The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we wish to be convinced of what, in the newer sense of the word, Natural Science signifies, we must look back to the sources of our present civilization. As can be seen even front the ordinary historical and scientific observation, these sources must be thought of as lying very far back in time, it is only if one keeps in mind the evolution of man and the gradual appearance of his special powers in more recent times that one can set-how these powers arose front the depths of the human soul, powers which lead to the present observation of nature and the affiliation of this to technique and to life.

There is a certain difficulty in placing more recent historical epochs in their essence before anyone who is wedded to the present day Science. In the previous lecture we attempted by way of introduction to proceed from the present—a present be it understood to which Herder and Goethe belong and to investigate certain streams which lead back to ancient times. We have seen how one of these two streams which existed so characteristically in Goethe led its hack to the Egyptian point of view, the other to the Chaldean. We went back to pre-Christian times and emphasized characteristic distinctions between the soul mood of the Chaldean people living in further Asia which can be traced back to about the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium and that of Egypt, which can be studied still further back even in external history.

We have seen how a view existed among the Chaldeans belonging more to the external world in which the human mind so lost itself in the external world that even time became elastic. This soul mood made it necessary to regard the day hours in summer longer than in winter, whereas with the Egyptians the division of the year throughout the centuries was held rigidly by a method of calculating and not from any grasp of external events. They reckoned 365 days to the year and went on in stages of 365 days, not noticing that in reality they were no longer in harmony with the course of the year as it ran in the sense world externally. While they reckoned the year shorter than it is they encountered contradictions with what is really perceived in the outer world. This shows a significant distinction in the soul moods of two people who were connected with each other through trade relations and by spiritual intercourse, people who stood near to each other outwardly. One can only value such a distinction correctly by entering deeply into the origins of human civilization. This is rendered increasingly difficult because the civilizations which have developed one after the other in time exist to-day side by side in space arrested at different phases of evolution.

If to-day the European or the American who wishes to emerge from his materialism to more spiritual ideas about the human being, if he turn to the present Indian civilization, he finds within this a highly developed spirituality, a mysticism penetrated by acute intellectual concepts. He finds within its philosophy absolutely nothing of what he has learnt to know as the natural scientific view of Western or American civilization. If he feel a longing to experience something concerning humanity, something which modern science cannot give him, and if he do not allow himself to take into consideration what a newer spiritual science can give concerning man, then he will seek to absorb himself in the spiritual view of modern India or at least of what has been preserved from an epoch that is relatively not very ancient.

Whoever is armed with spiritual science, however, and approaches this Indian view of the world will find that from what exists in it to-day or what has been preserved historically from a more or less far distant past, there is expressed something which is no longer quite apparent but which seems to be a kind of lower stratum, as something springing up from dark depths. This plays even into the language and especially into the ideas and images. It must be conceived as something which has undergone many transformations before it has reached its present form. What exists in modern India has only received its form in most recent times but it carries elements in itself which are primaeval, which have required thousands of years in order to be what they have become.

If we turn to other civilizations, the Western Asiatic or the Chinese for instance, we find that something similar is the case; but we have the feeling that we need not go back so far in order to understand the present as we have to do in India. And if we observe Egyptian life as it transpired since about the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium, we have the feeling that what is contained historically in documents is such that we are obliged to immerse ourselves into most ancient times, as we attempted to do, for example, in the last lecture. But we also find that the old has been preserved there with a kind of purity so that its fundamental depth is apparent even in later times, whereas in India it must be sought in the outset of its development.

In a similar way this is the case with the Greek and with our own civilization which, as we shall see, begins about the fifteenth century. The matter so appears that for a penetrating view, primeval elements have continued but are hardly noticeable to ordinary observation.

We will now see how the ancient elements within European and American civilizations are to be discussed.

One might say that the natural scientific element which has entered recent civilization appears to have so thoroughly cleared away what was old that this old element can only be substantiated by definite methods. It is however still there. There exist side by side on earth civilizations of different ages. One must go far back in time in order to understand modern Indian civilization, not so far back to understand the civilizations and literature of Western Asia, still less far back for the Egyptian and again still less to understand the Greco-Roman culture. One can remain almost entirely in the present in seeking to understand modern European and American civilization.

What has developed consecutively in the course of time stands side by side for us now and what stands side by side thus is in reality of varying ages, at least so far as regards external appearances. The temporal is mingled with the spacial and one must first find from a modern standpoint the methods which show from what present day civilizations one can go back into ancient times and from which one can find access to these old times by difficult and devious paths.

Now as you know, the observation of natural science, the so-called anthropological or geological observation, joins on to what history furnishes and we saw in the last lecture how superficially this is often done. We are led back into very early European times by superficial anthropological investigation. Of course there is less said about the people of Asia but as regards European evolution we are led back into ancient epochs. You know that geology, enriched by modern anthropology and history, says that, concerning certain trustworthy artistic remains which have been found in caves in Spain and France, very ancient races of Europe date back thousands of years; that in these extraordinary paintings revealed by the cave explorations we are told how in ancient times men must have lived in Europe in a certain degree of civilization even before that significant event spoken of by anthropology and geology as the European ice-age within which a great part of the European continent was covered with ice and thus made uninhabitable. Such regions as those in which the cave explorations of Southern France and Spain have been undertaken, must have been oases. Amid the wide ice fields men must have dwelt: a relatively rich nature must have existed and a civilization have evolved.

Thus are we led back even to-day into very ancient times of European life. And here, what external investigation can furnish joins on to what Spiritual Science has to say. Spiritual Science can indeed only proceed from what the developed soul powers of man can fathom, what can result from imagination and inspiration; it can speak of what can be consciously per-ceived inwardly. One can say in referring to what external history can investigate: Spiritual Science can in reality only fathom more or less the spiritual part of evolution, least of all that which has occurred in external nature. However, through spiritual investigation one can go back to those epochs which have seen man and his environment in quite different relations to those of the European ice-age.

It will be the task of these lectures to go back to those ancient times when man lived under quite different relationships and in quite different regions of the earth than later; but a feeling ought to be evoked regarding how justified it is to point to a supersensible cognition which traces back the history of human evolution into early times.

If anyone whose soul life, deepened through the view and feeling gained from spiritual science, approaches what outer history gives, he can have experience of the evolutionary path of civilized man. One can admit from the point of view of external anthropology and geology and history, that if one goes back ten to fifteen thousand years one finds quite another kind of life than that of modern civilized Europe. One can admit that in this epoch, during the last ten to fifteen thousand years, the evolution of European, Asiatic and eventually also of ancient American humanity takes place.

But what lies in documents must be illumined in a special manner by spiritual science. One must of course say that out of such considerations as I discussed by way of introduction, if one has acquired the possibility of going back from the present into earlier soul-moods one can then perceive correctly that which exists side by side.

In relation to antiquity, attention must be given first of all to the region of India. What is still there to-day as an extraordinary acute method of interpreting the world leads back to the times of the mighty Indian philosophy in which the Vedas had birth. But even if we let the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, the Yoga philosophy of India affect us we feel that in order to understand what, in its after effects, still exists beside us on Earth, we feel that we must go back into very early times indeed. If we compare it with, for example, our European method of thinking logically or with the Greek method of building up thoughts, we then find that the European culture of to-day, when compared with the Indian, appears like a descendant, like a grandchild, a child living beside his father and contemporary with him. Indian culture stands there reflecting very early times, but it has become old. In its old age condition one can still fathom what was revealed in ancient times as the highest spirituality, but one only sees it in decadence, in its old age. One sees it as one can see in the child certain early conditions of its father but these are changed because the conditions are experienced in a later date. Think of a man, for example, who was a child in the ninetieth year of the nineteenth century and then turn from him to his father or grandfather. The grandfather was a child in the fortieth or fiftieth year of the nineteenth century but he went through childhood in different conditions to those of the ninetieth year. The child of the latter time knows quite different things to what his grandfather knew with his naïve childhood in the fortieth year. If one acquire this kind of insight into the development of peoples, the present European civilization or even that of Greece appears, so far as we can penetrate into them, as if born late compared with what was born earlier in India or what to-day we find ancient in it. If we can sense this India which has grown old, which was already old at the time of the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy, if we can penetrate this in our mood of soul trained through spiritual science in order to see the earlier from out of the later just as one sees the childhood in a man who has become old, then we can arrive at a perception of primaeval India. But then we must realize that this primaeval India was without doubt a civilization fundamentally different from our own. It must have been absolutely permeated by the spirit and have comprehended man in a special, spiritual way. And if one observes the manifold character of what we find in India, the Veda poems with their imagery which remains however in a fluidic element, the acute Vedanta philosophy, the fervent Yoga philosophy, one must say that in the course of time civilization must have mingled with civilization there; that once upon a time a primaeval civilization of a thoroughly spiritual kind must have existed there.

Then something less spiritual was drawn over this, something which found its expression in the Vedas. What appears in the fervent Yoga philosophy was then founded. It was impossible that all these could have arisen out of one race. Different peoples with different capacities have intermingled. The one brought the teachings of Yoga, the other the Veda poems. These peoples already found a primeval India which they absorbed and from which they took what was ripe and old and had withered in man. The incoming race came with fresh blood; they fashioned that which men in decadence could develop no further. And so it went on.

In this way the present condition gradually arose and one is not far wrong in comparing this primaeval Indian culture with those remnants which exist in the regions where modern civilization has developed. We can compare with the men of primaeval India those who painted the extraordinary pictures in the west of Europe, the lines of which make such a deep impression on us. When we look at these pictures, if we can lose ourselves in what the human soul experienced while producing these pictures, we must say: certainly, something very primitive is contained here, often something like that which modern precocious children paint; but yet there is something else. We see from these pictures how men lived with a love for outer nature and we see that these pictures were painted from out of deep inner impulses. We see that they were painted by men who did not first analyse with the eye so as to decide how they should draw lines or place colours but who fashioned and painted from out of their inner experience what was deeply rooted in their love.

If one compares this with what was founded in the civilization of primeval India, one finds a relationship.

In Western Europe the development is primitive and it remains primitive; over in Southern Asia it evolves further and further because it is continually fructified by other races and it develops right on to the Vedanta philosophy. If I had brought these facts forward, as I have often done, in a spiritual scientific way you would then see that one can approach the matter concretely but quite differently. I now present them as they appear to the spiritual scientist when he takes external documents into consideration. But one cannot approach these matters, as customary to-day, with crude ideas acquired from a crude natural scientific observation. Our ideas must be pliable and plastic, as you will see from the considerations I will now place before you. Naturally one cannot show the connection between the cave civilization of Western Europe and the Indian as one proves the similarity of triangles, but the certainty we attain is not little if we only penetrate these things and if we adopt that soul-mood to which attention has been drawn.

He who deepens his soul life—from this point of view in the wonderful ideas of the Vedanta philosophy, sees these transformed into an abstract spirit in the draughtsmanship of those paintings in the caves of Spain and Southern France. It does not appear striking, therefore, even from external investigation, that spiritual science explains how a common primaeval race, which must be sought for in the eighth pre-Christian millennium, gradually spread over the inhabitable regions of Europe, Africa and Asia and developed according to the different relationships of life. This ancient civilization within which man lived united to outer nature, showed itself in its most gifted form in ancient India. Here was revealed what comes to expression otherwise in a primitive way only.

There was developed also farther that which has astounded people, for instance in the culture of Crete. This arose in the east of Europe. In India it developed as the primaeval Indian culture, and progressed further and further, remaining capable of life even in its old age. It passed through its blossom in that epoch when the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy and other philosophical methods of thought arose. A great many things intermingled in this India which developed at different times but which are there to-day side by side.

If we attend particularly to primeval Indian civilization we must say that everything points to a humanity with a soul mood into which we cannot enter through external means.

I have said that one can press forward to Imaginative Cognition. If one does this consciously one gets an idea of what such men experienced, not consciously yet but instinctively like the ancient Chaldeans or the later Egyptians. Their mood of soul was absolutely different from that of modern men.

Through this advance in Imaginative Cognition man himself becomes a picture; he blends with this picture and thus lives into the 'becoming' (das Werden) of the world. Thus did the Chaldeans for example, live in the 'becoming.' But on the other hand one learns to know also when to rise to Inspiration, how to overcome the separation between the inwardly subjective and the outwardly objective; to feel at one with the cosmic all, to so feel one's being in the Cosmos that one can say: What announces itself through me is the voice, the speech of the Cosmos itself. I only give myself to it in order to be an organ in the Cosmos and to let the world reveal itself through me. We can reach this state consciously in Inspiration.

The Egyptian lived in it instinctively in a late stage. This leads us back to times from out of which a relatively good document obtains in Chinese civilization. What is usually described as such is a late product, but just as in India ancient stages, child stages reveal themselves so are revealed in China primaeval stages of civilization. We can feel how an instinctive Inspiration lives in the Chinese civilization. Through spiritual science we obtain to-day a conscious Inspiration, in China it was more or less instinctive; which means that its results exist as a background in what is imparted to-day in Chinese literature. We are led back to a view of man which presents him as a member of the entire Cosmos.

Just as we speak to-day of a three-fold man, the head man, the member man, and the rhythmic man, and fathom his being in its full depths through Inspiration, in the same way the ancestors of the Chinese civilization once lived in an inspired knowledge of something similar. This however did not relate itself to man because man was only a member of the entire Cosmos but it related itself directly to the Cosmos. Just as we feel conscious of our head, the Chinese felt what he called 'Yang.' If we wish to contemplate our head especially we cannot look at it, we can at most see the tip of our nose if we turn our eyes that way. As we can see the surface portions of our organism when we regard ourselves outwardly but are only conscious of our head to a certain extent in our mind, in the same way the Chinese was conscious of something which he called Yang. And by this Yang he conceived what was to be found above, what spread itself out spiritually; the heavenly, the shining, the producing, the active, the giving. And he did not distinguish himself from what he knew as his head, from this Yang.

Again, as we distinguish man from his environment when we feel the 'member-man' placing us in activity and connecting us with our environment, similarly the Chinese speak of 'Yin,' and in this he points to what is dark, what is earthy, receptive, and so on.

We say to-day that in our limb and digestive system we take up external substances, uniting these through this system with our own being, and we take up the senses-thought element through our head organization, but between these two stands everything which maintains rhythm of breath; the rhythm of blood brings this about. As we feel and cognize man, in the same way the Chinese once saw the whole Cosmos: above the creative, illumining, heavenly; below the earthy, dark, receptive; and the equilibrium between the two, that which forms a rhythm between heaven and earth, that he felt when the clouds appeared in the sky, when the rain fell and when it evaporated, when the plants grew out of the earth towards the heavens. In all this he felt the rhythm of above and below and he called this 'Tao.' Thus he had a view of that with which he grew. It presented itself to him in this three-fold way. But he did not distinguish himself from all this.

This view meets us transformed in Western Asia. What is transmitted to us as a primaeval civilization from the region of Persia, what shows itself in China, this must have once undergone a quite different development, metamorphosed into what is given as the opposition between Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman; Ahura Mazdao the illuminating, radiating God of Light and the dark, gloomy Ahriman, between whom the world is represented as running its course.

The early Indian could not yet distinguish the higher from the lower, heaven from earth, and this is the difference between what was early Indian and what in China was metamorphosed entirely and can be found as the basis for many civilizations in further Asia that I have named the early Persian in my book Occult Science. As yet no difference was spoken about between what was subjective and inward in men and what was outward and objective. In the outer world no distinction was made between what is light spiritually and what inclines to be more bodily dark, while in later times, in the early Persian epoch, the two were distinguished from each other. The interchange of activity between the two was thought of as being brought about through Tao or through some rhythmic equilibrium.

What is it that now took place? Why did men forsake the old standpoint so that they could no longer distinguish the spiritually light from the physically dark and for what reason did they go over to the conception of so opposite an idea as that of polarity or duality?

When we realize what is to be found in documents and when we let the feeling which lies in these documents and in their tradition act upon our souls, we come to the knowledge that in those olden times men played little part in the outer world. They lived mostly, from our own correct point of view, on a high spiritual plane, but on the other hand also, in animal innocence. For everything that they experienced in relation to the universe was instinctive. Later on this was thought of as being the out-breathing of Brahma.

All this was only possible to men who did not take part and work actively in outer nature, but who entered into nature, one might say, as does an animal, as a bird that takes what nature offers for nourishment without first working for it; fetching it merely by flight. These men therefore lived in full harmony with all the kingdoms of nature and extended their love over them all.

When with full human understanding we place ourselves within all existence we realize directly that what was love of animals and plants in the Indian-oriental view of life has arisen out of the great all-love' that does not harm any being and therefore has not yet attained to the fully awakened human consciousness in which men lived in later days. They lived in an atmosphere of spirituality which was instinctive but was higher than that of the Greeks or of the spirituality of today. They lived blameless in nature: they did not kill, they even regarded the plants on which they lived in such a way that they did not sow them but took only those that grew wild.

In such a way one looks back upon the peopling of the southern Asiatic regions thousands of centuries ago.

Later there awoke in men the consciousness of the radical difference between the higher and lower, a consciousness of the spiritual which man cannot alter, which is above the physical upon which he can work and to which he can devote himself.

About the beginning of the 6th or 5th millennium B.C. a change takes place—one can trace it in decadent remnants—in which what surrounded men and what they could alter is looked upon differently and as something over which they could exercise lordship. They begin to tame animals, they make domestic animals out of wild animals, and they become agriculturists.

From the 7th or 6th millennium B.C. is the time of great radical change when men begin to work upon Nature and thus distinguish Nature from that which is radiant and shines upon what they could affect and what can gain form through humanity. But it is not only men that can give form to things: men can make instruments, a primitive axe was the instrument that preceded the plough—probably it was woman who first pursued agriculture—they ploughed the ground by hand, and sowed. But just as man saw that the earth could gain form through him he saw also that it was not through him that in spring the earth is decked out with plants and that in autumn the plants disappear. And therefore as the earth can acquire form through man, form also comes from what illumines him from out of surrounding space, and he comes to the distinguishing of light and darkness, spirit and matter.

All this developed in such a way that men first learnt to distinguish themselves from the outer world through labouring on the land and being agriculturists and through breeding cattle. We can see in later Persian culture how everything depended on agriculture. We can see the connexion of this with what is expressed in the Avesta and we can recognize the progress from the early Indian civilization. But this develops in such a way that man does not as yet know himself as a Self. Humanity identifies itself with the external world. Men on the whole are entirely instinctively inspirational and they pass from instinctive inspiration to an understanding of the soul life which in after times, in the beginning of the third millennium, appears as the Chaldean imaginative civilization of which we can say that men have progressed so far that they not only distinguish the higher from the lower but that they occupy themselves with the stars; that they invent instruments, water-timepieces, etc. If however we study the Chaldeans we will find everywhere how strongly mankind lives in the outer world and that it is difficult for an inner life to be acquired.

In Egypt we see something different. We see the Chaldean arising later than the Egyptian. We can follow the Egyptian back to the time in which we can also set the early Persian civilization with its metamorphosing of the Chinese culture, to the time when the higher and the lower were differentiated. But we can see, just in the beginning of the third millennium B.C., a mighty and radical change within the culture of Egypt. Just as we saw a similar radical change when taming animals and agriculture began, so do we see in the third millennium a still more extensive change. We come upon it in this way. We see how in Egypt the building of pyramids developed in a later period. We can also follow Egyptian culture historically to-day further back than the pyramids. These begin in the third millennium. Egyptian civilization reaches back to the time of Menes before this century. The mighty pyramids were not built then. At the same time that the pyramids were built we see something arising in Egypt which points in a conspicuous way to the fact that the Egyptians experienced intensely an inward development of consciousness. In order to build these pyramids powerful instruments must without doubt have existed. Such instruments could have only arisen through some kind of metal work and this working with metals implies a certain knowledge of the inner nature of metal . We see what was later named chemical knowledge arising in a primitive form with the Egyptians, in other words, we see how men began to make their inner nature strongly active and how they did not yet know that this inner nature was there.

How mankind became aware of this inner nature and its strength can best be recognized by us when we examine from a definite point of view the highly developed Egyptian art of healing. It is quite different from our own medical science. For the illnesses existing in Egypt there were specialists, eye specialists in particular. The healers there made use of the so called Temple sleep. The sick were brought to the Temple and put into a kind of sleep during which they entered a sort of dream condition. What they then remembered was studied in its pictorial characteristics by priests who were versed in such things. These priests found out what taught them pathology through the inner dramatic course of the dreams, through the character of the pictures, whether they were dark on light or dark following light and so on. From another side they discovered indications for remedies in the particular configuration of the dreams. Through observation of what men experienced inwardly and what in dream pictures presented itself to the inner sight, the inward bodily condition of human beings was studied in Egypt.

We see this occurring parallel with what was developing in Chaldea. There men lived more in an external outlook. They invented instruments, their wonderful water clocks for instance evolved from the pictorial character of their souls. They were so immersed in the pictorial element that they looked upon time as transmutable pictures. This picture making element was like an outward one in which they lived. With the Egyptian this element was grasped inwardly, it was so taken that they studied it in dream form. We see here an epoch when men did not feel themselves merely as members of the universe but in which they raised themselves out of the world and individualized themselves in these two ways in the Chaldean and the Egyptian. And we see an evolution in the arising of the pictorial observation of instinctive imagination. In a twofold way this meets us, the one in Chaldea, the other in Egypt. And in the beginning of the building of the pyramid, which in its measurements and geometric relations rests on a perception of proportions in the development of man, on the development of inner forces and on the experiencing of these forces, we see a third epoch of culture in which instinctive imagination gives a definite tint to the evolution of man.

And we see how in this time the social conditions became the natural result of what arose as soul conditions. If we study the social conditions of primeval India we will find that men lived in peace together.

We see in primaeval Persia how a warlike element existed, since there it was that men took up the fight with Nature, and we see how this warlike instinct went over into their imagination. And since they were possessed inwardly, since this instinctive inward possession of men in relation to themselves can only be what is emotional and of the will, those impulses for power showed themselves in the grotesque and great pyramids which are resting places for the dead and at the same time serve as testimonies of the outer power of those who ruled. We see how consciousness of power wells up but also how other folk mix with them bringing new blood into what existed as imaginative, instinctive, in the social conditions also. We see how such stock come more from out of central Asia and mix with the others. What they bring belongs to what is a feeling of 'themselves-now-men,' distinct from their environment.

In Egypt there arose in a definite period what made the Egyptian realize himself as a godlike human being: he felt his self-consciousness so strongly that he looked upon all other people as barbarians and as human only those people who could live in inner pictures. One can see thus arising an intensified value of self-consciousness which runs parallel with an event belonging to this spiritual condition.

If we study the laws of Hammurabi we find that the horse is not yet included among the domesticated animals. It came into civilized life, however, very soon after. Hammurabi speaks of the ass and the ox and soon after his time the horse is named in documents the 'mountain ass.' It was so called because it was brought over from the mountainous East. Races that had penetrated into Chaldea brought the horse with them and with this a war-like element appeared. We see the war-like element, born in olden times, developed further when the horse is tamed and added to the other tamed animals. This also is connected with a certain condition of the soul. One can say that up to this period man had not mounted a horse and strengthened his individuality to a certain extent through fettering the horse to his own movement. The point of development in which he now was awake expressed itself as the pictorial perception of the Chaldean and as the inner dreamlike life of the Egyptian. In this way the external relations of human evolution are intimately connected with the metamorphosis of the soul in the succeeding epochs: on one side the building of the pyramids, on the other the taming of the horse. Regarded externally they express the third epoch of culture, the Chaldean-Egyptian; and these are intimately connected with the arising of the instinctive-imaginative life.

The highly developed civilisation of Egypt at the period in which the pyramids were built expressed itself in a dreamlike imagination. It came to a close relatively early.

We see the first dawn at the beginning of the third millennium. After it had begun to decline its soul mood lived on in Asia, progressing through Western Asia, Asia Minor and over to the European continent. It is clearly perceptible in what comes over from Asia Minor from the older Greek civilization and is still perceptible in the Homeric poems and in their outlook on the world. But in the approach to these Homeric poems we come upon a radical transformation. What lies at their base as a world outlook shows imaginative ideas throughout and also the perception of man which is pictorial.

In order to understand Homer's own peculiar method, one must see plastically with the inner eye of the soul when, apart from the fact that he speaks in pictures that can be seen outwardly of an Achilles or a Hector, he points out the pictorial element, as for example, 'the quick footed Achilles, Hector the hero with the waving crest.' In the whole nature of Homer we see something that is Chaldean.

This becomes different as the Greek civilisation develops which we find with Aeschylus and Sophocles and in the Greek sculpture. We can distinguish this from what is older because we realise how strong was the impulse in Greece to understand man in his own actual human nature.

If we look at the Chaldeans we see how the plastic perception appeared there in images and we see it especially in one of those races which were near to the Chaldeans locally, the Sumerians. We see how this race tends like the Egyptian towards the outward aspect of humanity. We find among the Greeks in drama and also where drama is led over into the domain of sculpture, how man is to be understood in his outward aspect. This was strongly felt by the man of the third epoch in his expression of deep, instinctive forces. This happened in Egypt during the building of the pyramids when, in their structure, men allowed their forces to grow into gigantic proportions; and in certain races of Asia who lived in an especially warlike way and placed themselves on horseback and felt themselves one with the horse.

The Greek then proceeded to say: 'I do not require external means, all human forces lie within my skin.' And he fashioned plastically those forms of men, perfect in themselves, which take everything into themselves which a previous epoch had to seek through an external embodiment. This entire immersion of oneself, this entire living in what is human and this seeking for the sublime in man, this we find expressed in the Greek spirit. And we meet it later in another form in Rome if we call to mind the passing through the Forum of the Emperor or some other figures in the Roman toga. We can see even to-day how in a much more abstract way than in Greece there was this fashioning of men with the highest forces felt within their bodies.

In the sixth pre-Christian century a new epoch begins; the Homeric age being still earlier. This age which now begins develops especially strong and powerful in Greece where it increases in splendour for about four centuries and then meets with a downfall.

Then Christianity arises. When the Greek had his Zeus statue before him he still felt something fully living there, but when the Roman regarded his statues he saw fundamentally only an abstract idea. This abstraction be came more and more pronounced and even in the fourth post-Christian century when the Senators entered the Roman Senate Hall each one threw a grain of incense into the glowing flame which burned in front of the statue of Victory, before he took his seat as Senator. We see how that which was felt in Greece as the fulness of life in the statues of Zeus, Athene and Apollo is still felt in the statue though in a merely abstract thought form, which was however real. There was still something like the magic weaving of divine forces themselves in the Zeus and Athene statues.

We then see how the Christian Emperor Constantine had this statue removed out of the Senate Hall because he thought it had lost all meaning in the sight of Christianity. And we see how Julian the Apostate once again absorbs himself in the fully human view of the fourth epoch, bringing back again the statue of Victory to the Senate Hall; how he causes the ancient ceremonies to be enacted again by the Senators but how he can no more renew the old and how he succumbs as a consequence. For the arrow which struck him down was the arrow of a murderer hired by his enemies.

And out of all this the epoch develops which I shall have to characterize further, the epoch in which men occupy themselves with inner spirituality, with intellectuality, with the power of understanding. This develops in its own special way through the Middle Ages where the intellect was thought about as we find it in Scholasticism where men fought over Nominalism and Realism.

In the 15th century a quite different spirit leads over to the age of Natural Science. In the beginning this spirit was specially strongly developed in Galileo and Copernicus who brought about the great progress in human consciousness which might be called 'interiorization' as compared with Greek consciousness. It may be so called in spite of having developed during the 18th century into that materialism which in the 19th century revealed so much with regard to external nature.

To-day we stand at a great turning point. I do not want to bring forward epoch fantasies like those of Spengler but I wish to say something different. In the beginning of the Egyptian age we see the first stage of human understanding arising, how the age of the pyramids began and how this stage was announced through other symptoms. We see how the next stage begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, how it develops in Greece and in Rome in the soul mood which understands 'man as man,' how this age comes to an end and the 'interiorization' of the intellect begins in the fifteenth century.

Thus we look back upon three great turning points: the point where the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch begins, we see how the Greek-Latin period begins and we see how that age arose which inaugurated Natural Science. In this last something again is introduced as was the case with the pyramids, something representing the special penetration of human evolution with what is new.

The Romans could not uphold what was to the Greeks full of life; they could only carry out that abstraction and intellectuality which died in the lifeless Latin language. We must take heed of all this to-day because we have more consciousness than the Greeks. And from out of our consciousness we must take heed that we prevent from within that destruction which came upon Greece and which stands as a fearful example before us. We must learn from history in such a way that it will not happen to us as it has happened to men who were weak because they depended upon what was outward. We must conquer what could not be conquered in earlier ages. And when it is said that one must learn from history, we must do this in such a way that we steel ourselves and become attentive to what ancient times can teach us so that we not only learn to avoid those mistakes made by individuals but also what should be named the necessary omissions in human evolution. What threatens to come upon humanity today as it happened in the past must be overcome. We have got to transcend a great crisis. And we can only understand the nature of this present crisis if we understand it in the light of a deep comprehension of human evolution. Together with this we will understand how a spiritual Science arises from out of Natural Science. This can only be understood through being able to grasp it from out of the entire spirit of human evolution.

If we are to understand the way in which a scientific world view has been introduced into the mentality of the present day, we must turn to the results of the study of human evolution. But then this history of development must be considered in a style such as is attempted here in this lecture. And therein our consideration should culminate, to penetrate this integration of scientific thinking into the human state of mind.

We have seen that in successive epochs, the whole inner soul condition of people has also metamorphosed, and it now behooves us to look a little more closely at the soul condition at that turning point in human civilization that is marked by the advent of Christianity.

If one wants to study the state of mind that was prevalent in the Chaldean and Egyptian peoples, in particular, then, as I have already indicated, there is no other way to do so than to ascend in the soul to the imaginative view, to the inspired view, and so on. Regarding this imaginative insight, which I have characterized from various perspectives during these evenings, I only have to add the following: When a person consciously ascends to the state of imaginative knowledge, thus living in a consciousness of images that leads him to images of spiritual realities before his soul, then his entire introspection is transformed. His whole view of himself changes, and initially his view of the external world around him also changes. The inner vision becomes such that one does not, for example, advance to a more soul-like content through imaginative visualization, if one understands by soul-like content what is known from ordinary life experience. One could say that under the influence of imaginative visualization, inner vision transforms what is in the waking, conscious human being into something more concrete than the soul is in its ordinary experience. The strange thing is that the mystical nebulosity that some people expect when they hear about introspection does not arise, nor does what some mystics in the ordinary sense produce in the form of fantastic images of the human interior illuminated by the divine. But through true introspection, a person advances to get to know his or her organism, his or her organization, and in doing so, he or she gets to know the profound significance of the individual organs of his or her organism. He learns to recognize the role that the heart, lungs and other organs play in the organism, and thus he comes to know precisely that which the nebulous mystic does not seek, which he considers to be a lowly material thing. He thus attains a true transparency of his own organism by advancing to imaginative knowledge.

Those who then come to inspired knowledge realize that what they have come to know through the path of imagination is something more material, one might say, than the abstract that one usually mental content when one speaks of the external, seemingly sensory current of inheritance, which in reality is born out of the deeper-lying spiritual, that therefore what organizes the individual is born out of the spiritual. This teaches us an extraordinarily significant fact. Basically, we can understand the physical human being as a whole, as we see him before us, as a being that must have passed through the ancestors, through the hereditary current. But if we stop at this external, scientific view, which wants to trace everything back to heredity, we will not come to an understanding of the details of this organism. This may appear paradoxical to some, but it is so. Our organs as individuals are formed out of the spirit, only the whole configuration of the human being, as he appears to us in the sensory world, had to go through physical inheritance in order to come about as a synthesis of the individual organs. So we actually arrive at a spiritual-scientific anatomy and physiology, which, however, at the same time appears as a result of spiritual knowledge that lies deeper and is attained through inspiration. So we can say that if we consciously struggle to such knowledge through imagination and inspiration, we get to know the human being in a different way. But we also get to know the external world in a different way.

For the person who struggles upwards through imagination and inspiration – I have already hinted at this in the lectures in Dornach last fall on the “Limits of Knowledge of Nature” – for the person who struggles in this way to attain supersensible knowledge, the assumption that atoms lie behind sense phenomena can no longer be accepted. No matter whether we look at it from the older sense, where we assumed more elastic or even more rigid atoms, or from the present point of view, where we speak more of ions or electrons, no matter what kind of atomism it is, the assumption of such atoms, which are supposed to constitute matter, which are supposed to represent the substantiality of the material, this assumption loses its meaning. It appears simply as a non-entity. And what remains of the sense world, I once wanted to characterize in the third volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific writings, where I said: Everything that can be seen in the outside world and in which one has to immerse oneself in order to recognize it, are the contents of sensory perception, are the phenomena themselves. For if one looks behind phenomena with a spiritual-scientific view, one does not find atoms in the sense of physicists or physiologists, but one finds essential spiritual substance. The outer world is constituted by spiritual substance, and not, for instance, by those forces which we are accustomed to take as the basis of our calculations. These are not, therefore, the central forces which are usually assumed by mathematical physics to represent the constitution of matter. Instead, a more spiritual way of looking at things drives us outwards to the spirit, but inwards to an understanding that is initially material. Today, as we ascend from our present historical standpoint, which has been achieved by humanity, to such insights, we do so fully consciously. We survey the step we are taking; we know that as our knowledge metamorphoses, the external world is spiritualized for us, the inner world is materialized. And we thus grasp a now also metamorphosed image of the world in which we are and which we ourselves are. We then relate this image, which we receive, to our ordinary view, which lives in concepts of the mind; we express it through such concepts of the mind, and this makes us consciously live in one and the other view of the world. This consciousness was lacking in people until the 8th century BC, until the end of that period of time that I have characterized as the Egyptian-Chaldean one during these evenings. But in return they had the possibility to gain something instinctively, to which we can only work towards again consciously through inner methodology, spiritual scientific methodology. They did not have the ability to penetrate with concepts what they saw instinctively. Intellectualism was still foreign to them, but images stood before their soul without them first having to bring them about in full consciousness, as we have to do it today, and so the external world was spiritual to them. The further we go back in human development, the clearer this becomes.

If we go back to the times for which historical documents still exist, we do find a kind of decline in what once lived in these peoples. We find that the spiritual aspect of the external world had been debased to the point of demonism, and we therefore find demonic forces behind the phenomena of the senses everywhere. But this was only the echo of an ancient spiritual view that was still present in the ages I have called “Primitive Persian” and “Primitive Indian”. And further, these people instinctively had the view that in them, as soul, the organs themselves lived, so that they spoke of the soul precisely when they were educated personalities in these ancient peoples, as of the internal organs and thought of the soul as composed through the interaction of these internal organs. When we read the sayings of the ancients about the heart, liver, kidneys and the like, we do not have to imagine the fantasy that is found, for example, in Wundt's philosophy, but we have to understand them with the state of mind that we can achieve in imaginative, inspired knowledge. Only then will we understand what is meant by such strange sayings, handed down from ancient times, about the heart, liver and suchlike.

But we must also be clear about the spiritual condition of these ancient peoples. This spiritual condition was such that people saw spiritual things in the world outside, actually material things within, but that they had to be awake when they saw the outside world, while they slept and dreamed when they wanted to perceive their inner selves. I have already hinted at this for the Egyptians, hence the introduction of temple sleep. The sick person was brought to the temple, was brought to sleep; he then had to tell his dreams. The priests, who were taught these things, who knew that what mattered more than the content of the dream was the dramatic course of the dream. To interpret its content would have been superstition. But that was what mattered, whether some dark thing in the dream was followed by a light one or vice versa, and whether the dream had to refer to states of fear or joy and the like. It was the drama of the dream that mattered, and from this drama it then became clear how one organ or another could become diseased, and, as I indicated, it even revealed the remedy. That is the reality of what was later called the Egyptian temple sleep.

These things then passed into decadence, and when studied in their decadent state, they no longer present themselves as they were in the best times of ancient civilization; this should be fully understood. We may say, then, that in the waking state these ancient peoples had a kind of pictorial consciousness, not yet the intellectual consciousness that lives in abstract mental representations. With this pictorial consciousness they perceived a spiritual outer world, which for them was as underlying the sense world as causality and effect were later regarded as underlying the sense world. While these ancient peoples were in a subdued state of consciousness in their instinctive experiences at that time, their dreams were all the more vivid, and it was in the images of their dreams that they perceived their inner selves. And the scholars in the sense of that time were able to interpret these dream images in terms of the inner self, but actually in terms of its materiality.

The big change that occurred around the middle of the 8th century BC was that people increasingly developed the ability to think intellectually. At first, this intellectuality was not yet as we have it today, where we can, as it were, also separate ourselves from the outside world, close our eyes, make all our senses inactive and then set our minds in motion. This inward active work of the mind was not yet there. But by looking at the outside world in images, a kind of mind was revealed at the same time, and by looking through the world of images in dreams, it was also interspersed with this mind in memory. One can say that the mind as an ability only entered into human development around the middle of the 8th century BC.

If you study the old documents from this point of view, you will get along everywhere. The fact that people like Jeremiah or similar, who want to describe Chaldean antiquity, encounter contradictions everywhere, stems from the fact that they believe that what these Chaldeans had achieved had already been created by the actively working mind and not by the directly perceived world of images. If one assumes that the entire Chaldean culture was one that arose through the perception of images, then one assumes that the peculiar inwardness that the Egyptians developed, which was then lived out in their mythology, but also lived out in the explanations of the Book of the Dead, for example, if you take all this together and know that the interior once revealed itself in dreamy inner perception, then you only begin to understand what it is all about.

As I have always indicated, one must proceed to the consideration of the state of mind of those times. The activation of the intellect begins much later, it actually begins – and this is clearly shown in the development of the older Greek philosophy – it begins first as a kind of perception that also perceives the concepts of the intellect, the ideas in the sense things. One does not understand Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximenes and so on, especially not Anaxagoras with his vodg (nous); one does not understand the philosophy that Nietzsche called 'Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks' if one does not know that they did not yet ascribe to the human being: “There sits the mind, you are active in your mind,” but rather they painted the world, they perceived the concepts of the mind in the things they saw in the way they perceived the colors. And in a certain respect, Plato's Theory of Ideas can only be understood without contradiction from this point of view, and even more so the individual specifics, such as Hippocrates' medicine. This can only be understood if one knows that there was not a detached mind, but rather how things outside revealed themselves through colors, so they also revealed themselves in their conceptual context. Just as we today see the world of sense as a colored carpet, so did they see it in that time in the web of thought. Thus, of course, the relationship of the inner and the outer in the Egyptians was quite different than it later became.

Among the Chaldeans it was still the case that man in a certain sense counted himself entirely towards the outer world. For when he was awake and based the world of the senses on spiritual causality, he actually saw his own likeness in all things of nature. He suspected the soul in himself, as he sensed the spiritual behind the things of the senses. And when he was in a dream, he saw his own inner being in images, one might say, as in an external world. This whole state of mind made him feel that he was a member of the world in the most eminent sense. But this also meant that the way he thought about his connection with the world was different from the way we think about it now.

Now we are immersed in a world view that must be overcome. We are immersed in a world view that actually leaves a deep chasm between natural events and the order in which we are immersed through our human morality, through our moral views and through our religious convictions.

When people look at nature today, they understand natural processes through the so-called laws of nature. These laws are not colored by anything moral, which is precisely what people seek in them. It seems to man today as a paradoxical superstition, and, when it is a matter of a view of nature, rightly so, to assume, for example, that lightning shoots out of the clouds in a way that has to be explained morally and the like. But on the other hand, man also feels as if he has been torn away from the whole order of the world when he is supposed to apply the standard of the moral to his own actions. And a more recent world view has increasingly come to see only natural necessity out there in the world, and in man, only a kind of moral necessity. But today's view of life cannot find a connection between this inner moral-religious order and the outer natural order. It was quite different in those times when people saw themselves and their environment as I have just described. There was no such contradiction between morality and natural necessity. If we look at the majority of ancient peoples, we find that they all relate to the world in such a way that they think of their own soul destinies as subject to a certain natural order, that they think of what emerges from their own soul as emerging, so to speak, from the same power that they think of thunder and lightning as emerging from. There was only one nation that formed a remarkable exception, if we may call it that, which experienced the inner world in a different way, and that is the Hebrew, the Jewish nation. Anyone who has an affinity for it will find a tremendous difference between the Jewish creation story of the Bible, the Old Testament, and all the other creation stories. The other creation stories must be viewed from the perspective of an inseparable natural order and morality. The Jewish-Hebrew creation story is characterized precisely by the fact that it is basically devoid of any natural worldview. This is what distinguished the Jewish people from the surrounding peoples of antiquity. The Jewish people related everything to the one God. But the forces that worked through this God in the world, they described it, albeit in a different way than later conceptions, but basically as moral, that is, as arising from the will of Yahweh. And basically, when anything happened, be it in the natural world or through man, the member of the ancient Hebrew people could only answer: It happens because Yahweh wills it. One could say that the spiritual state of this Jewish people is as if the world around them existed only as a world for the senses, as if nothing spiritual or soulful were revealed from this world, as it was for the other, pagan nations. On the other hand, there was a particularly vivid perception of the human interior, and it was through this perception of the human interior that the Jewish people came to their monotheistic religion, to their religion of Yahweh. And everything that in ancient times led to and tended towards a certain insensitivity to the outside world, but on the other hand to an emphasis on what one perceives from within, all this can basically be traced back to the influence of the Hebrew people.

One might say that the ancient pagan peoples were such that they had a spiritual view of nature and also applied this spiritual view of nature to man as such. They saw the things of nature and traced them back to spiritual causes. They recognized the world through wisdom, in that wisdom is understood as that which the spiritual in the human soul takes in. The Jews had no organ for this wisdom in the world, but for that they had something else for special reasons, which there is no time to describe now. I once presented this in an internal lecture cycle in Kristiania, which I gave on the souls of nations. In contrast to the other nations, especially the Egyptians, who instinctively saw the inner life of man in dream images and dream imaginings, the Jews had developed a kind of intellectuality from their own inner life long before the dawn of intellectuality in the middle of the 8th century BC, albeit one-sidedly and prematurely. With the older Greek thinkers, we see how they receive intellectuality by observing nature. A living world view, as developed by Heraclitus, for whom basically the whole world is becoming, but for whom becoming is symbolized more than anything by fire. Such a living world view can only come about if the human being feels their way completely into the fire, so to speak, experiences the inner nature of the fire and simultaneously experiences the conceptual, the imaginative. While the outer, sensual redness of the fire is being perceived, the conceptual, intellectual element is perceived in the outer world. For the civilization represented by the Greeks, it is the case that the intellectual element is born for human beings in the middle of the 8th century BC. For the Hebrew people, it was already born earlier. For the Hebrew people, it was the case that they did not perceive the intellectual in the outside world, but that they perceived what is spiritual and intellectual within, not through dream images like the Egyptians, and already in a certain abstractness. And that led them to their monotheism. This led them, one might say, to moralize the whole world, to trace everything back to the will of Yahweh, to trace it back to the fact that Yahweh wills it. And it is perhaps a polar opposite when we take some Greek sage like Anaxagoras and see that he speaks of the world mind as the Nus, in a sense perceiving the mind outside in the world objectified, and when we speak of a Jewish scholar of antiquity who feels this mind rising from his inner being and thereby experiences the revelation of Yahweh. Even if you take something like the burning bush revelation to Moses, you will have to think about it differently according to the whole nature of the presentation, just as you have to think about a philosophical statement by Anaxagoras. What Moses perceives externally is only a stimulus. What he actually perceives arises from within him. Hence the remarkable abstractness with which everything appears, which is the actual content of this Hebrew antiquity. But this gave a tendency to the development of mankind that leads more away from nature. In Greek culture, we see man's living into nature in such a way that he gives birth to the intellect out of nature. In Judaism, we see an experience of the human inner being at an early stage. And it was from this tendency that the declining Greek culture, which had already begun to decline, came to replace Platonism, for example, with Neoplatonism, which represents an abstract mysticism, a living into an unintelligible, abstract spiritual world. We are already in the centuries of the decline of the Greek people. External observation has already turned inwards. One might say that the intellect, which the Greeks first discovered in the external world, has overwhelmed their inner being. And Plotinus, Jamblichus, Ammonius Sakkas, they are men who have devoted themselves entirely to the un-sensuous, the spiritual, who live entirely in this un-sensuous, spiritual, and who only call a man a true man when he can experience this un-sensuous, spiritual.

In certain regions of the Orient, however, something has been preserved that does not think the inner, the soul, in such an abstract way as the later Greeks did, for example in Neoplatonism, but which still represents an resonance of the inner perception of the organs and which also does not represent the external world in the way that the Greek Democritus began to imagine it through material atoms, but which presented the basis of the external, the sensual, as a spiritual world. And again and again, the tendencies arose from the East, from what was brought in by the Hebrew influence, to counter something. One only needs to study Philo, who lived at the beginning of the first century AD, to see this Hebrew influence. More and more, a reaction is spreading from certain areas of Asia against this internalization, against this complete absorption in the abstract interior.

In more recent times, it was the most unfortunate idea to simply interpret the biblical story of creation as a representation of symbols of external geological periods. That is certainly not what it is, but rather it is the representation of what one can see about the whole course of world development if one only allows the inner being of the human being to work. It is just that the Hebrew sages were such that they still saw what arose in their inner being in concrete terms, that they saw a great variety and diversity in it. What they saw as inner reality had already degenerated into a symbol in Philo's work, and in Neo-Platonism it had become completely abstract. And even if there is something sublime and magnificent about being transported into the otherworldliness of Plotinus and Jamblichus, on the other hand it means that in this ecstasy, in the purely abstract supersensible, the natural order, the whole view of nature, is lost. As I said, there had always been reactions from individual regions of Asia against this complete internalization of the human being, whereby he lost all inner imagery, whereby the images lost their contours, the imaginations became blurred and the human being finally dissolved into the abstract, into the pure, into the supersensible world, which could not be characterized by anything.

Now, into this time, in which such struggles took place, in which old worldviews still survived, as I characterized it today and yesterday, but in which the development of intellectuality is taking place more and more, into this time, as you know, the emergence of Christianity fell. The emergence of Christianity has a profound significance for the later emergence of natural science. But this significance can only be understood if we first ask ourselves: Whatever it was that came into the world through Christianity, it could only understand the world of that time from its own ideas. Whatever may have happened in Palestine, the people of that time had to understand it first from their own point of view.

Let us say, then, that somewhere over in Asia there sat a man who still had some echo of the more materialistic inner vision and of the spiritualized outer world. In the event of Golgotha he must have seen something that corresponded to his world-view. He had to explain it from the standpoint of his world-view. If anyone lived in Neoplatonism or Plotinusm, that is, in a world-view that saw all imaginations already with blurred contours and finally allowed everything to become blurred in the One, he translated everything he learned about the Mystery of Golgotha into such an internalized view of the world. He would say to himself, for example: “The highest that I can attain, even if I withdraw from all these sensory perceptions, when I allow only my inner being to prevail and unite myself with the All-One, then the Christ arises in me as this highest in my inner being. I experience the Christ impulse in this world-enraptured state.” This is how a Neoplatonic philosopher might express himself. Someone who still retained something of the old world view, as I have described it today, said to himself: In Christ, a spiritual element from the cosmos was united with a human element. And since he saw in a certain respect what lived in the organs of man more materially than soul, this special union of the spiritual Christ with the man Jesus became a problem for him. That is why the problem of the union of Christ with Jesus arises so often in the East. In those days, when humanity had only been experiencing intellectual development for seven and a half centuries, the Mystery of Golgotha was often understood as one could understand it, and one must distinguish what the individual said from what actually happened, what broke in as an objective event in the development of humanity, the event of Golgotha.

But let us first see, and then return to it, how these different views appeared, some of which had come down to us from ancient, unintellectual times, or had developed under the influence of the Hebrew element. Let us see how they appeared in the following centuries. One would like to say that what had happened in the development of mankind seems obvious – if I use the term symbolically – when one looks at the 4th century AD and, for example, at an event such as the founding of Constantinople by the Emperor Constantine, who, after all, elevated Christianity to the status of the official religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine founds Constantinople. We are thus in the 4th century AD. And one can say that the way this Constantine behaved when founding Constantinople would never have been the way any personality in ancient times would have behaved when founding any city. In those older times, everything had emerged from a more instinctive source. There is no doubt that everything that has come down to us about Constantine shows that he had the idea that the old opinions were true, which pointed to the fall of Rome. He therefore did not want to keep Rome as the capital. It must be emphasized that when people thought of the fall of Rome, they naturally thought primarily of the fall of the Roman Empire. That Rome could no longer remain the center of the world in the same way as it had been in the past was something that was intensively alive as an opinion at the time. But Constantine did not want the empire to perish with it. Now there was an old view that in the development of humanity, one lives in a kind of cycle. Therefore, already in older times, still in the times of pagan Rome, the thought arose to rebuild the city of T'roJa, from which, as legend also testifies, the founding of Rome is derived. One wanted to return to the origin again. Constantine did not go as far as Asia Minor, but he did move towards the East, and founded Constantinople, as we know from tradition, entirely based on the idea that world development must move back towards its origin. And he was, so to speak, intent on bringing as much as possible into this Constantinople that he believed was still viable. In the 4th century AD, Christianity was more viable than today's society often assumes. One only needs to think of such representations as, for example, Tertullianus gives, who, one would like to say, in a kind of petition, turns to the Roman emperor, one may tolerate the Christians, because what would help it if one did not tolerate them; half of the inhabitants of all cities are Christians, and they are therefore intolerant. We also know from pagan Roman writers that Christianity spread rapidly at that time. We know that basically the judgment weighed on many souls, that Christianity could not be stopped after all. In the time of Diocletian, the Romans sighed that one could kill a few hundred people, a few thousand people, but one could not kill half the population of the empire. This may be a somewhat exaggerated way of putting it, but it is based on the fact that Christianity spread relatively quickly in the first few centuries. Constantine saw through the sustaining power of Christianity, and that is why he wanted to combine what came from ancient times with what was now new. One might say that never before has anything in world history been as symptomatically significant as the foundation stone laying celebration that Constantine celebrated when founding Constantinople, where he had the porphyry column, to which the luck of Rome seemed tied, brought over to Constantinople with great difficulty. When they wanted to bring the porphyry column into the new city, they had to transport it over a swampy area and first had to lay iron rails for it, which is where the expression “The Iron Gate” comes from, which has been preserved to this day in the name “The Gate”. He had this porphyry column erected, but placed a statue of Apollo from Ilion on top of it. He had pieces of wood from the cross of Christ hidden in this statue of Apollo, which his mother Helena had brought from Jerusalem, and he surrounded the statue of Apollo with a kind of sunburst; in it were thorns from the crown of thorns, which he had also brought from Palestine.

You can see that what emerged from ancient times was supposed to converge with what was there as a new, fruitful element. But Constantine apparently did not believe that what was to be continued could be continued in Rome. The Palladium, which was said to have been brought from Troy to Rome, was also transferred to Constantinople and hidden in a place unknown to the outside world. But the legend remained: This Palladium was said to have been transferred twice, once from Asia to Rome, and the second time from Rome to Constantinople. The third time it would be transferred from Constantinople to the capital of the Slavs, and when this happened, a new period of world development would begin. This belief inspired many people in the European East. This view also still lived in those who were complicit in the planning of the last outbreak of war in 1914. The saga of the three relocations of the palladium is symptomatic. But in this saga there is an awareness of the progress of human development.

When we look at all this, does it not give us the impression of an awareness, of a rationality that must seem deeply significant when we consider that ancient mythological motifs and ancient pictorial motifs are combined by Constantine in a purely rational way, one might say with tremendous logic, and that this logic is to become the world-dominating logic? If we look at the particular state of mind of this Constantine, we can see how, at this time, rationality is already at a high level, but at the same time it is still so interwoven with the objective external world. I would say that there is still much of the Greek way of using reason in this. The Greeks perceived the intellect, the Nus, at the same time as the external world, as one perceives colors. They had also effectively imagined the Nus, the intellect, in history. Konstantin believes that he can only make his subjective intellect effective if he completely encloses it in objective processes: the transfer of the porphyry column, the transfer of the wood of the cross and the crown of thorns. Konstantin weaves history into his images through reason. Reason still lives in the external; it only feels real when it lives in the external. We see such a legend as that of the Palladium, I would like to say, transferred into the greatest sobriety.

It was indeed a remarkable time, this 4th century AD, and one realizes what is significant and essential about this epoch when one considers what continued into the later Middle Ages. Take just one example: the struggle of later ages between nominalism and realism. For the scholastics of the thirteenth century, realism was still, for example, the view that the perceptions of external nature have a reality in themselves. The nominalists, who saw in ideas only abstract names, not something as real as colors or sounds, rebelled against this, so that the great dispute arose between realism and nominalism. In realism, something survived from that view, which was quite natural in Greek thought. A Greek thinker could not help being a realist because he perceived his concepts of understanding just as he perceived colors. But what we still find connected with the objective external world in Constantine, one might say the realizing mind, was more and more taken up into the human being, more and more interwoven with inner activity. The human being became more and more obsessed with the mind. In this way he drew this intellect out of the external world for his own view. That realism arose in the Middle Ages had a special reason, which we shall become acquainted with tomorrow; it was not merely an echo of ancient Greece, but lay in the special relation of the intruding Germanic peoples to what had been handed down from antiquity.

But what nominalism was, it propagated itself in such a way that what had previously been experienced as understanding together with the external world of the senses was now experienced in the abstract. I would like to say that people were educated for this nominalism in that Latin was propagated into the Middle Ages as an old, dead language that no longer lived where one was in contact with the external world, but only lived for that spiritual world that Plotinus had led up into the abstract, into the All-One, into the supersensible. One would like to say that this supersensory should increasingly take hold of people, and for those who had a higher education, the Latin language, which had become a dead, abstract language, should be the means of education to this abstractness, to this detachment from the outer world. If we consider this in relation to later times, we can appreciate what was actually alive in this fourth century A.D.

Now we see again a deeply significant turning point in the development of humanity at the beginning of the 15th century. One need only delve into old writings about nature that date back to the 10th and 11th centuries, and one will find: there it is indeed the case that people, by living in the mind, perceive this mind as something abstracted, but perceive it as if it possessed them, as if it were a real element within them. The nominalists also do not see the mind outside in the things, they see in the representations mere names, namely in the summarizing representations; but in the experience of the representations they see a real power. This comes to an end in the consciousness of the beginning of the 15th century. The period in which we still live entirely within it and which we recognize when we ask ourselves: What has reason become for us? In this time, which loves exclusivity so much, which takes such pleasure in its own absoluteness, in this time one looks down very haughtily on earlier periods. Anyone who reads what was written in the 10th and 11th centuries today considers it childish. But if you immerse yourself in it from a spiritual science point of view, you will not want to return to it either, but you will not consider it childish, but rather as a different view. He notices that although the human being is active with the intellect, he still thinks of the intellect as united with things, at least in the process of cognition. From the 15th century onwards, this changes. Man is no longer aware that forces are at work in him as he reflects; he no longer feels possessed by the intellect, but feels entirely as the being that brings about the understanding itself. We no longer have the intellect as a real power, but only as that which provides us with images of the external world, images, shadows of what the intellect used to be. That which has emerged is the characteristic of the new age. Internalization has progressed so far that man no longer feels as if he were driven by something, as if logic were working in him, but he feels that the concept of the mind has become quite shadowy. He no longer feels that something inside is pushing and driving. Man of the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th century still felt that. That came to an end in the 15th century. With that, the age of the development of actual human consciousness begins. Man could only become fully aware of his own nature by no longer feeling the intellect as something he is inwardly possessed by, in relation to which he must say, as was said much more often in the old days than one might think: “It thinks in me,” but rather he becomes the one who says, “I think.” He ascends to his fully conscious self-awareness. The consciousness soul develops, while in the age from the middle of the 8th century BC to the beginning of the 15th century the mind soul had developed. Look it up, all the concepts we have today, including the concepts of evolution, the concepts of inheritance and so on, all the concepts, all the ideas we have, they come from the time before the 15th century. We have not acquired any new concepts. Today, as a humanities scholar, one feels how difficult it is to form words, even in an elementary way, when one is no longer satisfied with what the words actually express according to the concepts that were developed up to the 15th century. We are living on the shadows of the old concepts and have indeed been able to enter into the outer nature in a wonderful way in the scientific age by holding on to the shadows of earlier concepts.

It is remarkable when one looks at certain personalities from this point of view. In the course of the 19th century, a thinker emerged who has not been sufficiently appreciated. I have tried to describe his nature in the third chapter of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln': Franz Brentano. He is, I would say, the most characteristic of a whole series. One can study many such personalities. Franz Brentano becomes acquainted with the newer natural science. He takes in the scientific facts as a matter of course, along with the concepts. But at the same time, he comes from a pious family, has a pious upbringing, and wants to come to terms with the scientific concepts. He cannot help but ask himself: What about these concepts that live in me when I grasp the scientific facts? I am talking about heredity, about development, about metamorphosis, what about these concepts? And he is led to his extraordinarily ingenious treatise on Aristotle, in that he orients himself to Aristotle, thus having to find his way back to the period that began in the 8th century BC and ended in the first third of the 15th century. And if we want to understand the peculiar concepts that prevail in our time period, then we must always return to these previous time periods.

Franz Brentano once gave a lecture on jurisprudence. In this lecture on jurisprudence he wanted to make clear how man, as a soul and spiritual being, relates to the external world. He wanted to have a concept for this relationship of man to the external world; he wanted to be able to say to himself in other words: How does an idea relate to the external world? He resorted to the term “intentional,” which he found developed by the scholastics of the Middle Ages as a concept of the period that preceded ours. And so we must always go back with our concepts. It is a delusion to believe that concepts arose after the 15th century. We live in a shadow world of concepts, not in a world of conceptual reality. The period before 1400 is the age in which the conceptual reality, the concept, the intellectual as a real factor within, was formed. We have overcome this since the 15th century. We have replaced it with self-awareness. This was still in the background for the Greeks; it had something shadowy for them. They were primarily inhabited by the intellectual, but it lived as a real thing, as I have described.

I would say that humanity is educated, as it were, through the inner working of spiritual forces on these intellectual abilities. And this education lasts from the 8th century BC to the 15th century. And if you ask for the middle of this period, you will find: the 4th century AD is the middle. That is when the decision is made. Until then, it goes up, until then the power that drives the mind into the soul, so to speak, impels man. Then this power ebbs away, and gradually the mind becomes shadowy. And with the foundation of Constantine, one can see this change taking place from living in the full reality with the mind, as one lived with the old images in the full reality, so that one was no different from the external world. But already in man lives also the striving back to the going out from the world, in that old myth pictures are interwoven as with sober reason in the constant foundation. In such reversals one sees what lives in the evolution of mankind.

And now we can ask ourselves: did that which lived as reason, which then lived in Roman sobriety, which basically reduced all gods to mere external symbols for concepts of the state and the like, or for natural phenomena, , was there not something in what emerged, in what developed, something like a backward reaching effect of the Hebrew element, which had been completely cut off from outer nature and brought the inner being from earlier times? I would like to say that this backward movement, by clinging to the old pictorial quality, the Chaldean-Egyptian pictorial quality, to the unpictorial quality of the mystical contemplation of the All-One, was realized in the south of Europe, in the north of Africa, in the Near East. One had to enter this region, not to develop it convulsively, but to be able to fully experience the intellect within it. It was the preparation for the intellect, and one cannot understand this age if one does not grasp the interweaving of this mysticism at the end of antiquity, this mysticism that accompanied the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the intellect.

But just look at this entire development. In the south, the most educated part of the population convulsively moved towards the supersensory, towards the imageless, towards merging with the soul in the All-One, in order to arrive at understanding. There, the further development of understanding, even in language, was fueled by the dead language of Latin. But the whole thing had arisen one-sidedly. The whole thing had come about because humanity in the south had, as it were, raised itself above nature, and this raising above nature had already been prepared for in a social phenomenon. You cannot conceive of this whole process as anything other than a population of the upper classes emerging on the broad basis of a slave population, because only these upper classes can develop such a social milieu that Plotinism becomes possible, that this non-sensual, supersensual, this exclusion from the natural, becomes a basic disposition of the soul. But then the intellect can only absorb this, one might say, with this soul-spirituality distilled out of the fullness of humanity. It developed in southern Europe, it was not permeated by a sufficiently intense power to sustain the robust Roman Empire, it was permeated by the power that Egyptian hermits could generate, but which could not sustain the robust Roman Empire. The Roman Empire could only be inspired by this remoteness from the world, could only educate the mind, but could only be carried by the upper ten thousand, who were socially supported. The people could not grasp it, not all of humanity. So the return to nature had to be made again. Constantine wanted to start a return journey. He started the return journey to Constantinople. But that was only done with the intellect. Another return journey was started. This return journey consisted of the path that had to be taken by the Romans - even if I am now presenting it somewhat from the other side - to the peoples who brought them fresh blood and nature, to the Germanic peoples coming down from the north. There was robustness there, and reason could be absorbed with the blood, with the natural. Caesar already fought against Pompey with Germanic hordes. All the victories of the Roman imperial period were won with Germanic mercenary hordes. And alongside the, I would say, abstract act of founding Constantinople, there is the other, concrete act of Constantine, where he defeated Maxentius with Germanic-British, Germanic-Gallic and purely Germanic people.

The abstract element that had been approached could have been created by the state of mind of the Egyptian hermits, the state of mind of those who withdrew to Monte Cassino, but it was not enough to carry the robust world history. What had been left behind at an earlier stage had to intervene. The peoples who descended had remained behind by about a whole period. They still had the freshness that had already existed in an earlier, higher flowering, but had at least still been freshly lived in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries BC in Greece and the Near East. The inner soul power, willpower and emotionality that lived there was carried in the Germanic element to Romanism. And now a people with its whole humanity took up what had been developed in the south at an abstract level. And in this taking up lies the possibility of bringing realism into it again, of bringing reality into that which had become uninstinctive, unreal and could therefore only lead to the downfall of the Roman Empire. Intensive power, reality was brought into the process of human evolution. This prepared the way for what led the human being who had come to understanding, that is, to his inwardness and then to the consciousness soul, in which he had only the shadow of understanding, back to what he had lost from mind: to nature. The rise of the consciousness soul is connected with the burgeoning of the view of nature. We will talk about how to visualize this in more detail tomorrow.

It may well be that the fourth century A.D. has emerged from our considerations as a particularly significant turning point in human development, and I would like to say a few words about what actually took place in this 4th century.

One of the characteristic minds of this 4th century is, of course, Augustine, and when we look at Augustine, we have a true representative of this period before us. To a certain extent, with a part of his being, which he lived out primarily in his youth and in his early years, Augustine points quite clearly back to ancient education. And then we see a rather abrupt transition in his case, which led him to absolute submission to the Roman Catholic Church, so that Augustine became the one who, in a certain respect, set knowledge and insight aside for himself and inwardly and subjectively practically took the concepts of faith completely seriously by professing the opinion that he did not see what the basis of the truth was that he should recognize, and that he professed the truth to which he had finally decided only because the Catholic Church prescribed it. Augustine came to this opinion through hard struggles in life. For a certain period of time, he paid homage to the doctrine known as Manichaeism, the orientalizing doctrine of Mani. This doctrine is one of those that I have already characterized from a certain point of view in these evening reflections. I said: Again and again, from the times that we have come to regard as Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Egyptian, from these ancient times, views emerge as a kind of reaction against what is built up from the development of the primarily intellectual capacity of humanity. The Manichaean doctrine was one such. It just so happens that in those days, in the times when Augustine became acquainted with the Manichaean doctrine in his African homeland, such views actually appeared in a somewhat dubious form. Augustine was initially quite captivated by the Manichaean doctrine. But then he came into contact with a bishop of the Manicheans, Faustus, and the whole way in which this man represented the Manichean doctrine then disgusted Augustine. But through much of what was presented to Augustine, certainly not only as shallow dialectics but perhaps as empty verbiage, one must nevertheless glimpse something essential in this Manichaean doctrine, and this essence can only be inwardly understood if one approaches this Manichaean doctrine from the points of view have been asserted in these considerations, this Manichaean doctrine.

Not much of the true records of such teachings to mankind in modern times has been preserved; only what the Christian teachers of the first centuries quoted and then fought against has been preserved. Thus the most important information from ancient times has come down to us only through the quotations of opponents. But perhaps someone who can empathize with such things will also sense something of the essence of the Manichaean doctrine itself from Augustine's particular attitude towards it. Augustine turns away from the Manichaean doctrine for the reason that he says he has sought the truth, sought the truth in the sun, in the stars, the clouds, the rivers, the springs, the mountains, in the vegetable, in the animal beings, in short, in all that which could confront him as visible. He did not find it there, because all of this offered him only external material things, but he was looking for the spiritual. Then Augustine turned away from the Manichaean doctrine to Neoplatonism, which I have already characterized from a certain point of view. Neoplatonism turned away from the sensual world. It took little account of it and wanted to connect with the All-One in its inner being in a kind of mystical abstraction. This is what attracted Augustine in his later years, and what he presents against the Manichaean doctrine already contains what he had acquired through his immersion in Neoplatonism, in the non-representational, immaterial, non-sensual, abstract world. In relation to the world in which he now placed himself, what Manichaeism could offer him seemed to him, to a certain extent, to be no more than a registering of external, material things, which are then passed off as the divine. But those who come to spiritual science today will first learn to see these things in the right way. Let us consider, from the point of view of today's spiritual science, what may actually be at hand. I have already characterized to you: when one ascends to imaginative, to inspired knowledge, then one gradually becomes acquainted with the inner organs of the human being, concretely acquainted, and it does not result in that mystical world of fog that so many false mystics dream of, but rather it results in an objective insight into the inner organicity of the human being. It is precisely by understanding this inner organicity of man as a result of the spirit, by being able to see through it spiritually, that one gets to know it as material. I will give you an example of this. Let us say that a person who thinks more abstractly gets to know a so-called hypochondriac. An abstract thinker will easily say of a hypochondriac: There is actually nothing particularly wrong with him physically, he is only mentally ill. He is always dwelling too much on his own inner life, he lives entirely absorbed in introspection, as it were, and as a result judges the things of the outer world wrongly, often judging them as if they were persecuting him or the like. In any case, however, he comes into a false relationship with the outer world. And so it easily comes about that we say of the hypochondriac: there is nothing actually wrong with him physically, he is only mentally ill. Such an abstraction comes about because we have not yet penetrated to the actual inner structure of the human organization. This inner structure of the human organization is such that the human being is a threefold creature. There we have the head organization, which, as I have often explained, extends throughout the whole organism, but whose main seat is in the head and is therefore referred to as such; there we have the rhythmic organization of the chest organs, which includes breathing and blood circulation; and there we have everything that exists in the metabolic organism and the limb organism that is connected to it.

Now the fact is that in the head organization the individual organs are turned towards the outer world and are therefore outer sense organs. But in the other limbs of the human organism, too, we find that the organs, in addition to being digestive organs, are also sensory organs to a certain extent, and we find a kind of correspondence, a kind of polarity, between the organs of the head and the organs of metabolism. The organs of metabolism are also sense organs, only they are sense organs that are not directed outwards, but rather to the processes within the human skin. And so we find, for example, that the human being, in his head organization, directed outwards, has the sense of smell; with this he smells what is outside in his environment. Corresponding to this sense of smell, among the digestive organs, is the liver. The liver, so to speak, smells what is inside the person, in its environment. These things must be spoken about quite objectively if one wants to ascend to knowledge at all.

Now, you see, you have to direct your attention to the fact that what is, so to speak, the relationship of the organ of smell to the outside world corresponds to the relationship of the liver to the inner human processes. Now, in a hypochondriac, the liver is always out of order, quite simply as, if you will, a physical organ out of order. That is precisely what occurs in spiritual science, that it not only leads up into a nebulous spiritual realm, but that it also recognizes the material in its essence through the application of its methods, that it can therefore look into the functions of the material. And because liver complaints are usually associated with very little or no pain, they do not appear as a physically perceptible illness, but rather as a mental experience when the liver is not in order and therefore smells wrong on the inside. To the person who really sees through things, the hypochondriac is no different than someone whose liver is not in order and who therefore internally perceives what it very easily perceives as not exactly pleasantly smelling, not in a normal way, but in an overly sensitive way with his sick liver. He constantly smells himself inside, and this smelling, that is what actually underlies the hypochondriacal disposition. You see, you cannot characterize spiritual science as nebulous mysticism, because it leads to a truly objective knowledge of the material world as well. Materialism in particular does not come to these things because it only ever looks at them in abstract forms. Imaginative and inspired knowledge always explains so-called mental illnesses in terms of their physical foundations. From a spiritual scientific point of view, there are many more reasons to explain so-called physical illnesses from a spiritual point of view than there are to explain so-called mental illnesses. As a rule, mental illnesses are the most physical, that is to say, they are based on the most physical causes. And so it must be clear that anyone who sees through the spiritual world will also come to recognize the working of the spiritual in the material. He does not see the liver merely as what it presents itself as to the anatomist who dissects the corpses, but he sees the liver as an organ formed within, which in its outer form differs from the organ of smell, but nevertheless represents a metamorphosis of this organ of smell. And so much of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the material world will be, because he traces it back, I might say, to its spiritual causes, that he points precisely to the revelations of the material, because one recognizes the spiritual much more through the revelation of the material than through all kinds of mystical ravings and mystical nebulous so-called immersions into the inner self. They all arise, after all, from a certain reluctance to concern oneself with real knowledge and to brood over it in one's innermost being, which, after all, arises from nothing more than a certain disposition of physical organs. To practice mysticism in a nebulous sense is itself a kind of mental illness on a physical basis.

You see, something like the seeing of the spiritual in the material, that was what Augustine encountered in Manichaeism. But he was already too much born into - as is well known, he had the Greek mother Monica - the longing to get out of the physical, so that he could not have stuck with it. Therefore, he turned to Neoplatonism, and in this detour through Neoplatonism, he turned to Roman Catholicism.

We can see, then, how in this 4th century, in which the formative years of Augustine's education fall, people actually turned away from the spiritual contemplation of the external world and also of the inner world of man. This turning away was bound to happen. This turning away was bound to happen because man could never have become free, could never have become a free being, if he had felt himself to be only a part of the outer world, as I characterized it in the past evenings. Man had to, so to speak, get out of this amalgamation with the outer world. He had to turn away from the outer world for once. And the culmination of this turning away from the outer world, I would say, the point where man left consciousness: You are a member of the outer world, as the finger is a member of your organism - the culmination lies in this 4th century AD. What characterized the period before this fourth century AD was an evolution of humanity that basically came entirely from the human organism, I would say from the blood. In the southern regions of Europe, in North Africa and the Near East, human beings had already come to be abandoned, as it were, from their own human essence, in so far as it is a physical, an etheric one, and to ascend to an indeterminate state. For one might say that people had to develop into such an emptiness, into a void, where nothing is dependent on blood any more, where what is the view of life is no longer formed from the racial nature of man, people had to develop into such an emptiness in order to enter into intellectuality. What all the individual peoples had developed in terms of worldviews, knowledge and so on before this 4th century AD - of course, this is an approximation when specifying such a point in time - had arisen from their blood blood, just as we develop up to the change of teeth, which we also do not form out of our intelligence, but out of our organic substances, or how we develop up to sexual maturity, finally also out of the organism, and at the same time to the maturity of judgment. Thus everything that these peoples had produced in their old, instinctive imaginations and inspirations developed out of the blood. This had a racial origin everywhere. And when two races, two peoples of different bloods mixed somewhere, then the one people remained down below, they became slaves, while the other population rose to a certain extent, forming the upper ten thousand. Both these social differences and that which lived in the knowledge in the souls of men was entirely a result of race, of blood. But now these southern peoples, these peoples sitting around the Mediterranean, worked their way out of their blood. Now they worked their way through to a, if I may say so, purely spiritual level. For it was in the sphere of the purely spiritual that intelligence had to be developed.

You see, if man had continued to develop only from these Mediterranean peoples after the 4th century AD, he would have been, so to speak, without a foundation. The blood had nothing more to give. From the racial foundations nothing more developed in the way of soul abilities. Man was, so to speak, dependent on developing out of these regions into a vacuum, figuratively speaking.

This vacuum, that is to say this area of development free of racial factors, was now entered by the people of this Mediterranean region. They had to have something else to lean on. They had to receive from outside what used to come to them through their blood. And they received it in that calculating people, who at that time still knew from the old wisdom teachings how things actually are, transferred the old state views of the Roman Empire to the religious realm and founded the outer Catholic Church. This outer Catholic Church preserved what had previously emerged from the different races in the way of spiritual life; it preserved what the ancient times had kept and condensed it into dogmas. These dogmas were to be propagated. Nothing more was brought forth from man, but what was there was condensed into dogmas. And with that, an inanimate element was introduced from which man could really receive from outside what he had previously received from within. For the Latin language was propagated as a dead language, and the life of knowledge proceeded in the Latin language.

And so one had the one spiritual current, which consisted in the fact that what the old view of life had brought ran out, so to speak, in a dead element. If nothing else had come, this dead element would gradually have had to die out. The whole so-called culture would have had to die out. Admittedly, one would have had a high point, for it was a high point that had been lived up to at that time. The Catholic Church itself has taken over many Gnostic, Manichaean elements, only it has discarded the terminology. It has propagated the old world views. She also took up the old cult forms, preserved them and passed them on in a dead language. What thus continued to live was just as incapable of bringing forth anything that could have advanced civilization as, for example, a woman alone is incapable of bringing forth a child.

That was only one side of the being that was now necessary to move forward. The other side of the nature consisted in the fresh blood that the Germanic and other peoples migrating from Eastern Europe had in them. There was blood again. And the peculiar thing was that these peoples, in their development, if we do not take the word now in a judgmental way, but purely objectively in terms of terminology, were lagging behind the southern peoples. The southern peoples had, as it were, advanced at a gallop to the highest level of civilization, from which intellect then emerged. This stood at its highest level of development in the 4th century AD and was now to become established, to continue to live on as a dead intellect. Thus we have the survival of this dead intellect and the emergence of the Germanic blood of the other peoples who emerged to meet it.

If we now study the external historical processes, we come to something extraordinarily interesting. We come to say that in a certain period of time a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of Western life, is taking place. We see, in fact, that in a large, wide area of Europe, the old culture is dying out and a kind of peasant culture is emerging as a result of the so-called migration of peoples. What the upper crust had as their culture in the old Roman Empire is dying out. What remains is what the broad, settled population had, and something similar, albeit different, was also brought by the Germanic tribes. Within this rural way of life, where people actually lived in small village communities and told each other very different things in these small village communities than what the Catholic priests preached to them, within these areas where the village communities were, the Catholic religion was now spread by external power.

That was the one current that was in Latin. What did the people know who saw how their churches were built, how wisdom was passed on in Latin? What did these people, who were the mainstay of the villages at the time, know about what was going on? What they knew about were the stories they told each other in the evening after work, stories that consisted largely of musings, as we have come to know them from the ancient Egyptians and the like.

It was quite a worldview here, going through the time from the 4th to the 8th, 9th, 10th century through the village communities, which had long since been abandoned in the southern regions, at least among the upper crust. A fine culture had long since emerged from these foundations among the upper classes. And now, in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, we see - I have recently explained this in more detail in Dornach, I will only mention it here briefly - how the cities gradually crystallized from the mere village communities. The culture of the city begins, and it is as if the human being is torn away from the outer nature when he is concentrated together in the cities. This city culture, which we can follow from Brittany to Novgorod, deep into the Russian Empire, from above down to Spain, into Italy, everywhere this strange pull towards the city.

And if we look at what actually lives in this transition to urban life, then for those who can study history inwardly, it has a great similarity, an essential similarity to what happened when, after the Trojan War, the cities in Greece developed more out of a farming culture. What happened in Greece in the year 1200 BC was repeated up here now, around the year 950 or thereabouts – all these numbers are approximate – and much as 1200 and 950 years make a difference, so much were these people, who came over from the east as Germanic people, actually behind those in whose area they were now invading. If you add these numbers, the pre-Christian to the post-Christian, you get 2150 or 2160 years, and that is approximately the number of years that lies between two such successive cultures. You can see this from history if you really want to study history. If you ask yourself: how far behind were these Germanic peoples? - it is the length of a cultural epoch. A cultural epoch has lasted just that long, and so one can calculate the degree of maturity of backward peoples by their degree of backwardness.

Now we can also gain a certain clue as to why the fourth cultural epoch, which brought about the actual development of the intellect, begins around 747 BC and, let us say, ends in 1413. That gives you 2160 years. That is the length of such a cultural epoch. Of course, if we go further back, these numbers become somewhat blurred. But that is natural, because historical development cannot be characterized with mathematically exact numbers. These peoples brought something into the blood of the other, the southern population, which was basically there earlier. That was the other current.

And now the world-historical marriage was concluded between what was floating over in the Latin language and what was working its way up to the surface in the vernaculars, in very backward vernaculars. What could develop further had to emerge from these two elements. This then led to the development of the so-called consciousness soul in the 15th century, as I have often mentioned.

The old culture would have had to disappear completely if this new element had not been integrated into it, which in turn was now surrounded by this southern element. The backward and the advanced balanced each other out, and in place of a purely intellectual culture there arose a culture of consciousness.

In this culture, the intellect became a mere shadow. One no longer lived in it as in a grave, but it became a shadowy product, something that only lives in inner activity. And in this way the human being was, as it were, freed from being inwardly possessed by the intellect. He could apply the intellect in his inner activity and could now pass over to the outer observation of nature, as Galilei, Copernicus and Kepler did. But first the intellect had to be freed. If you look at everything that has emerged in European civilization since the beginning of the 15th century, you will see everywhere how it can be traced back to the penetration of this Germanic element into the old Latin-Roman. You can see this quite clearly down to the individual personalities.

Man had, so to speak, stepped into the void by developing from the south. But there was a strong awareness among the leading spirits that with the development of the intellect one enters into something empty. Certain personalities did not want to steer towards something new. If I now hypothetically put this under the aspect of historical development, then what could be said in the time that followed the 4th century AD can be expressed something like this. One could say: We either release the intellect, we let it develop, then the following happens. Whereas in the past what permeated man inwardly with spiritual and soul forces arose from him, he has now reached a highest point where his development has become free, so that he can develop into the void. What no longer clings to his body must, further developed, lead to man penetrating into a spiritual world from without. That was one thing one could have said to oneself. Or one could also say: We retain the old wisdom, we preserve it. Then we can say to people: By developing yourself intellectually up to the 4th century, you have now come to an end. You must not go further. You have come to nothing. Look back now, behind you, not ahead of you; do not continue to walk in the void, so that you may find a new spirituality by walking further. Steeped in this instinct to preserve the old and to hold the intellect back so that it does not develop further, the Eighth General Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869 was convened, which made a Catholic dogma out of what is then expressed in the words: Man has “unam animam rationalem et intellectualem”, he has a soul that is thinking and spiritual. But beyond this soul he has nothing, nothing further that is spiritual, for if anything spiritual had been ascribed to him, the way would have been open for him to develop into a new spirituality. Therefore, the tripartite human being was denied the spirit after body, soul and spirit, and only individual spiritual properties were attributed to his soul. He did not have body, soul and spirit, but body and soul, and the soul had thinking and spiritual properties, was rational and intellectual. It could not go further. That had now become dogma. It was nothing more than a statement of what actually existed in the matter of preserving the old and rationally processing the old, which was also intended to prevent further progress on the path of spiritual development. What was to become the child of the two merging currents was to be extinguished.

And that is what has continued to have an effect over the course of the 15th century and into our time. On the one hand, the human being has instinctively matured to gradually engage the intellect, of which he was already completely master, in inner activity. On the other hand, he was unable to keep this activated but shadowy mind in his spiritually empty interior, where it could have become active only on its own shadowiness. Although one would think that one would not try to process a shadow inwardly, that became the subject of all philosophy of that time, which therefore has only a shadowy quality. This is how Kantianism ultimately came about, which only has forms and categories, and which, like the other philosophies of the time, only splashes around in this shadowy realm.

It thus became clear that a shadowy intellect alone could not be used; it had to be filled with something else, and that is now the other side, and that could only be the outside world, that could only be external nature. This did not happen for some reason, for example, because man was once childlike and now gradually came to an understanding of nature, but because man needed it for his development. He needed fulfillment. In the last four to five centuries, we have experienced this fulfillment. The shadowy mind has taken hold of nature. This led to a climax. Right in the middle of the 19th century, the mind had become most shadowy.

While the mind itself is the most spiritual, it had been completely disregarded because it had become a shadow. But they had a developed, extensive natural science. The intellect had become filled with what nature offered from the outside, but the possibility of seeing the soul was fading more and more. This soul could be seen less and less, because when one turned to the outside world, one actually had only the shadowy intellect. That is why psychology, the study of the soul in the 19th century, became more and more, I would say, nominalistic, pure word skirmishing. It is downright bleak to read in the psychologies of the 19th century how people keep talking about feeling, wanting, thinking, and actually only have the words, until Fritz Mauthner finally comes and makes the great discovery that all knowledge consists of words and that people have only ever been mistaken when they sought for something behind the words.

This is characteristic of the 19th century, not of humanity, but of the 19th century. In this respect, Mauthner's discovery is not so bad after all. The 19th century, especially when it spoke of the soul, only wove in words, until people finally recognized this weaving in words, this constant juggling with thinking, feeling and willing, apperception ion and perception and everything possible, that which has emerged in English psychology since Alume, especially in the 19th century since John Stuart Mill, this juggling with mere words, until it became too stupid for people. And they said: Now we have found out something so beautiful in natural science through experimentation, so we also experiment with the soul. - Devices had been developed that could emit signals when a person had a perception. One could then know when this perception became conscious, when a person moved his hand as a result of this perception; one could experiment nicely. Until recently, the tendency has been to assess children's abilities, not by putting oneself in the child's place, by a certain devotion to this childlike mind, but by using apparatus to test memory, thinking, and all sorts of other things, as is reported, for example, in Russian schools, where the old style of testing is no longer used, but where abilities are determined from the outside with the help of apparatus. However, this Bolshevik view has already penetrated into our areas. Certain opponents of anthroposophy would also like to determine in such an external way whether this anthroposophy is based on truth, but that only corresponds to a Bolshevik prejudice. All this has its origin in the fact that, by ignoring the spirit, people have gradually come to apply the shadowy intellect to nature and, while producing a magnificent natural science, have left the soul-life unconsidered. But now this soul is asserting itself again, from the depths of the human being, and wants to be explored. To do this, it is necessary to go back the way we came, to remember it, so to speak.

Even if modern science believes itself to be independent, it is still under the influence of the dictate of the Church that man consists only of body and soul and has no spirit. We must come to the spirit again. And basically, spiritual science is just this striving to come to the spirit again and thus to explore the soul of man again, that is, to explore man himself. One will pass through an element that is indeed unpleasant for many, through the organization of man; but it is precisely through this that one will find the truly spiritual in man. But that means that spirit must be reintroduced into the contemplation of humanity. Today, however, there is a considerable obstacle to this, a formidable obstacle. One would almost be afraid to speak of this obstacle, because it is very slippery ground, but the whole signature of the time must be examined. People must become aware of what is actually the impulse of our time. You see, we must consider the following.

Since the middle of the 15th century, when man has lived in the shadowy mind and actually experienced his entire soul existence as a shadow, since that time man has been completely dependent on external nature. And so he gradually came to investigate the external phenomena of nature experimentally, not only in the way that Goethe, who was still inspired by the spirit of antiquity, investigated them, but to seek behind the phenomena for something that is basically also only a kind of phenomenon, but which must not be placed within them. Man came to atomism. Man came to think of the sense world as having another invisible sense world, smaller beings, demonic beings, the atoms. Instead of moving on to a spiritual world, he moved on to a duplicate of the sensual world, again to a sensual but fictitious world, and in this way his cognitive faculty froze for the external sense world. And in the course of the 19th century, this produced more and more something that had always been present, but which only emerged with full radicalism from this complete paralysis of the ability to perceive the external sensory world in the 19th century. That was the over-intellectualization of the law of the conservation of energy. It was said: In the universe, new forces do not arise, but the old ones merely change; the sum of the forces remains constant. If we consider any given moment, so to speak cutting out of world events, then up to this moment there was a certain sum of energies; in the next moment these energies have grouped themselves somewhat differently, they have moved around differently, but the energies are the same; they have only changed. The sum of the energies of the cosmos remains the same. You could no longer distinguish two things. It was perfectly correct to say that measure, number and weight remain the same in the energies. But that is confused with the energies themselves.

Now, if this energy doctrine, this law of the constancy of energy, which today dominates all of natural science, were correct, then there would be no freedom, then every idea of freedom would be a mere illusion. Therefore, for the followers of the law of the constancy of energy, freedom increasingly became an illusion. Just imagine how people like Wundt, for example, explain the freedom that one does feel after all. If I, let us say, am the donkey of the famous Buridan between two bundles of hay, left and right, which are the same size and the same taste, then if I were free, that is, if I were not pushed to one side or the other, I would have to starve to death because I could not make up my mind. When I have to decide not only between two such things, but between many, then, according to such psychologists, I am driven to it nevertheless, but because there are so many concepts that shoot into each other, what obsesses me inside and what works in confusion there, I decide at last and, because I cannot see what actually compels me to do it, I get the feeling of freedom. Yes, it is not ridiculous, it is really not ridiculous for the reason that what I have told you now – I did not expect at all that one would begin to laugh – is stated in numerous very learned works as a great achievement of modern thinking, which is born out of natural science; thus it is actually indecent toward science to laugh about something like that. Well, you see, freedom would be impossible if the law of conservation of energy were true. Because then I would be determined by everything that has gone before at every moment, the energies would merely be transformed, and freedom would have to be a mere illusion. This is what has happened as a result of the development of mankind in the 19th century, through the establishment of the law of the constancy of energy, that we have a view of nature that excludes freedom as an idea, makes it impossible, that makes man unconditionally a product of the necessary order of nature. Things were already prepared, I would like to say, people have felt this way for centuries. What about things like moral responsibility, ethics, religious conviction, which really cannot exist if there is only a natural order? The materialists of the 19th century were honest in a way, they therefore denied these ethical illusions of the old days and really did explain man as only a product of natural necessity. But others could not go along with this, partly because they did not have the courage, like David Friedrich Strauf? or Vogt, or partly because they had sinecures within which they were obliged to speak of freedom, ethics, and religion. You can't go into such things there. The matter had been awkward for a long time, and so it came about that people said to themselves: Yes, with science, you can only do something about necessity. This science proves that the world has emerged from a primeval nebula and that each successive state has always necessarily developed from the earlier one, that the sum of forces has remained constant and so on. With this science, there is no starting point for ethics, religion and so on. So away from this science! Nothing with science, only faith! You have to have a double accounting, on the one hand for the outside world, for the natural world: science; on the other hand, faith, which now determines ethics, even proves God. So we save ourselves to a completely different area than that of science.

The after-effects of this peculiar state of affairs can be seen everywhere since the emergence of newer spiritual science. Those who want to save this belief are called Zaun, Niebergall and Gogarten, and I could tell you a whole series of people, Bruhn, Leese, who think that the field of faith must be saved; when science breaks in, things get bad. So science, everything is accepted, everything is allowed to go, only what we want is called something else: faith. Now, as I said, it was the law of the conservation of energy, but that is only a dogmatic, now a scientific-dogmatic prejudice. Because in the end, what does it actually mean? You see, someone can do the experiment, can say: Yes, I stand in front of a bank building and watch how much money is brought in, and form statistics from that. And then I observe how much money is carried out and also make statistics about that, and I see, nevertheless, the same amount of money is carried out that was carried in. Now I am supposed to still rise to the idea that people work in there! What comes out is only the converted money. It is purely the law of the constancy of the size of money. Very nice experiments have been carried out, which, it seems, have been extended to students. The heat energy of the food has been calculated, and it has been calculated what these people have done, and it has been correctly calculated what was eaten and worked out: the law of conservation of energy! This law of conservation of energy is based on nothing more than a whole series of such prejudices. And if we do not rise above this law of conservation of energy, we will continue to extinguish the spiritual with this law of conservation of energy. For this law of conservation of energy is the implantation of intellect in external nature and the disregard of the soul.

We can only penetrate further into the soul if we in turn penetrate into the spiritual , and to penetrate into this spiritual realm means nothing other than to truly understand what actually entered into world evolution at the beginning of the Christian era as a completely new impulse, the Christ Impulse. I have already mentioned that it was understood in the way that it could be understood by one or other school of thought. But today we are compelled to understand it anew. For a time it was understood in such a way that people did not want to admit that the intellect, going out into the void, could come to a new spiritual realization. I have already told you that Neoplatonism took the Christ into the human soul. This has remained the custom until now. As we penetrate outwards, we must also think of the Christ as being connected with the outer world, that is, we must bring him into the evolution of the outer world. But that is precisely what is being fought against in anthroposophy: not only talking about the Christ in empty phrases, but also seeing him in connection with the whole evolution of the world. And when it is said that it is truly a cosmic event, that a cosmic being has really appeared in a human body, in Christ, that just as sunlight on the earthly plane unites with the earth every day, permeating the earth as something cosmic, so too in the spiritual realm such things take place, this is still not understood, especially by today's scholars. But it is necessary that what has been gained in the field of natural science should be applied to the inner world, so that this intellect, which has become a shadow, but precisely for that reason has become applicable to the outer world as a free human faculty, should also become applicable to the inner world. Therefore, the ascent to imagination, to inspiration, must come about, and thus the ascent to real spiritual knowledge must come about.

The necessity of natural science arises from the historical development of humanity, and the necessity of ascending to spiritual science arises from the existence of natural science. Turning to spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense is not a quirk, but an historical fact of development in itself. But, as I said, it is necessary to tread on thin ice in order to point out where the obstacles are. On the one hand, the obstacles are to be found in something like the law of the conservation of energy. In the 19th century, two laws were intended to limit the human intellect in two ways to that which lives only in the earthly-sensual, in the material. One of these laws was decreed by a council of natural scientists as the law of conservation of energy. If this law is correct, then human knowledge cannot advance to the acknowledgment of the spiritual and of freedom, but must remain at the level of a mere mechanical necessity, and then it must remain at the level of a mere soul, which gradually becomes shadowy. But then one cannot go beyond what has already been established by the eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869.

These are the two councils: one that started from the natural science side. The other council stands in polar opposition to it. It is the one that in 1870 declared the infallibility of the papal chair when it speaks ex cathedra. In order to arrive at knowledge, people no longer appeal to the spiritual, but to the Roman Pope. The Pope is the one who decides ex cathedra on what is to be true or false as Catholic doctrine. The decision about truth and error is brought down from spiritual heights to earth, into the material world. Just as our knowledge is immersed in the material world through the law of the constancy of force, so is the living development of the human being in the spiritual immersed in the material through the dogma of infallibility. The two belong together, the two relate to each other like the north and south poles.

What we need in the development of humanity, however, is a free spirituality. The ruler must be the spiritual itself, and man must find his way into the spiritual. Therefore, we need the ascent into the spiritual. We need this ascent to raise ourselves up, on the one hand, from the defeat that the spirit has suffered as a result of the law of the conservation of force being established, and from the other defeat that it has suffered as a result of all that is religious having been materialized by the decision about right and wrong being brought down to earth from Rome. It is understandable that a breakthrough in the path of the spirit is not easy today, because the world is thoroughly superficial and is terribly proud of its superficiality. It lets authorities decide, but the authorities sometimes decide in a very strange way. I recently read an article written by a professor who teaches here but lives in a neighboring town, because a local paper had asked him to give an authoritative judgment on this anthroposophy. This professor wrote all sorts of things in this article. Then, in the middle of it, you come across a strange sentence. It says that I claim, in describing the spiritual world, that one can see in this spiritual world how spiritual entities move freely like tables and chairs in physical space. Now that is Traub's logic! Seeing tables and chairs move in physical space – I don't want to examine the mental state of the author at the moment when he wrote such a sentence! But today the journals turn to people of such spiritual caliber when an authoritative decision is to be made about spiritual science. People are strange sometimes. For example, there is a fence. Because I have to give a lecture tomorrow, I read this booklet by Laun yesterday. I always asked myself: Yes, why does Laun talk such nonsense? I actually couldn't understand it because I didn't hear any human voice; it was something very hollow. However, I did come across a very strange sentence, which roughly reads – I don't have the pamphlet here –: It is true, however, that a Catholic Christian, if he were to judge anthroposophy, would actually be like a person who could not know anything about anthroposophy. – That is literally what it says. You can really believe Canon Laun, because then he says quite correctly: Yes, it would be self-evident that a Catholic Christian cannot know anything, because since July 18, 1919, Christians have been forbidden to read the books. They are not forbidden to write counter-writings, but they are forbidden to read the books! - They are not allowed to know anything. There are really strange people.

And that is just the other extreme, this state of having arrived at a completely passive devotion, now not to a spiritual thing, but to something very worldly, to something that definitely exists in the material world. And so one could enumerate many more examples. If one wanted to describe the morality of our time in a little cultural history, one would find many a cute little document. But I will give you just one more example. Here a dangerous heresy – you can guess what it is – is discussed in a feature from Göttingen. But the editors apparently count on the fact that the readers who read this have not read anything at all, have actually not heard anything correct about the subject under discussion. Therefore, a note of fourteen lines is made, and in these fourteen lines, Anthroposophy and Threefolding. I will spare you the treatise on Anthroposophy; I will just read you the last sentence, which is about the threefolding: “The movement strives for the highest possible development of humanity. It has also defined its views with regard to the state. It seeks a division into economic, financial and cultural states!” There you have the threefold order: in the economic, financial and cultural state! So you see, this is how one tries to educate those one is addressing in such criticisms, and one can educate them in such a way. One writes such articles by making comments in which one shows oneself to be so well informed! It is difficult to really struggle through to an understanding of the spiritual world, especially when on the one hand there is the impulse of world-historical development and on the other hand there is the scientific way of thinking, which, one might say, has only been perverted into its opposite with the discovery of the law of the constancy of energy or power. Much will rise up against this work, which consists in the cognizant grasping of the spiritual world. But this work must be done, and even if the opponents have the power to crush it for a time, it must arise again, because if we are to learn from history, we must not only learn to speak from this history, but we must learn to fuel our will and warm our hearts from this history! If we allow history to have this effect on us, then it will show us what our deeds must fulfill, what must penetrate into the spiritual, into the legal-national, into the economic as spiritual.

That is what I wanted to say in conclusion. I wanted to give you an objective presentation of how natural science grows out of the course of human development, and to give, at the end, this perhaps only as an appendix, the realization that it is a lesson of real history, not an agnostic history, that we have lived through in the 19th century, but that it is a teaching of real history: we human beings, we must through to spiritual knowledge!

My dear friends! You have come together this Christmas, some of you from distant places, to work in the Goetheanum on some matters in the field of spiritual science. At the outset of our considerations I would like to extend to you—especially the friends who have come from afar—our heartiest Christmas greetings. What I myself, occupied as I am with the most manifold tasks, will be able to offer you at this particular time can only be indications in one or another direction. Such indications as will be offered in my lectures, and in those of others, will, we hope, result in a harmony of feeling and thinking among those gathered together here in the Goetheanum. It is also my hope that those friends who are associated with the Goetheanum and more or less permanently residing here will warmly welcome those who have come from elsewhere. Through our working, thinking and feeling together, there will develop what must be the very soul of all endeavors at the Goetheanum; namely, our perceiving and working out of the spiritual life and essence of the world.

If this ideal increasingly becomes a reality, if the efforts of individuals interested in the anthroposophical world conception flow together in true social cooperation, in mutual give and take, then there will emerge what is intended to emerge at the Goetheanum. In this spirit, I extend the heartiest welcome to those friends who have come here from afar as well as to those residing more permanently in Dornach.

The indication that I shall try to give in this lecture course will not at first sight appear to be related to the thought and feeling of Christmas, yet inwardly, I believe, they are so related. In all that is to be achieved at the Goetheanum, we are striving toward the birth of something new, toward knowledge of the spirit, toward a feeling consecrated to the spirit, toward a will sustained by the spirit. This is in a sense the birth of a super-sensible spiritual element and, in a very real way, symbolizes the Christmas thought, the birth of that spiritual Being who produced a renewal of all human evolution upon earth. Therefore, our present studies are, after all, imbued with the character of a Christmas study.

Our aim in these lectures is to establish the moment in history when the scientific mode of thinking entered mankind's development. This does not conflict with what I have just said. If you remember what I described many years ago in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age,¹ you will perceive my conviction that beneath the external trappings of scientific conceptions one can see the first beginnings of a new spirituality. My opinion, based on objective study, is that the scientific path taken by modern humanity was, if rightly understood, not erroneous but entirely proper. Moreover, if regarded in the right way, it bears within itself the seed of a new perception and a new spiritual activity of will. It is from this point of view that I would like to give these lectures. They will not aim at any kind of opposition to science. The aim and intent is instead to discover the seeds of spiritual life in the highly productive modern methods of scientific research. On many occasions I have pointed this out in various way. In lectures given at various times on various areas of natural scientific thinking,² I have given details of the path that I want to characterize in broader outline during the present lectures.

If we want to acquaint ourselves with the real meaning of scientific research in recent times and the mode of thinking that can and does underlie it, we must go back several centuries into the past. The essence of scientific thinking is easily misunderstood, if we look only at the immediate present. The actual nature of scientific research cannot be understood unless its development is traced through several centuries. We must go back to a point in time that I have often described as very significant in modern evolution; namely, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At that time, an altogether different form of thinking, which was still active through the Middle Ages, was supplanted by the dawn of the present-day mode of thought. As we look back into this dawn of the modern age, in which many memories of the past were still alive, we encounter a man in whom we can see, as it were, the whole transition from an earlier to a later form of thinking. He is Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus,³ (Nicholas of Cusa) a renowned churchman and one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was born in 1401, the son of a boatman and vinegrower in the Rhine country of Western Germany, and died in 1464, a persecuted ecclesiastic.⁴ Though he may have understood himself quite well, Cusanus was a person who is in some respects extremely difficult for a modern student to comprehend.

Cusanus received his early education in the community that has been called “The Brethren of the Common Life.”⁵ There he absorbed his earliest impressions, which were of a peculiar kind. It is clear that Nicholas already possessed a certain amount of ambition as a boy, but this was tempered by an extraordinary gift for comprehending the needs of the social life of his time. In the community of the Brethren of the Common Life, persons were gathered together who were dissatisfied with the church institutions and with the monastic and religious orders that, though within the church, were to some degree in opposition to it.

In a manner of speaking, the Brethren of the Common Life were mystical revolutionaries. They wanted to attain what they regarded as their ideal purely by intensification of a life spent in peace and human brotherhood. They rejected any rulership based on power, such as was found in a most objectionable form in the official church at that time. They did not want to become estranged from the world as were members of monastic orders. They stressed physical cleanliness; they insisted that each one should faithfully and diligently perform his duty in external life and in his profession. They did not want to withdraw from the world. In a life devoted to genuine work they only wanted to withdraw from time to time into the depths of their souls. Alongside the external reality of life, which they acknowledged fully in a practical sense, they wanted to discover the depths and inwardness of religious and spiritual feeling. Theirs was a community that above all else cultivated human qualities in an atmosphere where a certain intimacy with God and contemplation of the spirit might abide. It was in this community—at Deventer in Holland—that Cusanus was educated. The majority of the members were people who, in rather narrow circles, fulfilled their duties, and sought in their quiet chambers for God and the spiritual world.

Cusanus, on the other hand, was by nature disposed to be active in outer life and, through the strength of will springing from his knowledge, to involve himself in organizing social life. Thus Cusanus soon felt impelled to leave the intimacy of life in the brotherhood and enter the outer world. At first, he accomplished this by studying jurisprudence. It must be borne in mind, however, that at that time—the early Fifteenth Century—the various sciences were less specialized and had many more points of contact than was the case later on.

So for a while Cusanus practiced law. His was an era, however, in which chaotic factors extended into all spheres of social life. He therefore soon wearied of his law practice and had himself ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He always put his whole heart into whatever he did, and so he now became a true priest of the Papal church. He worked in this capacity in the various clerical posts assigned to him, and he was particularly active at the Council of Basle (1431–1449).⁶ There he headed a minority whose ultimate aim it was to uphold the absolute power of the Holy See.⁷ The majority, consisting for the most part of bishops and cardinals from the West, were striving after a more democratic form, so to speak, of church administration. The pope, they thought, should be subordinated to the councils. This led to a schism in the Council. Those who followed Cusanus moved the seat of the Council to the South; the others remained in Basle and set up an anti-pope.⁸ Cusanus remained firm in his defense of an absolute papacy. With a little insight it is easy to imagine the feelings that impelled Cusanus to take this stand. He must have felt that whatever emerged from a majority could at best lead only to a somewhat sublimated form of the same chaos already existing in his day. What he wanted was a firm hand that would bring about law and order, though he did want firmness permeated with insight. When he was sent to Middle Europe later on, he made good this desire by upholding consolidation of the Papal church.⁹ He was therefore, as a matter of course, destined to become a cardinal of the Papal church of that time.

As I said earlier, Nicholas probably understood himself quite well, but a latter-day observer finds him hard to understand. This becomes particularly evident when we see this defender of absolute papal power traveling from place to place and—if the words he then spoke are taken at face value—fanatically upholding the papistical Christianity of the West against the impending danger of a Turkish invasion.¹⁰ On the one hand, Cusanus (who in all likelihood had already been made a cardinal by that time) spoke in flaming words against the infidels. In vehement terms he summoned Europe to unite in resistance to the Turkish threat from Asia. On the other hand, if we study a book that Cusanus probably composed¹¹ in the very midst of his inflammatory campaigns against the Turks, we find something strange. In the first place, Cusanus preaches in the most rousing manner against the imminent danger posed by the Turks, inciting all good men to defend themselves against this peril and thus save European civilization. But then Cusanus sits down at his desk and writes a treatise on how Christians and Jews, pagans and Moslems—provided they are rightly understood—can be brought to peaceful cooperation, to the worship and recognition of the one universal God; how in Christians, Jews, Moslems and heathens there dwells a common element that need only be discovered to create peace among mankind. Thus the most conciliatory sentiments in regard to religions and denominations flow from this man's quiet private chamber, while he publicly calls for war in the most fanatical words.

This is what makes it hard to understand a man like Nicholas Cusanus. Only real insight that age can make him comprehensible but he must be viewed in the context of the inner spiritual development of his time. No criticism is intended. We only want to see the external side of this man, with the furious activity that I have described, and then to see what was living in his soul. We simply want to place the two aspects side by side.

We can best observe what took place in Cusanus's mind if we study the mood he was in while returning from a mission to Constantinople¹² on the behalf of the Holy See. His task was to work for the reconciliation of the Western and Eastern churches. On his return voyage, when he was on the ship and looking at the stars, there arose in him the fundamental thought, the basic feeling, incorporated in the book that he published in 1440 under the title De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance).¹³

What is the mood of this book? Cardinal Cusanus had, of course, long since absorbed all the spiritual knowledge current in the Middle Ages. He was well versed also in what the medieval schools of Neo-Platonism and Neo-Aristotelianism had attained. He was also quite familiar with the way Thomas Aquinas had spoken of the spiritual worlds as though it were the most normal thing for human concepts to rise from sense perception to spirit perception. In addition to his mastery of medieval theology, he had a thorough knowledge of the mathematical conceptions accessible to men of that time. He was an exceptionally good mathematician. His soul, therefore, was filled on the one side with the desire to rise through theological concepts to the world of spirit that reveals itself to man as the divine and, on the other side, with all the inner discipline, rigor and confidence that come to a man who immerses himself in mathematics. Thus he was both a fervent and an accurate thinker.

When he was crossing the sea from Constantinople to the West and looking up at the starlit sky, his twofold soul mood characterized above revolved itself in the following feeling. Thenceforth, Cusanus conceived the deity as something lying outside human knowledge. He told himself: “We can live here on earth with our knowledge, with our concepts and thoughts. By means of these we can take hold of what surrounds us in the kingdom of nature. But these concepts grow ever more lame when we direct our gaze upward to what reveals itself as the divine.”

In Scholasticism, arising from quite another viewpoint, a gap had opened up between knowledge and revelation.¹⁴ This gap now became the deepest problem of Cusanus's soul, the most intimate concern of the heart. Repeatedly he sent through this course of reasoning, repeatedly he saw how thinking extends itself over everything surrounding man in nature; how it then tries to raise itself above this realm to the divinity of thoughts; and how, there, it becomes ever more tenuous until it finally completely dissipates into nothingness as it realizes that the divine lies beyond that void into which thinking has dissipated. Only if a man has developed (apart form this life in thought) sufficient fervent love to be capable of continuing further on this path that his though has traversed, only if love gains the lead over thought, then this love can attain the realm into which knowledge gained only by thinking cannot reach.

It therefore became a matter of deep concern for Cusanus to designate the actual divine realm as the dimension before which human thought grows lame and human knowledge is dispersed into nothingness. This was his docta ignorantia, his learned ignorance. Nicholas Cusanus felt that when erudition, knowledge, assumes in the noblest sense a state of renouncing itself at the instant when it thinks to attain the spirit, then it achieves its highest form, it becomes docta ignorantia. It was in this mood that Cusanus published his De Docta Ignorantia in 1440.

Let us leave Cusanus for the moment, and look into the lonely cell of a medieval mystic who preceded Cusanus. To the extent that this man has significance for spiritual science, I described him in my book on mysticism. He is Meister Eckhart,¹⁵ a man who was declared a heretic by the official church. There are many ways to study the writings of Meister Eckhart and one can delight in the fervor of his mysticism. It is perhaps most profoundly touching if, through repeated study, the reader comes upon a fundamental mood of Eckhart's soul.

I would like to describe it as follows. Though living earlier than Cusanus, Meister Eckhart too was imbued through and through with what medieval Christian theology sought as an ascent to the divine, to the spiritual world. When we study Meister Eckhart's writings, we can recognize Thomistic shades of thought in many of his lines. But each time Meister Eckhart's soul tries to rise from theological thinking to the actual spiritual world (with which it feels united,) it ends

By saying to itself that with all this thinking and theology it cannot penetrate to its innermost essence, to the divine inner spark. It tells itself: This thinking, this theology, these ideas, give me fragments of something here, there, everywhere. But none of these are anything like the spiritual divine spark in my own inner being. Therefore, I am excluded from all thoughts, feelings, and memories that fill my soul, from all knowledge of the world that I can absorb up to the highest level. I am excluded from it all, even though I am seeking the deepest nature of my own being. I am in nothingness when I seek this essence of myself. I have searched and searched. I traveled many paths, and they brought me many ideas and feelings, and on these paths I found much. I searched for my “I,” but before ever I found it, I fell into “nothingness” in this search for the “I,” although all the kingdoms of nature urged me to the search.

So, in his search for the self, Meister Eckhart felt that he had fallen into nothingness. This feeling evoked in this medieval mystic words that profoundly touch the heart and soul. They can be paraphrased thus: “I submerge myself in God's nothingness, and am eternally, through nothingness, through nothing, an I; through nothing, I become an I. In all eternity, I must etch the I from the ‘nothingness’ of God.”¹⁶ These are powerful words. Why did this urge for “nothing,” for finding that I in nothingness, resound in the innermost chamber of this mystic's heart, when he wanted to pass from seeking the world to seeking the I? Why? If we go back into earlier times, we find that in former ages it was possible, when the soul turned its gaze inward into itself, to behold the spirit shining forth within. This was still a heritage of primeval pneumatology, of which we shall speak later on. When Thomas Aquinas, for example, peered into the soul, he found within the soul a weaving, living spiritual element. Thomas Aquinas¹⁷ and his predecessors sought the essential ego not in the soul itself but in the spiritual dwelling in the soul. They looked through the soul into the spirit, and in the spirit they found their God-given I. And they said, or could have said: I penetrate into my inmost soul, gaze into the spirit, and in the spirit I find the I.—In the meantime, however, in humanity's forward development toward the realm of freedom, men had lost the ability to find the spirit when they looked inward into themselves.

An earlier figure such as John Scotus Erigena (810–880) would not have spoken as did Meister Eckhart. He would have said: I gaze into my being. When I have traversed all the paths that led me through the kingdoms of the outer world, then I discover the spirit in my inmost soul. Thereby, I find the “I” weaving and living in the soul. I sink myself as spirit into the Divine and discover “I.”

It was, alas, human destiny that the path that was still accessible to mankind in earlier centuries was no longer open in Meister Eckhart's time. Exploring along the same avenues as John Scotus Erigena or even Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart could not sink himself into God-the-Spirit, but only into the “nothingness” of the Divine, and from this “nothing” he had to take hold of the I. This shows that mankind could no longer see the spirit in inner vision. Meister Eckhart brought the I out of the naught through the deep fervor of his heart. His successor, Nicholas Cusanus,¹⁸ admits with complete candor: All thoughts and ideas that lead us in our exploration of the world become lame, become as nothing, when we would venture into the realm of spirit. The soul has lost the power to find the spirit realm in its inner being. So Cusanus says to himself: When I experience everything that theology can give me, I am led into this naught of human thinking. I must unite myself with what dwells in this nothingness in order to at least gain in the docta ignorantia the experience of the spirit.—Then, however, such knowledge, such perception, cannot be expressed in words. Man is rendered dumb when he has reached the point at which he can experience the spirit only through the docta ignorantia.

Thus Cusanus is the man who in his own personal development experiences the end of medieval theology and is driven to the docta ignorantia. He is, however, at the same time a skillful mathematician. He has the disciplined thinking that derives from the pursuit of mathematics. But he shies away, as it were, from applying his mathematical skills to the docta ignorantia. He approaches the docta ignorantia with all kinds of mathematical symbols and formulas, but he does this timidly, diffidently. He is always conscious of the fact that these are symbols derived from mathematics. He says to himself: Mathematics is the last remnant left to me from ancient knowledge. I cannot doubt its reliability as I can doubt that of theology, because I actually experience its reliability when I apprehend mathematics with my mind.—At the same time, his disappointment with theology is so great he dares not apply his mathematical skills in the field of the docta ignorantia except in the form of symbols.

This is the end of one epoch in human thinking. In his inner mood of soul, Cusanus was almost as much of a mathematician as was Descartes later on, but he dared not try to grasp with mathematics what appeared to him in the manner he described in his Docta Ignorantia He felt as though the spirit realm had withdrawn from mankind, had vanished increasingly into the distance, and was unattainable with human knowledge. Man must become ignorant in the innermost sense in order to unite himself in love with this realm of the spirit.

This mood pervades Cusanus's Docta Ignorantia published in 1440. In the development of Western civilization, men had once believed that they confronted the spirit-realm in close perspective. But then, this spirit realm became more and more remote from those men who observed it, and finally it vanished. The book of 1440 was a frank admission that the ordinary human comprehension of that time could no longer reach the remote perspectives into which the spirit realm has withdrawn. Mathematics, the most reliable of the sciences, dared to approach only with symbolic formulas what was no longer beheld by the soul. It was as though this spirit realm, receding further and further in perspective, had disappeared from European civilization. But from the opposite direction, another realm was coming increasingly into view. This was the realm of the sense world, which European civilization was beginning to observe and like. In 1440, Nicholas Cusanus applied mathematical thinking and mathematical knowledge to the vanishing spirit realm only by a timid use of symbols; but now Nicholas Copernicus boldly and firmly applied them to the outer sense world. In 1440 the Docta Ignorantia appeared with the admission that even with mathematics one can no longer behold the spirit realm. We must conceive the spirit realm as so far removed from human perception that even mathematics can approach it only with halting symbols; this is what Nicholas Cusanus said in 1440. “Conceive of mathematics as so powerful and reliable that it can force the sense world into mathematical formulas that are scientifically understandable.” This is what Nicholas Copernicus said to European civilization in 1543. In 1543 Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies,) where the universe was depicted so boldly and rudely that it had to surrender itself to mathematical treatment.

One century lies between the two. During this century Western science was born. Earlier, it had been in an embryonic state. Whoever wants to understand what led to the birth of Western science, must understand this century that lies between the Docta Ignorantia and the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Even today, if we are to understand the true meaning of science, we must study the fructifications that occurred at that time in human soul life and the renunciations it had to experience. We must go back this far in time. If we want to have the right scientific attitude, we must begin there, and we must also briefly consider the embryonic state preceding Nicholas Cusanus. Only then can we really comprehend what science can accomplish for mankind and see how new spiritual life can blossom forth from it.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1960) (formerly published as Eleven European Mystics).
• 2 . These include the three natural scientific courses held in Stuttgart: First First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977); Second Scientific Lecture Course: Warmth Course (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1981); and Das Verhältnis der verschiedenen naturwissenschaftlichen Gebiete sur Astronomie. (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag). The relationship between natural science and spiritual science is dealt with in The Boundaries of Natural Science (Spring Valley, NY, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 3 . Nicholas Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), 1401–1464. Lawyer, churchman, philosopher, mathematician. Ordained priest between 1436–1440, Cardinal 1448. Bishop of Brixen, 1450. cf. chapter on Cusanus in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 4 . Nicholas Cusanus was made Cardinal and named Bishop of Brixen in rapid succession. Though a stranger to Brixen he was named Bishop there directly by the Pope. This led to a protracted conflict with his diocese, during which the latter gathered behind the Duke of Tirol. Cusa was ambushed by the Duke, imprisoned, and forced into accepting a demeaning agreement. The Duke was excommunicated by the Pope and attacked by the Swiss Confederation. However, he was supported by German Counts and remained intransigent. Cusa died before the Emperor could resolve the conflict. The battles around him did not rob Cusa of his peace of mind, and he developed his philosophic, mathematical and theological insights, writing fifteen of his works during the time in Brixen.
• 5 . Brethren of Common Life (also of Good Will): Founded by Gerhart Groote around 1376. Brother-houses in Holland, Northern Germany, Italy and Portugal. Brought into the Catholic Church in the Fifteenth Century. Their schools taught under the strict observance of dogma.
• 6 . Council of Basel: 1431–1449. Called by Pope Martin V on July 23, 1431, the year of his death. This was the last of four reformatory councils with the aim of ending the division in the Church. There came a new rift in the Church.
• 7 . In 1437. This summarizes a long process: Cusanus entered the Council 1432 with the task from the Archdiocese of Trier to defend their Archbishop, whom they had chosen against the will of the Pope. Through the treatise De Concordantia Catholica (On Catholic Unity) which he distributed among the Council and which contained an exceptional survey of the decisions of the Councils and Decrees of the Church, he offered the advice welcome by the majority that the Common Council was beyond the Pope. Thus, he immediately became an important figure in the Council.
  
  Later, the Council majority and the history writings accused Cusanus of having changed his conviction. But Cusanus' deep understanding was ignored, which was rooted in his attitude and which comes to expression in the following words: “When a decision is made unanimously, then one can believe that it came from the Holy Spirit. It lies not in men's power to meet somewhere, and although they are so different from each other, they are able to come to a harmonious decision. It is God's work.” (From J.M. Duex, Der Deutsche Cardinal Nicolaus Von Cusa, Regensburg 1874, Bd. 2, s. 262, which has translated some of the most important of the De Concordantia Catholica. Cusanus must have experienced at the Council that his description of the meaning of a Council was not taken with interest, and he must have faced a decision that is mentioned in the lecture.
• 8 . Pope Eugene 4th was put down and Duke Amadeus of Savoy was set up as Pope Felix 5th in 1439. His resignation in 1449 caused the disbandment of the Council.
• 9 . From 1439–1448 Cusanus acted on the order of the Pope as “Hercules of the Eugenians” as an opponent called him. He went to worldly and churchly princes as well as to the “Reichstag,” and he tried to overcome the neutrality of the Germans about the split of churches, with complete success.
• 10. At the meetings of the princes, 1454, in Nuremberg, Regensburg, and Frankfurt after the invasion of Constantinople by the Turkish, Cusanus tried to motivate the princes to a crusade. After J. Hunnyadis' victory over the Turkish Army in front of Belgrade in 1456 Cusanus organized, at the same day he received the message, a festival of thanksgiving, and he spoke the following words: “Because the lower man can only enjoy life animal-like and physical, Satan who wants to destroy the Gospels in a fine way, intended the appearance of Muhammad who knows the Gospel and the Bible, to let him give the Gospel and Bible an animal-like, sensual meaning. In this way Satan taught Muhammad knowledge to let go forth the head of Malignity, the son of Ruin, and to be an enemy of the cross of Christ.” (From a sermon, “Landaus Invocalo Dominum,” partly translated by J.M. Duex A.A.O.S. 165). Further sermons against the Turks are known from October 28, and November 5 of the same year. (E. Varisteenberge, Le Cardinal Nicolas De Cues, Paris 1920, S. 231 F, and index of sermons s. 480), but this sermon seems to be available only in Latin.
  
  Cusanus himself announced his appointment as Cardinal with a short autobiographical note in which is written: Nicolas was made Cardinal secretly by Pope Eugene (Hist. Jahrbuch der Goerrers Gesellschaft 16.S.549).
• 11. De Pace Fidei (On the Peace of the Faiths), written in September 1453. “The horrible days of Constantinople ... had caused a deep feeling of sadness in the breast of a man who once had wandered through this region, and caused him to sink into deep contemplation, and he had a vision. In this sublime state, he particularly thinks about the differences of the religions of the world, and the possibility of their harmony. This harmony is, in his opinion, a basic condition for religious peace.” (Introduction to De Pace Fidei: Nach Duex A.A.O.S. 405).
• 12. Cusanus left Basel in May 1437 together with other representatives of the minority and traveled for the minority with the legation of the Pope to Constantinople to accompany the Greek Emperor and the heads of the Eastern Church to the Union Council in Ferrara. They arrived in February 1438 in Italy.
• 13. De Docta Ignorantia (The Learned Ignorance). Three books finished in February 1440.
• 14. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 15. Meister Eckhart: Hochheim by Gotha about 1260–before 1328, Cologne. Dominican, schoolmaster, German mystic. Preached in leading posts in orders and churches; taught in Paris, Strasbourg, Cologne. Main work: Opus Tripartius. Based on Scholasticism and writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. Copies of his sermons partly went around without his control. Meister Eckhart died, accused as heretic, during the trial. See chapter, “Meister Eckhart,” in Rudolf Steiner's Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 16. These lines cannot be made clear and simple because the German text plays at length on the words Nicht and Ich.
• 17. Thomas Aquinas: Castle Roccasecca in the Neopolitan region, about 1225–1274 Cloister Fossanuova. Dominican, scholar, churchman. In Cologne, student and friend of Albertus Magnus. Advocated the spiritual reality of general concepts. He directed the theological school in Rome from 1261–1267. There the studies of the Dominican; from 1268 onwards he is teaching in Naples and France. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking and Riddles of Philosophy (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 18. Nicholas Copernicus: Thorn 1473–1543 Frauenburg. Humanist, mathematician, astronomer, physician, lawyer. No publications during his life, with the exception of a translation. Finished his work on the heliocentric planetary system around 1507. Copernicus was already on his deathbed when his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published. He dedicated it to Pope Paul III. His friend and publisher introduced it as a purely hypothetical, special scientific method of calculation. It thus slipped past the censor, until the third edition was banned in 1616/17. Not until 1822 was it accepted by the Catholic Church, cf. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).

The view of history forming the basis of these lectures may be called symptomatological What takes place in the depths of human evolution sends out waves, and these waves are the symptoms that we will try to describe and interpret. In any serious study of history, this must be the case. The processes and events occurring at any given time in the depths of evolution are so manifold and so significant that we can never do more than hint at what is going on the depths. This we do by describing the waves that are flung up. They are symptoms of what is actually taking place.

I mention this because, in order to characterize the birth of the scientific form of thinking and research I described two men, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, in my last lecture. What can be historically observed in the soul and appearance of such men I consider to be symptoms of what goes on in the depths of general human development; this is why I give such descriptions. There are in any given case only a couple of images cast up to the surface that we can intercept by looking into one or another soul. Yet, by doing this, we can describe the basic nature of successive time periods.

When I described Cusanus yesterday, my intention was to suggest how all that happened in the early fifteenth century in mankind's spiritual development, which was pressing forward to the scientific method of perception, is symptomatically revealed in his soul. Neither the knowledge that the mind can gather through the study of theology nor the precise perceptions of mathematics can lead any longer to a grasp of the spiritual world. The wealth of human knowledge, its concepts and ideas, come to a halt before that realm. The fact that one can do no more than write a “docta ignorantia” in the face of the spiritual world comes to expression in Cusanus in a remarkable way. He could go no further with the form of knowledge that, up to his time, was prevalent in human development.

As I pointed out, this soul mood was already present in Meister Eckhart. He was well versed in medieval theological knowledge. With it, he attempted to look into this own soul and to find therein the way to the divine spiritual foundations. Meister Eckhart arrived at a soul mood that I illustrated with one his sentences. He said—and he made many similar statements—“I sink myself into the naught of the divine, and out of nothing become an I in eternity.” He felt himself arriving at nothingness with traditional knowledge. Out of this nothingness, after the ancient wisdom's loss of all persuasive power he had to produce out of his own soul the assurance of his own I, and he did it by this statement.

Looking into this matter more closely, we see how a man like Meister Eckhart points to an older knowledge that has come down to him through the course of evolution. It is knowledge that still gave man something of which he could say: This lives in me, it is something divine in me, it is something. But now, in Meister Eckhart's own time, the most profound thinkers had been reduced to the admission: When I seek this something here or there, all knowledge of this something does not suffice to bring me certainty of my own being. I must proceed from the Something to the Nothing and then, in an act of creation, kindle to life the consciousness of self out of naught.

Now, I want to place another man over against these two. This other man lived 2,000 years earlier and for his time he was as characteristic as Cusanus (who followed in Meister Eckhart's footsteps) was for the fifteenth century. This backward glance into ancient times is necessary so that we can better understand the quest for knowledge that surfaced in the Fifteenth Century from the depths of the human soul. The man whom I want to speak about today is not mentioned in any history book or historical document, for these do not go back as far as the Eighth Century B.C. Yet, we can only gain information concerning the origin of science if, through spiritual science, through purely spiritual observation, we go farther back than external historical documents can take us. The man I have in mind lived about 2,000 years prior to the present period (the starting point of which I have assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century.) This man of pre-Christian times was accepted into a so-called mystery school of Southeastern Europe. There he heard everything that the teachers of the mysteries could communicate to their pupils concerning spiritual wisdom, truths concerning the spiritual beings that lived and still live in the cosmos. But the wisdom that this man received from his teachers was already more or less traditional. It was a recollection of far older visions, a recapitulation of what wise men of a much more ancient age had beheld when they directed their clairvoyant sight into the cosmic spaces whence the motions and constellations of the stars had spoken to them. To the sages of old, the universe was not the machine, the mechanical contraption that it is for men of today when they look out into space to the wise men of ancient times. The cosmic spaces were like living beings, permeating everything with spirit and speaking to them in cosmic language. They experienced themselves within the spirit of world being. They felt how this, in which they lived and moved, spoke to them, how they could direct their questions concerning the riddles of the universe to the universe itself and how, out of the widths of space, the cosmic phenomena replied to them. This is how they experienced what we, in a weak and abstract way, call “spirit” in our language. Spirit was experienced as the element that is everywhere and can be perceived from anywhere. Men perceived things that even the Greeks no longer beheld with the eye of the soul, things that had faded into a nothingness for the Greeks.

This nothingness of the Greeks, which had been filled with living content for the earliest wise men of the Post-Atlantean age,¹⁹ was named by means of words customary for that time. Translated into our language, though weakened and abstract, those words would signify “spirit.” What later became the unknown, the hidden god, was called spirit in those ages when he was known. This is the first thing to know about those ancient times.

The second thing to know is that when a man looked with his soul and spirit vision into himself, he beheld his soul. He experienced it as originating from the spirit that later on became the unknown god. The experience of the ancient sage was such that he designated the human soul with a term that would translate in our language into “spirit messenger” or simply “messenger.”

If we put into a diagram what was actually seen in those earliest times, we can say: The spirit was considered the world-embracing element, apart from which there was nothing and by which everything was permeated. This spirit, which was directly perceptible in its archetypal form, was sought and found in the human soul, inasmuch as the latter recognized itself as the messenger of this spirit. Thus the soul was referred to as the “messenger.”

If we put into a diagram what was actually seen in those earliest times, we can say: The spirit was considered the world-embracing element, apart from which there was nothing and by which everything was permeated. This spirit, which was directly perceptible in its archetypal form, was sought and found in the human soul, inasmuch as the latter recognized itself as the messenger of this spirit. Thus the soul was referred to as the “messenger.”

A third aspect was external nature with all that today is called the world of physical matter, of bodies. I said above that apart from spirit there was nothing, because spirit was perceived by direct vision everywhere in its archetypal form. It was seen in the soul, which realized the spirit's message in its own life. But the spirit was likewise recognized in what we call nature today, the world of corporeal things. Even his bodily world was looked upon as an image of the spirit.

In those ancient times, people did not have the conceptions that we have today of the physical world. Wherever they looked, at whatever thing or form of nature, they beheld an image of the spirit, because they were still capable of seeing the spirit, a fragment of nature. Inasmuch as all other phenomena of nature were images of the spirit, the body of man too was an image of the spirit. So when this ancient man looked at himself, he recognized himself as a threefold being. In the first place, the spirit lived in him as in one of its many mansions. Man knew himself as spirit. Secondly, man experienced himself within the world as a messenger of this spirit, hence as a soul being. Thirdly, man experienced his corporeality; and by means of this body he felt himself to be an image of the spirit.²⁰ Hence, when man looked upon his own being, he perceived himself as a threefold entity of spirit, soul, and body: as spirit in his archetypal form; as soul, the messenger of god; as body, the image of the spirit.

This ancient wisdom contained no contradiction between body and soul or between nature and spirit; because one knew: Spirit is in man in its archetypal form; the soul is none other than the message transmitted by spirit; the body is the image of spirit. Likewise, no contract was felt between man and surrounding nature because one bore an image of spirit in one's own body, and the same was true of every body in external nature. Hence, an inner kinship was experienced between one's own body and those in outer nature, and nature was not felt to be different from oneself. Man felt himself at one with the whole world. He could feel this because he could behold the archetype of spirit and because the cosmic expanses spoke to him. In consequence of the universe speaking to man, science simply could not exist. Just as we today cannot build a science of external nature out of what lives in our memory, ancient man could not develop one because, whether he looked into himself or outward at nature, he beheld the same image of spirit. No contrast existed between man himself and nature, and there was none between soul and body. The correspondence of soul and body was such that, in a manner of speaking, the body was only the vessel, the artistic reproduction, of the spiritual archetype, while the soul was the mediating messenger between the two. Everything as in a state of intimate union. There could be no question of comprehending anything. We grasp and comprehend what is outside our own life. Anything that we carry within ourselves is directly experienced and need not be first comprehended.

Prior to Roman and Greek times, this wisdom born of direct perception still lived in the mysteries. The man I referred to above heard about his wisdom, but he realized that the teachers in his mystery school were speaking to him only out of a tradition preserved from earlier ages. He no longer heard anything original, anything gained by listening to the secrets of the cosmos. This man undertook long journeys and visited other mystery centers, but it was the same wherever he went. Already in the Eight Century B.C., only traditions of the ancient wisdom were preserved everywhere. The pupils learned them from the teachers, but the teachers could no longer see them, at least not in the vividness of ancient times.

But this man whom I have in mind had an unappeasable urge for certainty and knowledge. From the communications passed on to him, he gathered that once upon a time men had indeed been able to hear the harmony of the spheres from which resounded the Logos that was identical with the spiritual archetype of all things. Now, however, it was all tradition. Just as 2,000 years later Meister Eckhart, working out the traditions of his age, withdrew into his quiet monastic cell in search of the inner power source of soul and self, and at length came to say, “I sink myself into the nothingness of God, and experience in eternity, in naught, the ‘I’,”—just so, the lonely disciple of the late mysteries said to himself: “I listen to the silent universe and fetch²¹ the Logos-bearing soul out of the silence. I love the Logos because the Logos brings tidings of an unknown god.”

This was an ancient parallel to the admission of Meister Eckhart. Just as the latter immersed himself into the naught of the divine that Medieval theology had proclaimed to him and, out of this void, brought out the “I,” so that ancient sage listened to a dumb and silent world; for he could no longer hear what traditional wisdom taught him. The spirit-saturated soul had one drawn the ancient wisdom from the universe. This had not turned silent, but still he had a Logos-bearing soul. And he loved the Logos even though it was no longer the godhead of former ages, but only an image of the divine. In other words, already then, the spirit had vanished from the soul's sight. Just as Meister Eckhart later had to seek the “I” in nothingness, so at that time the soul had to be sought in the dispirited world.

Indeed, in former times the souls had the inner firmness needed to say to themselves: In the inward perception of the spirit indwelling me, I myself am something divine. But now, for direct perception, the spirit no longer inhabited the soul. No longer did the soul experience itself as the spirit's messenger, for one must know something in order to be its messenger. Now, the soul only felt itself as the bearer of the Logos, the spirit image; though this spirit image was vivid in the soul. It expressed itself in the love for this god who thus still lived in his image in the soul. But the soul no longer felt like the messenger, only the carrier, of an image of the divine spirit. One can say that a different form of knowledge arose when man looked into his inner being. The soul declined from messenger to bearer.

Soul: Bearer

Body: Force

Since the living spirit had been lost to human perception, the body no longer appeared as the image of spirit. To recognize it as such an image, one would have had to perceive the archetype. Therefore, for this later age, the body changed into something that I would like to call “force.” The concept of force emerged. The body was pictured as a complex of forces, no longer as a reproduction, an image, that bore within itself the essence of what it reproduced. The human body became a force which no longer bore the substance of the source from which it originated.

Not only the human body, but in all of nature, too, forces had to be pictured everywhere. Whereas formerly, nature in all its aspects had been an image of spirit, now it had become forces flowing out of the spirit. This, however, implied that nature began to be something more or less foreign to man. One could say that the soul had lost something since it no longer contained direct spirit awareness. Speaking crudely, I would have to say that the soul had inwardly become more tenuous, while the body, the external corporeal world, had gained in robustness. Earlier, as an image, it still possessed some resemblance to the spirit. Now it became permeated by the element of force. The complex of forces is more robust than the image in which the spiritual element is still recognizable. Hence, again speaking crudely, the corporeal world became denser while the soul became more tenuous. This is what arose in the consciousness of the men among whom lived the ancient wise man mentioned above, who listened to the silent universe and from its silence, derived the awareness that at least his soul was a Logos-bearer.

Now, a contrast that had not existed before arose between the soul, grown more tenuous, and the increased density of the corporeal world. Earlier, the unity of spirit had been perceived in all things. Now, there arose the contrast between body and soul, man and nature. Now appeared a chasm between body and soul that had not been present at all prior to the time of this old sage. Man now felt himself divided as well from nature, something that also had not been the case in the ancient times. This contrast is the central trait of all thinking in the span of time between the old sage I have mentioned and Nicholas Cusanus.

Men now struggle to comprehend the connection between, on one hand, the soul, that lacks spirit reality, and on the other hand, the body that has become dense, has turned into force, into a complex of forces.

And men struggle to feel and experience the relationship between man and nature. But everywhere, nature is force. In that time, no conception at all existed as yet of what we call today “the laws of nature.” People did not think in terms of natural laws; everywhere and in everything they felt the forces of nature. When a man looked into his own being, he did not experience a soul that—as was the case later one—bore within itself a dim will, an almost equally dim feeling, and an abstract thinking. Instead, he experienced the soul as the bearer of the living Logos, something that was not abstract and dead, but a divine living image of God.

We must be able to picture this contrast, which remained acute until the eleventh or Twelfth century. It was quite different from the contrasts that we feel today. If we cannot vividly grasp this contrast, which was experienced by everyone in that earlier epoch, we make the same mistake as all those historians of philosophy who regard the old Greek thinker Democritus²² of the fifth century B.C. as an atomist in the modern sense, because he spoke of “atoms.” The words suggest a resemblance, but no real resemblance exists. There is great difference between modern-day atomists and Democritus. His utterances were based on the awareness of the contrast described above between man and nature, soul and body. His atoms were complexes of force and as such were contrasted with space, something a modern atomist cannot do in that manner. How could the modern atomist say what Democritus said: “Existence is not more than nothingness, fullness is not more than emptiness?” It implies that Democritus assumed empty space to possess an affinity with atom-filled space. This has meaning only within a consciousness that as yet has no idea of the modern concept of body. Therefore, it cannot speak of the atoms of a body, but only of centers of force, which, in that case, have an inner relationship to what surrounds man externally. Today's atomist cannot equate emptiness with fullness. If Democritus had viewed emptiness the way we do today, he could not have equated it with the state of being. He could do so because in this emptiness he sought the soul that was the bearer of the Logos. And though he conceived his Logos in a form of necessity, it was the Greek form of necessity, not our modern physical necessity. If we are to comprehend what goes on today, we must be able to look in the right way into the nuances of ideas and feelings of former times.

There came the time, described in the last lecture, of Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, when even awareness of the Logos indwelling the soul was lost. The ancient sage, in listening to the universe, only had to mourn the silence, but Meister Eckhart and Cusanus found the naught and had to seek the I out of nothingness. Only now, at this point, does the modern era of thinking begin. The soul now no longer contains the living Logos. Instead, when it looks into itself, it finds ideas and concepts, which finally lead to abstractions. The soul has become even more tenuous. A third phase begins. Once upon a time, in the first phase, the soul experienced the spirit's archetype within itself. It saw itself as the messenger of spirit. In the second phase, the soul inwardly experienced the living image of God in the Logos, it became the bearer of the Logos.

Now, in the third phase, the soul becomes, as it were, a vessel for ideas and concepts. These may have the certainty of mathematics, but they are only ideas and concepts. The soul experiences itself at its most tenuous, if I may put it so. Again the corporeal world increases in robustness. This is the third way in which man experiences himself. He cannot as yet give up his soul element completely, but he experiences it as the vessel for the realm of ideas. He experiences his body, on the other hand, not only as a force but as a spatial body.

Soul: Realm of Ideas

Body: Spatial Corporeality

The body has become still more robust. Man now denies the spirit altogether. Here we come to the “body” that Hobbes, Bacon,²³ and Locke spoke of. Here, we meet “body” at its densest. The soul no longer feels a kinship to it, only an abstract connection that gets worse in the course of time.

In place of the earlier concrete contrast of soul and body, man and nature, another contrast arises that leads further and further into abstraction. The soul that formerly appeared to itself as something concrete—because it experienced in itself the Logos-image of the divine—gradually transforms itself to a mere vessel of ideas. Whereas before, in the ancient spiritual age, it had felt akin to everything, it now sees itself as subject and regards everything else as object, feeling no further kinship with anything.

The earlier contrast of soul and body, man and nature, increasingly became the merely theoretical epistemological contrast between the subject that is within a person and the object without. Nature changed into the object of knowledge. It is not surprising that out of its own needs knowledge henceforth strove for the “purely objective.”

But what is this purely objective? It is no longer what nature was to the Greeks. The objective is external corporeality in which no spirit is any longer perceived. It is nature devoid of spirit, to be comprehended from without by the subject.

Precisely because man had lost the connection with nature, he now sought a science of nature from outside. Here, we have once again reached the point where I concluded yesterday. Cusanus looked upon what should have been the divine world to him and declared that man with his knowledge must stop short before it and, if he must write about the divine world, he must write a docta ignorantia. And only faintly, in symbols taken from mathematics, did Cusanus want to retain something of what appeared thus to him as the spiritual realms.

About a hundred years after the Docta Ignorantia appeared in 1440, the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium appeared in 1543. one century later, Copernicus, with his mathematical mind, took hold of the other side, the external side of what Cusanus could not fully grasp, not even symbolically, with mathematics. Today, we see how in fact the application of this mathematical mind to nature becomes possible the moment that nature vanishes from man's immediate experience. This can be traced even in the history of language since “Nature” refers to something that is related to “being born,” whereas what we consider as nature today is only the corporeal world in which everything is dead. I mean that it is dead for us since, of course, nature contains life and spirit. But it has become lifeless for us and the most certain of conceptual systems, namely, the mathematical, is regarded as the best way to grasp it.

Thus we have before us a development that proceeds with inward regularity. In the first epoch, man beheld god and world, but god in the world and the world in god: the one-ness, unity. In the second epoch, man in fact beheld soul and body, man and nature; the soul as bearer of the living Logos, the bearer of what is not born and does not die; nature as what is born and dies. In the third phase man has ascended to the abstract contrast of subject (himself) and object ( the external world.) The object is something so robust that man no longer even attempts to throw light on it with concepts. It is experienced as something alien to man, something that is examined from outside with mathematics although mathematics cannot penetrate into the inner essence. For this reason, Cusanus applied mathematics only symbolically, and timidly at that.

The striving to develop science must therefore be pictured as emerging from earlier faculties of mankind. A time had to come when this science would appear. It had to develop the way it did. We can follow this if we focus clearly on the three phases of development that I have just described.

We see how the first phase extends to the Eighth Century B.C. to the ancient sage of Southern Europe whom I have described today. The second extends from him to Nicholas Cusanus. We find ourselves in the third phase now. The first is pneumatological, directed to the spirit in its primeval form. The second is mystical, taking the world in the broadest sense possible. The third is mathematical. Considering the significant characteristics, therefore, we trace the first phase—ancient pneumatology—as far as the ancient Southern wise man. Magical mysticism extends from there to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus. The age of mathematizing natural science proceeds from Cusanus into our own time and continues further. More on this tomorrow.

• 19. Post-Atlantean Age: cf. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline Of Occult Science (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 20. A literal translation of the transcript would read: “As body; and as body, as an image of the spirit.”
• 21. I listen to the silent universe: cf. Rudolf Steiner, Truth-Wrought Words. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1979).
• 22. Democritus: c. 460–360 B.C. From his numerous writings about philosophy, mathematics, physics, medicine, psychology, and technology, only some fragments and an index remain. The remark mentioned is a report from Aristotle, Metaphysics 1:4: “That is why they (Leucippus and Democritus) say that the non-existent exists just as much as the existent, just as emptiness is just as good as fullness, and they posit these as material causes.”
• 23. Francis Bacon: (also Francis Bacon of Verulam), London 1561–1626 Highgate. Lawyer, doctor, politician, diplomat, essayist, philosopher and humanist. The leading English government liberal, successful during 1603–1621. In these years his main work was developed. The philosophy of his age he found stuck in hopeless experiments to solve insolvable problems with Aristotelian logic. The only source of sure knowledge and abilities for him was natural science. He saw a renewal of the spiritual and economic life in this science. Principal works: Novum Organum (an inductive logic contradicting that of Aristotle (the old Organum); De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum; a Critical Encyclopedia of all Science; Sylva Sylvarum: Preliminary Announcement of Procedure and Method (this remained in preparation). His literary success was astonishing, and it greatly furthered the materialistic world view. cf. Riddles of Philosophy.

In the last two lectures I tried to indicate the point in time when the scientific outlook and manner of thinking, such as we know it today, arose in the course of time. It was pointed out yesterday that the whole character of this scientific thinking, emerging at the beginning most clearly in Copernicus’ conception of astronomy, depends on the way in which mathematical thinking was gradually related to the reality of the external world. The development of science in modern times has been greatly affected by a change—one might almost say a revolutionary change—in human perception in regard to mathematical thinking itself. We are much inclined nowadays to ascribe permanent and absolute validity to our own manner of thinking.

Nobody notices how much matters have changed. We take a certain position today in regard to mathematics and to the relationship of mathematics to reality. We assume that this is the way it has to be and that this is the correct relationship. There are debates about it from time to time, but within certain limits this is regarded as the true relationship. We forget that in a none too distant past mankind felt differently concerning mathematics. We need only recall what happened soon after the point in time that I characterized as the most important in modern spiritual life, the point when Nicholas Cusanus presented his dissertation to the world. Shortly after this, not only did Copernicus try to explain the movements of the solar system with mathematically oriented thinking of the kind to which we are accustomed today, but philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza²⁴ began to apply this mathematical thought to the whole physical and spiritual universe.

Even in such a book as his Ethics, the philosopher Spinoza placed great value on presenting his philosophical principles and postulates, if not in mathematical formulae—for actual calculations play no special part—yet in such a manner that the whole form of drawing conclusions, of deducing the later rules from earlier ones, is based on the mathematical pattern. By and by it appeared self-evident to the men of that time that in mathematics they had the right model for the attainment of inward certainty. Hence they felt that if they could express the world in thoughts arranged in the same clear-cut architectural order as in a mathematical or geometrical system, they would thereby achieve something that would have to correspond to reality. If the character of scientific thinking is to be correctly understood, it must be through the special way in which man relates to mathematics and mathematics relates to reality. Mathematics had gradually become what I would term a self-sufficient inward capacity for thinking. What do I mean by that?

The mathematics existing in the age of Descartes²⁵ and Copernicus can certainly be described more or less in the same terms as apply today. Take a modern mathematician, for example, who teaches geometry, and who uses his analytical formulas and geometrical concepts in order to comprehend some physical process. As a geometrician, this mathematician starts from the concepts of Euclidean geometry, the three-dimensional space (or merely dimensional space, if he thinks of non-Euclidean geometry.)²⁶ In three-dimensional space he distinguishes three mutually perpendicular directions that are otherwise identical. Space, I would say, is a self-sufficient form that is simply placed before one's consciousness in the manner described above without questions being raised such as: Where does this form come from? Or, Where do we get our whole geometrical system?

In view of the increasing superficiality of psychological thinking, it was only natural that man could no longer penetrate to those inner depths of soul where geometrical thought has its base. Man takes his ordinary consciousness for granted and fills this consciousness with mathematics that has been thought-out but not experienced. As an example of what is thought-out but not experienced, let us consider the three perpendicular dimensions of Euclidean space. Man would have never thought of these if he had not experienced a threefold orientation within himself. One orientation that man experiences in himself is from front to back. We need only recall how, from the external modern anatomical and physiological point of view, the intake and excretion of food, as well as other processes in the human organism, take place from front to back. The orientation of these specific processes differs from the one that prevails when, for example, I do something with my right arm and make a corresponding move with my left arm. Here, the processes are oriented left and right. Finally, in regard to the last orientation, man grows into it during earthly life. In the beginning he crawls on all fours and only gradually, stands upright, so that this last orientation flows within him from above downward and up from below.

As matters stand today, these three orientations in man are regarded very superficially. These processes—front to back, right to left or left to right, and above to below—are not inwardly experienced so much as viewed from outside. If it were possible to go back into earlier ages with true psychological insight, one would perceive that these three orientations were inward experiences for the men of that time. Today our thoughts and feelings are still halfway acknowledged as inward experiences, but he man of a bygone age had a real inner experience, for example, of the front-to-back orientation. He had not yet lost awareness of the decrease in intensity of taste sensations from front to back in the oral cavity. The qualitative experience that taste was strong on the tip of the tongue, then grew fainter and fainter as it receded from front to back, until it disappeared entirely, was once a real and concrete experience. The orientation from front to back was felt in such qualitative experiences. Our inner life is no longer as intense as it once was. Therefore, today, we no longer have experiences such as this. Likewise man today no longer has a vivid feeling for the alignment of his axis of vision in order to focus on a given point by shifting the right axis over the left. Nor does he have a full concrete awareness of what happens when, in the orientation of right-left, he relates his right arm and hand to the left arm and hand. Even less does he have a feeling that would enable him to say: The thought illuminates my head and, moving in the direction from above to below, it strikes into my heart. Such a feeling, such an experience, has been lost to man along with the loss of all inwardness of world experience. But it did once exist. Man did once experience the three perpendicular orientation of space within himself. And these three spatial orientations—right-left, front-back, and above-below—are the basis of the three-dimensional framework of space, which is only the abstraction of the immediate inner experience described above.

So what can we say when we look back at the geometry of earlier times? We can put it like this: It was obvious to a man in those ages that merely because of his being human the geometrical elements revealed themselves in his own life. By extending his own above-below, right-left, and front-back orientations, he grasped the world out of his own being.

Try to sense the tremendous difference between this mathematical feeling bound to human experience, and the bare, bleak mathematical space layout of analytical geometry, which establishes a point somewhere in abstract space, draws three coordinating axes at right angles to each other and thus isolates this thought-out space scheme from all living experience. But man has in fact torn this thought-out spatial diagram out of his own inner life. So, if we are to understand the origin of the later mathematical way of thinking that was taken over by science, if we are to correctly comprehend its self-sufficient presentation of structures, we must trace it back to the self-experienced mathematics of a bygone age. Mathematics in former times was something completely different. What was once present in a sort of dream-like experience of three-dimensionality and then became abstracted, exists today completely in the unconscious. As a matter of fact, man even now produced mathematics from his own three-dimensionality. But the way in which he derives this outline of space from his experiences of inward orientation is completely unconscious. None of this rises into consciousness except the finished spatial diagram. The same is true of all completed mathematical structures. They have all been severed from their roots. I chose the example of the space scheme, but I could just as well mention any other mathematical category taken from algebra or arithmetic. They are nothing but schemata drawn from immediate human experience and raised into abstraction.

Going back a few centuries, perhaps to the fourteenth century, and observing how people conceived of things mathematical, we find that in regard to numbers they still had an echo of inward feelings. In an age in which numbers had already become an abstract ads they are today, people would have been unable to find the names for numbers. The words designating numbers are often wonderfully characteristic. Just think of the word “two.” (zwei) It clearly expresses a real process, as when we say entzweien, “to cleave in twain.” Even more, it is related to zweifeln, “to doubt.” It is not mere imitation of an external process when the number two, zwei, is described by the word Entzweien, which indicates the disuniting, the splitting, of something formerly a whole. It is in fact something that is inwardly experienced and only then made into a scheme. It is brought up from within, just as the abstract three-dimensional space-scheme is drawn up from inside the mind.

We arrive back at an age of rich spiritual vitality that still existed in the first centuries of Christianity, as can be demonstrated by the fact that mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were considered to be almost one and the same. Mysticism, mathesis, and mathematics are one, though only in a certain connection. For a mystic of the first Christian centuries, mysticism was something that one experienced more inwardly in the soul. Mathematics was the mysticism that one experienced more outwardly with the body; for example, geometry with the body's orientations to front-and-back, right-and-left, and up-and-down. One could say that actual mysticism was soul mysticism and that mathematics, mathesis, was mysticism of the corporeality. Hence, proper mysticism was inwardly experienced in what is generally understood by this term; whereas mathesis, the other mysticism, as experienced by means of an inner experience of the body, as yet not lost.

As a matter of fact, in regard to mathematics and the mathematical method Descartes and Spinoza still had completely different feelings from what we have today. Immerse yourself in these thinkers, not superficially as in the practice today when one always wants to discover in the thinkers of old the modern concepts that have been drilled into our heads, but unselfishly, putting yourself mentally in their place. You will find that even Spinoza still retained something of a mystical attitude toward the mathematical method.

The philosophy of Spinoza differs from mysticism only in one respect. A mystic like Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler²⁷ attempts to experience the cosmic secrets more in the depths of feeling. Equally inwardly, Spinoza constructs the mysteries of the universe along mathematical, methodical lines, not specifically geometrical lines, but lines experienced mentally by mathematical methods. In regard to soul configuration and mood, there is no basic difference between the experience of Meister Eckhart's mystical method and Spinoza's mathematical one. Anyone how makes such a distinction does not really understand how Spinoza experienced his Ethics, for example, in a truly mathematical-mystical way. His philosophy still reflects the time when mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were felt as one and the same experience in the soul.

Now, you will perhaps recall how, in my book The Case for Anthroposophy,²⁸ I tried to explain the human organization in a way corresponding to modern thinking. I divided the human organization—meaning the physical one—into the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-limb system. I need not point out to you that I did not divide man into separate members placed side by side in space, although certain academic persons have accused²⁹ me of such a caricature. I made it clear that these three systems interpenetrate each other. The nerve-sense system is called the “head system” because it is centered mainly in the head, but it spreads out into the whole body. The breathing and blood rhythms of the chest system naturally extend into the head organization, and so on. The division is functional, not local. An inward grasp of this threefold membering will give you true insight into the human being.

Let us now focus on this division for a certain purpose. To begin with, let us look at the third member of the human organization, that of digestion (metabolism) and the limbs. Concentrating on the most striking aspect of this member, we see that man accomplishes the activities of external life by connecting his limbs with his inner experiences. I have characterized some of these, particularly the inward orientation experience of the three directions of space. In his external movements, in finding his orientation in the world, man's limb system achieves inward orientation in the three directions. In walking, we place ourselves in a certain manner into the experience of above-below. In much that we do with our hands or arms, we bring ourselves into the orientation of right-and-left. To the extent that speech is a movement of the aeriform in man, we even fit ourselves into direction of front-and-back, back-and-front, when we speak. Hence, in moving about in the world, we place our inward orientation into the outer world.

Let us look at the true process, rather than the merely illusionary one, in a specific mathematical case. It is an illusionary process, taking place purely in abstract schemes of thought, when I find somewhere in the universe a process in space, and I approach it as an analytical mathematician in such a way that I draw or imagine the three coordinate axes of the usual spatial system and arrange this external process into Descartes’ purely artificial space scheme.

This is what occurs above, in the realm of thought schemes, through the nerve-sense system. One would not achieve a relationship to such a process in space if it were not for what one does with one's limbs, with one's whole body, if it were not for inserting oneself into the whole world in accordance with the inward orientation of above-below, right-left, and front-back. When I walk forward, I know that on one hand I place myself in the vertical direction in order to remain upright. I am also aware that in walking I adjust my direction to the back-to-front orientation, and when I swim and use my arms, I orient myself in right and left. I do not understand all this if I apply Descartes’ space scheme, the abstract scheme of the coordinate axes. What gives me the impression of reality in dealing with matters of space is found only when I say to myself: Up in the head, in the nerve system, an illusory image arises of something that occurs deep down in the subconscious. Here, where man cannot reach with his ordinary consciousness, something takes place between his limb system and the universe. The whole of mathematics, of geometry, is brought up out of our limb system of movement. We would not have geometry if we did not place ourselves into the world according to inward orientation. In truth, we geometrize when we lift what occurs in the subconscious into the illusory of the thought scheme. This is the reason why it appears so abstractly independent to us. But his is something that this only come about in recent times. In the age in which mathesis, mathematics, was still felt to be something close to mysticism, the mathematical relationship to all things was also viewed as something human.

Where is the human factor if I imagine an abstract point somewhere in space crossed by three perpendicular directions and then apply this scheme to a process perceived in actual space? It is completely divorced from man, something quite inhuman. This non-human element, which has appeared in recent times in mathematical thinking, was once human. But when was it human?

The actual date has already been indicated, but the inner aspect is still to be described. When was it human? It was human when man did not only experience in his movements and his inward orientation in space that he stepped forward from behind and moved in such a way that he was aware of his vertical as well as the horizontal direction, but when he also felt the blood's inward activity in all such moving about, in all such inner geometry. There is always blood activity when I move forward. Think of the blood activity present when, as an infant, I lifted myself up from the horizontal to an upright position! Behind man's movements, behind his experience of the world by virtue of movements, (which can also be, and at one time was, an inward experience) there stands the experience of the blood. Every movement, small or large, that I experience as I perform it contains its corresponding blood experience. Today blood is to us the red fluid that seeps out when we prick our skin. We can also convince ourselves intellectually of its existence. But in the age when mathematics, mathesis, was still connected with mysticism, when in a dreamy way the experience of movement was inwardly connected with that of blood, man was inwardly aware of the blood. It was one thing to follow the flow of blood through the lungs and quite another to follow it through the head. Man followed the flow of the blood in lifting his knee or his foot, and he inwardly felt and experienced himself through and through in his blood. The blood has one tinge when I raise my foot, another when I place it firmly on the ground. When I lounge around and doze lazily, the blood's nuance differs from the one it has when I let thoughts shoot through my head. The whole person can take on a different form when, in addition to the experience of movement, he has that of the blood. Try to picture vividly what I mean. Imagine that you are walking slowly, one step at a time; you begin to walk faster; you start to run, to turn yourself, to dance around. Suppose that you were doing all this, not with today's abstract consciousness, but with inward awareness: You would have a different blood experience at each stage, with the slow walking, then the increase in speed, the running, the turning, the dancing. A different nuance would be noted in each case. If you tried to draw this inner experience of movement, you would perhaps have to sketch it like this (white line.) But for each position in which you found yourself during this experience of movement, you would draw a corresponding inward blood experience (red, blue, yellow—see Figure 2)

Of the first experience, that of movement, you would say that you have it in common with external space, because you are constantly changing your position. The second experience, which I have marked by means of the different colors, is a time experience, a sequence of inner intense experiences.

In fact, if you run in a triangle, you can have one inner experience of the blood. You will have a different one if you run in a square.

What is outwardly quantitative and geometric, is inwardly intensely qualitative in the experience of the blood.

It is surprising, very surprising, to discover that ancient mathematics spoke quite differently about the triangle and the square. Modern nebulous mystics describe great mysteries, but there is no great mystery here. It is only what a person would have experienced inwardly in the blood when he walked the outline of a triangle or a square, not to mention the blood experience corresponding to the pentagram. In the blood the whole of geometry becomes qualitative inward experience. We arrive back at a time when one could truly say, as Mephistopheles does in Goethe's Faust, “Blood is a very special fluid.”³⁰ This is because, inwardly experienced, the blood absorbs all geometrical forms and makes of them intense inner experiences. Thereby man learns to know himself as well. He learns to know what it means to experience a triangle, a square, a pentagram; he becomes acquainted with the projection of geometry on the blood and its experiences. This was once mysticism. Not only was mathematics, mathesis, closely related to mysticism, it was in fact the external side of movement, of the limbs, while the inward side was the blood experience. For the mystic of bygone times all of mathematics transformed itself out of a sum of spatial formations into what is experienced in the blood, into an intensely mystical rhythmic inner experience.

We can say that once upon a time man possessed a knowledge that he experienced, that he was an integral part of; and that at the point in time that I have mentioned, he lost this oneness of self with the world, this participation in the cosmic mysteries. He tore mathematics loose from his inner being. No longer did he have the experience of movement; instead, he mathematically constructed the relationships of movement outside. He no longer had the blood experience; the blood and its rhythm became something quite foreign to him. Imagine what this implies: Man tears mathematics free from his body and it becomes something abstract. He loses his understanding of the blood experience. Mathematics no longer goes inward. Picture this as a soul mood that arose at a specific time. Earlier, the soul had a different mood than later. Formerly, it sought the connection between blood experience and experience of movement; later, it completely separated them. It no longer related the mathematical and geometrical experience to its own movement. It lost the blood experience. Think of this as real history, as something that occurs in the changing moods of evolution. Verily, a man who lived in the earlier age, when mathesis was still mysticism, put his whole soul into the universe. He measured the cosmos against himself. He lived in astronomy.

Modern man inserts his system of coordinates into the universe and keeps himself out of it. Earlier, man sensed a blood experience with each geometrical figure. Modern man feels no blood experience; he loses the relationship to his own heart, where the blood experiences are centered. Is it imaginable that in the seventh or eighth century, when the soul still felt movement as a mathematical experience and blood as a mystical experience, anybody would have founded a Copernican astronomy with a system of coordinates simply inserted into the universe and totally divorced from man? No, this became possible only when a specific soul constitution arose in evolution. And after that something else became possible as well. The inward blood awareness was lost. Now the time had come to discover the movements of the blood externally through physiology and anatomy. Hence you have this change in evolution: On one hand Copernican astronomy, on the other the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey,³¹ a contemporary of Bacon and Hobbes. A world view gained by abstract mathematics cannot produce anything like the ancient Ptolemaic theory, which was essentially bound up with man and the living mathematics he experienced within himself. Now, one experiences an abstract system of coordinates starting with an arbitrary zero point. No longer do we have the inward blood experience; instead, we discover the physical circulation of the blood with the heart in the center.

The birth of science thus placed itself into the whole context of evolution in both its conscious and unconscious processes. Only in this way, out of the truly human element, can one understand what actually happened, what had to happen in recent times for science—so self-evident today—to come into being in the first place. Only thus could it even occur to anybody to conduct such investigations as led, for example, to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 24. Spinoza, Benedictus: Amsterdam 1632–1677. The Hague. Philosopher, mathematician, had Humanistic and Talmudistic training. By vocation, optician and politician. His main work Ethics with the characteristic full title Ethica Ordine Geometrica Demonstrata (Ethic Represented by Geometric Method) could only be published by his friends after his death. See Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age and Riddles of Philosophy.
• 25. René Descartes: Lat., Renatus Cartenius, Le Haye (Tourraine) 1598–1650 Stockholm. Mathematician, physicist, philosopher. Educated by the Jesuits in La Fleche, he first became a soldier and was part of some campaigns but turned away from outer life to enter into the loneliness of a striver for knowledge, living first in Paris and then for a long time in Holland. He died in Stockholm, having been called there by Queen Christine. For him, doubt of tradition, but also of all sense perception, was the starting point of his philosophy and he found in self-consciousness the security of all being (“Cogito ergo Sum”). He developed the method of analytical geometry and gave an explanation of the rainbow. Main works: Essays, 1637, in it “Discours de la Methode and Dioptiric,” “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,” 1641; “Passions de L'Ame,” 1650. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 26. Non-Euclidian geometry is a prime example of “the self-contained inner ability to think.” C. Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) discovered first that one can think more than only a geometric system. Because nobody understood this, he decided not to publish his results and to withdraw from the fruitless quarrel. Independently of Gauss in 1828 N.I. Lobatschewskij and in 1829 J. Boljai first published their solutions to the same problem. Rudolf Steiner often spoke about the meaning of this achievement, as in Wege und Ziele des geistigen Menschen in the lecture “Der Heutige Stand der Philosophie und Wissenschaft,” (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1973; GA Bibl. Nr. 125). See also: Georg Unger, Physic am Scheidewege (Dornach: 1948), pages 19–28, and Vom Bielden Physikalischer Begriffe, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 31–32 and 193–194.
• 27. Johannes Tauler: About 1300–1361 Strasbourg. Preacher and pastor, Dominican, mystic, student of Meister Eckhart. Sermons and writings in German by W. Lehmann, 1923; see also Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, the chapter “Friendship with God.”
• 28. Rudolf Steiner, The Case for Anthroposophy (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970).
• 29. In a reply to two lectures, which Walter Johannes Stein and Eugen Kolisko gave to defend two articles on “Anthroposophy as Science” in the Goettingen newspaper, Hugo Fuchs, Professor of Anatomy, spoke sarcastically of a human being with head, breast, and belly system. (From a report of the newspaper Die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus, August 1920, No. 5).
• 30. From Goethe's Faust, Part I, the scene in the Student Room with Faust and Mephisto. See Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967).
• 31. William Harvey, 1578–1658, physiologist, Professor of Anatomy, London, discoverer of the main bloodstream: De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (1628).

Author's note ¹ Prague, April 4, 1924

I would like to speak of a kind of education and teaching that strives to develop the whole human being, body, soul and spirit, in an equal way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical is formed out of the soul and spiritual during development. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws of this formation.

Anthroposophy leads to such knowledge of the human being. It does not look at the physical one-sidedly, as it happens in the scientific world view. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby looks at every age of the human being at the way in which the spirit works on the body of the human being and how the soul lives in the body.

In the face of such a view, clearly distinct epochs arise in the growing human being.

The first epoch runs from birth to the change of teeth, around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is not just a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is happening in the whole organism. Until then, the soul and spirit participate intensively in the formation of the body. During this period of human development, body, soul and spirit are still highly unified.

The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later is concentrated only in the sensory organization, still works in the whole human being at this time. The human being is therefore completely devoted to the activities of the environment, just like a sensory organ. In the most pronounced sense, he is an imitative being. His will reacts reflexively to everything that happens around him.

Therefore, the only way to educate a child at this age is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything they do. This must be taken in the broadest sense. There are imponderables at work between the child and their educator. The child is not only influenced by what it perceives with its external senses in its environment, but it also senses the attitudes, characters, and good and bad intentions of other people from their behavior. Therefore, as an educator, one should cultivate purity of life in the child's environment, right down to one's thoughts and feelings, so that the child can become what one is oneself.

But one should also be aware that one's behavior has an effect not only on the soul but also on the body. What the child absorbs and allows to flow reflexively into his will continues to vibrate in the organization of his body. A teacher with a violent temper can cause the child's physical organization to become brittle, so that in later life it is easily influenced by pathogenic influences. How one educates in this direction will become apparent in later life in the state of health of the person.

The anthroposophical art of education does not focus on the spiritual and soul aspects of education because it wants to develop only these, but because it knows that it can only develop the physical properly if it develops the spiritual, which works on the body, in the right way.

A complete metamorphosis takes place in the child when the teeth change. What was previously absorbed in the physical organization and working in it becomes an independent soul being and the physical is more left to its own forces.

Therefore, when dealing with the soul of the age at which the child is to be educated and taught in a scholastic way, one has to bear in mind that one is dealing with forces that were previously the malleable forces in the body. One only works in an educational and teaching way if one keeps this in mind. The child at this age does not yet absorb with an abstract mind; it wants to experience images, as it has worked with images up to this period of life. This is only achieved if the educator and teacher relate to the child in an artistic way through the soul. They cannot assume that the child already understands what they are communicating. He should work in such a way that the child is immersed in love in the images that he unfolds in an artistic way. He should be the self-evident authority for the child. The child cannot yet absorb what is true, good and beautiful because it understands it, but something must be true, good and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in front of the child.

Everything in teaching and education must be brought out in a pictorial way. All teaching must be artistically designed. You cannot start with reading and not with the letterforms, which in their present form are foreign to the inner experience of the human being. One must begin with a kind of painting drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that are similar to certain processes and things, like the signs in the pictographic writing of prehistoric peoples. First there must be a picture, which the child fixes from the things and processes of the world. Then one should proceed from the picture to the letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract sign writing.

Only when the child has progressed from painting to drawing to writing in this way should one move on to reading. This is because only one part of the human being is activated in this process: the ability to comprehend that is tied to the organization of the head. In painting, drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organization is also involved. This is how you educate the whole person, not just one side of the brain.

All education should be based on the same attitude until the second decisive point in the child's development. This lies in the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, not only a local part of the human organism undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. It is only at this point that the relationship between the human being and his environment unfolds, which is revealed in the more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point on should one count on the adolescent to grasp things intellectually and freely. Before that, everything should be presented in a pictorial form, and in grasping it, one should count on the child's love of pictures.

Such an education has the whole of human life in mind, not just childhood. It is quite a different matter to occupy the child in a pictorial way, so that what it has absorbed is only later understood, than to develop only the intellectual system one-sidedly at an early stage in so-called visual instruction, which is not true visual instruction because it has no artistic element. What is laid down in childhood only comes to expression in later life. A child who has gone through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become a person who can still be fresh and fit for life in old age; a child who is taught in a one-sided way to understand what is often thought to be appropriate for childhood will become a person who ages prematurely and is susceptible to disease-causing living conditions.

• 1. On April 4, 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Prague with this title. The author's note presented here is apparently a text written for press representatives to make it easier for them to report on the lecture. Rudolf Steiner prefaced it with the following note: “This is only an outline of what I will say; the spiritual researcher cannot actually do such things; in a lecture, he draws from the spirit, not from memory, and is therefore misled when his lecture is to be written down verbatim. Please excuse this.”

Ladies and gentlemen! From Herr Molt’s words, you will have inferred out of what spirit he took the initiative to found this Waldorf School. You will also have gathered from his words that its founding springs, not from any mundane intention, but from a call that resounds very clearly from the evolution of humanity in our times in particular. And yet, so little of this call is heard. Humanity’s evolution resounds with much that can be encompassed within the framework of rebuilding society, of giving social form to humanity’s lot. Thus there is something in this call, above all else, that must not be disregarded: the issue of education. We can rest assured that the only people who hear this call for social restructuring correctly amid the chaos of what our present time demands of us will be those who pursue its consequences all the way to the issue of education. But we will certainly be on the wrong track if we hear this social call in a way that makes us want to call a halt to all our social striving when faced with the issue of education, preferring to fashion the facilities of our educational system on the basis of social principles, whatever they may be, that have not also sprung from a renewal of the source of education.

For me, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a sacred obligation to take up what lay in our friend Herr Molt’s intentions in founding the Waldorf School, and to do so in a way that enabled this school to be fashioned out of what we believe to have won from spiritual science in our present times. This school is really intended to be integrated into what the evolution of humanity requires of us at present and in the near future. Actually, in the end, everything that flows into the educational system from such requirements constitutes a threefold sacred obligation.

Of what use would be all of the human community’s feeling, understanding, and working if these could not condense into the sacred responsibility taken on by teachers in their specific social communities when they embark on the ultimate community service with children, with people who are growing up and in the becoming? In the end, everything we are capable of knowing about human beings and about the world only really becomes fruitful when we can convey it in a living way to those who will fashion society when we ourselves can no longer contribute our physical work.

Everything we can accomplish artistically only achieves its highest good when we let it flow into the greatest of all art forms, the art in which we are given, not a dead medium such as sound or color, but living human beings, incomplete and imperfect, whom we are to transform to some extent, through art and education, into accomplished human beings.

And is it not ultimately a very holy and religious obligation to cultivate and educate the divine spiritual element that manifests anew in every human being who is born? Is this educational service not a religious service in the highest sense of the word? Is it not so that all the holiest stirrings of humanity, which we dedicate to religious feeling, must come together in our service at the altar when we attempt to cultivate the divine spiritual aspect of the human being whose potentials are revealed in the growing child?

Science that comes alive!
Art that comes alive!
Religion that comes alive!
In the end, that is what education is.

If we understand teaching and child-rearing in this sense, we will not be inclined to carelessly criticize what is imposed from the other side as the principles, goals, and foundations of the art of education. However, it does seem to me that no proper insight into what our modern culture demands of the art of education is possible unless we are aware of the great need for a complete spiritual renewal in our times, unless we can really work our way through to understanding that in future, something must flow into what we do as teachers and educators that is quite different from what can thrive in the sphere of what is now known as “scientific education.” Nowadays, after all, future teachers, people who will have a formative influence on human beings, are introduced to the attitudes and way of thinking of contemporary science. Now, it has never occurred to me to denigrate contemporary science. I am full of regard for all the triumphs it has achieved, and will continue to achieve for the sake of humanity’s evolution, through a scientific viewpoint and method that are based on understanding nature. But for that very reason, it seems to me, what comes from the contemporary scientific and intellectual attitude cannot be fruitfully applied to the art of education. Its greatness does not lie in dealing with human beings or in insight into the human heart and mind. Great technical advances are possible as a result of what springs from our contemporary intellectual attitude, and on that same basis it is also possible to develop the basic convictions of a free humanity in the context of society. However, it is not possible—grotesque as this may still sound to the majority of people today—to take a scientific viewpoint that has gradually come to the conclusion that the human heart is a pump and the human body a mechanical device, to use the feelings and sensations that proceed from this science to inspire us to become artistic educators of growing human beings. It is impossible to develop the living art of education out of what makes our times so great in mastering dead technology.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is where a new spirit must enter the evolution of humanity—the spirit we seek through our spiritual science, the spirit that leads us away from seeing the living human being as a carrier of implements that pump and suck, as a mechanism that can only be understood according to the methods of natural science. Into this intellectual attitude of humanity must come the conviction that spirit is alive in all natural existence, and that we are capable of recognizing this spirit. This is why, in the course that preceded this Waldorf venture, in the course intended for teachers, we attempted to found an anthropology or science of education that will develop into an art of education and a study of humanity that will once again raise what is alive in the human being from the dead. The dead—and this is the secret of our dying contemporary culture—is what makes people knowing, what gives them insight when they take it up as natural law. However, it also weakens the feeling that is the source of teachers’ inspiration and enthusiasm, and it weakens the will. It does not grant human beings a harmonious place within society as a whole. We are looking for a science that is not mere science, that is itself life and feeling. When such a science streams into the human soul as knowledge, it will immediately develop the power to be active as love and to stream forth as effective, working will, as work that has been steeped in soul warmth, and especially as work that applies to the living, to the growing human being. We need a new scientific attitude. Above all, we need a new spirit for the entire art of education.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we think about contemporary education and its needs, we will not be too quick to criticize what has been undertaken with the best of intentions on the basis of all kinds of worthwhile impulses, both in the present and in the recent past. What beautiful impulses underlay the efforts to move the educational system out of the chaos and deadening aspects of city life to the country, to rural boarding schools! We must acknowledge all the good will that was expended in this direction. However, ladies and gentlemen, if the living spirit that makes the human being comprehensible to human beings, that shows people how to deal with the growing human being, does not enter these rural boarding schools, then what was dead in the cities remains dead in the country.

People are now considering how to draft a constitution for a school so that the teachers” authority would no longer work in a deadening way. However, if they are unable to inject the real living spirit that makes human beings human into these newly structured schools, then in spite of all their socio-educational theories these educational establishments will remain something dead, something that cannot lead the present generation into the future in the right way.

The conviction that the call resounding from humanity’s evolution demands a new spirit for our present age, and that we must carry this spirit into the school system first and foremost, is what underlies the efforts of this Waldorf School, which is intended to be a model along these lines. An effort has been made to listen to what is subconsciously present in the demands of the best of those who have attempted to work for healing and regeneration of the art of education in the recent past. In this context I had to think of explanations given by Theodor Vogt, a student of Herbart’s and a prolific thinker, and by his successor Rein, professor of education at Jena.¹ Their thoughts seem to me to spring from a deeper feeling for what is lacking in our educational system at present. Vogt and Rein suspected, although they did not clearly say it, that in order to really be able to educate, it would be desirable to know how children actually develop in the early years between infancy and the time they enter school around the seventh year of life, and above all how they develop during the primary school years, from their sixth or seventh year of life up to the time in their fourteenth or fifteenth year that impacts so heavily on the growing person’s entire development. Insightful instructors of education ask whether we can also understand the kinds of forces at work in human nature, which presents us with a different intellectual, emotional, and bodily face, if not every month, then at least every year. As long as we have no real science of history, so these educators say, we will also not be able to know how an individual human being develops, because the individual human being presents in concentrated form what humanity as a whole has gone through in the course of its historical development.

People like the ones I mentioned felt that modern science is basically a failure when it comes to saying anything about the great laws that prevail throughout history, or to grasping what wells up out of the great all-encompassing laws of human evolution for us at the present moment. We would be attempting to do something very foolish if we tried to understand individual human beings on the basis of the composition of the nutrients they take in from their first breath until their last. However, this is basically what we are trying to do in the case of history, in understanding humanity’s entire evolution. In the case of an individual, we must understand how a physiological process such as the change of teeth intervenes in development, for example. We must know all the mysterious things that are going on in the body as a result of a completely new physiology that is not yet available to modern science. But we must also know what is accompanying this transformation on an emotional level. We must know about the metamorphoses of human nature. In the case of an individual, we will at least not deny, although we may be powerless to fully recognize the fact, that a person experiences metamorphoses or transformations on the basis of his or her inmost being. We do not admit to this with regard to the historical development of humanity as a whole. The same methods are applied to antiquity, the Middle Ages, and recent times. We do not accept that great leaps have taken place in humanity’s historical evolution. Looking back over historical developments, we find the last leap in the fifteenth century. Humanity’s ways of feeling, conceptualizing, and willing, as they have developed in more recent times and as we know them now, have only taken on this subtle character among civilized humanity since the fifteenth century. How this civilized humanity differs from that of the tenth or eighth century is similar to how a twelve-year-old child differs from a child who has not yet reached his or her seventh year. And what happened by way of transformation in the fifteenth century proceeded from the innermost nature of humanity, just as the change of teeth as a lawful development proceeds from the innermost nature of the individual. And everything we are living with now in the twentieth century—our striving for individuality, the striving for new social forms, the striving to develop the personality—is only a consequence of what the inner forces of history have brought up since the time in question.

We can understand how individuals attempt to take their place in the present only if we understand the course that humanity’s development has taken, as described above. People like Vogt and Rein who have given a lot of thought to education and who have also been involved practically in such things know that the powerlessness of our modern art of education is a result of the powerlessness of modern historical insight. Just as it is impossible to educate human beings with a science for which the heart has become a pump, it is also impossible to find one’s place as a teacher in a system of education based on a historical understanding that does not draw on the living spirit of humanity or recognize the metamorphoses that have taken place between the Middle Ages and modern times. We are still involved with the consequences of what began there.

Regardless of the fact that we tend to make fun of prophecy in this day and age, it must be said that in a certain respect teachers must be prophets. After all, they are dealing with what is meant to live in the generation to come, not in the present.

From the insightful vantage point of real, true historical happenings, ladies and gentlemen, such things often look somewhat different than they do to modern observers of humanity. In many respects, these observers often have a very superficial grasp of what is meant to come to life in the science and art of education. Today the question is being debated of whether people should be educated more in line with what fosters human nature itself—that is, whether a more humanistic education is preferable—or whether they should be provided with an education that prepares them for their future careers and to fit into the context of the state, and so on. For those who attempt an insight into the depths of such things, discussions of this sort are verbal dialectics that take place on the surface. Why is that? Those with insight into the generation to come get a clear feeling that individuals, in what they work at, think, and feel, and in what they strive toward for the future as adults, emanate from the womb of history. Careers and state context and the places people can make for themselves—all this originated in these people themselves. It is not something external that is superimposed on them. We cannot ask whether we should have the individual being or the outer career more in view when we educate people, because if seen rightly, these are one and the same thing!

If we can develop a living understanding of the careers and people that are out there, then we can also develop an understanding of what previous generations that are still alive and at work today brought up out of the womb of humanity into the present time.

Separating education toward a career and education toward being an individual is not sufficient when we want to work as teachers and educators. There needs to be something living in us that is not outwardly visible, neither in a career nor in the context of the state nor anywhere else in the outer world. What must be alive in us is what the generations to come will bring to life’s outer level. What must live in us is a prophetic merging with the future evolution of humanity. The educational and artistic feeling, thinking and willing of a faculty stands and falls with this merging. A living theory and methodology of education for the present must strive to have flow into the faculty what can be known about the growing human being. This is like a soul and spiritual life-blood that becomes art without first having been knowledge. What is to enter the childlike heart, mind, and intellect can proceed only from this living methodology.

I cannot present our educational principles in detail today. I only wanted to point out how the art of education as it is meant to be in the present and future is to take its place in a living spiritual grasp of the entire nature of the world and of humanity.

We talk a lot today about the social forms of humanity’s future. Why is it always so difficult to take steps to bring this future about? It is difficult because in our times, antisocial drives and instincts are present in the evolution of humanity and work against social striving.

When we look back at patriarchal times, to a time when humanity led a more instinctive life than is the case in our civilization, we may have many reasons to be proud of the accomplishments of the present. However, the impulses of earlier times were more social than ours; we are now governed by antisocial impulses. These antisocial impulses, however, must be eliminated from the art of education above all else. More precise observers will note how our educational system has gradually developed into an antisocial system. However, the only art of education that can be fruitful is one in which the teacher’s effect on the child results from a commonality of feeling from the very moment they enter the classroom. The child’s soul and the teacher’s soul must become one through a mysterious and subconscious bond that passes from the teacher’s spirit to the child’s. This gives the school its social character. For this to happen, the teacher must be able to put him or herself in the child’s position.

What do we often do nowadays? We make an effort to formulate our thoughts in ways that will enable us to explain something to the children. Perhaps we say to them, “Look, here is a chrysalis. A butterfly is going to come out of it.” We may show the children the butterfly and the chrysalis and may also demonstrate how the one develops out of the other. Perhaps we then go on to say, “Your immortal souls are at rest in your bodies just as the butterfly is at rest in the chrysalis. And just as the butterfly leaves the chrysalis one day, so too your immortal souls will one day leave your bodies when you go through the gate of death.” We have thought of an image from nature that we use in order to make something clear to the children, but we know that we have only used a comparison, and that we ourselves have a different way of understanding the whole thing. We have made an effort to straighten something out for the children. However, according to a mysterious law, we cannot really accomplish anything in the lesson if we straighten things out in this way. It is really only possible to convey to the children what we ourselves believe in the depths of our souls. Only when we have wrestled our way through to the feeling that the image of the butterfly and chrysalis is no mere cooked-up comparison, but one presented to us by divine spiritual nature itself, only when we can believe in the truth of the image in the way that the children are meant to believe it, only in that instant are we able to convey living spirit to them.

It is never permissible for us to merely give lip service to something, although this plays such a great role in cultural development today. We must speak and be able to work out of the spirit of truth. This is possible only when we are connected, deeply and intimately connected, to everything human. Even if we are already white-haired, we must be able to unite with what growing human beings are in accordance with their essential nature. We must have an inner understanding of the growing human being. Can we still do that today? No, we cannot, or we would not sit ourselves down in laboratories and practice experimental psychology in order to work out the rules by which human understanding and human memory work. If teachers see these superficial methods and procedures as the essential thing in learning to understand the human being, they kill off their living intuitive connection and relationship to human beings. I know that educational experiments and experimental psychology are useful to teachers in a certain way. However, I also know that these are only symptoms of what they are supposed to be most useful for, and I know that we have lost the direct soul-route from person to person and are looking for it again through outer observation in laboratories. We have become inwardly estranged from what is human and are looking for it in outer ways. However, if we want to be real teachers and educators, we must be reunited with the human aspect. We must foster the whole person within us, and then this whole person will be related to what we have to develop in the child in educational and artistic ways. What we as educators gain from experimental study and observation, which are often promoted as the basis of the science of education nowadays, is comparable to the effort of trying to understand how we eat and drink on the basis of the study of nutrition and its applications to the human being. We do not need a science of how one eats and drinks, we need a healthily developed sense of taste and healthy organs, and then we will eat and drink properly. Nor do we need a theory of education based on experimental psychology. What we as educators need is an awakening of our living human nature, which will experience in itself the whole of the child to which it makes a spiritual connection.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we want to create this Waldorf School on the basis of a new spirit. You will also have noticed what this school is nof meant to become. In any case, it is not meant to become a school to promote a particular philosophy. Anyone who says that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is founding the Waldorf School, and that it is now going to inject its philosophy into this school, will not be speaking the truth. I am stating this now, on the opening day. We are not interested in imposing our “dogmas,” our principles, or the content of our world-view on young people. We are not trying to bring about a dogmatic form of education. We are striving to turn what we have been able to learn from spiritual science into a living act of education. We are striving to include in our instructional methods a way of dealing with individual souls that can originate in a living spiritual science. Dead science can give rise only to knowledge; living spiritual science will give rise to instructional methodology and practical applications in the soul-spiritual sense. We strive to teach, to be able to educate. With regard to all this, we are fundamentally aware of the responsibility our dear friend Herr Molt spoke of earlier. We have pledged that the various religious denominations will be able to provide religious instruction in the school and to introduce the principles of their world-views, and we will honor this promise. It remains to be seen whether the art form we want to introduce provisorily and in a modest way will encounter as little interference from them as the world-views which they introduce will encounter from us.² We know that before humankind can acquire a correct insight into issues involving world-views and their interrelationships, people must understand that an art of education in the pedagogical and methodological sense can result from a spiritual world-view. Thus, we are not going to found a school on the basis of a particular world-view. What we are attempting to create in the Waldorf School is a school based on the art of education.

To you parents of the first children to be sent to this school, let me say that you are pioneering not only a personal human intention, but also a cultural challenge of our times, and that you will be able to grasp in the right way what is now meant to happen with regard to the Waldorf School only if you feel yourselves to be pioneers of this sort.

It is too soon to speak to the children in words as rational as those I spoke to their parents, but we will promise these children that what we are conveying to their parents in words will come to them in the form of actions—actions that will help them find their place in life so that they will be a match for the difficult challenges facing the generations to come. These challenges will be difficult, and what we today, especially in Central Europe, are experiencing as a time of great troubles is only the beginning of greater troubles to come. But just as the greatest things for human beings have always emerged from pain and suffering, so too a true, reality-based human art of education will emerge from these troubles. By seeking the source and foundation of our school system in the whole human being, by trying to build it up on the basis of the whole human being, we want to insert the social issue of education into the overall social issue of our times.

Comprehensive school! That is what our times are saying. And the art of teaching that draws its ability from the whole human being, as has been indicated here, will appear only in a comprehensive school. If humanity is to be able to live in social justice in the future, then people must first educate their children in a socially appropriate way. Through the Waldorf School, we hope to make a small contribution toward bringing this about.

In spite of the best will, we may be able to accomplish only a portion of what we set out to do, but we hope that the strength of the effort may not be exhausted in our feeble attempts, and that it will find successors. For we are convinced that although a feeble attempt may fail due to opposition and lack of understanding, the central core of this effort will find successors. When a real social art of education finds its way into the consciousness of all of humanity, which is what carries the faculty and the group of children to be educated, then the school will be incorporated into our overall life in society in the right way.

May the Waldorf School make a small contribution toward this great goal.

• 1. Theodor Vogt, 1835-1906. Wilhelm Rein, 1847-1929, author of Pädagogik im Grundriss [An Outline of Pedagogy].
• 2. Unlike in the U.S., in Germany it is even now quite standard for state-supported schools to make space available in the school and time in the school week for religious instruction, with teachers supplied by the churches.

Dear children! Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then, my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers’ love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children’s souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the care of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good will!²

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school’s working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.
• 2. A free rendering of the angels’ words to the shepherds (Luke 2:14).

Dear children!¹ Last time I was able to be here, I told you how glad I am when our dear friend Herr Molt comes to pick me up in Dornach, where the school for big people, for grown-ups, is being built.² Then I can be with you again for a little while and see what you are doing.

And why am I so glad when Herr Molt comes to bring me here? Because it makes me think, “Now I am going to the school that was founded for our dear children”—that is, for you who are here because you long to become capable people who are ready for life.

Because I have only been here for a short time, I have not been able to see much yet—just the tiny little folks in the first grade, and the eighth grade—but what I did see gave me great pleasure. I saw how patiently and lovingly the first grade teacher had helped the children make some progress, and I was privileged to spend a very nice lesson with the eighth grade students. They were hearing about what human history tells us of how human beings on earth are involved in an evolution, an ongoing progress, that is driven by the spirit: Something that lives in human history gives us the desire to work on into the future. The spirit in which this was being conveyed to the souls of our dear young friends in the eighth grade was very beautiful. I am looking forward to seeing all the other classes, too. I am always pleased when I see how what our friend Herr Molt planted here is beginning to develop.

You entered this school when the fall was approaching. At that time we tried to think about what we would experience here and what we wanted to foster—love for each other, love for our teachers, love for God, who speaks to us from everything. And now, while you have been enjoying what your teachers presented to you each morning, you have also been experiencing what comes up out of the earth, what the spring draws out of it. You have seen the trees growing green. And now we remember what we hear when we go out into the woods. We hear the songbirds, and we are glad.

But today we have also heard something else, something for which I am especially thankful. We have heard you, under the direction of your teachers, express something that comes from inside of you. We can hear the birds singing out in the woods, and we can also hear what you have expressed to us, but there is a difference between them.

We are glad when we hear the little birds singing. But we know that something else is present when we hear what you perform for us. This is something that we call the human soul. It is your human souls that speak to us and sing to us. This is what human beings make out of what speaks to them out there in nature. In the woods, we hear the birds, but when you sing many other things that are heard come toward us out from the human soul.

But there are also other things out there in nature. You see how the plants grow and the trees turn green. All of this is called forth by the light. Light floods the entire universe. Light and warmth are what call everything up out of the earth, all those things that delight your eyes and hearts. What sounds in your ears, brought to you through the patience and persistence of your teachers, what travels through the world as light and then enters your eyes—we hear all of this resounding from you, not only when you sing and dance, but also when you tell what you have learned to calculate and what you have learned about everything that is human. In your souls, this turns to light. And just think what the plants would be without the sun. They would not be able to come out of the ground. They would always remain roots that would not be able to develop flowers, and it would be dark. This is what it would be like for you if you went through the world without ever finding a school where you could learn something. You would be like a plant that never finds the sun. The soul finds its sun in people from whom it can learn something.

This is why we are so glad that a school like this has been founded as a result of Herr Molt’s insight, and why you are so glad to be able to be in a school that you love. Seek the light of the soul, just as the plants seek the light and warmth of the sun!

I do not want to always say the same things to you, because I also do not want to always hear the same things when I come, but there is one thing that I want to hear from you again and again. You must answer me; this is what I am most curious about. And so I ask you, children, do you still love your teachers? [“Yes!” shout the children.] That is what I want to hear from the majority of you. That is what you are meant to take up into your souls. Love for your teachers will support you as you go out into life. Again and again, each time I come here, I would like to experience that you have made progress in learning, but I would also like you to show me that you have continued to love your teachers. You can be sure that in the great building that is being built for grown-ups in Dornach, where big people are meant to learn something, we all think about the Waldorf School here, and we think of it with love and joy. There are a lot of people who are thinking of the Waldorf School with love today, and they are thinking, “How good and capable these people will grow up to be, since as children they were filled with love for their teachers.”

Oh, there is something I must tell you—Frau Steiner sends her greetings, since she cannot be here today.

There is a spirit that is always meant to prevail here, a spirit that your teachers bring to this place. From the spirit of the cosmos, they learn to bring this spirit here to you; they take in what St. Paul said with all of their souls. The spirit of Christ prevails throughout our school; whether we are doing arithmetic, reading, writing, or whatever we do, we do it with the attitude that the Christ awakened in us:

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”³

This is the spirit that is meant to prevail here, and it will do so through what your teachers bring to you with love, patience and endurance. May it also prevail through what lives in your souls!

Be with this spirit when you are in your class, and think of it when you leave. Be glad in your souls that you are coming back to the Waldorf School where the sun is lit for you, the sun that people need for life.

If there is someone among you who does not pay attention, there should be one of you who can go to that person and lovingly say, “Hey, hard work and paying attention get us up the mountain of life. Upward, friend! You should always be going up the mountain of life.”⁴ This is how each of you should help the friend who falters a little—all of you for each one, all for one, one for all, lovingly. Love needs to be present among you, for each other and for your teachers. This is something we want to cultivate as part of the good spirit of the Waldorf School.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner had suggested that the students gather at the school for a brief celebration instead of the monthly day off from school that was the custom in Baden-Württemberg. The mood of the course of the year was to form the background for this event and the classes were to show each other what they had been working on in recitation, drama, music, and eurythmy, or in foreign languages, gymnastics, and so on. Rudolf Steiner also gave a talk at these assemblies whenever he could be in Stuttgart.
• 2. The wooden building of the Goetheanum, the Free School of Spiritual Science, was under construction from 1913-1921.
• 3. Matthew 28:20.
• 4. In the original German, this is a reference to a song sung by the students at the beginning of the assembly.