming from the future, and you have two currents that merge and actually intersect at every point (Figure 19). Imagine a red current in one direction and a blue current in the other direction. And now imagine, for example, four different points in this intersection. [Then, at each of these four points, we have] an interaction of these red and blue currents. [This is an image for the interaction of] four successive incarnations, where in each incarnation something comes towards us from one side [and something from the other]. You can always say to yourself, there is a current that comes towards you and a current that you bring with you. Man flows together out of these two currents.

You get an idea of it if you think of it this way. Today you sit here with different experiences, tomorrow at the same hour you will have a different set of events around you. Imagine the events that you will have by tomorrow are already all there. It would then be the same experience as if you were looking at a panorama. It would be as if you were approaching these events, as if these events were coming towards you spatially. So imagine that the stream that is coming towards you from the future brings you these events, then you have the events between today and tomorrow in this stream. You allow the future flowing towards you to be carried by the past.

In every period of time, your life is an intersection of two currents, one from the future to the present and the other from the present to the future. Where the currents meet, a congestion occurs. Everything that a person still has ahead of him must be seen emerging as an astral phenomenon. This is something that speaks an incredibly impressive language.

Imagine that the secret disciple [comes to the point in his development where he] is supposed to look into the astral world, where the senses are opened to him so that he would see emerging around him as outer phenomena in the astral world that which he would still have to experience before the end of the present period. This is a sight that is very powerful for every human being. We must therefore say that it is an important step in the course of occult training for the human being to be confronted with the astral panorama, the astral phenomenon, of what he still has to experience until the middle of the sixth root race, because that is how long our incarnations will last. The path opens up before him. No secret disciple will experience it differently, except that he sees as an external phenomenon what he still has to face in the near future up to the sixth root race.

When the disciple has advanced to the threshold, the question arises: Do you want to live through all this in the shortest conceivable time? Because that is what it is about for the one who wants to receive the initiation. If you think about it, you have your own future life in front of you as an external panorama in a moment. That, in turn, is what characterizes our view of the astral. For one person, it is something that makes them say, “No, I'm not going in there.” For another, on the other hand, it is something that makes them say, “I have to go in there.” This point in the process of development is called the 'threshold', the decision, and the phenomenon that one has there, oneself with everything that one still has to experience and live through, is called the 'guardian of the threshold'. The guardian of the threshold is therefore nothing other than our own future life. It is ourselves. Our own future life lies behind the threshold.

You see in this another peculiarity of the astral world of appearance, namely, that when the astral world is suddenly opened to someone through some event – and such events do occur in life – that person must first face something incomprehensible. It is a terrible sight, which could not be more confusing for those people upon whom, unprepared, the astral world suddenly breaks in through some event. It is therefore eminently good to know what we have now discussed, so that in the event of the astral world breaking in, one knows what to do. It may be a pathological event, a loosening between the physical body and the etheric body or between the etheric body and the astral body. Through such events, a person may be unexpectedly transported into the astral world and gain insights into astral life. If this happens, the person will come and say that he sees this or that apparition. He sees it and does not know how to read it, because he does not know that he has to read symmetrically, that he has to understand every wild animal that approaches him as a reflection of what lies within himself. Indeed, the astral powers and passions of man appear in Kamaloka in the most diverse forms of the animal world.

It is not a particularly beautiful sight to see people in Kamaloka who have just been reaped. At that moment they still have all their passions, urges, desires and cravings. Such a person in Kamaloka no longer has his physical body or etheric body, but in his astral body he still has everything that connected him to the physical world, that can only be satisfied through the physical body. Imagine an average citizen of the present day who has achieved nothing special in his past life and has not made any effort to achieve anything, who has never done much for his religious development, who may not have abandoned religion in theory, but practically, that is, in his feelings and attitudes, has thrown it overboard. In that case it is not a living element in him. What then is in his astral body? There are only things that can be satisfied through the physical organism. For example, he craves palate enjoyment. But the palate would have to be there for that, so that this desire can be satisfied. Or man craves for other pleasures, which can only be satisfied by setting his physical body in motion. Suppose he had such a craving, but the body was gone. Then all this lives in his astral body. This is the situation in which man finds himself when he has died without astral purification and cleansing. He still has the desire for the pleasures of the palate and the other things, but not the possibility of satisfying them. This is what causes the torment and horror of the life in Kamaloka. Therefore, the desire must be laid aside in Kamaloka if man dies without astral purification. Only when this astral body has learned that it can no longer satisfy its desires and wishes, that it must unlearn them, is it freed.

[In the astral world] the instincts and passions take on animal forms. As long as the person is embodied in the physical body, the shape of their astral body is somewhat based on this physical body. But when the outer body is gone, then the instincts, desires and passions, as they are in their animal [nature], come into their own in their own form. So in the astral world, a person is an image of their instincts and passions.

Because these astral beings can make use of other bodies, it is dangerous to let mediums enter into a trance when there is no clairvoyant is present to avert evil.

In the physical world, the lion is a plastic expression of certain passions, the tiger is an expression of other passions, and the cat is an expression of yet other passions. It is interesting to see how each animal is the plastic expression of a passion, of an urge.

In the astral, in Kamaloka, man is therefore approximately similar to [animal nature] through his passions. This is the source of the misunderstanding regarding the doctrine of transmigration of souls that has been attributed to Egyptian and Indian priests and teachers of wisdom. You should live in such a way that you do not incarnate as an animal, says this teaching. But this teaching never speaks of the physical life, but of the higher life, and its only aim was to persuade people on earth to lead such a life that after death in Kamaloka they would not have to develop their animal form. Those who develop the characteristics of a cat will appear in Kamaloka as a cat. The fact that one also appears as a human being in Kamaloka is the meaning of the rules of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The true teachings have not been understood by the scholars; they only have an absurd idea of them.

Thus we have to deal with a complete mirror image of what we actually think and do here in the physical world in every area – in the areas of number, time and moral life – when we enter the astral realm. We must get used to reading symmetrically, because we must be able to do so when we enter the astral space.

The easiest way for a person to get used to reading symmetrically is to build on such elementary mathematical ideas as we have hinted at in the previous lecture and as we will get to know more and more in the following discussions. I would like to start with a very simple idea, namely the idea of a square. Imagine a square as you are accustomed to seeing it (Figure 20). I will draw the square so that the four sides are drawn in four different colors.

This is the physical appearance of the square. Now I would like to draw the devachan aspect of the square on the board. It is not possible to do this exactly, but I would like to give you an approximate idea of what a square would look like in the mind. The mental counter-image [of a square] is approximately like a cross (Figure 21).

We are dealing here mainly with two perpendicular intersecting axes. Two lines that pass through each other, and that's it. The physical counter-image is created by drawing perpendicular lines on each of these axes. The physical counter-image of a mental square can best be imagined as a congestion [of two mutually intersecting currents]. Let us imagine these perpendicular axis lines as currents, as forces that act outwards from the point of intersection, and let us imagine countercurrents to these currents, only now in the direction from outside to inside (Figure 22). A square then enters into the physical world by imagining these two types of currents or forces - one from the inside, the other from the outside - as accumulating against each other. The currents of force are thus limited by accumulations.

With this, I have given a picture of how everything mental relates to the physical. Likewise, you can construct the mental counterpart for any physical thing. The square here is only the simplest of examples.

If you could construct a correlative for every physical thing that corresponds to the physical world in the same way that two perpendicular lines correspond to a square, then you would obtain the devachan or mental image for every physical thing. With other things, it is of course much more complicated.

Now imagine a cube instead of a square. The cube is very similar to the square. The cube is a body that is bounded by six squares. Mr. Schouten made these six squares that bound the cube specially. Now, instead of the four bounding lines that are present in the square, imagine six bounding surfaces. Imagine that instead of vertical lines we have vertical surfaces as a kind of congestion, and then assume that you have not two but three axes standing on one another [vertically], and you have the boundary of the cube. Now you can also imagine what the mental correlate of the cube is. You have again two things that challenge each other reciprocally. The cube has three perpendicular axes and three surface directions; we have to think of congestion effects in these three surface directions (Figure 23). We cannot imagine the three axes and the six surfaces, as before the two axes and four lines, in any other relationship than by thinking of a certain contrast.

Anyone who reflects on this will have to admit that we cannot imagine this without forming a certain concept of the opposition, namely the opposition of activity and an obstruction, a counter-activity. You have to introduce the concept of opposition here. The matter is still simple here. By entwining ourselves around geometric concepts, we will be able to construct the mental counter-images of more complicated things in an appropriate way. Then we will find the way and to some extent reach higher knowledge. But you can already imagine the colossal complexity that arises when you think of another body and look for its mental counter-image. Many complicated things come to light. And if you were to imagine another person and their mental counterpart, with all their spatial forms and their activity, you can imagine the complicated mental structure that this produces. In my book 'Theosophy', I was only able to give a rough idea of what mental counter-images look like.

We have three dimensions, three axes in the cube. On each axis we have the corresponding perpendicular planes on both sides. So you must now be clear about the fact that the contrast I have spoken of is to be understood in such a way that you imagine each face of the cube as having come into being in a way similar to the way I described human life earlier, as the intersection of two currents. You can imagine currents emanating from the center point. Imagine space in one axial direction, flowing outwards from the center, and in the other direction, flowing in from infinity, another current. And this [imagine] flowing in two colors, one red, the other blue. At the moment they meet, they will flow into a surface, a surface will arise, so that we can assume the surface of the cube to be the meeting point of two opposing currents in a surface. This gives a vivid idea of what a cube is.

The cube is therefore an intersection of three currents acting on each other. If you think about it, you are not dealing with three, but with six directions: forward-backward, up-down, right-left. So you have six directions. And indeed, that is the case. Then the matter becomes even more complicated by the fact that you have two types of currents: One in the direction of a point, the other coming from infinity. This will give you a perspective on the practical application of the higher, theoretical theosophy. I have conceived every direction in space as two opposing currents. And if you then imagine a physical body, then you have in that physical body the result of these two currents running into each other.

Let us now denote these six currents, these six directions, with six letters a, b, c, d, e, f. If you could visualize these six directions or currents — we will come to being able to do this next time — and you would imagine the first and last, a and f, erased, then you would be left with four. And that is what I now ask you to take into account: these four that remain are the four that you can perceive when you see the astral world alone.

I have tried to give you an idea of the three [ordinary dimensions] and of three [further] dimensions that actually behave in the opposite way. It is through the interaction of these dimensions and their counteraction that physical bodies arise. But if you think a little way away from the physical [dimension] and a little way away from the mental on the other side, you are left with four dimensions. These then represent the astral world existing between the physical and mental worlds.

The theosophist's view of the world is such that it necessarily has to work with a higher sense of geometry that goes beyond ordinary geometry. The ordinary geometer describes the cube as bounded by six squares. We must understand the cube as the result of six currents running into each other, that is, as the result of a movement and its reversal, of the interaction of opposing forces.

I would like to show you another such concept outside in nature, where a real contrast has taken place that contains a deep secret of the world's development before the eyes of man. In the “Fairytale of the Snake and the Lily”, Goethe speaks of the “revealed secret”, and that is one of the truest and wisest words that can be spoken at all. It is true, there are secrets in nature that can be grasped with hands, but are not seen by people. We are dealing with reversal processes in nature in many cases. I would like to show you one such reversal process.

Let us compare humans with plants. When compared to plants, humans behave as follows. What I am about to say is not a game, even if it initially seems like one. It is something that points to a deep mystery. What does a plant have in the ground? Its roots. And upwards it develops stems, leaves, flowers and fruit. The main part of the plant, the root, is in the earth, and the organs of reproduction it develops upwards, towards the sun, which we can call the chaste way of reproducing. Imagine the whole plant turned upside down, with the root becoming the head of a human being. Then you have the opposite of the plant in the human being, who has his head at the top and his reproductive organs at the bottom. And the animal is in the middle of it all, as a stowage. If you turn the plant upside down, you get a human being. That is why the occultists of all times draw this with three lines (Figure 24).

One [line] as the symbol of the plant, one as the [symbol] of the human being, and one in the opposite direction as the [symbol] of the animal – three lines that together form the cross. The animal has the transverse position, it thus crosses what we have in common with the plant.

You know that we speak of an all-soul, of which Plato says that it is crucified to the cosmic body, that it is chained to the cross of the cosmic body.? Imagine the world soul as plant, animal and human being, and you have the cross. By living in these three realms, the world soul is chained to this cross. As a result, you will find the concept of congestion expanded. You will find it expanded by something in nature. Two complementary, diverging, but interlocking currents form plants and humans, with congestion being the animal. Thus, the animal actually places itself between an upward and a downward current. In this way, the Kamaloka [astral sphere] interposes itself between Devachan and the physical world. Thus, something interposes itself between these two symmetrical worlds, between Devachan and the physical world, and acts between them, acting on both sides like a dam. The outer expression of this Kamaloka world is the animal world.

Those who already have organs for this world, which must be grasped with strength, will recognize what we see in the three kingdoms in their mutual relationship to one another. If you understand the animal kingdom as emerging from a congestion, if you understand the three kingdoms as mutual congestion, then you will find the position that the plant kingdom has to the animal kingdom and the animal kingdom to the human kingdom. The animal is perpendicular to the other two directions, and the other two are two complementary currents that merge into each other. The lower realm serves the higher realm as food. This is something that allows a small glimpse of the very different kind of relationship between humans and plants and between animals and humans. Those who feed on animals are therefore related to a congestion.

The real effect consists in the encounter of opposing currents. This is the beginning of a series of thoughts that you may later see in a strange and very different way.

We have seen that the square is created when two axes are intersected by lines. The cube is created by intersecting three axes through surfaces. Can you now imagine four axes intersecting through something? The cube is the boundary of the spatial structure that is created when four axes are intersected.

The square limits the three-dimensional cube. Next time, we will see whose boundary the cube itself is. The cube bounds a four-dimensional structure.

Answering Questions

[What does it mean to] imagine six currents, of which two must be imagined as having been extinguished, and so on?

The six currents must be thought of as two times three currents: three acting from the inside out according to the three axial directions, and the other three as flowing towards these from infinity. For each axial direction, there are thus two types, one going from the inside out, the other coming from the outside in the opposite direction. If we call the two categories positive and negative, plus and minus, we have:

math figur

And of this [in order to get to the astral space, we have to] imagine an entire direction, [for example the] inner and outer flow, erased, so for example +a and -a.

I recently tried to give you a schematic idea of four-dimensional space. But it would be very difficult if we were not able to form a picture of four-dimensional space in some kind of analogy. If it were a matter of characterizing our task, then it would be this: to show a four-dimensional structure here in three-dimensional space. Initially, we only have three-dimensional space at our disposal. If we want to link something unknown to us with something known, then, just as we have mapped a three-dimensional object into two dimensions, we have to bring a four-dimensional object into the third dimension. Now I would like to show, in the most popular way possible, using Mr. Hinton's method, how four-dimensional space can be mapped within three dimensions. So I would like to show how this task can be solved.

First, let me assume how to bring three-dimensional space into two-dimensional space. Our blackboard here is a two-dimensional space. If we were to add depth to height and width, we would have three-dimensional space. Now let's try to visualize a three-dimensional object on the blackboard.

A cube is a three-dimensional object because it has height, width and depth. Let's try to bring it into two-dimensional space, or onto a plane. If you take the whole cube and roll it up, or rather unroll it, you can do it like this. The sides, the six squares that we have in three-dimensional space, can be spread out once in a plane (Figure 25). So I could imagine the boundary surfaces of the cube spread out on a plane in a cross shape.

There are six squares that can be rearranged to form a cube again if I fold them back, so that squares 1 and 3, 2 and 4, and 5 and 6 are opposite each other. Thus we have a three-dimensional structure simply laid in the plane.

This is not a method that we can use directly to draw the fourth dimension in three-dimensional space. For that, we have to look for a different analogy. We have to use colors to help us. To do that, I will label the six squares along their sides with different colors. The squares facing each other [in the cube] should have the same colors when they are unfolded. I will draw the squares 1 and 3 so that one side is red [dotted lines] and the other is blue [solid lines]. Now I will complete these squares so that I keep blue for the whole horizontal direction (Figure 26). So I will draw all the vertical sides of these squares in red and all the horizontal sides in blue.

If you look at these two squares, 1 and 3, you have the two dimensions that the squares have, expressed in two colors, red and blue. So here for us [at the vertical blackboard, where square 2 is “stuck” to the blackboard], red would mean height and blue depth.

Let us now keep in mind that we apply red wherever height occurs and blue wherever depth occurs; and then we want to take green [dashed line] for the third dimension, width. Now we want to complete the unfolded cube in this way. The square 5 has sides that are blue and green, so the square 6 must look the same. Now only the squares 2 and 4 remain, and if you imagine them unfolded, it follows that the sides will be red and green.

Now, if you imagine it, you will see that we have transformed the three dimensions into three colors. We now say red [dotted], green [dashed], and blue [(solid line)] for height, width, and depth. We name the three colors that are to be images for us instead of the three spatial dimensions. If you imagine the whole cube opened up, you can explain the third dimension in two dimensions in such a way as if, for example, you had let the blue-red square [from left to right in Figure 26] march through green. We want to say that red and blue passed through green. We will describe the marching through green, the disappearance into the third color dimension, as the passage through the third dimension. So, if you imagine that the green fog colors the red-blue square, both sides – red and blue – will appear colored. Blue will take on a blue-green hue and red a cloudy shade, and only where the green stops will both appear in their own color again. I could do the same with squares 2 and 4. So I let the red-green square move through a space that is blue, and then you can do the same with the other two squares, 5 and 6, where the blue-green square would have to pass through the red. In this way, you let each square disappear on one side, submerging it in a different color. It takes on a different color itself through this third color, until it emerges on the other side in its original state.

We thus have an allegorical representation of our cube using three perpendicular colors. We have simply used three colors to represent the three directions we are dealing with here. If we want to imagine the changes that the three pairs of squares have undergone, we can do so by imagining that the squares pass through green the first time, red the second time, and blue the third time.

Now imagine squares instead of these [colored] lines, and squares everywhere for the bare space. Then I can draw the whole figure differently (Figure 27). We draw the transit square blue, and the two that pass through it – before and after the transit – we draw them above and below, here in red-green. [In a second step] I take the red square as the one that allows the blue-green squares to pass through it. And [in a third step] we have the green square here. The two corresponding other colors, red and blue, pass through the green square.

You see, now I have shown you another form of propagation with nine adjacent squares, but only six of which are on the cube itself, namely the squares drawn at the top and bottom of the figure (Figure 27). The other three [middle] squares are transition squares that denote nothing more than the disappearance of the individual colors into a third [color]. [For the transition movement, we] therefore always have to take two dimensions together, because each of these squares [in the upper and lower rows] is composed of two colors and disappears into the color that it does not contain itself. To make these squares reappear on the other side, we let them disappear into the third color. Red and blue disappear into green, red and green have no blue, so they disappear into blue [and green and blue disappear into red].

So, you see, we have the option here of assembling our cube using squares from two color dimensions that pass through the third color dimension.

Now it stands to reason that we imagine cubes instead of squares, and in doing so we put the cubes together out of three color dimensions – just as we put the square together out of two lines of different colors – so that we have three colors, according to the three dimensions of space. If we now want to do the same as we did with the square, we have to add a fourth color. This will allow us to make the cube disappear as well, of course only through a color that it does not have itself. Instead of the three pass squares, we now have four pass cubes in four colors: blue, white, green, and red. So instead of the pass square, we have the pass cube. Mr. Schouten has now produced these colored cubes in his models.

Now, just as we have a square pass through another that is not its color, we must now let a cube pass through another that is not its color. So we let the white-red-green cube pass through a blue one. It will submerge into the fourth color on one side and reappear in its [original] colors on the other side (Figure 28.1).

So here we have a [color] dimension bounded by two cubes that have three colored faces. In the same way, we now have to let the green-blue-red cube pass through the white cube (Figure 28.2), and then let the blue-white-red cube pass through the green (Figure 28.3). In the last figure (Figure 28.4), we have a blue-green-white cube that has to pass through a red dimension, that is, it has to disappear into a color that it does not itself have, in order to reappear on the other side in its very own colors.

These four cubes behave exactly like our three squares did before. If you now realize that we need six squares to bound a cube, we need eight cubes to bound a four-dimensional object, the tessaract.

The purpose of this substitution of dimensions with colors is that, as long as we stick with the [three] dimensions, we cannot bring the three dimensions into the [two-dimensional] plane. But if we use three colors instead, we can do it. We do the same with four dimensions if we want to visualize them using [four] colors in three-dimensional space. This is one way in which I would like to introduce you to these otherwise complicated things, and how Hinton used them in his problem [of the three-dimensional representation of four-dimensional structures].

I would now like to spread out the cube in the plane again, to turn it over into the plane once more. I will draw this on the board. First, disregard the bottom square [of Figure 25] and imagine that you can only see two-dimensionally, so you can only see what is spread out on the surface of the board. If we put five squares together as in this case, so that they are arranged in such a way that the one square comes into the middle, this inner area remains invisible (Figure 29). You can go around it from all sides. You cannot see square 5 because you can only see in two dimensions.

Now let us do the same thing that we have done here with five of the six side squares of the cube with seven of the eight boundary cubes that form the tessaract when we spread our four-dimensional structure into space. I will lay out the seven cubes in the same way as I did with the faces of the cube on the board; only now we have cubes where we previously had squares. Now we have here the corresponding spatial figure, formed entirely analogously. Thus we have the same for three-dimensional space as we previously had for two-dimensional surface. Just as a square is completely hidden from all sides, so is the seventh cube, which a being that has [only] the ability to see three-dimensionally will never be able to see (Figure 30). If we could fold up these figures in the same way as the six unfolded squares of the cube, we could pass from the third into the fourth dimension. We have shown how one can form an idea of this by means of color transitions."

With this, we have at least shown how, despite the fact that humans can only perceive three dimensions, we can still imagine four-dimensional space. Now you might still wonder how one can gain a possible conception of the real four-dimensional space. And here I would like to point you to something that is called the actual “alchemical secret.” For the real insight into four-dimensional space is in some way connected with what the alchemists called “transformation”.

[First variant:] He who wishes to acquire a true intuitive grasp of four-dimensional space must perform very definite exercises in intuitive grasp. These consist in his first forming a very clear intuitive perception, a deepened intuitive perception, not an imagination, of what is called water. Such an intuitive perception of water is not so easy to come by. One must meditate for a long time and delve very deeply into the nature of water; one must, so to speak, creep into the nature of water. The second thing is to gain an insight into the nature of light. Man is familiar with light, but only in the sense that he receives it from outside. Now, through meditation, man comes to receive the inner counter-image of outer light, to know where and from what light arises, so that he can himself bring forth and generate something like light. The yogi acquires this ability to produce and generate light through meditation. This is possible for the person who is able to have pure concepts truly meditatively present in his soul, who truly allows pure concepts to have a meditative effect on his soul, who is able to think free of sensuality. Then the light arises from the concept. Then the whole environment opens up to him as flooding light. The secret disciple must now, as it were, chemically combine the conception he has formed of water with the conception of light. The water, completely permeated by light, is a body called by the alchemists Mercury. Water plus light is called Mercury in the language of the alchemists. But this alchemical Mercury is not ordinary mercury. You will not have received the matter in this form. One must first awaken within oneself the ability to generate the light from the [dealing with the pure] concepts. Mercury is this mixture [of light] with the contemplation of water, this light-imbued water power, in whose possession one then puts oneself. That is one element of the astral world.

The second [element] arises from the fact that, just as one has formed an idea of water, one forms an idea of air, that we therefore suck out the power of the air through a mental process. If you concentrate your feeling in a certain way, you create a fire through feeling. If you combine the power of the air chemically with the fire created by feeling, you get “fire air.” You know that Goethe's Faust speaks of fire air.” This is something in which the inner being of the person must participate. So one element is sucked out of a given element, the air, and the other [fire or warmth] is generated by yourself. This air plus fire was called sulfur, sulphur, luminous fire-air by the alchemists.

If you now have this luminous fire air in an aqueous element, then you truly have that [astral] matter of which it says in the Bible: “And the Spirit of God hovered, or brooded, over the ‘waters’.”

[The third element arises when] you draw the power from the earth and then connect it with the [spiritual forces in the] “sound”; then you have what is called the Spirit of God [here]. Therefore, it is also called “thunder”. [The acting] Spirit of God is thunder, is earth plus sound. The Spirit of God [thus hovers over the] astral matter.

Those “waters” are not ordinary water, but what is actually called astral matter. This consists of four types of forces: water, air, light and fire. The arrangement of these four forces presents itself to the astral view as the four dimensions of astral space. That is how they are in reality. It looks quite different in the astral than in our world, some things that are perceived as astral are only a projection of the astral into physical space.

You see, that which is astral is half subjective [that is, passively given to the subject], half water and air, because light and feeling [fire] are objective, [that is, actively brought to appearance by the subject]. Only part of what is astral can be found outside [given to the subject] and obtained from the environment. The other part must be brought about subjectively [through one's own activity]. Through conceptual and emotional powers, one gains the other [from the given] through [active] objectification. In the astral, we thus have subjective-objective elements.

In devachan, there is no longer any objectivity [that is merely given to the subject]. One would have a completely subjective element there.

When we speak of the astral realm, we have something that the human being must first create [out of himself]. So everything we do here is symbolic, an allegorical representation of the higher worlds, of the devachanic world, which are real in the way I have explained to you in these suggestions. What lies in these higher worlds can only be attained by developing new possibilities of perception within oneself. Man must do something himself for this.

[Second text variant (Vegelahn):] Those who want to acquire a real view of four-dimensional space must do very specific visual exercises. First of all, they form a very clear, in-depth view of water. Such a view is not easy to come by; one has to delve very deeply into the nature of water; one has to, so to speak, get into the water. The second thing is to gain an insight into the nature of light. Light is something that man knows, but only in the sense that he receives it from outside. Through meditation, he can gain an inner image of light, know where light comes from and therefore produce light himself. This can be done by someone who allows pure concepts to have a real meditative effect on his soul, who has a thinking free of sensuality. Then the whole of his environment will reveal itself to him as flooding light, and now he must, as it were chemically, combine the idea he has formed of water with that of light. This water, completely permeated by light, is a body that was called “Mercury” by the alchemists. But the alchemical Mercury is not the ordinary mercury. First you have to awaken within yourself the ability to generate Merkurius from the concept of light. Merkurius, light-imbued water power, is what you then place yourself in possession of. That is the one element of the astral world.

The second is created by you also forming a vivid mental image of air, then sucking out the power of the air through a spiritual process, connecting it with feeling, and you ignite the concept of “warmth”, “fire”, then you get “fire air”. So one element is sucked out, the other is produced by yourself. This - air and fire - the alchemists called “sulfur”, sulfur, luminous fire air. In the aqueous element, there you have in truth that matter of which it is said: “and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters”.

The third element is “spirit-God”, which is connected to “earth” and “sound”. This is what happens when you extract the earth's forces and combine them with sound. These “waters” are not ordinary water, but what is actually called astral matter. This consists of four types of forces: water, air, light and fire. And this manifests itself as the four dimensions of astral space.

You see, that which is astral is half subjective; only part of what is astral can be gained from the environment; from conceptual and emotional powers, one gains the other through objectification. In devachan, you would have a completely subjective element; there is no objectivity there. So everything we do here, the symbolic, is an allegorical representation of the devachanic world. Everything that lies in the higher worlds can only be attained by developing new views within yourself. Man must do something about it himself.

Last time, we tried to get an idea of a four-dimensional space. To visualize it, we reduced it to a three-dimensional one. First, we started by transforming a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional one. We used colors instead of dimensions. We formed the idea in such a way that a cube appeared in three colors along the three dimensions. Then we laid the boundaries of a cube on the plane, which resulted in six squares in different colors. Through the diversity of colors on the individual sides, we obtained the three different dimensions in two-dimensional space. We had three colors, and with that we had represented the three dimensions.

We then imagined that we were passing a square cube into the third dimension, as if we were passing it through a colored fog and it reappeared on the other side. We imagined that we had pass squares, so that the square cubes move through these squares and are thereby tinged [with the color of the pass square]. This is how we tried to imagine the [three-dimensional] cube [by means of a two-dimensional color representation]. [For the one-dimensional representation of the] surfaces, we thus have two boundary colors and [for the two-dimensional representation of the] cube, three colors. [To represent a four-dimensional spatial structure in three-dimensional space, we must] then add a fourth boundary color.

Now we have to imagine in the same way that a cube, which, analogous to our square, has two different colors as boundary sides, has three different colors in its boundary surfaces. And finally, each cube moves through another cube that has the corresponding fourth color. In doing so, we let it disappear into the fourth color dimension. So, according to Hinton's analogy, we let the respective boundary cubes pass through the new [fourth] color, which then reappears on the other side, emerging in their [original] own color.

Now I will give you another analogy and first reduce the three dimensions back to two, so that we will then be able to reduce four dimensions to three. To do this, we have to imagine the following. The cube can be put together at its boundary surfaces from its six boundary squares; but instead of doing it in succession, as we did recently, it will now be done in a different way. I will also draw this figure (Figure 31). You see, we have now spread out the cube in two systems, each of which lies in the plane and consists of three squares. Now we have to be clear about how these different areas will lie when we actually put the cube together. I ask you to consider the following. If I now want to reassemble the cube from these six squares, I have to place the two sections on top of each other so that square 6 comes to rest on square 5. When square 5 is placed at the bottom, I have to fold up squares 1 and 2, while folding down squares 3 and 4 (Figure 32). In doing so, we get certain corresponding lines that overlap. The lines marked in the figure with the same color [here in the same line quality and in the same number of lines] will coincide. What lies here in the plane, in two-dimensional space, coincides to a certain extent when I move into three-dimensional space.

The square consists of four sides, the cube of six squares, and the four-dimensional area would then have to consist of eight cubes.? We call this four-dimensional area a tessaract [after Hinton]. Now, the point is that these eight cubes cannot simply be reassembled into a cube, but that one of them should always pass through the fourth dimension in the appropriate way.

If I now want to do the same with the tessaract as I just did with the cube, I have to follow the same law. The point is to find analogies of the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional and then of the four-dimensional to the three-dimensional. Just as I obtained two systems of [three squares each] here, the same thing happens with the tessaract with [two systems of four cubes each] when I fold a four-dimensional tessaract into three-dimensional space. The system of eight cubes is very ingeniously devised. This structure will then look like this (Figure 33).

Each time, these four cubes in three-dimensional space are to be taken exactly as these squares in two-dimensional space.

You just have to look carefully at what I have done here. When the cube was folded into two-dimensional space, a system of six squares resulted; when the corresponding procedure is carried out on the tessaract, we obtain a system of eight cubes (Figure 34). We have transferred the observation from three-dimensional space to four-dimensional space. [Folding up and joining the squares in three-dimensional space corresponds to folding up and joining the cubes in four-dimensional space.] In the case of the folded-down cube, [in the two-dimensional plane] different corresponding lines were obtained, which coincided when it was folded up again later. The same occurs with the surfaces of our individual cubes of the tessaract. [When the tessaract is folded down in three-dimensional space, corresponding surfaces appear on the corresponding cubes.] So, for example, in the case of the tessaract, the upper horizontal surface of

cube 1—by observing [mediation] the fourth dimension—with the front face of cube 5.

In the same way, the right face of cube 1 coincides with the front square of cube 4, and likewise the left square of cube 1 with the front square of cube 3 [as well as the lower square of cube 1 with the front square of cube 6]. The same applies to the other cube surfaces. The remaining cube, 7, is enclosed by the other six.

You see that here again we are concerned with finding analogies between the third and fourth dimensions. Just as a fifth square enclosed by four squares remains invisible to the being that can only see in two dimensions, as we saw in the corresponding figure of the previous lecture (Figure 29), so it is the case here with the seventh cube: it remains hidden from the three-dimensional eye. Corresponding to this seventh cube in the tessaract is an eighth cube, which, since we have a four-dimensional body here, lies as a counterpart to the seventh in the fourth dimension.

All analogies lead us to prepare for the fourth dimension. Nothing forces us to add the other dimensions to the usual dimensions [within the mere spatial view]. Following Hinton, we could also think of colors here and think of cubes put together in such a way that the corresponding colors come together. It is hardly possible in any other way [than by such analogies] to give a description of how to think of a four-dimensional entity.

Now I would like to mention another way [of representing four-dimensional bodies in three-dimensional space], which may also give you a better understanding of what we are actually dealing with here. This is an octahedron bounded by eight triangles, with the sides meeting at obtuse angles (Figure 35).

If you visualize this structure here, I ask you to follow the following procedure with me in your mind. You see, here one surface is always intersected by another. Here, for example, in AB, two side surfaces meet, and here in EB, two meet. The entire difference between an octahedron and a cube lies in the angle of intersection of the side surfaces. If surfaces intersect as they do in a cube [at right angles], a cube is formed. But if they intersect as they do here [obtuse], then an octahedron is formed. The point is that we can have surfaces intersect at the most diverse angles, and then we get the most diverse spatial structures."

Now imagine that we could also make the same faces of the octahedron intersect in a different way. Imagine this face here, for example AEB, continued on all sides, and this lower one here, BCF, also (Figure 36). Then likewise the ADF and EDC lying backwards. Then these faces must also intersect, and in fact they intersect here in a doubly symmetrical way. If you extend these surfaces in this way, [four of the original boundary surfaces] are no longer needed: ABF, EBC and, towards the back, EAD and DCF. So of the eight surfaces, four remain. And the four that remain give this tetrahedron, which is also called half of an octahedron. It is therefore half of an octahedron because it intersects half of the faces of the octahedron. It is not the case that you cut the octahedron in half. If you bring the other four faces of the octahedron to the cut, the result is also a tetrahedron, which together with the first tetrahedron has the octahedron as a common intersection. In stereometry [geometric crystallography], it is not the part that is halved that is called the half, but the one that is created by halving the [number of] faces. With the octahedron, this is quite easy to imagine.

If you imagine halving the cube in the same way, that is, if you allow one face to intersect with the corresponding other face, you will always get a cube. Half of a cube is a cube again. I would like to draw an important conclusion from this, but first I would like to use something else to help me.

Here I have a rhombic dodecahedron (Figure 37). You can see that the surfaces adjoin each other at certain angles. At the same time, we can see a system of four wires, which I would like to call axial wires, and which run in opposite directions to each other [i.e. connect certain opposite corners of the rhombic dodecahedron, and are therefore diagonals]. These wires now represent a system of axes in a similar way to the way in which you imagined a system of axes on the cube.

You get the cube when you create sections in a system of three perpendicular axes by introducing blockages in each of these axes.

If the axes are made to intersect at other angles, a different spatial figure is obtained. The rhombic dodecahedron has axes which intersect at angles other than right angles.

The cube reflects itself in half.

But this applies only to the cube. The rhombic dodecahedron, cut in half, also gives a different spatial structure.

Now let us take the relation of the octahedron to the tetrahedron. And I will tell you what is meant by this. This becomes clear when we gradually let the octahedron merge into the tetrahedron. For this purpose, let us take a tetrahedron, which we cut off at one vertex (Figure 38). We continue this process until the cut surfaces meet at the edges of the tetrahedron; then what remains is the indicated octahedron. In this way we obtain an eight-sided figure from a three-dimensional figure bounded by four surfaces, provided we cut off the corners at corresponding angles.

What I have done here with the tetrahedron, you cannot do with the cube.

The cube has very special properties, namely that it is the counterpart of three-dimensional space. Imagine the entire universe structured in such a way that it has three perpendicular axes. If you then imagine surfaces perpendicular to these three axes, you will, under all circumstances, get a cube (Figure 39). That is why, when we speak of the cube, we mean the theoretical cube, which is the counterpart of three-dimensional space. Just as the tetrahedron is the counterpart of the octahedron when I make the sides of the octahedron into certain sections, so the single cube is the counterpart of the whole of space.” If you think of the whole of space as positive, the cube is negative. The cube is the polar opposite of the whole of space. Space has in the physical cube its actually corresponding structure.

Now suppose I would not limit the [three-dimensional] space by two-dimensional planes, but I would limit it in such a way that I would have it limited by six spheres [thus by three-dimensional figures].

I first define two-dimensional space by having four circles that go inside each other [i.e., two-dimensional shapes]. You can now imagine that these four circles are getting bigger and bigger [as the radius gets longer and longer and the center point moves further and further away]; then, over time, they will all merge into a straight line (Figure 40). You then get four intersecting lines, and instead of the four circles, a square.

Now imagine that the circles are spheres, and that there are six of them, forming a kind of mulberry (Figure 41). If you imagine the spheres in the same way as the circles, that they get larger and larger in diameter, then these six spheres will ultimately become the boundary surfaces of a cube, just as the four circles became the boundary lines of a square.

The cube has now been created from the fact that we had six spheres that have become flat. So the cube is nothing more than a special case of six interlocking spheres – just as the square is nothing more than a special case of four interlocking circles.

If you are clear in your mind about how to imagine these six spheres, that they correspond to our earlier squares when brought into the plane, and if you imagine an absolutely round shape passing into a straight one, you will get the simplest spatial form. The cube can be imagined as the flattening of six spheres pushed into each other.

You can say of a point on a circle that it must pass through the second dimension if it is to come to another point on the circle. But if you have made the circle so large that it forms a straight line, then every point on the circle can come to every other point on the circle through the first dimension.

We are considering a square bounded by figures, each of which has two dimensions. As long as each of the four boundary figures is a circle, it is therefore two-dimensional. Each boundary figure, when it has become a straight line, is one-dimensional.

Each boundary surface of a cube is formed from a three-dimensional structure in such a way that each of the six boundary spheres has one dimension removed. Such a boundary surface has therefore been created by the third dimension being reduced to two, so to speak bent back. It has therefore lost a dimension. The second dimension was created by losing the dimension of depth. One could therefore imagine that each spatial dimension was created by losing a corresponding higher dimension.

Just as we obtain a three-dimensional figure with two-dimensional boundaries when we reduce three-dimensional boundary figures to two-dimensional ones, so you must conclude that when we look at three-dimensional space, we have to think of each direction as being flattened out, and indeed flattened out from an infinite circle; so that if you could progress in one direction, you would come back from the other. Thus, each [ordinary] spatial dimension has come about through the loss of the corresponding other [dimension]. In our three-dimensional space, there is a three-axis system. These are three perpendicular axes that have lost the corresponding other dimensions and have thus become flat.

So you get three-dimensional space when you straighten each of the [three] axis directions. If you proceed in reverse, each spatial part could become curved again. Then the following series of thoughts would arise: If you curve the one-dimensional structure, you get a two-dimensional one; by curving the two-dimensional structure, you get a three-dimensional one. If you finally curve a three-dimensional structure, you get a four-dimensional structure, so that the four-dimensional can also be imagined as a three-dimensional structure curved on itself.*

And with that, I come from the dead to the living. Through this bending, you can find the transition from the dead to the living. Four-dimensional space is so specialized [at the transition into three dimensions] that it has become flat. Death is [for human consciousness] nothing more than the bending of the three-dimensional into the four-dimensional. [For the physical body taken by itself, it is the other way around: death is a flattening of the four-dimensional into the three-dimensional.]

I would like to conclude the lectures on the fourth spatial dimension today if possible, although I would like to demonstrate a complicated system in more detail today. I would have to show you many more models after Hinton; therefore, I can only refer you to the three detailed and spirited books.” Those who do not have the will to form a picture through analogies in the way we have heard it in the past lectures cannot, of course, form a picture of four-dimensional space. It involves a new way of forming thoughts.

I will try to give you a true representation [parallel projection] of the tessaract. You know that in two-dimensional space we had the square, which is bounded by four sides. This is the three-dimensional cube, which is bounded by six squares (Figure 42).

In four-dimensional space, we have the tessaract. A tessaract is bounded by eight cubes. The projection of a tessaract [in three-dimensional space] therefore consists of eight interlocking cubes. We have seen how the [corresponding eight] cubes can be intertwined in three-dimensional space. Today I will show you a [different] way of projecting the tessaract.

You can imagine that the cube, when held up to the light, throws a shadow on the blackboard. We can mark this shadow figure with chalk (Figure 43). You see that a hexagon is obtained. Now imagine this cube transparent, and you will observe that in the hexagonal figure the three front sides of the cube and the three rear sides of the cube fall into the same plane.

In order to get a projection that we can apply to the tessaract, I would ask you to imagine that the cube is standing in front of you in such a way that the front point A covers the rear point C. If you imagine the third dimension, all this would give you a hexagonal shadow again. I will draw the figure for you (Figure 44).

If you imagine the cube like this, you would see the three front surfaces here; the other surfaces would be behind them. The surfaces of the cube appear foreshortened and the angles are no longer right angles. This is how you see the cube depicted so that the surfaces form a regular hexagon. Thus, we have obtained a representation of a three-dimensional cube in two-dimensional space. Since the edges are shortened and the angles are changed by the projection, we must therefore imagine the [projection of the] six boundary squares of the cube as shifted squares, as rhombi.

The same story that I did with a three-dimensional cube that I projected into the plane, we want to do this procedure with a four-dimensional spatial object, which we therefore have to place in three-dimensional space. We must therefore bring the structure composed of eight cubes, the tessaract, into the third dimension [by parallel projection]. With the cube, we obtained three visible and three invisible edges, all of which enter into the space and in reality do not lie within the [projection] surface. Now imagine a cube shifted in such a way that it becomes a rhombicuboctahedron.” Take eight of these figures, and you have the possibility of combining the eight [boundary] cubes of the tessaract in such a way that, when pushed together, they form the eight (doubly covered) rhombicuboctahedra of this spatial figure (Figure 45).

Now you have one more axis here [than in the three-dimensional cube]. Accordingly, a four-dimensional spatial structure naturally has four axes. So if we push it together, four axes still remain. There are eight [pushed together] cubes in this projection, which are represented as rhombicuboctahedra. The rhombicuboctahedron is a [symmetrical] image or silhouette of the tessaract in three-dimensional space.

We arrived at this relationship by means of an analogy, but it is completely correct: just as we obtained a projection of the cube onto a plane, it is also possible to represent the tessaract in three-dimensional space by means of a projection. It behaves in the same way as the silhouette of the cube in relation to the cube itself. I think that is quite easy to understand.

Now I would like to tie in with the greatest image that has ever been given for this, namely Plato and Schopenhauer and the parable of the cave.

Plato says: Imagine people sitting in a cave, and they are all tied up so that they cannot turn their heads and can only look at the opposite wall. Behind them are people carrying various objects past them. These people and these objects are three-dimensional. So all these [bound] people stare at the wall and see only what is cast as a shadow [of the objects] on the wall. So they would see everything in the room only as a shadow on the opposite wall as two-dimensional images.

Plato says that this is how it is in the world in general. In truth, people are sitting in the cave. Now, people themselves and everything else are four-dimensional; but what people see of it are only images in three-dimensional space.

This is how all the things we see present themselves. According to Plato, we are dependent on seeing not the real things, but the three-dimensional silhouettes. I only see my hand as a silhouette; in reality it is four-dimensional, and everything that people see of it is just as much an image of it as what I just showed you as an image of the Tessaract. Thus Plato was already trying to make clear that the objects we know are actually four-dimensional, and that we only see silhouettes of them in three-dimensional space. And that is not entirely arbitrary. I will give you the reasons for this in a moment.

Of course, anyone can say from the outset that this is mere speculation. How can we even imagine that the things that appear on the wall have a reality? Imagine that you are sitting here in a row, and you are sitting very still. Now imagine that the things on the wall suddenly start to move. You will not be able to tell yourself that the images on the wall can move without going out of the second dimension. If something moves there, it indicates that something must have happened outside the wall, on the real object, for it to move at all. That's what you tell yourself. If you imagine that the objects in three-dimensional space can pass each other, this would not be possible with their two-dimensional silhouettes, if you think of them as substantial, that is, impenetrable. If those images, conceived substantially, wanted to move past each other, they would have to go out of the second dimension.

As long as everything on the wall is at rest, I have no reason to conclude that something is happening outside the wall, outside the space of the two-dimensional silhouettes. But the moment history begins to move, I must investigate the source of the motion. And you realize that the change can only come from motion outside the wall, only from motion within a third dimension. The change has thus told us that there is a third dimension in addition to the second.

What is a mere image also has a certain reality, possesses very definite properties, but differs essentially from the real object. You will not be able to deny that the mirror image is also a mere image. You see yourself in the mirror, and you are also there. If there is not a third [that is, an active being] there, then you could not actually know what you are. But the mirror image makes the same movements that the original makes; the image is dependent on the real object, the being; it itself has no ability [to move]. Thus, a distinction can be made between image and being in that only a being can bring about movement and change out of itself. I realize from the shadows on the wall that they cannot move themselves, so they cannot be beings. I have to go out of them if I want to get to the beings.

Now apply this to the world in general. The world is three-dimensional. Take this three-dimensional world for itself, as it is; grasp it completely in your thoughts [for yourself], and you will find that it remains rigid. It remains three-dimensional even if you suddenly think the world frozen at a certain point in time. But there is no one and the same world in two points in time. The world is completely different at successive points in time. Imagine that these points in time cease to exist, so that what is there remains. Without time, no change would occur in the world. The world would remain three-dimensional even if it underwent no change at all. The pictures on the wall also remain two-dimensional. But change suggests a third dimension. The fact that the world is constantly changing, and that it remains three-dimensional even without change, suggests that we have to look for the change in a fourth dimension. We have to look for the reason, the cause of the change, the activity outside the third dimension, and with that you have initially uncovered the fourth of the dimensions. But with that you also have the justification for Plato's image. So we understand the whole three-dimensional world as the shadow projection of a four-dimensional world. The only question is how we have to take this fourth dimension [in reality].

You see, we have the one idea to make it clear to ourselves, of course, that it is impossible for the fourth dimension to fall [directly] into the third. That is not possible. The fourth dimension cannot fall into the third. I would like to show you now how one can, so to speak, get an idea of how to go beyond the third dimension. Imagine we have a circle – I have already tried to evoke a similar idea recently – if you imagine this circle getting bigger and bigger, then a piece of this circle becomes flatter and flatter, and because the diameter of the circle becomes very large at the end, the circle finally turns into a straight line. The line has one dimension, but the circle has two dimensions. How do you get a second dimension from a single dimension? By curving a straight line, you get a circle again.

If you now imagine the surface of the circle curving into space, you first get a shell, and if you continue to do this, you get a sphere. Thus a line acquires a second dimension by curvature and a surface acquires a third dimension by curvature. If you could now curve a cube, it would have to be curved into the fourth dimension, and you would have the [spherical] tessaract.

You can understand the sphere as a curved two-dimensional spatial structure. The sphere that occurs in nature is the cell, the smallest living thing. The cell is limited spherically. That is the difference between the living and the lifeless. The mineral always occurs as a crystal bounded by flat surfaces; life is bounded by spherical surfaces, built up of cells. That means that just as a crystal is built from spheres that have been straightened out, that is, from planes, so life is built from cells, that is, from spheres that have been bent together. The difference between the living and the dead lies in the way they are defined. The octahedron is defined by eight triangles. If we imagine the eight sides as spheres, we would get an eight-limbed living thing.

If you curve the three-dimensional structure, the cube, again, you get a four-dimensional structure, the spherical tessaract. But if you curve the whole space, you get something that relates to three-dimensional space in the same way that a sphere relates to a plane.

Just as the cube, as a three-dimensional structure, is bounded by planes, so every crystal is bounded by planes. The essence of a crystal is the assembly of [flat] boundary planes. The essence of the living is the assembly of curved surfaces, of cells. The assembly of something even higher would be a structure whose individual boundaries would be four-dimensional. A three-dimensional structure is bounded by two-dimensional structures. A four-dimensional being, that is, a living being, is bounded by three-dimensional beings, by spheres and cells. A five-dimensional being is itself bounded by four-dimensional beings, by spherical tessaracts. From this you can see that we have to ascend from three-dimensional to four-dimensional, and then to five-dimensional beings.

We only have to ask ourselves: What must occur in a being that is four-dimensional?* A change must occur within the third dimension. In other words: If you hang pictures on the wall here, they are two-dimensional and generally remain static. But if you have pictures in which the second dimension moves and changes, then you must conclude that the cause of this movement can only lie outside the surface of the wall, that the third dimension of space thus indicates the change. If you find changes within the third spatial dimension itself, then you must conclude that a fourth dimension is involved, and this brings us to the beings that undergo a change within their three spatial dimensions.

It is not true that we have fully recognized a plant if we have only recognized it in its three dimensions. A plant is constantly changing, and this change is an essential, a higher characteristic of it. The cube remains; it only changes its shape when you smash it. A plant changes its shape itself, that is, there is something that is the cause of this change and that lies outside the third dimension and is an expression of the fourth dimension. What is that?

You see, if you have this cube and draw it, you would labor in vain if you wanted to draw it differently at different moments; it will always remain the same. If you draw the plant and compare the picture with your model after three weeks, it will have changed. So this analogy is completely accurate. Everything that lives points to something higher, where it has its true essence, and the expression of this higher is time. Time is the symptomatic expression, the appearance of liveliness [understood as the fourth dimension] in the three dimensions of physical space. In other words, all beings for whom time has an inner meaning are images of four-dimensional beings. This cube is still the same after three or six years. The lily bud changes. Because for it, time has a real meaning. Therefore, what we see in the lily is only the three-dimensional image of the four-dimensional lily being. So time is an image, a projection of the fourth dimension, the organic liveliness, into the three spatial dimensions of the physical world.

To understand how a following dimension relates to the preceding one, please imagine the following: a cube has three dimensions; when you visualize the third, you have to remember that it is perpendicular to the second, and the second is perpendicular to the first. The three dimensions are characterized by the fact that they are perpendicular to one another. But we can also imagine how the third dimension arises from the following [fourth dimension]. Imagine that you would change the cube by coloring the boundary surfaces and then changing these colors [in a certain way, as in Hinton's example]. Such a change can indeed be made, and it corresponds exactly to the change that a three-dimensional being undergoes when it passes into the fourth dimension, when it develops through time. If you cut a four-dimensional being at any point, you take away the fourth dimension, you destroy it. If you do that to a plant, you do exactly the same thing as if you were to make a cast of the plant, a plaster cast. You have captured that by destroying the fourth dimension, time. Then you get a three-dimensional object. If for any three-dimensional being the fourth dimension, time, has an essential significance, then it is a living being.

Now we enter the fifth dimension. You can say to yourself that you must again have a boundary that is perpendicular to the fourth dimension. We have seen that the fourth dimension is related to the third dimension in a similar way to the third dimension being related to the second. It is not immediately possible to visualize the fifth dimension in this way. But you can again create a rough idea by using an analogy. How does a dimension come into being in the first place? If you simply draw a line, you will never create another dimension by simply pushing the line in one direction. Only by imagining that you have two opposing directions of force, which then accumulate at a point, only by expressing the accumulation, do you have a new dimension. We must therefore be able to grasp the new dimension as a new line of accumulation [of two currents of force], and imagine the one dimension coming from the right one time and from the left the next, as positive and negative. So I understand a dimension [as a polar [stream of forces] within itself], so that it has a positive and a negative dimension [component], and the neutralization [of these polar force components] is the new dimension.

From there, we want to create an idea of the fifth dimension. We will have to imagine that the fourth dimension, which we have found expressed as time, behaves in a positive and negative way. Now take two beings for whom time has a meaning, and imagine two such beings colliding with each other. Then something must appear as a result, similar to what we have previously called an accumulation of [opposing] forces; and what arises as a result when two four-dimensional beings come into relation with each other is their fifth dimension. This fifth dimension arises as a result, as a consequence of an exchange [a neutralization of polar force effects], in that two living beings, through their mutual interaction, produce something that they do not have outside [in the three ordinary spatial dimensions together], nor do they have in [the fourth dimension,] time, but have completely outside these [previously discussed dimensions or] boundaries. This is what we call compassion [or feeling], by which one being knows another, thus the realization of the [spiritual and mental] inner being of another being. A being could never know anything about another being outside of time [and space] if you did not add a higher, fifth dimension, [i.e. enter the world of] sensation. Of course, here the sensation is only to be understood as a projection, as an expression [of the fifth dimension] in the physical world.

Developing the sixth dimension in the same way would be too difficult, so I will only indicate it. [If we tried to progress in this way, something could be developed as an expression of the sixth dimension that,] when placed in the three-dimensional physical world, is self-conscious.

Man, as a three-dimensional being, is one who shares his imagery with other three-dimensional beings. The plant, in addition, has the fourth dimension. For this reason, you will never find the ultimate essence of the plant within the three dimensions of space, but you would have to ascend from the plant to a fourth spatial dimension [to the astral sphere]. But if you wanted to grasp a being that has feeling, you would have to ascend to the fifth dimension [to the lower Devachan, to the Rupa sphere]; and if you wanted to grasp a being that has self-awareness, a human being, you would have to ascend to the sixth dimension [to the upper Devachan, to the Arupa sphere]. Thus, the human being as he stands before us in the present is indeed a six-dimensional being. That which is called feeling or compassion, or self-awareness, is a projection of the fifth or sixth dimension into ordinary three-dimensional space. Man extends into these spiritual spheres, albeit unconsciously for the most part; only there can he actually be experienced in the sense indicated last. This six-dimensional being can only come to an idea of even the higher worlds if it tries to get rid of the actual characteristics of the lower dimensions.

I can only hint at the reason why man considers the world to be only three-dimensional, namely because he is conditioned in his perception to see only a reflection of something higher in the world. When you look in a mirror, you also see only a reflection of yourself. Thus, the three dimensions of our physical space are indeed reflections, material copies of three higher, causally creative dimensions. Our material world therefore has its polar [spiritual] counter-image in the group of the three next higher dimensions, that is, in those of the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions. And in a similar sense, the spiritual worlds that lie beyond this group of dimensions, which can only be sensed, are also polar to those of the fourth to sixth dimensions.

If you have water and you let the water freeze, the same substance is present in both cases; but in form they differ quite substantially. You can imagine a similar process for the three higher dimensions of man. If you think of man as a purely spiritual being, then you have to think of him as having only the three higher dimensions – self-awareness, feeling and time – and these three dimensions are reflected in the physical world in its three ordinary dimensions.

The yogi [secret student], if he wants to advance to a knowledge of the higher worlds, must gradually replace the mirror images with reality. For example, when he looks at a plant, he must get used to gradually substituting the higher dimensions for the lower ones. If he looks at a plant and is able to abstract from one spatial dimension in the case of a plant, to abstract from one spatial dimension and instead to imagine a corresponding one of the higher dimensions, in this case time, then he actually gets an idea of what a two-dimensional, moving being is. To make this being more than just an image, to make it correspond to reality, the yogi must do the following. If he disregards the third dimension and adds the fourth, he would only get something imaginary. However, the following mental image can help: when we make a cinematographic representation of a living being, we remove the third dimension from the original three-dimensional processes, but add the [dimension of] time through the sequence of images. If we then add sensation to this [moving] perception, we perform a procedure similar to what I described earlier as the bending of a three-dimensional structure into the fourth dimension. Through this process you then get a four-dimensional entity, but now one that has two of our spatial dimensions, but also two higher ones, namely time and sensation. Such beings do indeed exist, and these beings - and this brings me to a real conclusion to the whole consideration - I would like to tell you about.

Imagine two spatial dimensions, that is, a surface, and this surface endowed with motion. Now imagine a bent as a sensation, a sentient being that then pushes a two-dimensional surface in front of it. Such a being must act differently and be very different from a three-dimensional being in our space. This flat creature that we have constructed in this way is incomplete in one direction, completely open, and offers you a two-dimensional view; you cannot go around it, it comes towards you. This is a luminous creature, and the luminous creature is nothing other than the incompleteness in one direction.

Through such a being, the initiates then get to know other beings, which they describe as divine messengers approaching them in flames of fire. The description of Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments,® means nothing other than that a being could indeed approach him that, to his perception, had these dimensions. It appeared to him like a human being from whom the third spatial dimension had been removed; it appeared in sensation and in time.

These abstract images in the religious documents are not just external symbols, but powerful realities that man can get to know if he is able to appropriate what we have tried to make clear through analogies. The more you devote yourself diligently and energetically to such considerations of analogies, the more you really work on your mind, and the more these [considerations] work in us and trigger higher abilities. [This is roughly the case when dealing with] the analogy of the relationship of the cube to the hexagon and the tessaract to the rhombic dodecahedron. The latter represents a projection of the tessaract into the three-dimensional physical world. If you visualize these figures as living entities, if you allow the cube to grow out of the projection of the die – the hexagon – and likewise allow the tessaract itself to arise from the projection of the tessaract [the rhombic dodecahedron], then you create the possibility and the ability in your lower mental body to grasp what I have just described to you as a structure. And if, in other words, you have not only followed me but have gone through this procedure vividly, as the yogi does in an awakened state of consciousness, then you will notice that something will occur to you in your dreams that in reality is a four-dimensional entity, and then it is not much further to bring it over into the waking consciousness, and you can then see the fourth dimension in every four-dimensional being.

The astral sphere is the fourth dimension. Devachan to rupa is the fifth dimension. Devachan to arupa is the sixth dimension.

These three worlds, the physical, astral and celestial [devachan], comprise six dimensions. The even higher worlds are completely polar to these.

Mineral Plant Animal Human Arupa Self-consciousness Rupa Sensation Self-consciousness Astral plane Life Sensation Self-consciousness Physical form Life Sensation Self-plan consciousness Form Life Sensation Form Life Form

The subject we are to discuss today will present us with a number of difficulties. Consider the lecture as an episode; it is being held at your request. If you only want to grasp the subject formally in its depth, some mathematical knowledge is necessary. But if you want to grasp it in its reality, you have to penetrate very deeply into occultism. So today we can only talk about it very superficially, only give a suggestion for this or that.

It is very difficult to talk about multidimensionality at all, because if you want to get an idea of what more than three dimensions are, you have to delve into abstract areas, and there the concepts must be very precisely and strictly defined, otherwise you end up in a bottomless pit. And that's where many friends and enemies have ended up.

The concept of multidimensional space is not as foreign to the world of mathematicians as one might think.® In mathematical circles, there is already a way of calculating with a multidimensional type of calculation. Of course, the mathematician can only speak of this space in a very limited sense; he can only discuss the possibility. Whether it really is can only be determined by someone who can see into a multidimensional space. Here we are already dealing with a lot of concepts that, if we grasp them precisely, really provide us with clarity about the concept of space.

What is space? We usually say: there is space around me, I walk around in space — and so on. If you want a clearer idea, you have to go into some abstractions. We call the space in which we move three-dimensional. It has an extension in height and depth, to the right and left, to the front and back, it has length, width and height. When we look at bodies, these bodies are extended for us in this three-dimensional space; they have a certain length, a certain width and height for us.

However, we have to deal with the details of the concept of space if we want to arrive at a more precise concept. Let us look at the simplest body, the cube. It shows us most clearly what length, width and height are. We find a base of the cube that is the same in length and width. If we move the base up, just as far as the base is wide and long, we get the cube, which is therefore a three-dimensional object. The cube is the clearest way for us to learn about the details of a three-dimensional object. We examine the boundaries of the cube. These are formed everywhere by surfaces bounded by sides of equal length. There are six such surfaces.

What is a surface? Those who are not capable of very sharp abstractions will already falter here. For example, you cannot cut the boundaries of a wax cube as a fine layer of wax. You would still get a layer of a certain thickness, so you would get a body. We will never get to the boundary of the cube this way. The real boundary has only length and width, no height. Thickness is eliminated. We thus arrive at the formulaic sentence: The area is the boundary [of a three-dimensional object] in which one dimension is eliminated.

What then is the boundary of a surface, for example of a square? Here we must again take the most extreme abstraction. [The boundary of a surface] is a line that has only one dimension, length. The width is canceled. What is the boundary of a line? It is the point, which has no dimension at all. So you always get the boundary of a thing by leaving out a dimension.

So you could say to yourself, and this is also the line of thought that many mathematicians have followed, especially Riemann,* who has achieved the most solid work here: We take the point, which has none, the line, which has one, the plane, which has two, the solid, which has three dimensions. Now mathematicians asked themselves: Could it not be that formally one could say that one could add a fourth dimension? Then the [three-dimensional] body would have to be the boundary of the four-dimensional object, just as the surface is the boundary of the body, the line is the boundary of the surface, and the point is the boundary of the line. Of course, the mathematician then goes even further to five-, six- and seven-dimensional objects and so on. We have [even arbitrary] “-dimensional objects [where ” is a positive integer].

Now, there is already some ambiguity in the matter when we say: the point has none, the line has one, the plane two, the solid three dimensions. We can now make such a solid, for example a cube, out of wax, silver, gold and so on. They are different in terms of matter. We make them the same size, then they all occupy the same space. If we now eliminate all material, only a certain part of space remains, which is the spatial image of the body. These parts of space are the same [among themselves], regardless of what material the cube was made of. These parts of space also have length, width and height. We can now imagine these cubes as infinitely extended and thus arrive at an infinitely extended three-dimensional space. The (material) body is, after all, only a part of it.

The question now is whether we can simply extend such conceptual considerations, which we make starting from space, to higher realities. In these considerations, the mathematician actually only calculates, and does so with numbers. Now the question is whether one can do that at all. I will show you how much confusion can arise when calculating with spatial quantities. Why? I only need to tell you one thing: Imagine you have a square figure here. I can make this figure, this area, wider and wider on both sides and thus arrive at an area that extends indefinitely between two lines (Figure 56).

This area is infinitely large, so it is >. Now imagine someone who hears that the area between these two lines is infinite. Of course, he thinks of infinity. If you now talk to him about infinity, he may have very wrong ideas about it. Imagine that I now add below [each square one more, so another row of] an infinite number of squares, and I get a [different] infinity that is exactly twice as large as the first (Figure 57). So we have > = 2 + 0,

In the same way I could get: “ = 3 +,

In calculating with numbers, you can just as well use infinity as finiteness. Just as it is true that space was already infinite in the first case, it is just as true that it is 2 + c, 3 - c, and so on. So we are calculating numerically here.

We see that the concept of the infinity of space [which follows from the numerical representation] does not give us any possibility of penetrating deeper [into the higher realities]. Numbers actually have no relation to space at all, they relate to it quite neutrally, like peas or any other objects. You now know that nothing changes in reality as a result of calculation. If someone has three peas, multiplication does not change that, even if the calculation is done correctly. The calculation 3 + 3 = 9 does not give nine peas. A mere consideration does not change anything here, and calculation is a mere consideration. Just as three peas are left behind, [you do not actually create nine peas,] even if you multiply correctly, three-dimensional space must also be left behind if the mathematician also calculates: two-, three-, four-, five-dimensional space. You will feel that there is something very convincing about such a mathematical consideration. But this consideration only proves that the mathematician could indeed calculate with such a multidimensional space; [but whether a multidimensional space actually exists, that is,] he cannot determine anything about the validity of such a concept [for reality]. Let us be clear about that here in all strictness.

Now we want to consider some other considerations that have been made very astutely by mathematicians, one might say. We humans think, hear, feel and so on in three-dimensional space. Let us imagine that there are beings that could only perceive in two-dimensional space, that would be organized so that they always have to remain in the plane, that they could not get out of the second dimension. Such beings are quite conceivable: they can only move [and perceive] to the right and left [and backwards and forwards] and have no idea of what is above and below.

Now it could be the same for man in his three-dimensional space. He could only be organized for the three dimensions, so that he could not perceive the fourth dimension, but for him it arises just as the third arises for the others. Now mathematicians say that it is quite possible to think of man as such a being. But now one could say that this is also only one interpretation. One could certainly say that. But here one must again proceed somewhat more precisely. The matter is not as simple as in the first case [with the numerical determination of the infinity of space]. I am intentionally only giving very simple discussions today.

This conclusion is not the same as the first purely formal [calculative] consideration. Here we come to a point where we can take hold. It is true that there can be a being that can only perceive what moves in the plane, that has no idea that there is anything above or below. Now imagine the following: Imagine that a point becomes visible to the being within the surface, which is of course perceptible because it is located in the surface. If the point only moves within the surface, it remains visible; but if it moves out of the surface, it becomes invisible. It would have disappeared for the surface being. Now let us assume that the point reappears, thus becoming visible again, only to disappear again, and so on. The being cannot follow the point [as it moves out of the surface], but the being can say to itself: the point has now gone somewhere I cannot see. The being with the surface vision could now do one of two things. Let us put ourselves in the place of the soul of this flat creature. It could say: There is a third dimension into which the object has disappeared, and then it has reappeared afterwards. Or it could also say: These are very foolish creatures who speak of a third dimension; the object has always disappeared, perished and been reborn [in every case]. One would have to say: the being sins against reason. If it does not want to assume a continuous disappearance and re-emergence, the being must say to itself: the object has submerged somewhere, disappeared, where I cannot see.

A comet, when it disappears, passes through four-dimensional space.

Everything that has been said so far is as unassailable as it can possibly be. And the confirmation is so simple that it will not even occur to man in his present deluded state to admit it. The answer to the question: Is there something that always disappears and reappears? — is so easy. Just imagine, a feeling of joy arises in you and then it disappears again. It is impossible that anyone who is not clairvoyant will perceive it. Now the same sensation reappears through some event. Now you, just like the surface creature, could behave in different ways. Either you say to yourself that the sensation has disappeared somewhere where I cannot follow it, or you take the view that the sensation passes away and arises again and again.

But it is true: every thought that has vanished into the unconscious is proof that something disappears and then reappears. At most, the following can be objected to: if you endeavor to object to such a thought, which is already plausible to you, with everything that could be objected to from a materialistic point of view, you are quite right. I will make the most subtle objection here, all the others are very easy to refute. For example, one says to oneself: everything is explained in a purely materialistic way. Now I will show you that something can quite well disappear within material processes, only to reappear later. Imagine that some kind of vapor piston is always acting in the same direction. It can be perceived as a progressive piston as long as the force is acting. Now suppose I set a piston that is exactly the same but acting in the opposite direction. Then the movement is canceled out and a state of rest sets in. So here the movement actually disappears.

In the same way, one could say here: For me, the sensation of joy is nothing more than molecules moving in the brain. As long as this movement takes place, I feel this joy. Now, let us assume that something else causes an opposite movement of the molecules in the brain, and the joy disappears. Wouldn't someone who doesn't go very far with their considerations find a very meaningful objection here? But let's take a look at what this objection is actually about. Just as one [piston] movement disappears when the opposite [piston movement] occurs, so the [molecular movement underlying the sensation] is extinguished by the opposite [molecular movement]. What happens when one piston movement extinguishes the other? Then both movements disappear. The second movement also disappears immediately. The second movement cannot extinguish the first without itself being extinguished. [A total standstill results, no movement whatsoever remains.] Yes, but then a [new] sensation can never extinguish the [already existing] sensation [without perishing itself]. So no sensation that is in my consciousness could ever extinguish another [without extinguishing itself in the process]. It is therefore a completely false assumption that one sensation could extinguish another [at all]. [If that were the case, no sensation would remain, and a totally sensationless state would arise.]

Now, at most, it could be said that the first sensation is pushed into the subconscious by the second. But then one admits that something exists that eludes our [immediate] observation.

We have not considered any clairvoyant observations today, but have only spoken of purely mathematical ideas. Now that we have admitted the possibility of such a four-dimensional world, we ask ourselves: Is there a way to observe something [four-dimensional] without being clairvoyant? — Yes, but we have to use a kind of projection to help us. If you have a piece of a surface, you can rotate it so that the shadow becomes a line. Similarly, you can get a point from a line as a shadow. For a [three-dimensional] body, the silhouette is a [two-dimensional] surface. Likewise, one can say: So it is quite natural, if we are aware that there is a fourth dimension, that we say: [Three-dimensional] bodies are silhouettes of four-dimensional entities.

Here we have arrived at the idea of [four-dimensional space] in a purely geometrical way. But [with the help of geometry] this is also possible in another way. Imagine a square, which has two dimensions. If you imagine the four [bounding] lines laid down next to each other [i.e., developed], you have laid out the [boundary figures] of a two-dimensional figure in one dimension (Figure 58). Let's move on. Imagine we have a line. If we proceed in the same way as with the square, we can also decompose it into two points [and thus decompose the boundaries of a one-dimensional structure into

zero dimensions]. You can also decompose a cube into six squares (Figure 59). So there we have the cube in terms of its boundaries decomposed into surfaces, so that we can say: a line is decomposed into two points, a surface into four lines, a cube into six surfaces. We have the numerical sequence two, four, six here.

Now we take eight cubes. Just as [the above developments each consist of] unfolded boundaries, here the eight cubes form the boundary of the four-dimensional body (Figure 60). The [development of these] boundaries forms a double cross, which, we can say, indicates the boundaries of the regular [four-dimensional] body. [This body, a four-dimensional cube, is named the Hinton Tessaract after Hinton.]

We can therefore form an idea of the boundaries of this body, the tessaract. We have here the same idea of the four-dimensional body as a two-dimensional being could have of a cube, for example by unfolding the boundaries.

Recent lectures given at the Goetheanum have laid repeated emphasis on the fact that the Spiritual Science cultivated here must work fruitfully upon the whole scientific mind of to-day and also upon the various branches of science. This is perhaps brought home to us most strongly of all when we realise the light that is shed by Spiritual Science upon the problems of history. And so far as the limits of two brief lectures allow, we will try to go into this matter.

On many sides to-day it is being said that the science of history is facing a crisis. Not so very long ago, among certain circles in the days of the historian Ranke, it was held that history must be made into an ‘exact’ science—exact in the sense in which this expression is used in connection with ordinary scientific research. We often hear it said by those to whom ‘exact research’ implies the methods current in the domain of external science, that all historical writings are inevitably coloured by the nationality, temperament and other personal propensities of the historian, by the element of imagination working in the condensation of the details, by the depth of his intuitive faculty and the like. And as a matter of fact in the most recently written histories it is abundantly evident that the presentation of objective facts and events varies considerably according to the nationality of the historian, according to his power of synthesis, his imagination and other faculties.

In a certain respect, Spiritual Science is well fitted to cultivate an objective outlook in the study of history. It is, of course, not to be denied that the measure of talent possessed by the historian himself will always play an important part. Nevertheless, in spite of what our opponents choose to say to the contrary, it is precisely in the study of history that a quality essentially characteristic of Spiritual Science comes into play.

By its very nature Spiritual Science must begin with a development of the inner, subjective faculties in the being of man. Forces otherwise latent in the soul must be awakened and transformed into real faculties of investigation. The subjective realm, therefore, is necessarily the starting-point. But in spite of this, the subjective element is gradually overcome in the course of genuine spiritual research; depths are opened up in the soul in which the voice of objective truth, not that of subjective feeling, is speaking. It is the same in mathematics, when objective truths are proclaimed, in spite of the fact that they are discovered by subjective effort.

From this point of view I want to speak to you of a chapter of history which cannot but be of the deepest interest to us in this modern age. I will choose from the wide field of history the more spiritual forms of thought which came to the fore in the nineteenth century, and speak about their origin in the light of Spiritual Science. To-day I propose to deal with the more exoteric aspect—if I may use this expression—and pass on in the next lecture more into the realm of the esoteric connections and deeper causes underlying the facts of the spiritual and mental life of humanity.

As we look back to the nineteenth century—and the character of the first twenty years of the twentieth century is really very similar—the impression usually is that thought in the nineteenth century developed along an even, regular course. But those who go more deeply into the real facts discover that this was by no means the case. About the middle of the century a very radical change came about in the development of thought. The mode of thinking and outlook of men underwent a metamorphosis. People began to ask questions about the nature of the impulses underlying social life in the past and present. It is only possible to-day to indicate these things in a few characteristic strokes, but this we shall try to do.

Leading minds in the first half of the nineteenth century were all characterised by certain spiritual and idealistic aspirations, in spite of the fact that they were the offspring of the kind of thought that had become habitual in the domain of natural science. These leading minds were still, to a certain extent, conscious of their dependence upon an inner guidance A few definite examples will show that this changes entirely in the second half of the century. In following up this particular line of development we shall not be able to concentrate upon those who were either scientists or artists in the narrower sense. We shall have to select typical representatives of scientific thought at that time who set themselves the task of clarifying the problems of the social life which had become more and more insistent in the course of the nineteenth century. More and more it was borne in upon eminent thinkers that the only way of approach to the problems of the social life was, on the one hand, to emphasise the importance of the results achieved by science and, on the other, to deal with the depression which had so obviously crept into the life and impulses of the soul.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, we find a representative personality in Saint-Simon, a son, as it were, of the French Revolution, and who had thoroughly imbibed the scientific thought of his time. Saint-Simon was one whose mind, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, may be taken as a typical example of the scientific thinking of the day. He was also deeply concerned with the social problem. He had experienced the aftermath of the French Revolution and had heard the cry for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity resounding from the depths of the human soul. But it had also been his lot to experience the disappointments suffered by Europe alter the Revolution. He witnessed the gradual emergence of what, later on, became the burning social question. And if we study the whole temper and outlook of Saint-Simon's mind, it is clear that he was a firm believer in the fact that knowledge can ultimately lead to ideas which will be fruitful for the social life, provided always that these ideas are in inner harmony with the demands of the times. He was convinced that study, understanding and enthusiasm for the tasks of social life would lead to the discovery of something which could be communicated to men, and that they would respond to knowledge born of enthusiasm for the betterment of social life and presented to them in a form suited to the conditions of the age. Betterment and progress—so thought Saint-Simon—will come about in the social life of Europe through the co-operation of individuals who have both understanding and strength of will. Saint-Simon was imbued with the firm belief that it is possible to convince human beings when one's own mind has grasped the truth and is capable of presenting it to others in the proper scientific form. And so he tries to base all his work upon the spiritual and mental conceptions of his day. He looks back to times which, in his opinion, had already fulfilled their mission; he thinks of the power once possessed by the nobles and the military class, and says to himself: In earlier times the nobles and the military class had their purpose and function. The nobles provided military forces for the protection of those who desired to devote their energies to the so-called arts of peace.

But—thought Saint-Simon—in earlier times the priesthood too was a factor of great significance. For long ages the instruction and education of the people were in the hands of the priesthood and the priests were the bearers of the spiritual life. But this state of things has long since passed away. The nobles and the military class, nay even the priesthood, have lost their raison dêtre. And on the other hand, an entirely new line of activity has established itself in civilised life. Saint-Simon was well aware of all that the development of industry and industrial science meant in the evolution of humanity. He said to himself: This industrial development will in its turn give rise to a kind of thinking that has already been adopted by natural science, is employed in physics, chemistry, biology, and will inevitably spread to the other sciences. In astronomy, chemistry, physics and physiology we find evidences of the kind of thinking that is current in the modern age.

But it is also essential to inaugurate a science of man, in other words, psychology and sociology. The principles of physics must be introduced into political science and then it will be possible to work and act effectively in the domain of social life. What is needed—so said Saint-Simon—is a kind of ‘political physics,’ and he set out to build up a science of social life and action that should be in line with the principles of chemistry, physics and physiology. Saint-Simon considered that this kind of thinking was evitable because of the overwhelming importance which industrial life was beginning to assume in his day, and he was convinced that no further progress would be possible in industry if it remained under the old conditions of subordination to the military class and to the priesthood.

At the same time Saint-Simon indicated that all these changes were to be regarded as phases. The priests and the nobility had had their function to perform in days gone by and the same significance was, he said, now vested in the scholars and the industrialists. Although in former times a spiritual conception of life was thoroughly justified, the kind of thought that is fitting in the modern age, said Saint-Simon, is of a different character. But something always remains over from earlier times. Saint-Simon's rejection of the older, sacerdotal culture was due to his intense preoccupation with the industrialist mode of thinking that had come to the fore in his day. He spoke of the old sacerdotal culture as a system of abstract metaphysics, whereas the quest of the new age, even in the sphere of politics, must be for philosophy concerned as directly with concrete facts as industrial life is concerned with the facts of the external world. The old sacerdotal culture, he said, simply remains as a system of metaphysical traditions, devoid of real life, and it is this element that is found above all in the new form of jurisprudence and in what has crept into political life through jurisprudence. To Saint-Simon, jurisprudence, and the concepts on which it was based, were remnants and shadows of the time when sacerdotalism and militarism had a real function to perform in the life of the people.

The views of a man like Saint-Simon are born of the scientific mode of thinking which had become so widespread in the eighteenth century, and even before that time. It is a mode of thinking which directs all inner activity in man to the external world of material facts. Saint-Simon's attitude, however, was influenced by yet another factor, namely, the demand for individual freedom which was at that time arising from the very depths of man's being. On the one side we find the urge to discover natural law everywhere and to admit nothing as being ‘scientific’ which does not fall into line with this natural law.—And on the other side there is the insistent demand for individual freedom: Man must be his own matter and be able in freedom to find a place in the world that is consistent with the dignity of manhood. These two demands are, as a matter of fact, in diametrical opposition to one another. And if we study the structure of the life of thought in the nineteenth century, we realise that the mind of Saint-Simon and others like him was faced continually with these great problems: How can I reconcile natural law—to which man too must, after all, be subject—with the demand for human freedom, for freedom of the individuality.

In the French Revolution a materialistic view of the universe had been mingled with the inner demand for individual freedom. And it was the voice of the French Revolution, sounding over into the nineteenth century, which led men like Saint-Simon to this bitter conflict in the realm of knowledge.—The laws established by natural science hold good and are universal in their application. They obtain also in the being of man, but he will not admit it because within this body of scientific law he cannot find his freedom as an individual.

And so at the beginning of the nineteenth century, men like Saint-Simon stood as it were without ground under their feet before two irreconcilable principles. In trying to solve the problems of social life it was a question, on the one side, of keeping faith with science and, on the other, of discovering a form of social life wherein the freedom of true manhood is preserved and maintained.

Saint-Simon tried hard in every direction to find ideas for the institutions of industrial life and of human life in general which might bring him satisfaction. But again and again he was baffled by the incompatibility of these two demands of his age. The conflict, moreover, did not only make itself manifest in individual minds. Over the whole of the thought-life and its offspring, namely, the political and economic life of the beginning, of the nineteenth century, there loomed the shadow of this conflict. On the one side men yearn for unshakable law and, on the other, demand individual freedom. The problem was to discover a form of social life in which, firstly, law should be as supreme as in the world of nature and which, secondly, should offer man the possibility of individual freedom. The shrewdest minds of the age—and Saint-Simon was certainly one—were not able to find ideas capable of practical application in social life. And so Saint-Simon prescribes a social system directed by science and in line with scientific habits of thought.—But the demand for individual freedom finds no fulfilment.

A cardinal demand had thus obtruded itself in the life of the times, and is reflected in many a mental conflict. Men like Goethe, not knowing where to turn and yet seeking for a reconciliation of these two opposing principles, find themselves condemned to a life of inner loneliness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there is a feeling of despair in face of the fact that human thinking, in spite of every effort, is incapable along these lines of discovering a practicable form of the social organism. And the consequence of this is that minds of another character altogether begin to make a stir—minds not fundamentally under the influence of scientific thought nor desirous of applying the abstract demands of the French Revolution but who aim at establishing some permanent principle in the social life of a Europe shaken by the Revolution and the deeds of Napoleon. And support is forthcoming for a man like de Maistre who points back to conditions as they were in the early centuries of Christendom in Europe.

De Maistre, born in the South of France, issued his call to the French Nation in the nineties of the eighteenth century, wrote his striking work on the Pope and also his Soirées de St. Petersbourg. He is the most universal mind among the reactionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century—a shrewd and ingenious thinker. He calls the attention of those who are willing to listen to the chaos that must gradually ensue if men prove incapable of evolving ideas upon which a social order may be built up. From this point of view he criticises with considerable acrimony those whom he considers responsible for the chaos in modern thought, among them, Locke, and he lays it down as an irrefutable principle that no social order worthy of the name can arise unless the civilisation of Europe is imbued once again with the old Catholic spirit of the early centuries of Christendom.

We must be absolutely objective in our study here and try to put ourselves in the place of a man like de Maistre and of those who even to-day still think more or less as he did. We must be able to see with the eyes of one who is convinced that no true social science can be born of modern scientific thought and that if no spiritual impulse can find its way into the social organism, chaos must become more and more widespread. It is, of course, true that neither de Maistre himself nor those who listened to his impassioned words perceived the reality of a new spiritual impulse. De Maistre pointed back to olden times, when the building of social order had actually been within the capacity of men. In the world of scientific thought to-day his voice has to all intents and purposes died away, but on the surface only.

Those who perceive what is really happening below the surface of civilised life, who realise how traditional religions are stretching out their tentacles once again and trying desperately to ‘modernise’ know how strongly the attitude of men like de Maistre is influencing ever-widening circles of reactionary thought. And if no counterbalance is created this influence will play a more and more decisive Part in our declining civilisation.

An objective study of de Maistre makes it abundantly evident that there is in him no single trace of a new spirit but that he is simply an ingenious and shrewd interpreter of the ideas of Roman Catholicism. He has worked out the principles of a social system which would, in his opinion, be capable of calling forth from chaos a possible (although for the modern age not desirable) social order, directed by ecclesiasticism. A strange situation has arisen at this point in the life of modern thought.

In a certain sense, another man who is also a typical representative of modern thinking came strongly under the influence of de Maistre. He gave an entirely different turn to the ideas of de Maistre but we must not forget that the actual content of a thought is one thing and the mode of thinking another, and it may be said with truth that the reactionary principles of de Maistre appear, like an illegitimate child of modern culture, in an unexpected place. Not from the point of view of content but from that of the whole configuration of thought, Auguste Comte, sometimes called the ‘father of modern society,’ is a true disciple of de Maistre for whom, moreover, he had considerable admiration. On the one side, Comte is a disciple of Saint-Simon, on the other, of de Maistre. This will not readily be perceived by those who concentrate on the actual content of the thoughts instead of upon the whole trend and bent of the mental life. Comte speaks of three phases in the evolution of humanity.—There is, firstly, the ancient, mythological period—the theological stage—when supremacy was vested in the priesthood. This, in his view, was superseded by the metaphysical phase, when men elaborated systematic thoughts relating to things super-physical. This stage too has passed away. The transition must now be made to a kind of political physics, in line with the idea of Saint-Simon. Science of given facts—this alone is worthy of the name of science. But there must be an ascent from physics, chemistry, biology, to sociology, and thus, following the same methods, to a kind of political physics.

Comte outlines a form of society directed by positive thinking, that is to say, by thought based entirely upon the material facts of the external world. In this social structure there is, naturally, not a single trace of Catholic credulity to be found. But in the way in which Comte builds up his system, the way in which he substitutes the authority of the senses for the super-sensible authority of the Church, putting humanity in the place of God, declaring that it is the individual who acts but humanity who guides—all this is simply another way of saying: Man thinks and God guides.

All this goes to show that the essentially Catholic, reactionary thought of de Maistre is working in the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte which is directed entirely to the things of the material world. Catholic thought is being promulgated in this sociology. And yet we must admit that there was an idealistic tendency too in the thought of Auguste Comte. He believes, provided always that his thought is in conformity with the spirit of the age, that he can discover in the social structure something that will be a blessing to man; he believes, furthermore, that this can be brought home to men and that a beneficial and desirable form of social life may thus be achieved. Implicit in every thinker during the first half of the nineteenth century there is a certain confidence in ideas that can be born in the mind of man and then communicated to others. There is a certain confident belief that if only men can be convinced of the truth of an idea, deeds of benefit to human life will spring from a will that is guided by intelligence. This attitude of confidence expresses itself in many different ways and is apparent in all the thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Their individual views are, of course, partly influenced by nationality and partly by other factors, but this attitude is none the less universal.

Consider for a moment how men like Saint-Simon, Comte or Quételet conceive of the social order. They work entirely with the intellect and reasoning faculty, systematising, never departing from the principles of mathematical calculation, building up statistics and orderly systems with a certain elegance and grace. And then think of a man like Herbert Spencer in England during the first half of the nineteenth century. Herbert Spencer is absolutely typical of the English outlook. He does not systematise like Saint-Simon and Comte, nor does he work with statistics. Economic and industrial thinking, the way in which the problems of industrial life are interlinked—all these things which he has learnt from the others, he then proceeds to build up into a social science. On the basis of scientific and economic thinking Herbert Spencer evolves a kind of ‘super-organism’. He himself does not use this expression but many other thinkers adopted it, and indeed it became a habit in the nineteenth century to place the prefix ‘super’ before anything of which they were unable to form a concrete idea. This may be quite harmless in the realm of lyrical thought, but when it becomes a question of raising the concrete to a higher level simply by using the prefix ‘super’—as was usual at one time—then one is stumbling about in a realm of confused thoughts and ideas. In spite of this habit, however, eminent minds in the first half of the nineteenth century were all possessed of a certain confidence that the power of the spirit would ultimately lead them to the right path.

In the second half of the nineteenth century there is a complete change. From many points of view, Karl Marx may be regarded as an outstanding figure of this period. He too, in his own way, tries to give to the social life a lead based upon modern scientific thought. But the attitude of Karl Marx is very different from that of Saint-Simon, of Auguste Comte, of Herbert Spencer. Karl Marx has really given up the belief that it is possible to convince others of something that is true and capable of being put into practice, once the conviction has been aroused. Saint-Simon, Comte, Herbert Spencer, Buckle and many others in the first half of the nineteenth century had this inner belief, but in the second half of the century it was not, could not be there. Marx is the most radical example, but speaking quite generally this trust in the spirit was simply non-existent. So far as Karl Marx is concerned, he does not believe that it is possible to convince men by teaching. He thinks of the masses of the proletariat and says to himself: These men have instincts which express themselves as class instincts. If I gather together those in whom these class instincts are living, if I organise them and work with what is expressing itself in these class instincts, then I can do something with them, I can lead them in such a way that the inauguration of a new age is possible.

Saint-Simon and Comte are like priests who have been transported into the conditions of the modern age. They at least believe that conviction can be aroused in the hearts of men, and this was actually the case in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx, however, sets to work like a strategist, or a General who never gives a thought to the factor of conviction but simply sets out to organise the masses. And there is really no difference between drilling soldiers and then the masses in order to prepare them for the field of battle, and marshalling the class instincts that already exist in human beings. And so we find the old sacerdotal methods in men like Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and militaristic methods in men like Karl Marx who being out-and-out strategists have given up the belief that men can be convinced and through their conviction bring about a desirable state of affairs. Such thinkers say to themselves: I must take those whom I can organise just as they are, for it is not possible to convince human beings. I will organise their class instincts and that will achieve the desired result.

A very radical change had come about in the course of the nineteenth century and anyone who studies this change deeply enough will realise that it takes place with considerable rapidity and is, moreover, apparent in another sphere as well.

The natural scientific mode of thinking came to the fore in the modern age, during the first half of the nineteenth century. We have only to think of men like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. In their days, men still had faith in the spirit and believed that the spirit would help them to fathom the world of nature; they believed that nature was in some way directed by the spirit. But later on, just as faith in the creative spirit was lost in the domain of sociological thinking, so too was faith lost in the sphere of the knowledge of nature. Men placed reliance alone upon observation and experiment, and confidence in the creative spirit died away entirely. The spirit, they said, is capable only of recording the results of observation and experiment. And then, when this attitude creeps into the realm of social science, the scientific mode of observation is applied, as in Darwinism, in the study of the evolution of man. Benjamin Kidd, Huxley, Russell, Wallace and others in the second half of the nineteenth century are typical representatives of this kind of thinking The spirit is materialised and identified with external things both in the realm of social life and in the realm of knowledge.

It is strange how in the nineteenth century the human mind is beset by a kind of inner agnosticism, how it gradually loses faith even in itself. There was a radical increase of this agnosticism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who observe the way in which thoughts are expressed—and when it is a matter of discovering historical connections this is far more important than the actual content of the thoughts—will realise that these voices of the nineteenth century were the offspring of a tendency that was already beginning to make itself felt in the eighteenth century. It is possible, too, to follow the line of development back into the seventeenth, sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. We shall not there find direct evidence of the urge that became so insistent in the nineteenth century to unfold a new conception of the social order, in spite of a realisation that the goal was impossible of achievement, but we shall find nevertheless that the change which took place in men's thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century had been gradually working up to a climax since the fifteenth century. We find too, as we follow the development of thought back to the time of the fifteenth century, that concepts and ideas are invariably intelligible to us as thinkers living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But this is no longer the case as soon as we get back to the time preceding the fifteenth century and towards the Middle Ages.

I could tell you of many ideas and views which would prove to you the difference of outlook in these earlier centuries, but I will give one example only.—Anyone who genuinely tries to understand writings which deal with the world of nature, dating from the time preceding the fifteenth century, will find that he must approach them with an attitude of mind quite different from that which he will naturally bring to bear upon literature of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Before the fifteenth century, all the writings on the subject of nature indicate quite clearly that anyone who experiments with processes of nature must be filled with a certain inner reverence. Experiments with mineral substances, for instance, must only be carried out in a mood that finds favour in the eyes of certain Divine Beings. Experiments with the processes of nature must be accompanied by a moral attitude of soul—so it was said.

But just think of what would happen to-day if it were demanded of someone working to produce a chemical reaction in a laboratory, that his soul must first be suffused with a mood of piety! The idea would be ridiculed. Nevertheless, before the fifteenth century, and more strongly so in earlier times, it was quite natural that this demand should be made of those who were in any way working with the processes of nature. It was the aim of a man like de Maistre to bring to life again in the modern age, concepts that had really lost the vital meaning once attaching to them, and above all he tried to bring home the difference between the concepts of sin and of crime.

According to de Maistre, the men of his day—he is speaking of the beginning of the nineteenth century—had no insight into the difference between sin and crime. The two concepts had become practically synonymous. And above all there was no understanding of the meaning of ‘original sin.’

Let me now try to describe the idea men had of original sin before the days of the fifteenth century. Modern thought is altogether unfitted to grasp the real meaning of original sin, but some measure of understanding at least must be present in studying the development of thought through the centuries. We must here turn to fundamental conceptions resulting from spiritual investigation. For it is only by independent research that we can understand the character of a mental outlook quite different from our own. When we peruse books on the subject we are simply reading so many words and we are dishonest with ourselves if we imagine that the words convey any real meaning. Enlightened minds before the fifteenth century would have set no store by such definitions of original sin as are given by modern theology. In those days—and I repeat that these things can only be discovered nowadays by Spiritual Science—it was said: The human being, from the time of his birth, from the time he draws his first breath, until his death, passes through certain processes and phases in his inner life. These inner processes are not the same as those at work in the world of nature outside the human being. It is, as a matter of fact, a form of modern superstition to believe that all the processes at work in the being of man can also be found in the animal. This is mere superstition, because the laws of the animal organisation are different from those of the human organism. From birth until death the organism of the human being is permeated by forces of soul. And when we understand the nature of the laws and forces at work in the human organism, we know that they are not to be found in outer nature. In outer nature, however, there is something that corresponds in a certain sense with the laws at work during the period of embryonic development, from the time of conception until birth. The processes at work in the being of man between birth and death are not to be explained in the light of the processes of outer nature. Nevertheless, if it is rightly applied, the knowledge gleaned from a study of external nature enables us to understand the processes at work during the embryonic period of the life of a human being. It is not easy for the modern mind to grasp this idea, but my object in speaking of it is to give an example of how Spiritual Science can throw light upon conceptions of earlier times. Not of course with clear consciousness, but out of dim feeling, a man engaged in the investigation of nature before the fifteenth century said to himself: Outer nature lies there before me, but the laws of this outer nature work only in the processes of my physical body as it was before birth. In this sense there is something in the inner being of man that is openly manifest in outer nature. But the evolution of the human being must not be subject to the laws and processes of external nature. Man would be an evil being if he grew as the plant grows, unfolding its blossom in the outer world of space.

Such were the views of an earlier time. It was said that man falls into sin when he gives himself over to the forces by which his development in the mother's womb was promoted, for these forces work as do the forces of nature outside the human being. In nature outside the human being, these forces are working in their proper sphere. But if, after birth, man gives himself over to the forces of nature, if he does not make his being fit to become part of a world of super-sensible law—then he falls into sin. This thought leads one to the concept of original sin, to the idea of the mingling of the natural with the moral world order. Processes which belong to outer nature are woven, as it were, into the moral world order and the outcome is the birth of a concept like that of ‘original sin’ which was an altogether scientific concept before the days of the fifteenth century. De Maistre wanted to bring this concept of original sin again to the fore, to make a connecting link between natural science and the moral world. In the nineteenth century, however, the only possible way of preserving this concept of original sin was to bring about an even more radical separation of religion and scientific knowledge. And so we find great emphasis being laid upon the cleft between faith and knowledge. In earlier times no such cleft existed. It begins to appear a few hundreds of years before the fifteenth century but becomes more and more decisive as the centuries pass, until, in the nineteenth century, religion says: Let science carry out its own methods of exact research. We on our side have no desire to use these methods. We will ensure for ourselves a realm where we need simply faith and personal conviction—not scientific knowledge. Knowledge was relegated to science and religion set out to secure the realm of faith because the powers of the human soul were not strong enough to combine the two. And so, in the opinion of de Maistre, the concept of crime alone, no longer that of sin in its original meaning, conveyed any meaning to the modern mind, for the concept of sin could only have meaning when men understood the interplay between the natural and moral worlds.

This example shows us that the concepts and ideas of men in the time immediately preceding the fifteenth century were quite different from ours. Going backwards from the fifteenth century, we come to a lengthy period generally referred to as the dark Middle Ages, during which we find no such progress in the realm of thought as is apparent from the fifteenth century onwards. The development of thought that has taken place since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, leading up to the achievements of the nineteenth century, bear witness to unbroken progress, but in the time preceding the fifteenth century we cannot speak of progress in this sense at all. We can go back century alter century, through the twelfth, eleventh, tenth, ninth, eighth, seventh and sixth centuries, and we find quite a different state of things. We see the gradual spread of Christianity, but no trace of progressive evolution in the world of thought such as begins in the fifteenth century and in the middle of the nineteenth century undergoes the radical change of which we have spoken. We come finally to a most significant point in the spiritual life of Europe, namely, the fourth century A.D. Gradually it dawns upon us that it is possible to follow stage by stage the progressive development beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century with Nicolas Cusanus, expressing itself in the thought of men like Galileo and Copernicus and ultimately leading on to the radical turning-point in the nineteenth century, but that things are not at all the same in earlier centuries. We find there a more stationary condition of the world of thought and then, suddenly, in the fourth century of our era, everything changes.

This century is a period of the greatest significance in European thought and civilisation. Its significance will be brought home to us all the more when we realise that events after the turning-point in the fifteenth century, for example, the movements known as the Renaissance and the Reformation, denote a kind of return to conditions as they were in the fourth century of the Christian era. This is the decisive time in the process of the decline of the Roman Empire. The headway made by Christianity was such that Constantine had been obliged to proclaim religious freedom for the Christians and to place Christianity on an equal footing with the old pagan forms of religion. We see, too, a final attempt being made by Julian the Apostate to reinculcate into the civilised humanity of Europe the views and conceptions of ancient Paganism. The death of Julian the Apostate, in the year 363, marks the passing of one who strove with might and main to restore to the civilised peoples of Europe impulses that had reigned supreme for centuries, had been absorbed by Christianity but in the fourth century were approaching their final phase of decline. In this century too we find the onslaught of those forces by which the Roman Empire was ultimately superseded. Europe begins to be astir with the activities of the Goths and the Vandals. In the year A.D. 378 there takes place the momentous battle of Hadrianople. The Goths make their way into the Eastern Roman Empire. The blood of the so-called barbarians is set up in opposition to the dying culture of antiquity in the South of Europe. The history of this fourth century of our era is truly remarkable. We see how the culture of Greece, with its belief in the Gods and its philosophy, is little by little lift ed away from its hinges and disappears as an influence, and how the remnants of its thought pass over to the Roman Catholic Church. Direction of the whole of the spiritual and mental life falls into the hands of the priests; spirituality in its universal, cosmic aspect vanishes, until, brought to light once again by the Renaissance, it works an so strongly that when Goethe had completed his early training and produced his first works, he yearned with all his heart and soul for ancient European-Asiatic culture.

What, then, is the state of things in the age immediately following the fourth century A.D.? Education and culture had vanished into the cities, and the peasantry, together with the landowning population in Southern Europe, fused with the peoples who were pressing downward from the North. The next stage is the gradual fading away of that spiritual life which, originating in the ancient East, had appeared in another garb in the culture of Greece and Rome. These impulses die down and vanish, and there remain the peasantry, the landowning populace and the element with which they have now fused, living in the peoples who were coming down from the North into the Graeco-Roman world. Then, in the following centuries, we find the Roman priesthood spreading Christianity among this peasant people who practically constituted the whole population. The work of the priesthood is carried on quite independently of the Greek elements which gradually fade out, having no possibilities for the future. The old communal life is superseded by a system of commerce akin to that prevailing among the barbarians of the North. Spiritual life in the real sense makes no headway. The impulses of an earlier spirituality which had been taken over and remoulded by the priesthood, are inculcated into the uneducated peasant population of Europe; and not until these impulses have been inculcated does the blood now flowing in the veins of the people of Europe work in the direction of awakening the spirit which becomes manifest for the first time in the fifteenth century.

In the fourth century A.D. we find many typical representatives of the forces and impulses working at such a momentous point of time in the evolution of humanity. The significance of this century is at once apparent when we think of the following dates.—In the year 333, religious tolerance is proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine; in the year 363, with the murder of Julian the Apostate, the last hope of a restoration of ancient thought and outlook falls to the ground; Hadrianople is conquered by the Goths in the year 378. In the year 400, Augustine writes his Confessions, bringing as it were to a kind of culmination the inner struggles in the life of soul through which it was the destiny of European civilisation to pass.

Living in the midst of the fading culture of antiquity, a man like Augustine experienced the death of the Eastern view of the world. He experienced it in Manichæism, of which, as a young man, he had been an ardent adherent; he experienced it too in Neoplatonism. And it was only after inner struggles of unspeakable bitterness, having wrestled with the teachings of Mani, of Neoplatonism and even with Greek scepticism, that he finally found his way to the thought and outlook of Roman Catholic Christianity. Augustine writes these Confessions in the year A.D. 400, as it were on tables of stone.

Augustine is a typical representative of the life of thought as it was in the fourth century A.D. He was imbued with Manichæan conceptions but in an age when the ancient Eastern wisdom had been romanised and dogmatised to such an extent that no fundamental under standing of Manichæan teaching was possible. What, then, is the essence of Manichæism? The teachings that have come down to us in the form of tradition do not, nor can they ever make it really intelligible to us.

The only hope of understanding Manichæism is to bring the light of Spiritual Science to bear upon it. Oriental thought had already fallen into decadence but in the teachings of Mani we find a note that is both familiar and full of significance. The Manichæans strove to attain a living knowledge of the interplay between the spiritual and the material worlds. The aim of those who adhered to the teachings of Mani was to perceive the Spiritual in all things material. In the light itself they sought to find both wisdom and goodness. No cleft must divide Spirit from nature. The two must be realised as one. Later on, this conception came to be known by the name of dualism. Spirit and nature—once experienced as a living unity—were separated, nor could they be reunited. This attitude of mind made a deep impression upon the young Augustine, but it led him out of his depth; the mind of his time was no longer capable of rising to ideas which had been accessible to an older, more instinctive form of cognition, but which humanity had now outgrown. An inner, tragic struggle is waged in the soul of Augustine. With might and main he struggles to find truth, to discover the immediate reality of divine forces in cloud and mountain, in plant and animal, in all existence. But he finally takes refuge in the Neoplatonic philosophy which plainly shows that it has no insight into the interpenetration of Spirit and matter and, in spite of its greatness and inspiration, does no more than reach out towards abstract, nebulous Spirit.

While Augustine is gradually resigning hope of understanding a spirit-filled world of nature, while he is even passing through the phase of despising the world of sense and idolising the abstract spirituality of Neoplatonism, he is led, by a profoundly significant occurrence, to his Catholic view of life.

We must realise the importance of this world-historic event. Ancient culture is still alive in Augustine's environment, but it is already decadent, has passed into its period of decline. He struggles bitterly, but to no purpose, with the last remnants of this culture surviving in Manichæism and Neoplatonism. His mind is steeped in what this wisdom, even in its decadence, has to offer, and, to begin with, he cannot accept Christianity. He stands there, an eminent rhetorician and Neoplatonist, but torn with gnawing doubt. And what happens? Just when he has reached the point of doubting truth itself, of losing his bearings altogether along the tortuous paths of the decadent learning of antiquity in the fourth century of our era, when innumerable questions are hurtling through his mind, he thinks he hears the voice of a child calling to him from the next garden: ‘Take and read! Take and read!’ And he turns to the New Testament, to the Epistles of St. Paul, and is led through the voice of the child to Roman Catholicism.

The mind of Augustine is laden with the oriental wisdom which had now become decadent in the West. He is a typical representative of this learning and then, suddenly, through the voice of a child, he becomes the paramount influence in subsequent centuries. No actual break occurs until the fifteenth century and it may truly be said that the ultimate outcome of this break appears as the change that took place in the life of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century.

And so, in this fourth century of our era, we find the human mind involved in the complicated network of Western culture but also in an element which constitutes the starting-point of a new impulse. It is an impulse that mingles with what has come over from the East and from the seemingly barbarian peoples by whom Roman civilisation was gradually superseded, but whose instructors, after they had mingled with the peasantry and the landowning classes, were the priests of the Roman Church. In the depths, however, there is something else at work. Out of the raw, unpolished soul of these peoples there emerges an element of lofty, archaic spirituality. There could be no more striking example of this than the bock that has remained as a memorial of the ancient Goths—Wulfila's translation of the Bible. We must try to unfold a sensitive understanding of the language used in this translation of the Bible. The Lord's Prayer, to take one example, is built up, fragment by fragment, out of the confusion of thought of which Augustine was so typical a representative. Wulfila's translation of the Bible is the offspring of an archaic form of thought, of Arian Christianity as opposed to the Athanasian Christianity of Augustine.

Perhaps more strongly than anywhere else, we can feel in Wulfila's translation of the Bible how deeply the pagan thought of antiquity is permeated with Arian Christianity. Something that is pregnant with inner life echoes down to us from these barbarian peoples and their culture, to which the civilisation of ancient Rome was giving place. The Lord's Prayer rendered by Wulfila, is as follows:

Atta unsar thu in himinam,
Veihnai namo thein;
Quimai thiudinassus theins.
Vairthai vilja theins, sve in himina, jah ana aerthai.
Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan, gif uns himma daga.
Jah aflet uns, thatei skulans sijaima, svasve jah veis afletam thaim skulam unsaraim.
Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausei uns af thamma ubilin.
Unte theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in aivius. Amen.

Atta unsar thu in himinam, veihnai namo thein; Quimai thiudinassus theins. Vairthai vilja theins, sve in himina, jah ana aerthai.—The words of this wonderful prayer cannot really be translated literally into our modern language, but they may be rendered thus:

We feel Thee above in the Spirit-Heights, All Father of men.
May Thy Name be hallowed.
May Thy Kingdom come to us.
May Thy Will be supreme, on the Earth even as it is in Heaven.

We must be able to feel what these words express. Men were aware of the existence of a primordial Being, of the All-sustaining Father of humanity in the heights of spiritual existence. They pictured Him with their faculties of ancient clairvoyance as the invisible, super-sensible King who rules His Kingdom as no earthly King. Among the Goths this Being was venerated as King and their veneration was proclaimed in the words : Atta unsar thu in himinam.

This primordial Being was venerated in His three aspects: May Thy Name be hallowed. ‘Name’—as a study of Sanscrit will show—implied the outer manifestation or revelation of the Being, as a man reveals himself in his body. ‘Kingdom’ was the supreme Power: Veihnai namo thein; Quimai thiudinassus theins, Vairthai vilja theins, sve in himina, jah ana aerthai.

‘Will’ indicated the Spirit shining through the Power and the Name.—Thus as they gazed upwards, men beheld the Spirit of the super-sensible worlds in His three-fold aspect. To this Spirit they paid veneration in the words:

Jah ana aerthai.
Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan, gif uns himma daga.

So may it be on Earth. Even as Thy Name, the form in which Thou art outwardly manifest, shall be holy, so may that which in us becomes outwardly manifest and must daily be renewed, be radiant with spiritual light. We must try to understand the meaning of the Gothic word Hlaif, from which Leib (Leib=body) is derived. In saying the words, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ we have no feeling for what the word Hlaif denoted here:—Even as Thy ‘Name’ denotes thy body, so too may our body be spiritualised, subsisting as it does through the food which it receives and transmutes.

The prayer speaks then of the ‘Kingdom’ that is to reign supreme from the super-sensible worlds, and so leads on to the social order among men. In this super-sensible ‘Kingdom’ men are not debtors one of another. The word debt among the Goths means debt in the moral as well as in the physical, social life.

And so the prayer passes from the ‘Name’ to the ‘Kingdom’, from the bodily manifestation in the Spirit, to the ‘Kingdom’. And then from the outer, physical nature of the body to the element of soul in the social life and thence to the Spiritual.—

Jah aflet uns, thatei skulans sijaima, svasve jah
veis afletam thaim skulam unsaraim.

—May we not succumb to those forces which, proceeding from the body, lead the Spirit into darkness; deliver us from the evils by which the Spirit is cast into darkness. Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausei uns af thamma ubilin.—Deliver us from the evils arising when the Spirit sinks too deeply into the bodily nature.

Thus the second part of the prayer declares that the order reigning in the spiritual heights must be implicit in the social life upon Earth. And this is confirmed in the words : We will recognise this spiritual Order upon Earth.

Unte theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in aivius. Amen.

—All-Father, whose Name betokens the out er manifestation of the Spirit, whose Kingdom we will recognise, whose Will shall reign: May earthly nature too be full of Thee, and our body daily renewed through earthly nourishment. In our social life may we not be debtors one of another, but live as equals. May we stand firm in spirit and in body, and may the trinity in the social life of Earth be linked with the super-earthly Trinity. For the Supersensible shall reign, shall be Emperor and King. The Supersensible—not the material, not the personal—shall reign.

Unte theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in avius. Amen.

—For on Earth there is no thing, no being over which the rulership is not Thine.—Thine is the Power and the Light and the Glory, and the all-supreme Love between men in the social life.

The Trinity in the super-sensible world is thus to penetrate into and find expression in the social order of the Material world. And again, at the end, there is the confirmation: Yea, verily, we desire that this threefold order shall reign in the social life as it reigns with Thee in the heights: For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the revealed Glory.—Theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in aivius. Amen.

Such was the impulse living among the Goths. It mingled with those peasant peoples whose mental life is regarded by history as being almost negligible. But this impulse unfolded with increasing rapidity as we reach the time of the nineteenth century. It finally came to a climax and led on then to the fundamental change in thought and outlook of which we have heard in this lecture.

Such are the connections.—I have given only one example of how, without in any way distorting the facts, but rather drawing the real threads that bind them together, we can realise in history the existence of law higher than natural law can ever be. I wanted, in the first place, to describe the facts from the exoteric point of view. Later on we will consider their esoteric connections, for this will show us how events have shaped themselves in this period which stretches from the fourth century A.D. to our own age, and how the impulses of this epoch live within us still. We shall realise then that an understanding of these connections is essential to the attainment of true insight for our work and thought at the present time.

I have tried to show how about the middle of last century a radical transformation took place in spiritual life, and how moreover the peculiar configuration of the nineteenth century thought and the spiritual life in general that underwent this transformation can be traced back to another crucial turning point in the west which we have to look for in the fourth century A.D.

Now it might at first sight appear as if we were trying to show too close a connection between two periods that are so very widely separated in point of time. But this very thought will serve to call attention to certain interconnections in the history of humanity. To-day we will begin where we left off yesterday, with the downfall of ancient culture and of the Roman empire. We drew attention to a distinguishing feature of that time. We placed before our souls two representative personalities; one of them was Augustine, who grew entirely out of the South-West; and we compared them with another personality, that of the Gothic translator of the Bible, Wulfila, and with the spiritual stream out of which Wulfila sprang.

We have to be quite clear that Augustine was altogether the child of the conditions which had developed in the south-western parts of the European-African civilization of the day. At that time men who sought a higher culture only found it through contact with the philosophy, literature, art and science which had for a long time been pursued in a certain upper level of society. We even have to think of Greek culture as the possession of an upper class which relegated its more menial work to slaves. And still less can we think of Roman culture without widespread slavery. The life of this culture depended upon its possessors being remote from the thought and feeling prevailing in the masses. But one must not think that there was therefore no spiritual life in the masses. There was an exceptionally strong spiritual life among them. This was of course derived more from the native stock left behind at an earlier stage of evolution than that of the upper class, but it was nevertheless a spiritual life. History knows very little about it, but it was very like what was carried into the southern parts of Europe by the barbarian tribes, forced to migrate by the forward pressure of the Asiatic hordes. We must try to form a concrete idea of it.

Take, for instance, the people who over-ran the Roman Empire—the Goths, the Vandals, the Lombards, the Herules. Before the migrations had begun, thus before the fourth century A.D. which is for us such an important turning-point, these men had spiritual life away in the East which culminated in a certain religious insight, in certain religious ideas, which pervaded everything; and the effects of these experiences influenced every aspect of daily life. Before the migrations began these people have had a long period of settled life. It was while they were thus settled that they first experienced the southern oriental peoples, from whom the Indian, Persian and succeeding cultures sprang, had experienced at a much earlier time; they experienced what we can call a religion which was closely connected with the blood relationships of the people. It is only through spiritual science that this can be observed, but it is also echoed in the sagas and myths I lived in these peoples. What they worshipped were the ancestors of certain families. But these ancestors first began to be worshiped long after they had passed away, and this worship was in no way based upon abstract ideas, but upon what was instinctively experienced as dreamlike clairvoyant ideas, if I can use the expression without causing misunderstanding. For there were certain ideas which arose in quite another way from the way our ideas of to-day are formed. When we have ideas nowadays our soul life comes into play more or less independently of our bodily constitution. We no longer feel the seething of the body. These people had a certain intensive inward sense that in what took place in their bodies all sorts of cosmic mysteries were active. For it is not only in the chemical retorts that cosmic processes work according to law, but in the human body also. And just as to-day, by means of the processes which take place in their retorts chemists seek with their abstract reason to understand the laws of the universe, so these men too tried through what they had experienced inwardly, through their own organism, whose inner processes they felt, to penetrate into the mysteries of the cosmos. It was entirely an inner experience that was still closely bound up with ideas arising in the body. And out of these ideas which were called forth by what we might describe as the inward seething of the organism, there developed the pictorial imaginations which these men connected with their ancestors. It was their ancestors whose voices they heard for centuries in these dream formations. Ancestors were the rulers of people living in quite small communities, in village tribal communities.

These tribes had still this kind of ancestor-worship, which had its life in dreamlike ideas, when they pressed forward from the east of Europe towards the west. And if we look back to the teachers and the priests of these peoples we find that they were advanced spirits whose foremost task was to interpret what the individual saw in his dream-pictures, albeit dream-pictures which he experienced in his awake consciousness. They were interpreters of what the individual experienced. And now the migrations began. During the period of the migrations it was their greatest spiritual consolation that they had this inner clairvoyant life which was interpreted by their priests. This spiritual life was reflected in sagas which have been handed down, notably in the Slav world, and in these sagas you will find confirmation of what I have just briefly outlined.

Now shortly after the end of the fourth century these tribes settled down again. Some of them were absorbed into the peoples who had already for a long time inhabited the southern peninsulas, that is to say they were absorbed into the lower classes of these peoples, for their upper classes had been swept away in the time of Augustine. The Goths were among the tribes absorbed in this way, but mainly those Goths who peopled the countries of middle and western Europe; those who settled in the northern regions of southern Europe maintained their own existence and acquired a permanent home there.

Thus we see that after the fourth century the possession of a fixed dwelling place becomes an essential characteristic of these peoples. And now the whole spiritual life begins to change. It is most remarkable what a radical change now takes place in the spiritual life of these people through their peculiar talent. They were gifted not only with special racial dispositions, but with a much greater freshness as a folk for experiencing spiritual reality in dreams; something which in the southern regions had long since been transformed into other forms of spiritual life.

But now they have become settled, and through their peculiar endowment a new kind of spiritual life developed in them. What in earlier times had expressed itself in ancestor-worship, had conjured before the soul the picture of the revered forefather, now attached itself to the place. Wherever there was some special grove, some mountain which contained let us say, special treasures of metal, wherever there was a place from which one could watch storms and so on, there, with a depth of feeling left to them from their old ancestor-imaginations and dreams, men felt something holy to be connected with the place. And the gods that used to be ancestral became gods of place.

Religious perceptions lost their time a character and took on a spatial character. Those who had been previously the interpreters of dreams, the interpreters of inner soul-experience, now became the guardians what one might call the signs c—the peculiar reflection of the sun in this or that waterfall or other feature of nature, the phenomena of the cloud-drifts in certain valleys and so on—these are now the objects of interpretation, something which then became transformed into the system of Runes cultivated in certain places, where twigs were plucked from trees and thrown down, and the signs read from the special forms into which the twigs fell. Religion underwent a metamorphosis into a religion of space. The entire spiritual life became attached to the place. Thus these tribes became more and more susceptible to the influence which the Roman Catholic Church, since it had become the state church in the fourth century, had been accustomed to exercise over the southern peoples, that is to say over the lower classes which had been left behind after the upper classes have been swept away.

And what was it that the church had done? In these southern regions the period of transition from the time conception to the spatial conception of the world was long since past, and something of extraordinary importance always happens in a period of transition from a time outlook to a spatial outlook, a certain living experience passes over into an experience through symbol and cult. This had already taken place for the lower classes of the people in the southern regions. So long as men continue to live in their time-conceptions, the priests, those who in the sense of ancient times we can call learned men, our interpreters of a corresponding life of the soul. They were engaged in explaining what man experience. They were able to do that because men lived in small village communities, and the interpreter, who was in fact the leader of the whole spiritual life, could address himself to the individual, or to a small group. When the transition takes place from the time-outlook to the space-outlook, then this living element is more or less suppressed. The priest can no longer refer to what the individual has experienced. He can no longer treat of what the individual tells them and explain to him what he has experienced. What is something living is thus transformed into something bound to a place. And thus ritual gradually arises, the pictorial expression of what in earlier times was a direct experience of the super-sensible world.

And at this point development begins again, so to say, from the other side. The human being now sees the symbol, he interprets the symbol. What the Roman Catholic Church built up as cult was built up with exact knowledge of this world-historic course of human evolution. The transition from the ancient celebration of the Last Supper into the sacrifice of the Mass arose, in that the living Last Supper became the symbolic rite. Into this sacrifice of the Mass, it is true, flowed primeval holy mystery usages which had been handed down in the lower classes of the people. These practices were now permeated with the new conceptions Christianity brought. They became, so to say, christianised. The lower classes of the Roman people provided good material for such a birth of ritual, which was now to reveal the super-sensible world in symbol.

And as the northern tribes had also made the transition to a spiritual life associated with place, this ritual could also be implanted among them, for they began to meet it with understanding. This is the bases of one of the streams which start in the fourth century A.D.

The other stream must be characterised differently. I have described how the ancient ancestor-worship lived on, rolling over from the east upon the declining Roman Empire. In the “Our Father” of Wulfila we see that in these nomadic peoples Christianity was absorbed into the ancestral cults and the cults connected with locality. And that constitutes the essence of Arian Christianity. The dogmatic conflict in the background is not so important. The important thing for this Arian Christianity, which traveled with the Goths and the other German tribes from the East towards the West by a path which did not lead through Rome, is that in it Christianity becomes steeped in a living spiritual life which has not yet reached the stage of ritual, that is closely related to the dream experience, to the clairvoyant experience, if you will not misunderstand the expression.

On the other hand the Christianity that Augustine experienced had passed through the culture of the upper classes of the southern peoples, and had to encounter all sorts of oriental cults and religious ideas, which flowed together in a great city of Rome. The heathen Augustine had grown up amidst these religious ideas and had turned from them towards Christianity in the way I have described. He stands within a spiritual stream which was experienced by the individual in quite a different way from the stream I have already mentioned. The latter arose out of the most elemental forces of the folk-soul life. What Augustine experienced was something which had risen into the upper class through many filtrations. And this was now taken over and preserved by the Roman Catholic clergy. Moreover its content is far less important for the progress of history than the whole configuration of soul that constituted first Greco-Roman culture and then, through the adoption of Christianity, the culture of the Catholic clergy. It is essential to see this culture as it was at that time and as it then lived on through the centuries. Our present-day educational system is something which remains over from the real culture of that time.

After one had mastered the first elements of knowledge, which we should to-day call primary education, one entered what was called the grammar class. In the grammar classes one was taught structure of speech; one learned how to use speech properly in accordance with the usages established by the poets and the writers. Then one assimilated all other knowledge that was not kept secret, for even at that time quite a lot of knowledge was kept secret by certain mystery schools. What was not kept secret was imparted through grammar, but through the medium of speech. And if anyone reached a higher stage of culture, as for example Augustine, then he passed on from the study of grammar to the study of rhetoric. There the object was to train the pupil above all in the appropriate use of symbol, how to form his sentences rightly, particularly how to lead his sentences to a certain climax. This was what the people who aspired to culture had to practice.

One must be able to sense what such a training develops in a human being. Through this purely grammatical and rhetorical kind of education he is brought into a certain connection with the surface of his nature, he is within what sounds through his mouth far more than is under the influence of thought. He pays much more attention to the structure of speech and to the connection of thought. And that was the primary characteristic of this ancient culture, that it was not concerned with the inner soul experience, but with structure, the form of speech, with the pleasure it gives. In short, the man became externalised by this culture. And in the fourth century, at that time Augustine was a student, as we should say to-day, we can see clearly this process of externalization, this living in the turn of words, in the form of expression. Grammar and rhetoric were the things that students had to learn. And there was good reason for this. For what we to-day call intelligent thought did not at that time exist. It is a mere superstition very commonly to be found in history to suppose that men have always thought in the way they think today. The entire thought of the Greek epoch right up to the fourth century A.D. was quite different. I have gone into this to a certain extent in my Riddles of Philosophy. Thought was not hatched out of inner soul activity, as is the case to-day, but thought came to the human being of itself like a dream. Particularly was this the case in the East, and the Oriental spiritual life which had animated Greece and still animated Rome was not won through thinking, it came, even when it was thought, as dream pictures come. And the oriental and south-european scholars only differed from those of the north in that the pictures that came to the northerners at first stimulated ideas of their ancestors, and later were associated with particular localities and became more or less ritualistic. The ideas that were formed in Asia, in southern Europe, already had the character of thought, but they were not thoughts won by inner soul activity, inner intelligence, they were inwardly revealed thoughts. One experienced what one called knowledge and elaborated for oneself only the word, the sentence, the discourse. There is no logical activity. Logic arose through Aristotle, when Greece was already decadent. And what lived in beauty of speech, in rhetoric, was essentially Roman culture, and became the culture of Catholic Christianity.

This habit of living not in oneself but in an external element expresses itself in the education that was given, and one can see how in this respect Augustine was a representative of his time. The correspondence between Jerome and Augustine is illuminating in this respect. It shows how differently these people conducted an argument in the fourth or beginning of the fifth century from the way we should do so to-day. When we discuss things to-day we have a feeling that we make use of a certain activity of thought. When these people discussed, one of them would have the feeling—“Well, I have formed my own view about a certain point, but perhaps my organism does not give me the right view. I will hear what the other man has to say; perhaps something else will emerge from his organism.” These men were within a much more real element of inner experience. This difference is seen also in Augustine's attitude in condemning heretics of various sorts. We see people deriving from the life of the common people, people like the priests of Donatism, like Pelagius and some others, specially coming to the fore. These people, although they believe themselves to be entirely Christian, stress the point that man's relation to justice, to sin, must come from the man himself. And thus we see a whole series of people one after the other who cannot believe that it has any sense to baptize children and thereby to bring about forgiveness of sins. We see objections made against the Christianity issuing from Rome, we see how Pelagianism wins adherents, and how Augustine, as a true representative of the Catholic element, attacks it. He rejected a conception of sin connected with human subjectivity. He rejects the view that a relation to the spiritual world or to Christ can come from an individual human impulse. Hence he works to bring about gradually the passing over of the Church into the external institution. The important question is not what is in the child, but what the Church as external ordnance bestows upon it. The point is not that baptism signifies something for the soul's experience, but that there exists an external ordnance of the Church which is fulfilled in baptism. The value of the human soul living in the body matters less than that the universal spirit that lives in the sacrament, so to say an astral sacrament, should be poured out over mankind. The individual plays no part, but the important thing is the web of abstract dogmas and ideas which is spread over humanity. To Augustine it seems particularly dangerous to believe that the human being should first be prepared to receive baptism, for it is not a question of what the human being inwardly wills, but it is a question of admitting into the Kingdom of God which has objective existence. And that is essentially the setting in which Athanasian Christianity lived, in contrast to the other background that originated in the north-east, in which a certain popular element lived. But the Church understood how to clothe the abstract element in the ritualistic form which again arose from below. It was this that made it possible for the Church to spread in this European element, from which the ancient culture had vanished. And above all it attains this expansion through the exclusion of the wide masses of the people from the essential substance of religious culture. It is a matter of tremendous significance that in the centuries which follow this substance is propagated in the Latin language.

And from the fourth century A.D. onward Christianity is propagated in the Latin tongue. It is as it were a stream flowing over the heads of men. That goes on right up to the fifteenth century. For what history usually relates is only the outer form of what went on in the souls of men. Christianity was kept secret by those who taught at right up to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in a far deeper sense than the ancient Mysteries were kept secret. For only the outer ritual penetrated the masses. And what was transmitted, which at the same time laid claim to all science coming from the ancient culture and clothed it in the Latin tongue, this was the Church, something which hovered above the essential evolution of humanity.

And the centuries between the fourth and the fourteenth stand under the sign of these two parallel streams. The external history books, even the histories of the mind, only give the traditional description of what leaks out into greater publicity from the Latin ecclesiastical stream. Hence from present-day historical literature we get no idea of what took place among the wide masses of the people.

What took place among the masses was something like this. At first there were only village communities; in the colonization of the whole of middle, western and even of southern Europe the towns played a very small part. The most significant life developed in small village communities; such towns as did exist were really only large villages; in these large village communities there was the Catholic Church, way over the heads of men, but through the ritual working suggestively upon them; however, these men who only saw the symbolic rite, who participated in the cult, who watched something which they could not understand, did nevertheless develop a spiritual life of their own. The very rich spiritual life developed throughout Europe at that time, a spiritual life which stood first and foremost under the influence of human nature itself. It was something quite apart from their participation in the spread of Catholic doctrine. For to associate everything with the personality of Boniface, for instance, is to place things a false light. What went on in these village communities was an inner soul life through which echoed the omens of the divinity or spirituality associated with the place. Everywhere people saw intimations from one or other of these. They developed a magical life. Everywhere human beings had premonitions, and told their fellows about them. These premonitions expressed themselves in sagas, in mysterious hints as to what one or another had experienced spiritually in the course of his work.

But something very remarkable permeated this remains of an ancient prophetic and clairvoyant dream-life, which continued to flourish in the village communities whilst Catholic doctrine passed over their heads, and one can see that everywhere in Europe the organization of the human being was involved in this characteristic spiritual life. Something was at work which indicated a quite special disposition of soul in two respects. When people told of their weightiest premonitions, their most significant dreams (these were always associated with places), when they describe their half-waking, half-sleeping experiences, these dreams are always connected either with events, with questions which were asked them from out of the spiritual world, or with tasks which were imposed upon them, with matters in which their skill played a part. From the whole character of these stories, which were still to be found among the common people in the nineteenth century, one sees that when men began to ponder and to dream and to build up their legendary sagas in their mythologies, of the three members of the human being it was not so much the nerve-system—which is more connected with the outer world—but the rhythmic system which was active; and in that the rhythmic system was drawn forth out of the organism it showed itself in clairvoyant dreams which passed by word of mouth from one to another, and in this way the villagers shared with one another fear and joy, happiness and beauty. In all this there was always an element of delicate questioning which came from the spiritual world. People had to solve riddles half in dreams, had to carry out skillful actions, had to overcome something or other. It was always something of the riddle in this dream life.

That is the physiological basis of the widespread spiritual experience of these men who lived in village communities. Into this, of course, penetrated the deeds of Charlemagne of which history tells you; but those are only surface experiences, though they do of course enter deeply into individual destiny. They are not the main thing. The important thing is what takes place in the village communities, and there, side by side with the economic life, a spiritual life developed such as I have described. And this spiritual life goes on right into the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Of course, something of what has developed in the heads of men in the upper strata of society gradually trickles down into the lower strata, and the ghostly and magical character of the stories men recount gets charmingly mixed with the Christ and His deeds, and what comes from the human being himself is sometimes overlaid with what comes from the Bible or the Gospel. But then we see that it is primarily into social thinking that the Christian element is received. We see it in ‘Der Heliand’ and other poems which arose out of Christianity but always we see something spiritual brought to the people, who meet it with a spirituality of their own.

When we come to the tenth and eleventh centuries we see a change in the external life. Even earlier, but at this time more markedly so, we see life centering itself in the towns. That life of picture-like waking dreams which I have described to you is altogether bound up with the soil. As, therefore, in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries the whole country became covered with larger towns, in these towns another kind of thinking began to develop. Men living in towns had a different kind of thought. They were cut off from the places in which their local cults had developed, their attention was more directed towards what was human.

But the human element which developed of the towns was still under the influence of this earlier state of mind, for some of the people who settled in the towns came from the villages and they with very special spiritual endowment made their own contribution. What they brought with them was an inner personal life which was an echo of what was experienced in the country, but which now manifested itself in a more abstract form. These men were cut off from nature, they no longer participated in the life of nature, and although they still have forms of thought derived from nature, they already began to develop the kind of thinking which was gradually directed towards intelligence. In the towns of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries there developed the first trace of that intelligence which we see arise in the fifteenth century among the leading European peoples. Because life in the towns was more abstract, the abstract ecclesiastical element, clothed in the Latin tongue, became mixed up with what sprang directly out of the people.

Thus we see how this Latin element developed in the towns in a more and more abstract form. Then we see the great outburst of people from below upwards in various countries. There is a great to-do when Dante, assisted by his teacher, makes his way up into the world of culture. But even that is only one instance of many similar outbursts which happened because of the peculiar manner in which the Latin culture came up against the popular element in the towns.

We must not forget that still other streams entered into what was taking place at that time. It is of course true that the main streams of spiritual life, which so to say carried the others, was the one that continued the spiritual tradition in which Augustine had lived; that controlled everything and finally not only gave the towns the bishops, who controlled the spiritual life, if somewhat abstractly and over the heads of the people, but also, little by little, because it took over everything from the constitution of the Roman empire, ended by giving the civil government also, and built up the alliance between Church and State which in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was very close. We see other events light up in this stream, we see crusades arise, which I need not describe to you, because I want to lay the greatest stress upon the things that external history places in a false light; and too little importance is attached to other currents that were present.

First of all there is the commercial traffic which had in fact always existed in Europe between the Danube basin and the East. There was constant trading in both directions particularly in the middle of the middle ages. In this way oriental ideas in an advanced stage of decadence were brought over into Europe. And someone who had probably never been in the east himself but had only traded with men from the east, brought to the householder not only spices, but spiritual life, a spiritual life tinged with Orientalism. This traffic went on throughout the whole of Europe. It had less influence on Latin culture, far more on the wide masses of people who understood no Latin. In the towns and in the surrounding villages there was a living intercourse with the east which was not merely a matter of listening to tales of adventure that which deeply influenced spiritual life. And if you want to understand figures such as Jacob Boehme, who came later, Paracelsus and many others, then you must bear in mind that they sprang from people who had developed without any understanding of the Latin culture which passed over their heads, but who were in a certain way steeped in Orientalism. All that developed as popular alchemy, astrology, fortune telling, had developed out of the union of what I described above as the inner experience of the riddle, told in waking dreams, with what came over from the east as decadent oriental life. Nor within the Latin culture have the will to think been able to make any headway. The logic of Aristotle had appeared, as it were, like a meteor. We see that even Augustine was little influenced by this logic. By the fourth century interest had been withdrawn from Greece, and later the Emperor Justinian had closed the School of Philosophy at Athens. This led to the condemnation for heresy of Origen, who had brought with him into Christianity much of oriental culture, of the earlier spiritual life. And the Greek philosophers were driven out. The teaching that they had from Aristotle was driven into Asia. The Greek philosophers founded centre in Asia, and carried on the Academy of Gondishapur, which had for its main objective the permeation of the old decadent oriental spiritual culture with Aristotelianism, its transformation into an entirely new form. It was the Academy of Gondishapur wherein a logical form of thought developed with giant strides, that saved Aristotelianism. Aristotelianism was not transmitted through Christianity, it came into Latin-ecclesiastical life by way of Africa, Spain and the west of Europe. And thus we see how Gondishapur, this philosophic form of Arabism, which does contain a living world-conception, although it is quite abstract, brings its influence to bear upon the current which we have already described as passing over the heads of men.

I have described to you both these streams, the one at work above, in the heads of men, the other in their hearts. They work together and it is very significant that the ancient culture was transmitted in a dying language. Of course there then flows into all this what came through the Renaissance. But I cannot describe everything to-day. I want to point out some of the main things which are of special interest to us. The two currents existed side-by-side right on into the fifteenth century.

Then something happened of extraordinary importance. The thought of antiquity, inspired thought which was half vision, became gradually clothed in abstract forms of speech, and became Christian philosophy, Christian spiritual life, the Scholastic philosophy, out of which the modern university system developed. In this grammatical-rhetorical atmosphere not thought, but the garment of thought, Romanism lived on. But in the popular stream thinking was born, evoked through subjective activity—for the first time in human evolution. Out of this ghostly-magical element of presentiment, mingled with Orientalism, which above all had its life in the interpretation of natural phenomena, active thinking was born. And this birth of thought out of the dreamlike mystical element took place somewhere about the fifteenth century. But up to that time the system of Roman law, clothed in Latin form, gathers strength side by side with the Roman priesthood. This current over the heads of men had been able to spread everywhere in a most systematic way first in the villages, then in the towns, and now in the new age which dawned in the fifteenth century it joined forces with that other current which now arose. In the towns people were proud of their individualism, of their freedom. One can see this in the portraits painted at that time. But the village communities were shut off from all this. Then the medieval princes rose to power. And those who outside in the villages gradually came to be in opposition to the towns, found in the princes their leaders. And it was from the country, from the villages that the impulse came which drew the towns into the wider administrative structure, into which then came Roman law. There arose the modern state, made up of the country parishes; thus the country conquered the towns again, and became itself permeated by what came out of the Latin element has Roman law. Thus the latter had now become so strong that what was stirring among the common people could find no further outlet; what in the times of unrest, as they were called, had expressed itself among the Russian peasants in the Hussite movement, in Wycliffism, in the Bohemian Brotherhood, such movements could no longer happen; the only thing that could find expression was what merged with the Roman-administrative element.

Thus we see that the folk-element which had won for itself the reality of thought, which held its own in opposition to the Roman-Latin element, remained to begin with a faint glow under the surface. There is a cleavage in the spiritual life. Out of the Latin element develops Nominalism, for which universal concepts are merely names. Just as this was an inevitable development from grammar and rhetoric, so, where there still remained a spark of the folk-element, as was the case with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, there developed Realism, which experienced thought and expression of something real. But at first Nominalism had the victory. All that happened in the historical evolution of humanity is in a sense necessary, and we see that the abstract element becomes all the stronger because it is carried by the dead Latin language right up to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and is then fructified by thought, has to reckon with the birth of thought, but clothes thought in abstractions. And the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are primarily under the influence of thought born from out of the ancient Gothic Germanic way of life, clothed however in Roman formulae, in grammatical, rhetorical formulae. But now that they have been fructified by thought, these formulae can be called logical formulae. That now becomes inward human thinking. Now one could think thoughts, but the thoughts had no content. All the old world-conceptions contained, together with the inward experience, at the same time cosmic mysteries. So that thought still had content right up to the fourth century A.D. Then came the time which as it were bore the future in its womb, the time in which rhetoric, grammar and dialectic developed further and further in a dead language. Then that was fructified by the force of thought which came from below, and men acquired mastery over that, but in itself it had no content. There was a dim perception of Realism but a belief in Nominalism, and with the aid of Nominalism next came the conquest of nature.

Thought as inner soul life brought no content with it. This content had to be sought from without. Thus we see how from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century the conquest of natural law was the achievement of a thinking that was empty of all content, but was born as a capacity out of all that Europe had brought forth as her own. In the middle of the nineteenth century men began to be aware “With your thought you are conquering natural law, you are conquering the external world, but thought itself is making no progress.” And men gradually got into the way of eliminating from their thought everything that did not come from outside. They found their life in religious faith which was supposed to have nothing to do with scientific knowledge, because their thinking has become void of content and had to fill itself only with external facts and natural entities. The content of faith was to be protected because it had to do with the super-sensible. But because this empty thinking had no content, it could apply itself to the sense-perceptible. But this faith in which man lived could only fill itself with old traditions, with the content of the oriental culture of the past, which still lived on.

It was the same with art. If one looks back to earlier times, one finds art closely associated with religion, and religious ideas find their expression in works of art. One sees how their ideas about the Gods find expression in the Greek dramatists or the Greek sculptors. Art is something within the whole structure of the spiritual life. But by the time of the Renaissance Art begins to be taken more externally. Indeed in the nineteenth century we see more and more how men are happy to be offered a pure phantasy in art, something which they need not accept as a reality, something which has nothing to do with reality. And such men as Goethe are like modern hermits. Goethe says “He to whom nature begins to unveil her open secrets feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, art.” Art, says Goethe, is a revelation of nature's secret laws, laws which would never be revealed without her. And it is worthy of note that Goethe has a way of turning to the past, different from that of other men,—he speaks therein for a content, in the age of empty intellect, filled only with the impression of the external world of the senses. He yearns toward Greece. And when in Rome he finds still something of what Greek art has fashioned out of the depths of its philosophy, he writes “That is necessity, that is God.” Art unveiled for him the spirituality of the world which he was trying to experience. But more and more men have a obscure ill-defined feeling “This thinking of ours is all right for the external world, but it is not suited to attain to an inner spiritual content.” And thus we see the second half of the nineteenth century run its course. As I remarked yesterday, the winds of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Hegel, Saint-Simon or even Spencer, still believed that they could reach a philosophy, even a social philosophy, out of their inner soul experiences. In the second half of the nineteenth century men thought that no longer.

But something of what had given birth to thought out of the unconscious was still at work. Why was it that in the portentous dreams of village populations over the whole of Europe right up to the twelfth century there was always something of this riddle-solving element, this cleverness which expresses itself in all sorts of cunning? It was because thought, reflection, the work of thinking, was born. The foundation of thought was laid. And now we see how in the second half of the nineteenth century there is utter despair. Everywhere we find statements as to the boundaries of knowledge. And with the same rigidity and dogmatism with which once the scholastics had said that reason could not rise to the super-sensible, du Bois-Reymond, for example, said that scientific investigation could not penetrate to the consciousness of matter. I mean that previously the barrier had been set up in relation to this super-sensible; now it referred to what was supposed to hide behind the senses. But in all manner of other spheres we see the same phenomena emerge.

Ranke the historian of the second half of the nineteenth century is very typical in this respect. According to him history has to investigate the external events, even of the time in which Christianity begins to spread; one has to pay attention to what is taking place in the world around one politically and socially and culturally. What however has taken place through Christ in the course of human evolution—that Ranke assigns to the original world (Urwelt), not in the temporal sense, but to the world behind what can be investigated. We have seen that the scientist du Bois-Reymond says ‘ignorabimus’ as regards matter and consciousness. Natural Science can go pretty far; but what is there where matter lurks, what is there where consciousness arises, there du Bois-Reymond formulates his seven universal riddles; they are he pronounces his ‘ignorabimus!’ And Leopold von Ranke, the historian who works in the same spirit says “Upon all the wealth of existing documents historical investigations can pour its light; but behind what is at work as external historical fact there are events which seem to be primeval.” Everything which thus lies at the base of history he calls the ‘Urwelt’, just as does du Bois-Reymond the world lying beyond the limits of natural science. Within that sphere lie the Christian mysteries, the religious mysteries of all peoples. There the historian says ‘ignorabimus’. ‘Ignorabimus’ alike from scientist and historian; that is the mood of the entire spiritual life of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Wherever you meet the spiritual life, in Wagnerian music, in the cult of Nietzsche, everywhere this mood is to be found. The former is driven to take refuge in certain musical dreams, the latter suffers through what is taking place in the world of ‘ignorabimus’. Agnosticism becomes fashionable, becomes politics, shapes the state. And anyone who wishes to do anything positive but relies not on any kind of gnosticism, but upon agnosticism. The strategy of Marxism builds upon what lies in the instincts, not upon something which it wants to bring forth of super-earthly nature. We see how everywhere spirituality is driven back, how agnosticism becomes the formative reality. It is thus that we have to understand modern spiritual life. We shall only understand it aright if we follow its origin from the fourth century A.D., if we know that in it Nominalism is living, the purely legalistic and logical; and thought has been born in the way I have described. This thought, however, is still only so far born as to be able to make use of formalism, of empty thinking. It slumbers in the depths of civilised humanity. It must be brought out into the open.

We learn how really to study history, if we illuminate with the light of spiritual investigation what has hovered over us since the fourth century. Then we can know what is above. And certainly thought has become fruitful and natural science because it has been fructified by thought born out of human nature in the way I have described. But now in the time of poverty, in the time of need, mankind needs to remember that thought which to begin with could only fructify formalism—empty thought that receives knowledge of nature from outside—has exhausted itself in natural scientific agnosticism, must strengthened itself, must become ripe for vision, must raise itself into the super-sensible world. This thought is there, it has already played a part in natural scientific knowledge, but its essential force still lies deep beneath the consciousness of human evolution. That we must recognize as a historical fact, then we shall develop trust in the inner force of spirituality, then we shall establish a spiritual science, not out of vague mysticism, but out of clarity of thought. And the thoughts of such a spiritual science will pass over into action, they will be able to work into the human social and other institutions. We are constantly saying that history should be our teacher. It cannot be our teacher by putting before us what is past and over, but by making it capable of discovering the new in the depths of existence. What goes forth from this place goes forth in search of such a new vision. And it can find its justification not only in the inculcation of spiritual scientific method, but also by a right treatment of history.

In these lectures I should like to bring forward some details about the connections existing between the spiritual life of nations and their destiny in history.

Natural Science is an especially important element in our civilization to-day because of the constitution of our present day souls, and I shall therefore select from the many different points of view from which the theme can be treated, the scientific element, and show that the entire historical development of nations is the deep basis for our present day inclination towards the scientific view. It will be necessary first to give an introduction and treat the theme itself on the basis of to-day's observations.

If we turn our attention to the historical development of nations—and for the moment we will remain within what is historic—we will see that by the side of external political and economic destinies, spiritual endow¬ments, acquisition and accomplishments are forced upon us. You know that to-day two modes of thought oppose each other strongly. I have pointed out these opposing tendencies of thought in an earlier lecture held here in Stuttgart. First there exists the view proceeding more from the Ideal, the supporters of which are of the opinion that a spiritual basis, merely in the form of an abstract idea, prevails in the evolution of a nation. Accord¬ing to this view external events are produced from out of such a spiritual basis. One can say that ideas prevail in history which express themselves from epoch to epoch, but usually one is not clear regarding the shadowy relation between the real spiritual basis and the sequence of ideas which are brought to expression in the course of history.

The other view, which at present exercises great sway, considers that all spiritual phenomena, including Morals, Rights, Science, Art, Religion, etc., are simply a result of material events, or rather, as a great portion of mankind would say to-day, of the economic life. It is thought, in this case, that certain dim forces which are not investi¬gated further, have brought about this or that economic system or method of co-operation in the time sequence of history ; and so, through purely material economic processes, what men regard as Ideas, Morals, Rights, etc., have arisen.

One can produce if desired convincing reasons for the one view as well as for the other. Both are capable of proof in the sense in which ' proofs' are often spoken of to-day. Whether a proof is regarded as decisive for the one or the other view depends on the way one is placed in the world with reference to one's ordinary interests or what one has experienced in life through mode of philosophic thought. Everything in this Wundt characterization is built up, is constructed. Some observations are made about the way in which modern uncivilized tribes show their way of thinking through their language. The hypothesis is continued and the primaeval population of the world is shown to have been like these primitive tribes which have remained in this earlier condition, only perhaps more decadent. From the ideas found here one can see how they have arisen. They are not gained from experience, but their originator who built them up uses the modern concepts of Causality, Cognition, Natural Causes, etc., and then he reflects how these would appear in more primitive conditions. Then he proceeds to carry over to primitive races what he has thus constructed.

There is but little possibility to-day for looking into the soul of another human being. There is absolutely nothing in Wundt's exposition of which one can say, one can recognize that it has arisen from insight into the soul conditions, even those of primitive races to-day. The renowned Wundt merely revolves about his own ideas which he simplifies and applies to the human creatures he is studying.

Because nothing correct exists to-day connecting primaeval races and the races with developed outlook upon the world, we see these things placed historically side by side without regard to the fact that it is, one might say, logically offensive to find highly developed views of the world supported by wonderful intuitions of the Hindus and Chinese placed immediately after such a description of primitive man as given by Wundt. What is so lacking to-day is this power of penetrating feelingly into other modes of thought. We go back with what we are accustomed to think in the 19th or 20th centuries to the 15th and 16th centuries and then to the middle ages. We do not feel allied to them and cannot understand them and so we say they were dark ages and that human civilization came to a certain pause. Then we go back to Greece and here one feels the necessity for close contact while retaining the same ideas one holds regarding the ordinary life of culture to-day. At best, men of fine feeling, like Hermann Grimm, speak differently. He has emphasized the fact that, with our modern ideas, we can only go as far back as the Romans. Generally speaking, we can understand them, we can grasp with modern ideas what transpires with the Romans. If we go back however to the Greeks we see that already Pericles, Alcibiades, even Socrates or Plato, Aeschylus or Sophocles are shadowy beside our modern understanding; there is something foreign about them, if we approach them with modern ideas. They speak to us as if from another world. They speak to us as if history itself starts with them as a fairy-tale world. Hermann Grimm has spoken in this way of facts. But one must add something if we proceed from another point of view, from the view existing in the world through the spirit of Natural Science (this was not the view of Hermann Grimm.) One cannot go back in thought even to the Romans so as to make them appear really objectively before us.

Grimm, who did not have an education in Natural Science but only received what existed as a continuation from the Roman epoch into modern times, is still able to enter into, the spirit of Roman times but not into the Greek. And if the concepts of Rights of the State which are copied from Rome were not known to us, if we possessed nothing of that singular feeling for Art which arose again in the Renaissance and into which Grimm entered deeply, but if instead of all this we lived in purely scientific ideas we should be as little at home in the Roman world or even in the medieval world as Grimm felt himself at home in the Greek world. This is one point that must be added, and the other is that Grimm paid no attention either to the World of the East. With his whole observation of the world he only traces back as far as the Greeks. Consequently he does not attain to what he would have attained according to his own suppositions if he had applied himself to, let us say, the Vedas, to Vedantic philosophy. He would then have said: If the Greeks meet us as shadows, those men whose special conditions have found expression in the Vedas, in Vedanta, meet us not even as shadows but as voices from out of a quite different world, a world which does not resemble ours even in its shadow-images. But this is only valid if we have so taken up the present mode of thought and condition of spirit that we are able to understand these as soul content.

Quite different is it if we adopt the methods which to-day are alone purposeful. Because of a certain entanglement in natural-scientific education, we are to-day imprisoned in a system of ideas which appear to be almost absolute. It is only through Spiritual science that one can to-day enter with one's feelings and one's life into past epochs of time. From the standpoint of Spiritual science the single epochs of human evolution appear absolutely different from each other; indeed, it is only in Spiritual Science that the possibility arises of entering into the spirit of what men in past epochs of historical development possessed as soul-constitution. How does this possibility arise? It is possible in the following way. I have often explained in lectures that Spiritual Science rests on a definite development of our soul powers. The cognition which we apply in Natural Science and in ordinary life and which in recent times we have carried over into History and into Social Science and even into the science of Religion, I have called in my books 'Objective Cognition.' This is namely what every human being who belongs to our modern civilized life is aware of. We observe the external world through the senses and combine sense impressions through the medium of the intellect. We thereby gain serviceable rules for life, a certain survey over life or over the laws of nature. In this consists what one calls objective cognition.

As characteristic of this we acquire a clear distinction between ourselves and the surrounding world. Ignoring for the moment the different theories of knowledge, the different psychological and physiological hypotheses, we know that we face sense-perception as an Ego. Through the intellect, in which we clearly know ourselves to be active, we gain a kind of synthesis of what is given through the senses. We thus distinguish active, intellectual activity from passive perception. We feel ourselves as an Ego in the environment which reveals itself through sense experience. In other words, man distinguishes himself as a thinking, feeling and willing being from the environment which imparts itself to him through sense revelation.

But I have continually pointed out that beyond this method of cognition other methods can be developed and I have shown in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science how such methods are attained.

The first steps for such cognition—whether one calls it 'higher' or something else does not matter—is Imaginative Cognition. This is distinguished chiefly from objective cognition by its working, not with abstract ideas, but with pictures which are as pregnant and as evident as ordinarily perceived images but which are not transformed into abstract thoughts. In our rela-tion to these pictures, as I have often emphasized, we produce and dominate them just as one does mathematical ideas.

The method of raising oneself to Imaginative Cognition has a quite definite effect on the constitution of the soul. But this result—and I say this with emphasis—lasts only during the time given to Imaginative Cognition. For when the spiritual investigator finds himself once again in ordinary life he makes use of ordinary knowledge, or objective cognition, like anyone else. He is then in the same disposition of soul as another man who is not a spiritual investigator.

During spiritual investigation, within that condition of looking into the spiritual world, the investigator is actually in his imaginative world. But there imaginations are not dreams, they are experienced with as much presence of mind as are mathematical ideas.

With regard to this presence of mind the condition of soul is not changed during imaginative experiences, but with regard to ordinary working experience in the world it is changed. During imaginative experience the feeling is at first that of being one with all that runs its course in our own soul life in time apart from space. Space does not come into question here, only time. I have already explained how, with this entry into imaginative representations, our experiences since birth or since some definite time later stand before us as a tableau arranged in time, a time picture made perceptible. This is difficult for the ordinary intellect to conceive because we are dealing with a picture which is not spatial but must be thought of only in time in which, however, simultaneity is an inherent factor. In ordinary consciousness one has always to do with the single moment. From this one looks back into the past. During this moment the world is seen surrounding us in space and we see ourselves existing in a definite epoch in time distinct from this surrounding world.

In Imaginative Cognition this is different. Here there is no sense in saying: I am living in the definite moment now; for when I behold this picture of life I flow with my life, I am just as much in the time of 10 or 20 years ago as in the present. To a certain degree the Ego is absorbed in the state of 'becoming' which is here perceived. One is united with this perception in time to the state of 'becoming.' It is as if the Ego which usually is experienced in the present moment is spread out over the past. As you can imagine, a transformation of the whole soul life is thus involved during the moments of such experiences. We have to deal with a world of pictures in which we are living. We feel ourselves to a certain extent to be a picture among pictures.

Whoever understands this in the right frame of mind will no longer talk foolishly about the spiritual investigator being subject to some kind of suggestion or hypnosis; for he himself is absolutely clear about the picture and the character of his experience; clear that he is a picture among pictures. But just because of this he knows also that the pictures in his consciousness are just like other ordinary representations, they are copies of a reality; images which he does not yet perceive as reality but the pictures of which he beholds inwardly.

One is in the condition of suggestion or hypnosis only if one has pictures and believes them to be realities like the realities perceptible through the senses. As soon as we are clear regarding the character of our experiences in consciousness, then it is simply a question of an inner possession of the same faculties that one uses in mathematics.

The essential thing that I want especially to emphasize to-day is this merging into what is objective-temporal, into this 'becoming' so that one no longer clings to the 'Now' in time but feels alive in the stream of happenings.

The next stage obtained through exercises, which I have also described in the books named, is that of Inspiration. This is distinguished from the Imagination stage by the picture element almost vanishing. One must first have the pictures in order to obtain correct ideas of Spiritual Science, but one must also be able to extinguish them from consciousness, one must obliterate them arbitrarily. And then the possibility comes for a holding back of something and what is held back is actually a revelation from the spiritual world. In my books named above I speak of inspired ideas of the spiritual world. But even with such experiences one has not yet attained the spiritual world. At first one had pictures, now one has the revelation to a certain extent of the spiritual world, but one stands independent and facing it, recognizing its reality in that one stands outside it.

To-day I should like to consider especially the soul condition when, from out of one's own will, such Inspiration is evolved. The ordinary objective world is then renounced, one knows then what it means to have outside one's body a revelation of the spiritual world. In other words, we can now float in unison not only with time, but with all that is spiritually objective, external to man; we no longer feel the distinction between cosmic existence and Ego existence in the way pertaining to objective cognition, but we experience the Ego and in the Ego the Cosmos in its concrete variety and multiplicity. It is fundamentally the same, at this stage of knowledge whether I say 'I am in the world' or 'The world is in me.' Ordinary methods of expression cease to have validity. Prepositions such as 'in' or 'outside' can only be used when one connects them with another condition. One feels poured out in the whole world not only in the 'becoming' but in everything that appears anew in consciousness as spiritual. One no longer feels this 'outside you' and 'in you.' This is the soul condition which holds us during Inspiration. It is not as if the Ego were submerged, not as if the outpouring of the Ego were identical with a suppression of the Ego, but the Ego in all its activity feels that it has become one with the concrete, manifold varied world it now experiences.

We know ourselves apart from our ideas, our feelings and our will impulses in spite of the fact that these are one with ourselves. So also through Inspiration we feel the manifold nature of the world in spite of knowing that we are really merged together with this world.

In the present epoch of human evolution, these stages of cognition must be evoked by such energies as I have described in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science. They have to be reached consciously. But we can distinguish what constitutes the feeling of the soul in these conditions from what we con-sciously evoke there as content. One can distinguish how one feels in the state of Imagination and Inspiration from what one gains there by working and from what one finally apprehends there.

I do not want to indicate this soul condition through abstract considerations; I would like to describe it concretely. You see, when Goethe learnt to know Herder he, together with Herder, buried himself deep in the work of Spinoza. Whoever knows anything of Herder's biography knows to what an enthusiastic degree Herder admired Spinoza. But if one reads again such a work by Herder as, for instance his 'God,' in which he records his feelings regarding Spinoza's works, one must realize that Herder speaks about Spinoza, from out of Spinoza, but quite differently from Spinoza the philosopher himself. In one point Herder is similar to Spinoza and that is in the soul condition from which he reads Spinoza. Herder's soul was very similar to the soul condition from which Spinoza's Ethics, for example, were written. This condition passed over to Herder and, in a certain way, passed over also to Goethe while he plunged into the study of Spinoza with Herder. But while Herder had a certain satisfaction in this soul condition, Goethe had none. Goethe felt deeply that passing over into the object, that merging together of the Ego into the outer world, so magnificently alluded-to by Spinoza when he speaks in absolute passionless contemplation, as if the Cosmic ALL itself spoke, as if he would forget himself and as if his words were merely the means through which the Cosmos itself were speaking. Goethe could experience what can thus be experienced in objectivity, and in this connexion he felt just as Herder felt: but he was not satisfied. He still felt a longing for something else and it seemed to him that in spite of the depth of feeling acquired, Spinoza's philosophy cannot by any means fill the whole of man's needs. Fundamentally, what Goethe felt in this way towards Spinoza is but another 'nuance' of his feeling towards the northern world. The civilization accessible at Weimar dissatisfied him, and, you know how he was driven south, to Italy through this feeling.

In Italy he at first saw only what the Italians created on the basis of Greek art, but something like a reconstruction of the Greek spirit and method in Art arose in his soul. One can feel deeply what is characteristic of Goethe at this period if one reads what he wrote to his Weimar friends while standing before those works of art which called up before his soul the creative art faculty of the Greeks. 'There is Necessity, there is God' (with reference to Herder's work' God' inspired by Spinoza). Goethe did not find in Spinoza that Necessity he wanted: he found it in what was presented to his soul during his Italian journey. Out of what fashioned itself then there arose in him the possibility of developing his own special outlook on Nature. One knows how he brought to expression his longing for an exposition of Nature in abstract, lyrical words in a 'Prose-Hymn,' before he travelled south. And one sees how what was poured out in abstract lyrical form in this prose hymn 'Nature' became in Italy concrete perception. How for example, the plant nature appeared before his soul as supersensible perceptible pictures and how he then discovered the 'primal plant archetype' among the manifold plant forms. This archetype is an ideal-real form which can only be seen spiritually, but in this spirit form it is real, lying at the base of all individual plants.

We can see how from now on the object of his search is to bring before his soul those archetypes for all nature which are one and many. We can see how his knowledge rests on the transforming pictures, from the single plant's leaf-sequence on to the blossom and the fruit. He wishes to hold fast in pictures what is in process of becoming. From Spinoza's ethics which he read with Herder there streamed something that seemed invisible, resounding from out of another world, a world in which man can immerse himself with his feelings if he attains a passionless contemplation. But with Spinoza this was not perceptible. The longing for vision lived in Goethe's soul and this longing was fulfilled in a certain way when he was stimulated by those pictures appearing like resurrected art creations of the Greeks. And it was also satisfied when he was able to conjure pictorially before his soul the primal archetypes of Nature.

What was it that Goethe thus experienced in sequences? It was that soul feeling—not soul content, not that which one can investigate—but the soul feeling which, on the one hand is Inspiration and on the other hand is Imagination. Neither Goethe nor Herder had the possibility in their time of looking into the spiritual world as can be done to-day through spiritual Science, but as a premonition of this spiritual science the feeling prevalent in them was the feeling which appears in special strength and intensity in Inspiration and Imagination. Herder and Goethe felt themselves in the mood of Inspiration while they read Spinoza and Goethe felt himself in the mood of Imagination when lie formulated an outlook on nature through the Italian works of Art. Out of this Inspiration mood of Spinoza Goethe experienced the longing for the Imaginative mood. What he discovered as the archetype of plant and animal, this was not yet real Imagination, for Goethe did not possess the method of acquiring real imagination. What he possessed was the mood for Imagination. He could kindle the mood in himself, not because lie strove towards real, pure imaginations freely created inwardly, but because he experienced in himself sensible supersensible pictures stimulated by what plants, animals and what the cloud world express. He could find himself in the mood which accompanies Imagination just as in reading Spinoza he found himself in the mood of Inspiration. He recognized the soul condition in which man experiences what he utters in such a way that he uses words so as to allow the secrets of the Cosmos to be uttered, to a certain extent, by the Cosmos itself.

Whoever has really felt the transition in the soul which can take place through reading Spinoza's Ethics as a mathematical treatise, becoming immersed in the ideas as mathematical ideas so as to rise to the Scientia Intuitiva which speaks in Spinoza as consciously as though the world were using him as its mouthpiece,—any one who has felt thus will realize what Goethe and Herder felt in Spinoza. How the one, Herder, was satisfied and how the other lived with longing more in a mood of Inspiration. And we can say that a certain soul mood proceeds from what spiritual scientific investigation offers to-day as methods to attain Imagination and Inspiration. We can follow historically how Goethe, without having Inspiration or Imagination, tends towards these moods.

Now if we go further we can regard Spinoza more exactly. When we study him historically (not as is often done to-day by the historians of philosophy) one is led from Spinoza to know who stimulated him. These were the adherents of Arabism, living in the South-west of Europe, adherents to the Arab-Semitic outlook on the world. He who understands such things will be able to experience once again that which flowed from the Kabbalah into the ideas of Spinoza. One is then led further back beyond Arabism to the East and one learns to know what comes forth in Spinoza is the conception of an ancient view of the world. In the old Eastern world what appears is the same as in Spinoza only not in intellectual form but as ancient Eastern inspiration. This inspiration was not acquired as ours is to-day, but it existed among certain oriental races as a natural gift and went through an especially profound development there.

If we go back to the Egypt from which Moses created his views, to the sources from whence the Greeks created, we find that what came to Egypt from the Asiatic east is developed to a very high degree. The Egyptians before the 8th pre-Christian century lived instinctively in their environment so that they felt themselves one with it, so that what they discerned of their environment they experienced in inner contemplation.

Now let us turn to the Imagination, to what Goethe longed for when he felt the mood of Inspiration. At first he recognized this to a certain degree in the art of Greece. He sensed in vision what Herder felt in concepts, in the world of perceptions as these appeared contemplatively with Spinoza. And what Goethe realized he deepened into a view of outer Nature so that later on he could utter, from out of his spirit, this deep saying:

'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret, yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.'

In Art, Goethe saw through to the basis of Imagination, and by relying on evolution in Nature he sought that soul mood which a man enters if he become one with this evolution. This conquest of oneself, together with maintaining oneself in Imagination, was revealed to Goethe through the art of the Greeks, and he sought it not only in Art but as the basis for a view of Nature. And if we follow on to further consequences this special element which Goethe thus developed, we attain in a fully conscious manner Imaginative Perception.

If we follow this method of Goethe back to its origins, as we follow Spinoza's method, we are led to the Greeks, and from them further East. From the Greeks we come back to that view of the world which existed in the development of the so-called Chaldees, who again created from out of the Persian world and out of the entire Asiatic world. And just as we look back through the soul mood of Spinoza to ancient Egypt, so we look through the Goethe-Greek view of Art to that view of evolution which obtained in ancient Chaldea. One can follow, even into the details, this opposition of Chaldea and Egypt in Goethe and Spinoza.

We can thus go back in feeling to earlier epochs of time if we do not entangle ourselves in what alone is regarded to-day as absolutely correct and exact. If we attempt to press forward to other kinds of ideas, to Imagination, to Inspiration, if we know the moods of soul pertaining to Imagination and Inspiration, then we can go back in cognition to earlier epochs. Whoever reads Spinoza today merely with the intellect which has been so strongly developed with us, and as if everything previous were fundamentally but childish ideas, he cannot feel how in Spinoza there lived as a mood what was productive intuitively and creatively as the highest blossom in ancient Egyptian civilized life. He cannot feel how the soul mood of the ancient Chaldeans lived on in that which ensouled Goethe as he uttered the words: 'There is Necessity. There is God,' or 'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.' Whoever bases himself merely on the abstract thought content of to-day, does not come back to the earlier historical epochs. Therefore there results for him that abyss to which I pointed at the beginning of this lecture. Only he can come into ancient epochs of humanity who immerses himself in this basic mood as it appears in Spinoza and Goethe. No Egyptian Myth, least of all the Osiris-Isis Myth, can be really experienced in its import if one does not base oneself in this mood. People may be ever so clever and give ever so many allegorical, symbolical interpretations. This is not the point. It is a question of feeling with one's entire being what was felt in ancient times. One may think this or that about ancient ideas, one may choose clever or foolish symbols, it is not a question of choice but of experiencing a basic mood. Through this we can come to what lived in an earlier epoch. One cannot find what existed in ancient Chaldea by the present means of investigating, but only by being able really to immerse oneself in the mood of Imagination which actually appeared to a certain extent with the Chaldeans as a view of the world. They lived in a 'becoming.'

One understands what contrasts existed between the Chaldeans and Egyptians, for instance, as contemporary races. Trade relation went from Chaldea to Egypt and from Egypt to Chaldea. Their culture was so fashioned that they could write letters to each other. Everything consti-tuting external life stood in regulated interchange.

Their inner soul constitution was however quite different. An Imaginative element lived with the Chaldeans, an Inspirational one with the Egyptians. There was, with the Chaldeans, an external perception, such as reappeared, intensified, in Goethe. With the Egyptians, from what proceeded out of inner being, the soul, there was that which later on appeared at a higher stage from out of the inner being of Spinoza. One can follow this into minute details. I will give an instance and one will see how such details are to be understood on the basis of these general moods.

The Chaldeans had fundamentally a highly developed astronomy. They developed it by means of cleverly devised instruments, but above all by a quite definite kind of perception which was an instinctive Imagination. They came thereby to divide the course of time into Day and Night so that each was regarded as 12 hours long. But how did they divide the days and nights? They made the long summer day into 12 hours and they also made the short summer night into 12 hours. In winter they similarly divided the short day into 12 hours and the long night also into 12 hours, so that the winter hours by day were short and the summer day hours were long. Thus with the Chaldeans the hours in the different seasons had quite different lengths of time. This means that the Chaldeans so lived in the sense of 'becoming' that they carried this 'becoming' into Time. When they lived in the outer world in summer they could not let the hours run as they let them run in winter. In summer the course of time, the 'becoming' was drawn out. This "becoming was inwardly moveable, not rigid as it is with us. Time was elastic with them.

How was it with the Egyptians? The Egyptians reckoned 365 days to the year. Through this they were obliged to add supplementary days at definite times, but they could not decide to depart in any way from their 365 days to the year. In reality the year is longer than 365 days, but this length remained immoveable with them up to the third pre-Christian century, and thereby the perceptible outer world got beyond their control. Through this the Festivals changed. For instance, a festival of early autumn became a festival of late autumn, and so on. Thus the Egyptians so lived into the course of time that they had a conception of time which was not applicable to outer perception. Here we see an important contrast. The Chaldeans lived so intensely in the externally perceptible that they made time elastic. The Egyptians made time so rigid, experiencing what lives subjectively from within, that they could not even correct it through intercalary days in order to make the feasts of the year harmonize with the seasons; and so they let the external festivals fall on the wrong months while the whole external world thus became unsteady. They did not find themselves in the outer world, they remained in their own inner being. That is the mood of Inspiration which we must have in order to come to real cognition. The Egyptians had it as instinctive Inspiration.

As a man knowing the higher worlds one should be as mobile on the one hand as the Chaldeans and on the other hand be able to enter deeply to inner being as the Egyptians could. A rigid system of time was the basis of their whole life, even of their social and historical life. This contrast between the mood of naïve Inspiration and naïve Imagination thus comes to expression in History.

Goethe, as a complete being, re-experienced the experience of Spinoza as a continuation of Orientalism and Egypt. Goethe experienced his longing for a complete adaptation to the external world from out of his inner feeling where everything is invisible, from whence a man looks out into the world and does not recognize things because he judges them according to what the inner being offers, so that the things are beyond his control. While Goethe felt the mood of Egypt, he sought to experience in himself the mood of Chaldea, as that of the other pole. If a man re-create out of his own nature historical moods, one can then see the threads extend from a newer over to an earlier epoch, and one hopes to reunite the different epochs of time through this observation.

This now is essential, that one does not merely designate from documents what happened in this or that epoch, but that one learns as a complete human being to immerse oneself in these epochs, in what was felt and inwardly experienced by men and by races in the different epochs, in what mood of soul they existed. Their external fate was the result of this inner experience, of this peculiar soul constitution.

This is the way that will lead us above such ideas as 'Does the egg come first or the hen?' and can lead us into the deeper regions of reality. It is the way which shows us how each time we observe the reality we must press forward beyond what is given by external objective cognition.

And if it is often emphasized that one must learn from history about our activities to-day and in the future, then attention must be directed to the manner in which we should learn. We should so learn that what we experienced with our soils in past epochs should become living. The abyss of which I have spoken is bridged through this consideration. We are able to look hack into the metamorphosis of the soul constitution of men during the different epochs of time, and ardour and thoughtfulness will flow into our present soul constitution, so that we find the necessary thoughtfulness to build those ideas which are needed for the healing of the social relationships of to-day. But the necessary ardour must be kindled to have the force to attain full consciousness and to express in ideas that Imagination and Inspiration which formerly were developed instinctively.