The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to make a few aphoristic remarks on various pedagogical questions which we discussed in our first course and which I have since added to as I feel necessary at the present time. The Christmas course that I gave in Dornach, which in many ways complements the other explanations on pedagogy, I have not yet been able to print after the postscripts. I hope that this will happen some day. But for the time being it has been appearing continuously in the lectures of Steffen at the "Goetheanum". This reprint in the "Goetheanum" will now also be published in book form, so that at least these lectures by Steffen on this Christmas course, which I consider to be especially important for study by those interested in pedagogy, will be available.

Today I would like to point out some feelings that the teacher, the educator, should always have, and that he should also repeatedly, I would like to say meditatively, call into consciousness. The basic feeling must be what I have expressed in various ways: respect for the individuality of the child. We must be aware that there is a spiritual individuality embodied in every child, and that what we have before us as a physical child is not actually a true expression of the child's individuality. The regularity, the structure of the human organism, as you have seen from much that has come before our souls since the first Teacher's Course, is an extraordinarily complicated one. And for a variety of reasons, that which is the true individuality of a child is prevented from fully expressing itself by obstacles in the physical and also in the etheric organism, so that we actually always have before us in the child the more or less unknown true individuality and that which is actually concealed by the physical of the child. It is also possible to express the same truth in the other form that I tried to say in the public lectures in Vienna: We must be aware that in a certain individuality of a child, if we characterize it radically, there could be a genius, and it could also be that we ourselves as teachers and educators would not be a genius. If this relationship exists, that the child is a genius and the teacher is not a genius, it is a completely justified relationship, because not all teachers can be geniuses, and pedagogy has to deal with the general laws. But, of course, it would be quite wrong if the teacher then wanted to inculcate his own individuality or even his own sympathies and antipathies into the child, if he wanted to teach the child as right, as desirable, etc., what he himself thinks is right and desirable. Of course, he would hold the child back on his level, and we must not do that under any circumstances. We can help ourselves tremendously if we, I would say, once again meditate and become very deeply aware that all education basically has nothing to do with the real individuality of the human being, that we, as educators and teachers, actually have the main task, It is our duty as educators and teachers to stand before individuality with reverence, to offer it the possibility to follow its own laws of development, and to remove only those obstacles to development which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional, that is, in the physical body and in the etheric body. We are only called upon to remove those inhibitions which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional and to let the individuality develop freely; so that we should basically use what we teach the child in terms of knowledge only to bring the body, both the physical-emotional and the etheric-emotional, so far forward that the human being can just develop freely.

My dear friends, this seems abstract, but it is the most concrete thing in education, and at the same time it points to where one makes the most mistakes. Many people say that it is necessary to develop the individuality of the child. This is as true as it is empty. For if the physical and etheric inhibitions were not there, the individuality of each child would develop properly in life. But we have to remove these physical and etheric inhibitions. Just think of the terrible things we do when we teach six, seven, eight year old children to read and write. It is not often enough that this is brought home to us in all its gravity. For when the child grows up to be six, seven, eight years old, he really brings nothing with him to point out or even to imitate those little demonic things that appear before him on paper. There is no human relationship to the letter forms of today. Therefore, we must be aware of the fact that there is a terrible gap between what has developed in the later course of human civilization and what the child in his 7th year is. Today we have to teach the child something that it certainly does not want, so that it can grow into today's civilization. And if we don't want to spoil the child, we have to proceed in such a way that we treat the child in these years as it needs to be treated, so that the obstacles to its development are removed and it is gradually led, after the obstacles to its development are removed, to the point of view of the soul, to the state of the soul, where the adult people stood in that period of culture when the present forms of writing came into being. The nature of the child itself gives cause for this, of course.

You see, today experiments are being conducted on the tiredness of children. The fact that such figures have been found should not be the end of the research, but the beginning. We should ask ourselves: Why are children so tired? - We are looking at a system, we are looking at the head system, and probably also at the metabolic system and the limb system, which are tired, while the rhythmic system, which is in the highest flower of its development from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, is not really tired. For the heart beats even when it is tired, and the respiratory rhythm and all rhythms go on unharmed by any fatigue, so that the present figures of experimental psychology say something different from what is usually assumed today. They say that the rhythmic system is not taken into account enough in the education of children. But the rhythmic system is stimulated directly from the soul when the whole teaching is artistic, plastic-artistic or musical-artistic. Then you will find that the child will hardly get tired to a great extent because of this kind of teaching. And the teacher should indeed acquire a watchful eye to see whether his children tire too much; he should acquire a certain instinct to see whether the fatigue is much greater than it should be according to the mere external conditions, whether the air in the classroom is somewhat worse than it should be, whether the children have to sit for hours on end, that is, the purely physical things that occupy the metabolic-limb organism. On the other hand, the child has to think. If the thoughts echo in a quiet rhythm, they are not too tired. They get a little tired, but not too tired. The rhythmic system is the physical organ of education and teaching that must be used especially by the child. Now, in the subjects that are not directly artistic, we must try to make the teaching as artistic as possible. This must be taken very seriously, for this is the only real means of education: the artistic between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Yesterday I said that what is very important for this age of life is that we transform everything into the image, either into the musical image or into the plastic image. Now, of course, you may find how extraordinarily difficult it is in some subjects to work through the image. It will be relatively easy to work through the image in history, where you can make an image of what you are describing; it will be relatively easy in this or that subject, for example, in natural history, where you should also make an image of what you want to teach the child. In other subjects it will be more difficult. In languages, for example, it will not be so difficult to bring things into the picture, if one attaches any importance at all to taking the pictorial aspect of language into account in teaching. One should not miss any opportunity to look at how sentences are structured, for example, a three-part sentence structure consisting of the main clause, the relative clause and the conditional clause, even with ten, eleven, twelve-year-old children. Not true, the grammatical aspect is not the main thing; it should be treated by us only as a means to get the picture, but we should not neglect to give the child, I would say, even a spatial-visual idea of a main clause and a relative clause. Of course, this can be done in many different ways. You can make the main proposition a large circle, the relative proposition a small circle, perhaps placed eccentrically - without theorizing, by staying in the picture - and you can make the conditional proposition, the if proposition, so vivid that you introduce, say, rays against the circle as the conditional factors. It is not necessary to exaggerate these things, but it is really necessary to come back to these things again and again after a good preparation of the subject. And even with ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old children, one should pay attention to what I would call the moral-characterological aspects of pictorial style. Not that you should have style lessons at that age. We discussed yesterday where that should be in the class. Rather, the matter should be grasped more from the inner intuitive. You can go very far. For example, you can treat the individual reading piece, not the pedantic reading pieces that are in our reading books, but what you really prepare carefully, you can treat it according to your temperament. You can talk about a melancholic style or a choleric style, not about the content. So please leave out the content completely, even the poetic content, I mean the sentence structure. There is no need to take things apart, which should be avoided; but the transformation into the image, which should be cultivated, when I say: into the moral-characterological. One can find the possibility to have a stimulating effect on the children already in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th years, if one restrains oneself in an appropriate way to make the necessary studies..

You see, my dear friends, I do not want to mend anybody's things, I only want to characterize something. Again, at our Vienna Congress, I was able to make quite meaningful studies, meaningful for me, when I compared the attitude, the stylistic attitude of those who spoke, let us say, from Northern Germany, and those who spoke as our Viennese, who were called here. I always thought to myself, when Baravalle or Stein or another Viennese comes again, will he again begin his lecture with "if"? That is so characteristic of the Austrian, it is infinitely meaningful to begin with a conditional sentence, it immediately leads into the moral-characterological. I think you yourself are hardly aware of how you begin your lectures with "If"! The North Germans and the Swiss do not begin with "if," they immediately blurt out an unconditional, affirmative sentence. This is so characteristic, and this is how one should learn to approach things, first of all, so that one can become free, if I may say so, from one's own conditions, and so that in this becoming free one can also achieve an artistic treatment, which is not pedantic, an artistic treatment of any teaching material. If you learn to pay attention to such things, you can achieve an artistic treatment of any subject. And I would like to point out that it is extremely important to feel oneself in artistic things in such a way that one pays attention to details in artistic things, if one wants to be a good teacher for children from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Again, look at the photographs*; look at how Dr. Kolisko and Walleen are standing, and do not look at them with an interpretive, commenting sense, but look at them with an artistic sense, and you will see how much they give you. It is very important not to force things like that; of course, if you make a judgment with your mind, that someone always holds a folder in a certain hand position and things like that, it comes out immediately as nonsense. But if you grasp it with an artistic sense, something comes out that cannot be completely put into words, but which pours the artistic into your limbs in a tremendously significant way, which is exactly what you need as an educator. It is very important to be able to transform things into a picture, because the picture brings the things that we want to teach the child closer to the human being.

With what we, after our own scientific education, what we have taken up and what we are always confronted with when we prepare ourselves - the books we prepare ourselves from contain nothing but abominations - we burden ourselves with something that is scientific systematics, and when we do not have enough time to get rid of the whole thing - when we prepare ourselves for a lesson, we have to take a contemporary book in which things are arranged scientifically - then this haunts our minds. When we bring this to the children, it is something that is not possible. And we have to realize that this causes us great difficulties, that today scientific systematics, not human systematics, have crept into the preparation books that we can use. So we have to get rid of it absolutely. We have to get everything that we bring into the school for this age absolutely free of all scientific systematics.

And here it is good to remember times when older children, older young people were taught in such a way that it was taken for granted that the appeal was not to the head, but to the whole person. One only has to remember the medieval education: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, where it was not important to teach this or that, but to get the child to be able to express himself in a sentence that was grammatically correct. There, grammar was not taught, but the child was given the opportunity to think in such a pictorial way that his sentences had a pictorial character. Then, not true, rhetoric: the child should be accustomed to feel the beauty of the word in its formation; dialectic: the child should be accustomed to let the thought free in itself, and so on; there it was a matter of ability. And basically it must also come to ability in the most spiritual things, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. But the ability is reached only at that age when everything is brought into the picture.

Well, that's where the trivialities sometimes play an extraordinarily large role. For example, when presenting mathematics, it really makes a difference whether you put one line of letters that is wider and then another that is shorter, whether you put it at the beginning or in the middle. You can make a picture out of what is an arithmetic operation at the end, which the students have in front of them, and put a certain value on something like that, so that even what you write on the blackboard becomes a picture; that even in the trivialities these things are thoroughly taken into account. Sometimes there are opportunities to bring out the picture from a very special corner of life, I would say. Mathematical formulas or sequences of formulas can sometimes be described by figures that are immediately perceived as beautiful. We should not miss such opportunities. It would be a sin and a pity if we missed such an opportunity to make something descriptive, which might be a kind of unnecessary tendril for those who can only think in a philistine way. We should gradually inoculate the philistro-logical way out of our souls for this age, if I may say so. Today we inoculate it much too much more and more. We should inoculate it out; we should work with all our might towards the imaginative or towards the musical, and then actually come close to rhythm for this age of life.

And now we should not close our minds to the realization that truly imponderables play a great role in the totality of teaching. You see, in our very first pedagogical courses, we spoke of a pedagogical relationship between the four temperaments. The task of the educator is to study these four temperaments in the child continuously, to study them in such a way that he can take them into account continuously. This is because, as I say, the right karma of a class is created through the right treatment of the temperaments of the children in the class. After all, such a class is together; they are souls that are together. As they work with the teacher and with each other, a part of their life karma is played out. All kinds of threads of life are being spun, but a piece of karma is being played out; especially between the 7th and 14th years, a piece of karma is being played out very strongly. And how the individual temperaments work into that karma is what we should look at. In this respect, the class can be a constant subject of inner apercus, if we let this be the quiet undertone of our pedagogical work. And above all, one should not let it happen that in any class there are sleeping, co-sleeping students. By sleeping students I mean those who, during the course of the lesson, give only half or three-quarters or a quarter of their whole being. It can happen that the few gifted ones, as they are usually called - they are not always - show up and the others remain asleep. Then the lesson will be really lively with a few, and the others will always be a kind of extras, and this is what must be avoided at all costs. Because, of course, this becoming an extra or being a chatterbox - I don't mean that in a bad way - is also based on other moments. But it is also based on the contrast of temperaments. Of course, among the students there are those who have, let's say, a sanguine or even a choleric temperament, and they will always show off, and you will always have to deal with them if you don't pay special pedagogical attention to them; and there are others, the more melancholic, phlegmatic ones, who then become the extras. This must be avoided at all costs, because the best thing we can do for the students who think more quickly and speak more easily is to make those who think more slowly and do not open their mouths so readily take part in everything, speak, cooperate, and so on. It is absolutely necessary that we go along with this inconvenience. Then we will feel that for a short time we may make less progress than if we left the extras to themselves, but in the long run it will be different. In the long run it will turn out that we have a tremendous effect on the memory retention of the children by not allowing the extras. What is justified in memory is essentially supported by the fact that we do not allow extras.

And so I would say that the possibility of working quite pictorially depends also on the effectiveness of these imponderables. We will see from experience that if we allow all the temperaments, all the possible dispositions of a class to really live themselves out, that for the age from the change of teeth to sexual maturity we are much more likely to arrive at a pictoriality seated in the soul than if we do not. Of course, a certain, I would say, strong devotion to the lesson is necessary if the things to be taught are really always to be taught with the consideration that they will become pictorial; but nevertheless, one should never end a lesson for this age without giving the child something pictorial. Those who are able to draw with the children from the very beginning have an easier time in this respect; but those who, let us say, give the children something pictorial, for example in languages or arithmetic, have all the more effect on them. And, in fact, there is no other real preparation for the educator for this pictorial work than that which I have indicated: to sharpen our sense of observation of life in such a way that we can respond objectively to what life reveals, especially in the human being. A healthy artistic physiognomics, not only human physiognomics, but also, for example, animal physiognomics, should indeed be revived among educators, a healthy, not the sentimental physiognomics of Lavater and the like, but a healthy physiognomics in which the pictorial is sought, without going so far as to close the concept, staying in the picture, being satisfied with it, when one has brought things into the picture, such a healthy physiognomy should be revived, and it will then pass over of itself into all kinds of actions, into all kinds of processes that the teacher develops during the lesson. Nowhere should we pay so much attention to the how and not so much to the what as in teaching and education. It is not the what that is important, but the fact that the what appears in a certain way, in a certain way in the lesson. And there is no greater enemy for the teacher than an incomplete preparation, because it always makes him stop at the "what," whereas a complete preparation always makes him go from the "what" to the "how," makes him rejoice to see how he can prepare it for the child, how he can form it before the child, because the forming itself has become like an inspiration and the like. We should not shrink back when we ourselves often bring incomprehensible things to the children in this respect. Incomprehensible things which the children accept on our authority - and for the children, between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, authority decides - are better taught to the children than trivial things which are comprehensible to them and which they grasp out of their own intellect.

These are quite, I would say, finer nuances of what the teacher, the educator, should do with his own soul life. You will notice, if you perhaps look again at the Christmas course on education, that there is actually everywhere an emphasis on answering the question: How do we form the shell of the human being, the physical body, the etheric body? - Not, how do we form the individuality? That will form itself. If you say, "How do we form the physical body? -...people today, in this materialistic age, have no idea that it is only through the spiritual-mental processes, the spiritual-mental processes that you develop during the teaching, that you form the physical body.

For example, suppose a child stumbles over its own words, cannot find the next word. You see, in the child, before he has reached sexual maturity, this stumbling over his own words is a trait that is still based in physical corporeality in the Upper Man. The upper man is the man in physical relationship, who undergoes his main development in the first and even in the infantile period of life. If you find the possibility to find out the right tempo for what you make the child sing, tell, to get the right tempo for such a person who makes us wait there when he has to look for the transition from one word to the other, then you are in a position to cure this in the child up to sexual maturity absolutely from the spiritual. You are removing a physical inhibition. If you have not removed it from the physical up to sexual maturity, then you have formed its counterpart in the metabolic limb system, then it has become a property of the intestines, then you cannot get it out. Then whatever you do in the ordinary sense as spiritual practices will not help you. They have to be done in such a way that they affect the digestive system, and of course it is not always possible to introduce this, I would say, in a general way. That would lead to the abuse of certain exercises. But with the child, we have to watch carefully to see if he goes from one word to another, from one thought to another, subnormally slowly. And in the child we can still make the body healthy. We make the digestive system sick if we do not cure such waiting from one word to another in youth. This is our duty, and it is more important than any content - which we need, because we have to teach, and therefore we have to have content - to teach the child. This is simply how the mind works in the whole physical organism. In order to learn to control the physical organism in the right way, we have to know the spiritual science, because it is the spirit that works in the physical organism. Therefore, we need to bring healthy medical thinking closer to educational thinking in a certain way. So that we really know how to take such a thing seriously, let us say that when it is said in the Old Testament that someone was tormented by bad dreams, the expression is not used: My brain has done something special, God has afflicted me through my brain. - No one who was active in the Old Testament would have said that. But he said: God is afflicting me through my kidneys. - And why? For the simple reason that it is true. People today are proud to know that spiritual things come from the brain, and they arrogantly disregard what is written in the Old Testament. Not only the brain is spiritualized, but the whole organism is spiritualized. Dreams, for example, come from the kidneys; the expression in the Old Testament is very serious. Just as it is clever in the modern sense to say that compassion also comes from the brain; but in the deeper sense it is nonsense, and the Old Testament form, that compassion comes from the bowels, is the correct one.

And so we must know that when we approach the child with the soul-spiritual, we are treating its whole body. We are the very ones who, with medical wisdom, take care of the physical-spiritual of the child when we do this or that in the construction of sentences, in the treatment of colors, in the treatment of sounds, in the treatment of this or that object. We are influencing the whole physical; for in the physical is the spirit, and we are influencing this spirit, not only the spirit which is only directly in the brain, for there, strangely enough, is the most ineffective thing. And so we must see ourselves as educators, either as people who are constantly bringing up in children something that nourishes and shapes life, or something that is poisonous and destroys the body. If we exaggerate a little in the direction of formalism, if we make the children think until they are tired, then we condemn them between the ages of 7 and 14 to relatively early sclerosis. We just have to be aware that we are working on the whole life when we develop this or that in the child's environment in education and teaching. And if we are not aware of this, we will certainly not approach pedagogical issues in the right way: We are really entitled to remove only the obstacles and hindrances that arise from the physical and etheric nature of man.

As for the rest, today's man, who is much more selfish than he thinks, will naturally say - this seems right to me, that seems wrong to me - and will then bring up the child to feel and think as much as possible like himself. That, of course, is wrong. What is right in all matters is life - not the individual teacher - whom we must ask. Today, of course, we have to teach a child to write. I must confess that I cannot find in myself any judgment of taste that would give me an answer directly from human nature as to whether a child should learn to write or not; it arises only from consideration of the development of civilization. Mankind has now come to the point where a certain content of civilization has an effect on the way of writing and reading. In order to educate the child not for another world but for this world, we must teach him to read and write. This is something we must accept as a condition of civilization, and we must remove the obstacles to development that come with living in a certain age. We have an enormous amount of work to do if we want to answer the question: How can we make the objects that are already given for the human development of the child as harmless as possible? - Because we can always assume that by giving the child a certain material, we are doing the child more harm than good. So we must always ask ourselves: How can we avoid the harm that must always be done when we teach the child something? Well, of course, this is all the less true the more artistic the material is, and all the more true the more cognitive the material is. But this fact must always be before our minds. And now we should be very clear about this: the right authoritative relationship that should exist between the change of teeth and sexual maturity between the educator and the child, this right authoritative relationship is brought about under no other circumstances than when we make an effort to make the teaching artistic-pictorial. If we can do that, then the authoritative relationship will certainly develop. You see, what undermines the authoritative relationship is one-sided intellectuality. Of course, it is easiest to cultivate one-sided intellectuality in the fields of arithmetic, science, and so on. But it is there that we should work into the pictorial. Often we are too unimaginative in language teaching. Let us be clear about this: when we create figuratively, there is a certain selflessness involved. It is much easier to think cleverly, it is much more selfish to think cleverly, than to create pictorially; and we face the child unselfishly when we create pictorially in our teaching. When the child has reached sexual maturity, and knowledge is to pass into cognition, then, because its intellect is now awakened, it simply rejects the judgment of the teacher, the educator, of its own accord. Then nothing is achieved by mere authority, then we have to be able to compete, then we really have to compete with the child, because actually at the age of 17 one is as clever as at the age of 35 in terms of the ability to judge. There are certain nuances, but basically you are as smart at 17 as you are at 35 in terms of formal logic. So you really have to compete with the child as soon as they reach sexual maturity. And therefore, what I said yesterday, that one must not show oneself in any way, must come true. Of course, this will be easy for the younger child if you devote yourself to an artistic organization of the lessons. And a great deal will be achieved if one gets a feeling for how different parts of one or the other can be formed artistically in different ways. Let's say you take the children through a series of plants. You talk about the blossoms; now you try to describe the blossoms in the whole tone, I would say, up to the tone of voice, in such a way that the whole words and ideas are something flowing, that they are light. Now, when you develop this, you try to appeal to the sanguine children in particular, so that the sanguine children contribute to the whole class what they have especially in the ability to perceive, in the easy ability to perceive, let us say, for such ideas as an artistic person develops when he describes blossoms. If you turn to the leaves, you may find that you strike such a tone that the melancholy children are more interested in the leaves; the dialog with the class now passes to the melancholy children. If you describe the roots, which are not usually seen, but which you can describe in such a way that their power can be felt in the flowers, if you describe what is usually invisible, then you must no longer describe statically, but dynamically, and then the choleric children help you to have a real dialog. In this way the whole class can be used for mutual stimulation, if only one develops the sense for it, which can become instinctive. Only, isn't it, it is necessary to pay attention to such things.

Well, actually the thing is that you imagine it to be much more difficult than it actually is. Because once you have brought yourself a quarter in such a direction, then you yourself have the need to bring yourself in 'such a direction'. But there is a catch. You start with great desire. You say to yourself: I want to do this now, I really want to create a picture, I want to create a picture for the lessons, tomorrow I will start. - Now it goes on for eight days, but after that you get lazy, and that is the catch. You have to persevere for a quarter of a year, and then you have to persevere longer. Eight days won't do it, but a quarter of a year will do it, if you are serious about training yourself for a quarter of a year.

And now today, my dear friends, I do not want to have given you one rule or another for one thing or another in class. Perhaps we will always organize pedagogical lectures at future meetings, so that we always move forward. But I would have liked to give you something today that would have made you meditate and put you in a pedagogical and pedagogical mood. I would have liked to see an arm move differently here and there in a class, so that it would create a different image in front of the students. Sometimes I wish that the always unimaginative bumpiness, for example, would not be one of the first things in the classroom. Sometimes I wish that this or that ungraceful wiping of the blackboard would be replaced by a more graceful one. All this comes naturally. It is worked out from the unartistic to the artistic when the general sense for it is there, and the general sense is actually much more important for the pedagogue than the individual dogmatic rule. I would like you to have taken up this today, which draws your attention to the importance of the heartbeat with which one is in pedagogy.

If today we think of the education of the young, we must bear in mind that we are concerned with feelings, the ideas, the will impulses of the next generation; we must be clear that our present work is to prepare this next generation for definite tasks which will be accomplished, at some time in the future of mankind. When a thing of this kind is said, the question at once arises; Why is it then that humanity has reached the widespread misery in which it is today? Humanity has entered into this misery because it has really in essential things made itself dependent, through and through dependent, on the kind of thinking and feeling peculiar to the western man. It is true to say that when today someone in Central Europe speaks about, e.g., Fichte, Herder or even Goethe, if he belongs to external public life, either as a journalist, book-wright or the like, he is much further from the true spiritual impulse living in Fichte, Herder or Goethe when he is thinking and active in Berlin or Vienna, than he is from what is felt and thought today in London, Paris, New York or Chicago. Things have worked out gradually In such a way that speaking generally our whole civilization has been flooded by the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of the western nations and our whole public life is lived in the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of these nations.

It must also be admitted that this is particularly true where the art of education is concerned. For from the last third of the 19th century European nations, speaking generally, have learned from the western nations in all such educational matters, and today it is taken for granted by those men who discuss or dispute among other things about questions of education, that they should make use of the habits of thought which come from the west. If you trace back all the educational ideas which are considered reasonable in Central Europe today, you will find their source in the views of Herbert Spencer or similar men. People do not trace out the numerous paths by which the views of Spencer and others like him have entered the heads of those who have to decide about spiritual questions in Central Europe, but these paths exist—they are to be found. And if you (I will not lay special stress on the details) take the spirit of the educational line such as is to be found, e.g., in Fichte, it is now not only absolutely different from that which is generally looked upon today as sensible pedagogy, but the fact is that modern men are hardly in a position to think and feel along the lines which would enable then to understand what was meant by Fichte and Herder that they could find a way of continuing it. Thus, our experience today in the realm of pedagogy, especially in the art of pedagogy, is that the principles that have arisen are exactly the opposite of what they ought to be. Here I would like to point out to you something which Spencer has written.

Spencer was of the opinion that the way of giving object lessons should be such that they would lead over into the experience of the naturalist, into the research work of the men of science. What then would have to be done in the school? According to that, we should have to teach the children in school in such a way that when they are grown up and have the opportunity, they can continue what they have learned in the school about plants, minerals, animals, etc., so that they can become regular scientists or natural philosophers. It is true that this kind of idea is frequently attacked, but at the same time people really put this principle into practice. And for this reason; Our textbooks are composed with this in view, and no one thinks of altering or doing away with our textbooks. Today the fact is that, e.g., the textbooks on botany are composed for future botanists rather than for human beings in general. In the same way textbooks on zoology are written for future zoologists, not for human beings in general.

Now the remarkable thing is that we ought to strive for the exact opposite of that which Spencer has laid down as a true educational principle. When we are teaching the children about plants and animals in our Volkschule lessons, we could hardly imagine a greater mistake in our method of education than to treat the subject as an introduction to the studies which would be required to enable the child later to become a botanist or zoologist. If, on the contrary, you could have arranged your lessons so that your way of teaching about plants and animals would hinder the child in question from becoming a botanist or zoologist, then you would have acted more wisely than by following Spencer's principle, for no one should become a botanist or zoologist through what he learns in the Volkschule; that he can only become through his special gifts which are revealed by his choice of vocation and which would be sure to appear during his life if there is a true art of education. Through his gifts! That is, if he has the gifts necessary for a botanist, he can become a botanist; and if he has the gifts necessary for a zoologist, he can become a zoologist. That can only be the result of the gifts of the child in question, i.e., of his predetermined Karma. This must come about through the fact that we recognise this child has the makings of a botanist, that child has the makings of a zoologist. It must never be the result of making our Volkschule lessons in any way a preparation for special scientific activity. Just think what has happened of late. It has come about that unfortunately our “scientists” have been our educationalists; people who have definitely trained themselves to think scientifically have been engaged in pedagogy, have taken a most important part in deciding educational questions. That is to say, it has been thought that the teacher as such has something to do with the scientist; a scientific training has actually been taken as a teacher's training, whereas the two should be completely and absolutely different. If the teacher is a scientist, if he makes it his business to think scientifically in a narrow sense (that he can do as a private man, but not as a teacher), then there comes about something which does often happen. The teacher cuts rather a comical figure in his class and among his pupils or among his colleagues; jokes are made at his expense. Goethe's “Baccalaureus” in the upper classes is not such a rarity as is usually supposed.

And as a matter of fact, if you are asked today whether you would be more on the side of the teacher when his pupils make jokes about him or on the side of the scholars, you would under present educational conditions be more on the side of the scholars. For it is in our universities that you can best see whence this has arisen. What are our universities, properly speaking? Are they institutions for teaching young men and women or are they institutions for research? They would like to be both and that is why they have become the caricatures which they are today. It is usually even held up as a special feature of our universities that they are at the same time institutions for teaching and for research. But it is in this way that the bad methods, which come into our education when it is carried out by scientists, work their way first of all into our highest educational centres. Later these bad methods find their way down into the Mittelschule, and then finally also into the Volkschule. And it is this which cannot sufficiently be borne in mind, that the art of education must proceed from life and that it cannot proceed from abstract scientific thought.

Now the remarkable thing is that there is now arising, chiefly out of the western culture, just what can be called a pedagogy with a scientific, even a natural scientific, bent and that when we remember what was to be found in Herder, in Fichte, what was to be found in Jean Paul, in Schiller and similar minds, we know that here is really a pedagogy, which has been forgotten, taken from life, a pedagogy drawn directly from life. And now there lies before us the calling of the Central European nations, that calling which has its place in the history of the world, to cherish and develop this pedagogy, to make it their esoteric task to develop this pedagogy. For many things can be common to humanity and many things must be common to humanity if an improvement in social affairs is to come in the future; but the western nations will not be able to understand what will arise out of the whole concrete Central European spiritual culture with regard to the art of education; on the contrary, it will annoy them, and it really ought not to be told them in its original form. It could only have an undesirable effect upon them. It will only be possible to speak of it to them when they have made up their minds to take their stand on the esoteric foundation of Spiritual Science. With regard to all those things which have been looked upon in Germany during the last forty years with such pride, with regard to all those things which have been considered such a great advance, Germany has lost. All this will pass over to the dominion of the western nations. In this respect there is nothing to be done, and we can only hope to awaken so much understanding for the threefold social organism that the western nations will take part in it. But with regard to what has to be given for the art of education, we have something to give the world from Central Europe which no one else can give, not an oriental and not a western man. But we must know how to keep this among those who are able to understand it; we must understand how to guard it with a certain sense of trust, and we must know that it is this guardianship which will make our work effectual. You must know exactly about what things you have to be silent before certain people if you want to obtain a result. Then we must above all things be clear that there is nothing to hope from anything that might come to us from the kind of thought which, proceeding from the west, is indispensable in many branches of modern civilization; we must know that there is absolutely nothing to be expected from this direction for the educational art we have to develop.

There is a publication about education by Herbert Spencer which is extraordinarily Interesting. He gives there a whole number of maxims, of “Principles,” as he calls them, about the intellectual education of the child. Among these principles there is one which he especially emphasizes. In teaching you should never proceed from the abstract, but always from the concrete; you should always work your subject out from an individual case. Now in his book about education, before anything concrete is approached, there is the worst possible abstract litter, really abstract chaff, and he does not notice that he is himself carrying out the opposite of those principles which he sets forth as indispensable. Thus, we have an illustration of how an eminent, leading philosopher of the present day absolutely contradicts what he himself advocates.

Now you saw last year that our pedagogy has not to be built up on abstract principles of education, for it was said that we should not bring things to the child from the outside, but rather develop the individuality of the child. You know that our educational art should be built upon a real sympathy with the child's being, that it should be built up, in the widest sense, on a knowledge of the growing child, and in our first course of lectures and then later in our conferences we have collected sufficient facts about the being of the growing child. If as teachers we can enter into the child's being, then, out of our knowledge of the child, there will spring up a perception of the way in which we should act. In this respect we must as teachers become artists. Just as it is impossible for an artist to take a book on aesthetics in his hand in order to paint or model according to the principles laid down by the writer, so it should be quite impossible for a teacher to use an “educational guide” in order to teach, but what he needs is a real insight into what the child really is, what he will become as he works his way through childhood. It is above all necessary that we should be clear about the following: we teach, let us say, to begin with in the first class, the 6-7 year old children; now our teaching will always be bad, will have failed to fulfil its purpose if after we have worked with this first class for a year we do not say to ourselves; Who then has really learned the most? It is I, the teacher! If we say to ourselves, “At the beginning of the school year I had excellent educational principles, I have followed the best educational authorities, have done everything to carry out these principles;”—If you really had done this, you really would have taught badly. You would however certainly have taught best if each morning you had gone into your class in fear and trembling without over much confidence in yourself and then had said at the end of the year, you yourself have really learned the most during this time! For whether you can say: you, yourself have learned the most depends on how you have acted; it depends upon what you have really done, depends upon your constantly having had the feeling: you are growing while you are helping the children to grow, you are experimenting in the highest sense of the word, you are not really able to do so very much, but by working with the children there grows in you a certain power. Sometimes you will have the feeling: there is not much to be done with this kind of child, but you will have taken trouble with them. From other children, owing to their special gifts, you will have had certain experiences. In short, you have become quite a different person from what you were before you began, and you have taught what you would not have been able to teach a year earlier. At the end of the school year you say: yes, now for the first time you can do what you ought to have been doing. This is quite a religious feeling! And here there lies hidden a certain secret. If at the beginning of the school year you had really been able to do all you can do at the end, you would have taught badly. You have given good lessons because you had to work them out as you went along! I must put the following paradox before you. You taught well when you did not know at the beginning what you had learned by the end of the year, and it would have been harmful if you had already known at the beginning of the year what you had learned by the end. A remarkable paradox!

It is important for many people that they should know this, but it is most important of all that teachers should know it. For this is a special case of universal comprehensive understanding; a knowledge, no matter what the subject is, which can be comprehended in abstract principles, which can be represented by ideas in the mind, can be of no practical value; it is only what leads to this knowledge, only what is found on the way to this knowledge that is of any practical value. For this knowledge which is ours after we have taught for a year, receives its first value after our death. It is not until after the death of a man that this knowledge becomes such a reality that it can further his development, that it can further the development of the real individual man. In life it is not the ready knowledge that is of value, but the work which leads to the knowledge and particularly in the art of education this work has its own particular value. It is the same in education as in the arts, I do not think that an artist has the right attitude of mind if, when he has finished a work, he does not say to himself; it is only now that you could really do it. I do not think that an artist has the right attitude of mind If he is satisfied with any work he has done. He may have a certain natural egoistic feeling for what he has done, but he cannot really be satisfied with it. A work of art when it is finished really loses for the artist a large part of its interest, and this loss of interest is owing to the peculiar nature of the knowledge which is acquired while the work is being done. And on the other hand, the living element in a work of art, the life that springs from it, owes its being to the fact that it has not yet been transmuted into knowledge.

The same thing is indeed true with regard to the whole human organism. Our head is as “finished” as anything can be finished, for it is formed out of the forces of our last incarnation; it is over mature. Human heads are all over mature, even the immature ones. But the rest of the organism is only at the stage of furnishing the seed for the head in our next incarnation; it is full of life and energy, but it is incomplete. It will not be until our death that the rest of our organization will really show its true form, namely the form of the forces which are at work in it. The constitution of the rest of our organism shows that there is flowing life in it; ossification is reduced to the minimum in this part of our organism while in our head it reaches the maximum.

This peculiar kind of real heartfelt modesty, this feeling that we ourselves are still only becoming, is something which will give the teachers strength, for more arises out of this feeling than out of any abstract principles. If when we are in our class we are conscious that we are doing everything imperfectly, then we shall teach well. If on the other hand we are constantly smacking our lips with satisfaction over the perfection of our teaching, then it is quite certain that we shall teach badly.

But now imagine the following: to begin with you have charge of the teaching of the first class and so on, so that you have gone through everything that has to be gone through, of excitements, disappointments, successes too, if you will. Imagine that you have gone through all the classes of the Volkschule; at the end of each year you have spoken to yourself somewhat after the fashion that I have just described, and now you go down again from the eighth to the first class. Yes, now it might be supposed that you must say to yourself; now I am beginning with what I have learned, now I shall be able to do it well, I shall be an excellent teacher! But it will not be like that. The course of your new class will bring something quite different before your mind. At the end of the second third of each school year, you will say just the same out of a really right feeling. I have now learned what it was possible to learn about seven, eight and nine-year old children by working with them; at the end of each school year I know what I ought to have done. But when you have reached the fourth or fifth, school year, you will again not know how you really ought to have taught. For now, you will correct what you thought to be right after you have taught for a year. And so, after you have finished the eighth school year and have corrected everything, if you really have the good fortune to begin again at the first school year, you will be in the same position, only you will teach in a different spirit. But if you go through your teaching with true, noble, not with mock scepticism, you will find that your diffidence has brought you an imponderable power which will make you peculiarly fitted to accomplish more with the children that are entrusted to you. That is doubtless true. The effect however in life will really then only be a different one, not one that is so much better, but a different effect. I might say that the quality which you bring about in the children will not be much better than the first time; the effect will only be a different one. You will attain something different in quality but not much more in quantity. You will attain something that is different in quality and that is sufficient, for everything which we acquire in the way described with the necessary, noble diffidence and heartfelt humility has the effect that we are able to make individualities out of the children; on the whole they become individualities. We cannot have the same class twice over and send out into the world the same copies of a cut and dried educational pattern.

We can however give the world figures which are individually different. We bring about many-sidedness in life. This does not depend on the working out of abstract principles, but rather this many-sidedness in life depends on a deeper understanding of life such as has been put before you.

Thus, you can see that what matters more than anything else in a teacher is the way in which he regards his holy calling. That is not without significance, for the most Important things In teaching and in education are those which are imponderable. A teacher who enters his classroom with this feeling in his heart achieves something different from another. Just as, even in everyday life, it is not always the largest thing physically that determines our standard but something quite small, so also it is not always what we do with the largest number of words which carries most weight, but sometimes it is that perception, that feeling which we have built up in our hearts before we enter the classroom. There is one thing especially which is of great importance. That is that we must quickly strip off our narrower, personal self like a snake skin when we go into the class. A teacher may in certain circumstances, because he, as is sometimes said with such self-satisfaction, is also only human, go through all sorts of experiences between the end of a class one day and beginning again on the next. It may be that he has been warned by his creditors, or he may have had a quarrel with his wife, as does happen in life.

These are things which bring disharmonies. Disharmonies of this kind give a man's frame of mind a certain tendency; so also do happy joyous feelings. The father of one of your pupils, if he particularly likes you, may have sent you a hare after he has been out hunting, or a bunch of flowers perhaps, if you are a lady teacher. What I mean is that it is quite a natural thing in life to have moods of this kind. As teachers we must train ourselves to lay aside these moods and to give ourselves up entirely to the content of the subject we are going to teach, so that we are really able in presenting one subject to speak tragically, taking our mood from our subject and then to pass over into a humorous mood as we proceed with our lesson, in this way entering completely into our subject. The important thing however is that we should now be able to perceive the whole reaction of the class to tragedy or sentimentality or humour. Then, when we are in a position to do this, we shall be aware that tragedy, sentimentality and humour are of extraordinary significance for the souls of children. And if we allow our lessons to be carried along by an alternation between humour, sentimentality and tragedy, if we pass from the one mood into the other and back again, if we are really able, after presenting something for which we needed a certain heaviness, to pass over into a certain lightness, not a forced lightness, but one that arises because we are living in our lesson, then we are bringing about in the soul something akin to the in and outbreathing in the bodily organism. In teaching, our object is not to teach merely intellectually or intellectualistically, but to be able to really take these various moods into consideration. For what is tragedy, what is sentimentality, what is a “melancholic” mood? It is just the same as an inbreathing in the organism, the same as filling the organism with air. Tragedy signifies that we are trying harder and harder to draw our physical body together so that in our drawing together of the physical body we are aware how the astral body comes ever more and more out of the physical body owing to the drawing together of the physical body. A humorous mood signifies that we paralyze the physical body, but with the astral body we do just the opposite of what we did before; we stretch it out as far as possible, stretch it out over its surroundings so that we are aware, if we, e.g., do not merely see redness but grow into it, how we stretch out our astral body beyond this redness, pass over into it. Laughing simply means that we drive the astral body out of our face; laughing is simply nothing else but an outbreathing. Only, if we want to apply all this, we must have a certain feeling for the force there is in these things. It is not always advisable to go straight over into something humorous when we have just had something serious or melancholy, but if we can always have in our lessons the means of preventing the childish soul from being imprisoned by the serious, the tragic, and of freeing it so that it can really experience this breathing in and out between the two frames of mind.

I have now told you something of the variety of moods which should be taken into consideration by the teacher, for this is just as necessary as any other part of special pedagogy.

It is impossible to educate or teach without a spiritual grasp of the whole human being, for this whole human being comes into consideration even far more prominently during the time of a child's development than later on. As we know, this whole human being comprises within itself the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. These four members of the nature of man are by no means going through a symmetrical development, but rather they develop in very different ways; and we must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and of the etheric body, and that of the astral body and of the ego. The outer manifestations of this differentiated development express themselves—as you know from the various elucidations—in the change of teeth and in that change which in the male appears as the change of voice at puberty, but which also proclaims itself clearly in the female, though in a different way. The essence of the phenomenon is the same as with the male in the change of his voice, only in the female organism it appears in a more diffused form, so that it is not merely observable in one organ as in the case of the male organism, but it extends more over the entire organism.

You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice, or puberty, lies that period of teaching with which we have principally to do in the grade-schools; but the careful educator, in teaching and educating, must pay close attention as well to the years following the change of voice, or its analogy in the female organism.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. Before the change of teeth—that is, between birth and the change of teeth—the physical body and the etheric body in the child's organism are strongly influenced by the nervous-sensory system, that is, from above downward. Up to about the seventh year the physical body and the etheric body are most active from the head. In the head are concentrated, as it were, the forces that are particularly active in these years—that is, in the years when imitation plays so important a role. And what takes place in the formative process in the remaining organism of trunk and limbs is achieved through the emanation of rays from the head to this remaining organism, to the trunk and the limb organism, from the physical body and the etheric body. That which here radiates from the head into the physical and etheric bodies of the whole child, right into the tips of his fingers and toes—this that radiates from the head into the whole child is soul-activity, even though it has its inception in the physical body: the same soul-activity that is later active in the soul as mind and memory. Later on this soul-activity appears in such a form that after the change of teeth the child begins to think, and that his memories become more conscious. The whole change that takes place in the soul-life of the child shows that certain psychic powers previously active in the organism become active as soul-forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is a result of the same forces which after the seventh year appear as mental forces, intellectual forces.

There you have a case of actual co-operation between soul and body, when you realize how the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body but independently. Now those forces which in the body itself come newly into being as soul-forces begin to be active with the seventh year; and from then on, they operate through into the next incarnation. Now that which is radiated forth from the body is repulsed, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are checked. Thus, at this time of the change of teeth the hardest battle is fought between the forces tending downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The physical change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between those two kinds of forces: the forces that later appear in the child as the reasoning and intellectual powers, and those that must be employed particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. All these forces that shoot up, arising out of the conflict, we employ when we develop writing out of drawing; for these forces really tend to pass over into plastic creation, drawing, and so forth. Those are the forces that come to an end with the change of teeth, that previously had modelled the body of the child: the sculpture-forces. We work with them later, when the change of teeth is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are in the main the forces in which the child's soul lived in the spiritual world before conception; at first their activity lies in forming the body, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul- forces. Thus, in the educational period following the seventh year, during which we must work with the forces of authority, we simply see that manifesting itself in the child which formerly he practiced unconsciously as imitation, when these forces still influenced the body unconsciously. If later the child becomes a sculptor, a draftsman, or an architect—but a real architect who works out of the forms—this is because such a person has the capacity for retaining in his organism, in his head, a little more of those forces that radiate downward into the organism, so that later on as well these forces of childhood can radiate downward. But if they are entirely used up, if with the change of teeth everything passes over into the psychic, children result who have no talent for architecture, who could never become sculptors.

These forces are related to the experiences between death and a new birth; and the reverence that is needed in educational activity, and that takes on a religious character, arises if one is conscious that when, around the seventh year, one calls forth from the child's soul these forces that are applied in learning to draw and to write, it is actually the spiritual world that sends down these forces. And the child is the mediator, and you are in reality working with forces sent down from the spiritual world. When this reverence permeates the instruction it truly works miracles. And if you have this reverence, if you have the feeling that by means of this telephone which transcends time you are in contact with the forces developed in the spiritual world during the time before birth—if you have this feeling that engenders a deep reverence, then you will see that through the reality of such a feeling you can accomplish more than through any amount of intellectual theorizing about what should be done. The teacher's feelings are the most important means of education there is, for this reverence can have an immeasurable formative influence upon the child.

Thus, we find in the change of teeth, when the child is entrusted to us, a process that directly represents a transfer through the child of spiritual forces out of the spiritual world into the physical world.

Another process takes place in the years of puberty, but it is prepared gradually through the whole cycle from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year. During this period something comes to light in those regions of the soul-life not yet illuminated by consciousness—for consciousness is still being formed, and something of the outer world which remains unconscious is constantly radiating into those regions not yet illuminated by consciousness—that only gradually becomes conscious, but that from birth has permeated the child from the outer world, that has co-operated in building the child's body, and that has entered into the plastic forces.

Those, again, are different forces. While the plastic forces enter the head from within, these forces now come from without. They are dammed up by the plastic forces and then descend into the organism. They co-operate in what takes place, beginning with the seventh year, in connection with the building of the child's body. I can characterize these forces in no other way than as those active in speech and in music. These forces are derived from the world.

The musical forces derive more from the outer world, the extra-human world, from the observation of processes in nature, particularly their regularities and irregularities. For all that takes place in nature is permeated by a mysterious music: I In- earthly projection of the “music of the spheres.” In every plant, in every animal, there is really incorporated a tone of the music of the spheres. That is also the case with reference to the human body, but it no longer lives in what is human speech—that is, in expressions of the soul—but it does live in the body, in its forms and so forth. All this the child absorbs unconsciously, and that is why children are musical to such a high degree. They take all that into their organism. While that which the child experiences as forms of movement, lines and plastic elements in his surroundings is absorbed by him and then acts from within, from the head, all that is absorbed by the child as tone-texture, as speech-content, comes from without. And this again, that which comes from without, is opposed by the gradually developing spiritual element of music and speech—only somewhat later: around the fourteenth year. This also is dammed up again now, in the woman in the whole organism, in the man more in the region of the larynx, where it causes the change of voice. The whole process, then, is brought about by the fact that here an element of the nature of will expresses itself from within in conflict with a similar element coming from without; and in this conflict is manifested that which at puberty appears as the change of voice. That is a conflict between inner music-speech forces and outer music-speech forces. Up to the seventh year, man is essentially permeated more by plastic and less by musical forces—that is, less by the music and speech forces that glow through the organism. But beginning with the seventh year what proceeds from music-speech becomes particularly active in the etheric body. Then this condition is opposed by the ego and the astral body: an element of the nature of will struggles from with-out against the similar one from within, and this appears at puberty. It is manifest even externally by the pitch of the voice that a difference exists between the male and the female. Only partially do the pitches of the voices of men and of women over lap: the woman's voice reaches higher, the man's goes lower—down to the bass. That corresponds with absolute accuracy to the structure of the remaining organism that forms itself out of the conflict of these forces.

These things show that in our soul-life we are concerned with something which at certain definite times co-operates also in the up-building of the organism. All the abstract discussions you find in modern scientific books on psychology, all the talk about psycho-physical parallelism, are merely testimony to the inability to grasp the connection between the psychic and the physical. For the psychic is not connected with the physical in the manner set forth in the senseless theories thought out by the psycho-physical parallelists; but rather we have to do with the recognition of this wholly concrete action of the psychic in the body, and then in turn with the reaction. Up to the seventh year what is plastic-architectonic works together with what is active in music-speech; only this changes in the seventh year, so that from then on the relation between music-speech on the one hand and the plastic-architectonic on the other is merely a different one. But through the whole period up to puberty this co-operation takes place between the plastic-architectonic, which emanates from the head and has its seat there, and speech-music, which comes from without, uses the head as a passage, and spreads itself into the organism.

From this we see that human language as well, but particularly music, co-operates in the formation of man. First it forms him, then it is dammed up as it halts at the larynx; now it does not enter the gate as it did before. For before, you see, it is speech that changes our organs, even down into the bony system; and anyone who observes a human skeleton from a psycho-physical thoughts of our present-day philosophers--and considers the differentiation between the male and the female skeleton sees in the skeleton an embodied musical achievement performed in the reciprocal action between the human organism and the outer world. Were we to take a sonata, and could we preserve its structure through some spiritual process of crystallization, we would have, as it were, the principal forms, the scheme of arrangement, of the human skeleton. And that will incidentally attest the difference between man and the animals. Whatever the animal absorbs of the music-speech element—very little of the speech, but very much of the musical—passes through the animal, because in a sense the animal lacks man's isolation that later leads to mutation. In the shape of an animal skeleton we find a musical image too, but only in the sense that a composite picture of the different animal skeletons, such as one can gain, for instance, in a museum, is needed to yield a musical coherence. An animal invariably manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

Such things we should consider carefully in forming our picture of man: they will show us what feelings we should develop. As our reverence grows through feeling our connection, through fostering our feeling of contact, with pre-natal conditions, we acquire greater enthusiasm for teaching, by occupying ourselves intensely with the other forces of man. A Dionysian element, as it were, irradiates the music-speech instruction, while we have more of an Apollonian element in teaching the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we impart with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The plastic forces offer the stronger opposition, hence they are held up as early as the seventh year; the others act less vigorously, so they are held up only in the fourteenth year. You must not interpret that to mean physical strength and weakness: it refers rather to the counter-pressure that is exerted. Since the plastic forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter-pressure is stronger. Therefore, they must be held up earlier, whereas the music-forces are permitted by cosmic guidance to remain longer in the organism. The human being is permeated longer by the music forces than by the plastic ones.

If you let this thought ripen within you and bring the requisite enthusiasm to bear, conscious that by developing an appreciation for speech and music precisely during the grade-school period, when that battle is still raging and when you are still influencing the corporeality—not just the soul—then you are preparing that which man carries with him even beyond death. To this we contribute essentially with everything we teach the child of music and speech during the grade-school period. And that gives us a certain enthusiasm, because we know that thereby we are working for the future. On the other hand, by working with the plastic forces we make contact with what lived in man before birth or conception, and that gives us reverence. In that which reaches into the future we infuse our own forces, and we know that we are fructifying the germ of music-speech with something that will operate into the future after the physical has been stripped off. Music itself is a reflection of what is spheric in the air—only thus does it become physical. The air is in a sense the medium that renders tones physical, just as it is the air in the larynx that renders speech physical. That which has its being as non-physical in the speech-air, and as non-physical in the music-air unfolds its true activity only after death. That gives us the right enthusiasm for our teaching, because we know that when working with music and speech we are working for the future. And I believe that in the pedagogy of the future, teachers will no longer be addressed as they usually are today, but rather in ideas and concepts that can transform themselves into feelings, into the future. For nothing is more important than that we be able, as teachers, to develop the necessary reverence, the necessary enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—those are two fundamental forces by which the teacher-soul must be permeated.

To make you understand the matter still better I should like to mention that music has its being principally in the human astral body. After death man still carries his astral body fur a time; and as long as he does so, until he lays it aside completely—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy — there still exists in man after death a sort of memory—it is only a sort of memory—of earthly music. Thus, it comes about that whatever in life we receive of music continues to act like a memory of music after death—until about the time the astral body is laid aside. Then the earthly music is transformed in the life after death into the “music of the spheres,” and it remains as such until some time previous to the new birth. The matter will be more comprehensible for you if you know that what man here on earth receives in the way of music plays a very important role in the shaping of his soul-organism after death. That organism is molded there during this period. This is, of course, the kamaloka time; and that is also the comforting feature of the kamaloka time: we can render easier this existence, which the Roman Catholics call purgatory, for human beings if we know that. Not, to be sure, by relieving them of their perception: that they must have; for they would remain imperfect if they could not observe the imperfect things they have done. But we furnish the possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life if during that time after death, when he still has his astral body, he can have many memories of things musical. This can be studied on a comparatively low plane of spiritual knowledge. You need only, after having heard a concert, wake up in the night, and you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert again before waking. You even experience it much better by thus awaking in the night after a concert. You experience it very accurately. The point is that music imprints itself upon the astral body, it remains there, it still vibrates; it remains for about thirty years after death. What comes from music continues to vibrate much longer than what comes from speech: we lose the latter as such comparatively quickly after death, and there remains only its spiritual extract. What is musical is as long as the astral body. What comes from speech can be a great boon to us after death, especially if we have often absorbed it in the form which I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. When I describe the latter in this way I naturally have every reason to point out that these things cannot be rightly interpreted without keeping in view the peculiar course the astral body takes after death: then the matters must be described somewhat as I have described them in my lectures on eurythmy. Here, you see, we must talk to people in the most primitive language, so to speak; and it is really true that, seen from the point of view beyond the Threshold, people are actually all primitive: only beyond the Threshold are they real human beings. And we can only work ourselves out of this primitive-man state by working ourselves into spiritual reality. This is also the reason for the constantly increasing fury against the endeavors of Anthroposophy to show the path to a spiritual reality.

Now I would call your attention to something that is very much in the foreground in the art of pedagogy and that can be pedagogically employed—namely, that in the first conflict which I described in connection with the adolescent child, the outer expression of which is the change of teeth, and in that later struggle whose equivalent is the change of voice, there is to be considered something peculiar that gives to each its special character: everything that up to the seventh year descends from the head appears as an attack in relation to that which meets it from within and which builds up. And everything is a warding off that acts from within toward the head, that rises upward and opposes the current emanating from the head and descending.

In the case of music in turn the conditions are similar; but here that which comes from within appears as an attack, and that which descends from above through the head-organism appears as the warding off. If we had not music, frightful forces really would rise up in man. I am completely convinced that up to the sixteenth or seventeenth century traditions deriving from the old Mysteries were active, and that even then people still wrote and spoke under the influence of this after-effect of the Mysteries. They no longer knew, to be sure, the whole meaning of this effect, but in much that still appears in comparatively recent times we simply have reminiscences of the old Mystery-wisdom. Hence, I have always been deeply impressed by the passage in Shakespeare :*

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Is fit for treason, murder and deceit!
Let no such man be trusted.”

Merchant of Venice, V, 1.

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.”

Translator's Note: The third line of the German translation of this passage reads: “Is fit for treason, murder and deceit”, and thus it is quoted by Dr. Steiner. Thus, must be kept in mind to understand what follows.

In the old Mystery-schools the pupils were told: that which acts in man as an attack from within and which must be continually warded off, which is dammed back for the nature of man, is “treason, murder and deceit,” and the music that is active in man is that which opposes the former. Music is the means of defense against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder and deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains what comes to us from music-speech quite aside from the pleasure it affords. Its purpose is to make people into human beings. One must, of course, keep in mind that the old Mystery- teachers expressed themselves somewhat differently: they expressed things more concretely. They would not have said “treason, murder and deceit” (it is already toned down in Shakespeare) but would have said something like “serpent, wolf and fox.” The serpent, the wolf and the fox are warded off from the inner nature of the human being through music. The old Mystery-teachers would always have used animal forms to depict that which rises out of the human being, but which must then be transformed into what is human. Thus, we can achieve the right enthusiasm when we see the treacherous serpent rising out of the child and combat it with music-speech instruction, and in like manner contend with the murderous wolf and the tricky fox or the cat. That is what can then permeate us with the intelligent, the true sort of enthusiasm—not the burning, Luciferic sort that alone is acknowledged today. We must recognize, then: attack and warding off.

Man has within him two levels where the warding off occurs. First, within himself, where the warding off appears in the change of teeth in the seventh year; and then again, in what he has received from music and speech, through which is warded off that which tends to rise up within him. But both battlefields are within man himself, what comes from music-speech more toward the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic- plastic more toward the inner world. But there is still a third battlefield, and that lies at the border between the etheric body and the outer world. The etheric body is always larger than the physical body; it extends beyond it in all directions; and here also there is such a battlefield. Here the battle is fought more under the influence of consciousness, whereas the other two proceed more in the subconscious. And the third conflict manifests itself when everything has worked itself to the surface that is a transformation of what takes place on the one hand between the human being and what is plastic-architectonic, and on the other between him and what is music-speech, when this amalgamates with the etheric body, thereby taking hold of the astral body, and is thus moved more toward the periphery, toward the outer border.

Through this originates everything that shoots through the fingers in drawing, painting, and so on. This makes of painting an art functioning more in the environs of man. The draftsman, the sculptor, must work more out of his inner faculties, the musician more out of his devotion to the world. That which lias ils being in painting and drawing, to which we lead the child when we have it make forms and lines, that is a battle that lakes place wholly on the surface, a battle that is fought principally between two forces, one of which acts inward from without, the other on I ward from within. The force that acts outward from within really tends constantly to disperse the human being, tends to continue the forming of man—not violently but in a delicate way. This force—it is not so powerful as that, but I must express il more radically so that you will see what I mean—this force, acting outward from within, tends to make our eyes swell up, to raise a goiter for us, to make the nose grow big and to make the ears bigger: everything tends to swell outward. Another force is the one we absorb from the outer world, through which this swelling up is warded off. And even if we only make a stroke—draw something—this is an effort to divert, through the force acting from the outer world inward, that inner force which tends to deform us. It is a complicated reflex action, then, that we as men execute in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. In drawing or in having the canvas before us, the feeling actually glimmers in our consciousness that we are excluding something that is out there, that in the forms and strokes we are setting up thick walls, barbed wire. In drawing we really have such barbed wire by means of which we quickly catch something that tends to destroy us from within and prevent its action from becoming too strong. Therefore, instruction in drawing works best if we begin its study from the human being. If you study what motions the hand tends to make—if, say, in eurythmy instruction you have the child hold these motions, these forms that he wants to execute—then you have arrested the motion, the line, that tends to destroy, and then it does not act destructively. So when you begin to have the eurythmic forms drawn, and then see that drawing and also writing are formed out of the will that lives there, you have something which the nature of man really wants, something linked with the development and essence of human nature.

And in connection with eurythmy we should know this, that in our etheric body we constantly have the tendency to practice eurythmy: that is something the etheric body simply does of its own accord; for eurythmy is nothing but motions gleaned from what the etheric body tends to do of itself. It is really the etheric body that makes these motions, and it is only prevented from doing so when we cause the physical body to execute them. When we cause them to be executed by the physical body these movements are held back in the etheric body, react upon us, and have a health-giving effect on man.

That is what affects the human being in a certain hygienic- therapeutic as well as didactic-pedagogic way, and which outwardly gives the impression of beauty. Such things will be understood only when we know that something which is trying to manifest itself in the etheric organization of man must be stopped at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case, that of eurythmy, an element more connected with the will is stopped; in the other, in drawing and painting, an element more closely allied with the intellect. But fundamentally both processes are but the two poles of one and the same thing.

If we now follow this process too with our feeling and incorporate it in our sensitive teaching ability, we have the third feeling that we need. That is the feeling which should really always penetrate us especially in grade-school instruction: that, when a human being is placed in the world, he is really exposed to things from which we must protect him through our teaching. Otherwise he would become one with the world too much. Man really always has the tendency to become psychically rickety, to make his limbs rickety, to become a gnome. And in teaching and educating him we work at forming him. We best obtain a feeling for this forming if we observe the child making a drawing, then smooth this out a bit so that the result is not what the child wants, but not what we want either, but a result of both. If I succeed, while smoothing out what the child wants to scribble, in merging my feelings with those of the child, the best results obtain. And if I transform all that into feeling and let it permeate me, the feeling arises that I must protect the child from an over-strong coalescence with the outer world. We must see that the child grows slowly into the outer world and not let him do so too rapidly. That is the third feeling that we as educators must cherish within us: we constantly hold a protecting hand over the child.

Reverence, enthusiasm, and the feeling of protection, these three are actually the panacea, as it were, the magic formula in the soul of the educator and teacher. And if one wished to represent, externally, artistically, something like an embodiment of art and pedagogy in a group, one would have to represent this:

Reverence for what precedes the child's existence (before birth);

Enthusiastic looking forward to what follows it (after death);

Protecting gesture for what the child experiences (during life).

Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these three sentences with a gesture.

This work of art would also best represent the external manifestation of the teacher-character.

When one says something thus derived out of the intimacies of the world-mysteries one always feels it as unsatisfactory when uttered in conventional speech. But if one must say such things by means of external speech one always has the feeling that a supplement is necessary. What is spoken rather abstractly always feels the urge to pass over into the artistic. That is why I wanted to give you that hint in closing.

The fact is, we must learn to bear something of mankind's future frame of mind within us, consisting of the knowledge that the possession of mere science makes the human being into something which will cause him to regard himself as a psycho-spiritual monster. He who is a scientist pure and simple will not have the impulse—not even in the forming of his thoughts—to transform the scientific into the artistic. But only through the artistic can one comprehend the world. Goethe's saying always remains true:

“He to whom Nature begins to reveal her manifest secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent — Art.”

As educators we should have the feeling: as far as you are a scientist only, you are in soul and spirit a monster. Not until you have transformed your psycho-spiritual-physical organism, when your knowledge takes on artistic form, will you become a human being. Future development will in the main lead from science to artistic grasp, from the monster to the complete human being. And in this it is the pedagogue's duty to co-operate.

We have differentiated colours in that out of their own nature we have got black, white, green and peach-colour as images, and from this pictorial character of colours we had to differentiate what I called the luminous nature of colours which we meet in blue, yellow and red. And we saw that just these colours, blue, yellow and red, possess what I might call certain properties of will, by reason of their being luminous. As you know, one perceives a colour as a so-called colour of the spectrum, such as we see in the rainbow, and we perceive colour in solid bodies. And we know also that we must make use of bodies as painting-colours, their bodily composition, mixture, etc., if we want to practice the art of colour which is painting. Here we are brought to the important question, the answer to which in the state of present-day knowledge, is nowhere to be found, the question namely: What is the relation of colour as such, which we have got to know as something volatile and fleeting, either as image or luster, to solid body, to matter? What makes matter as such appear to us coloured? Those who have looked into Goethe's Theory of Colour, will perhaps know that there, this question is not touched upon, from a certain intellectual honesty of Goethe, because from the means at his disposal he simply was not capable of getting as far as the problem—how is colour applied to solid matter? Moreover this is a question, in the highest sense, for the Art of Painting. For in painting we practice this phenomenon, at any rate for the purpose of outward appearance. We apply colour and through its application we try to call forth the impression of something painted. So, if we want to raise the study of the nature of colour to the plane of painting, we must be interested in this coloured appearance of material nature. Now since in recent times the physicists of colour have regarded the theory of colour as a part of Optics, we find also explanations of the colour of solids worthy of the new physics. We find, for example, the characteristic explanation of the question, Why is a body red? A body is red because it absorbs all other colours and reflects only red. This is the explanation so characteristic of the new Physics, for it is based approximately on the logical formula: Why is a man stupid? He is stupid because he absorbs all cleverness and radiates only stupidity outwards. If one applies this logical principle so common in colour-theory everywhere to the rest of life, you see what interesting things result. He pursued his problem as far as his means allowed him. Then he stopped in front of the question: How is matter coloured?

Now let us recall how we first got the pictorial character of the first four colours we dealt with. We saw that we there have a property which produces on a medium its shadow or its image. We saw how the living forms its image or shadow in the lifeless and how thereby green results. We saw then how the psychic forms its image in the living and produces thereby peach-colour. We saw how the spiritual forms its image in the psychic, and thereby white is the result, and finally how the lifeless reflects its image or shadow in the spiritual and produces black.

There we have all the colours which have a pictorial or image character. The rest have the luster or luminous character. The pictorial character we meet most visibly in the objective world is green. Black and white are to a certain extent frontier-colours and are for this reason no more regarded as colours. Peach-colour, we have seen, is to be understood really only in movement. So that green is the most typical. And this would be the colour applied to the external world, or, as we say, applied to the Vegetable Kingdom. And so in the Vegetable Kingdom we have expressed the real origin of applied colour as image. Now it is a question perhaps of examining this vegetable green in order to find the character, the essence of green. And here we must enlarge the problem contrary to what is usually recognized today.

We know from our Occult Science that the Vegetable Kingdom was formed during the previous metamorphosis-condition of our earth. But we also know that at that time there was as yet no solid matter. We know it has been transformed during the evolution of our earth, and must have been made, during the evolution of the old moon, in a fluid state, for there existed nothing solid then. We can speak of colour matter floating in this fluid and permeating it. It need not be attached to anything, or at the most, to the surface. Only on the surface does the fluid matter tend to become solid. And so, if we look back at this stage of evolution, we might say: in the formation of vegetation we have to do with a fluid green, or, in act, with fluid colour-matter, and with something that is really a fluid element. And plants—as you can see in my Occult Science—could not have assumed their firm shape, could not have put on their mineral form, till the period of earth-evolution. It is possible that something was formed in vegetation which made it definite, and not fluid. So that what we call plants first appeared during the formation of the earth. It was then that colour must have taken on the character in plants such as we perceive today; it was then that it became a permanent green.

Now a plant does not wear only this green—at least generally,—for you are aware how a plant in the course of its metamorphosis merges into other colours, as a plant has yellow, blue or red flowers, and as a green fruit—take for example, a melon, merges into yellow. A superficial observation shows you what is at work there when a plant takes on a colour other than green. When this happens—you can easily prove it—the sun is essential to the circumstances connected with the growth of these other colours,—direct sunlight. Just consider how plants, if they cannot hold up their flowers to the sunlight, in fact hide themselves, curl up, etc. And we shall find a connection,—superficially a connection,—between the absence of green colour in certain plant parts and the sun. The sun metamorphoses, one might say, the green. It brings the green to another condition. If we bring the manifold colouring of vegetation into relation with a heavenly body—as already said, in a superficial study—we shall not find it difficult to consult the statements of Occult Science, and to ask: What has it, from its observations, to say concerning possible other relationships of coloured plant-life to the stars?

And here we have to ask ourselves the question: What kind of starry phenomenon is of the greatest effect on earth? What heavenly body is there whose influence would be contrary to the sun's, and could produce that in plant-nature which sunlight as it were metamorphoses, destroys, changes to other colours? What is there that can produce the green in the vegetable world?

We arrive at that particular heavenly body which represents the polaric opposite of the sun, namely the moon. And Spiritual Science can establish the connection between the green of plants and this moon-nature (I will only just mention the subject today) as well as one can establish the connection of the rest of plant-life, with the sun. This it does by pointing to the properties of moonlight as opposed to sunlight, and above all, by pointing out how moon-light influences sun-darkness. If we consider vegetation, we get an interplay of lunar and solar influences. But at the same time we get an explanation why green becomes an image, and why green in plants is not luminous like the other colours. The other colours in plants are lustrous. They have a shiny character. Just look with proper understanding at the colour of flowers; they shine at one. Compare it with the green. It is “fixed” to the plant. You see in it nothing else but a copy of what you perceive in the Cosmos. Sunlight shines; moonlight is the pictorial image of sunlight. Thus you find again the image (or shadow, Ed.) of light, colour as the image of light, in the green of plants. And you have in the plant through the sun the colour of the luster. And you have the colour of the “fixation”; the colour of the image in the green. These things cannot be understood with the clumsy ideas of Physics. They have to be brought into the region of feeling and must be realized with spiritual sensibility. Then you automatically get what we have understood in this way, the transition into Art. Physics, with its clumsy methods of approaching the world of colour, has driven all artistic considerations from its study. So that actually the artist has not the least idea what to make of what Physics has to say concerning it.

But if we regard the colour of plants in such a way that we know that cosmic forces play a part, that we have in the colour-formation of plants a conjunction of solar and lunar forces, we then have the first element by which we can understand how colour is attached to an object, at any rate primarily to a vegetable object, how it becomes an embodied colour. It becomes a embodied colour because it is not the luster which works on it cosmically, but already the image as such. In the plant we have to deal with that green which becomes an image because at one time in the evolution of the earth the moon was separated from this earth. In this separation we must see the real origin of the green in the vegetable world. Because of it the plant can no longer be exposed to the equivalent of lunar forces on the earth, but receives its image-character direct from the Cosmos.

Our feeling is well acquainted with this cosmic interchange of relations in respect of vegetation, and if we question our feeling we shall be able to approach this character of green and other colours from this world of feeling by means of an artistic appreciation of the nature of colours. It is, you see, something peculiar. If you go back in the history of painting you will find that the great painters of former ages paint people and human situations, but seldom paint external nature, in so far as it consists of plant-life. You can of course also easily find the explanation for it; that in older times it was not so usual to observe nature and that therefore one did not paint it. But that of course is only a superficial explanation, though people today are easily satisfied with such superficial explanations.

What lies behind it is different. Landscape painting arises really at that time in which materialism and intellectualism grip mankind, in which an abstract nature acquires more and more power over human civilization and culture. You may say that landscape painting is in fact a product of the last three or four centuries. If you take this into consideration you will have to say to yourself: only in the last three or four centuries has man reached a state of soul which enables him to comprehend the element necessary for painting nature in landscape. Why? If you look at the pictures of old times, we shall conclude that all these pictures have a quite definite character. Precisely if we differentiate (we will discuss it more exactly) in colour between the image-character and the luster-character, we find that the old artists did not make this distinction in their painting. And they paid no attention, as we had to do yesterday, to this inner will-nature of colour-luster. The old painters do not always take into consideration that yellow demands a shadowy edge. They take it into consideration when they carry their painting more into the spiritual; but not when they paint the everyday world. Nor did they pay attention to what we demanded of blue; possibly rather more so with red. You can see this in certain pictures by Leonardo, and also in others, for example, by Titian. But in general we can say that the old painters do not make this distinction between image and luster in the nature of colours. Why? They stand in a different relationship to the world of colours; they grasp what is luster in colour-nature. They grasp what is image and give it in painting an image-character. But if you give image-character to what in the world of colours is luster, if you have turned everything in the nature of colours into image, then you cannot paint a landscape of plants.

Why not?

Now suppose you want to paint a landscape of plant-life, and it is to give a real impression of life, you have to paint the plants themselves as well in their green as in their individual colours rather darker than they really are. You must make a green surface, in any case darker than it is. You must also make the red or yellow plant-life darker than reality. But then, after you have got your colour in this way in image-character, rather darker than it really is, you must cover the whole with an atmosphere, and this atmosphere must in a certain way be yellowish-white. You must get the whole in a yellowish-white light, and only then you get in the right manner what a plant really is. You have to paint a glow over the image; and therefore you must cross over to the luster-character of colour; you must have its luster-character.

And I would ask you to look, from this point of view, at the whole effort of modern landscape painting, look how it has tried to get more and more at the secret of painting vegetation. If you paint it as it is out there, you don't get there. The picture does not create the impression of life. It does this only if you paint the trees, etc. darker in their colour than they are, and pour over them the glow, something yellowish-white, that is luminous. Because the old masters did not cultivate the painting of this glow, of this lit-up atmosphere, they could not paint a landscape at all.

You notice particularly in painting towards the end of the nineteenth century, how they sought the means to comprehend landscape. Open air painting, all sorts of things have cropped up in order to comprehend landscape. They do it only if they resolve to paint the Vegetable Kingdom darker in its separate shades and then to cover it with the gleaming yellowish-white. Of course you must do this according to colour-composition, etc. Then you succeed really in painting on the canvas, or any other surface, something that gives you the impression of life. It is a matter of sensibility, and this sensibility leads you to paint in something that floods it as the expression of the shining Cosmos, of that which descends out f the universe on to earth as luster. In no other way can you get behind the secret of plant-life, that is, of nature clothed in vegetation.

If you obey this law, you will also realize that everything painting seeks to achieve must also be sought in the nature of colours itself. What are in fact the media of painting? You have the surface, canvas or paper or what not, and on the surface you have to fix in pictorial form what is there. But if something refuses to be fixed in pictorial form, such as plant-nature, you must at least pour over it the luster-character.

Observe, we have not yet reached the different coloured mineral substances, the lifeless objects. In this case particularly it is necessary to understand the matter with sensibility. The world of colour cannot be captured with the reason; we must apply our sensibility, and now I ask you to reflect if there is anything in the nature of colour itself which raises the question, when you are painting, something inorganic, i.e. walls or some other inanimate objects: is there any need to understand whatever you are painting from the colour itself? There is a strong necessity; for think for a moment what is tolerable and what is intolerable. You agree, don't you, that if I paint a black table on a white ground, that is quite tolerable. If I paint a blue table—just imagine a room full of furniture painted blue—if you have any artistic feeling, you would find it intolerable. Equally impossible is a room with yellow or red furniture, that is a painted room. You can, as I've said, paint a black table on a white ground, it is purely a drawing, but you can do it; in fact, one can put directly upon paper or canvas only something whereby the inorganic, the inanimate is to result, which at first has image-character in its colour. So we have to ask generally: What do the colours black, white, green and peach allow to inanimate objects? You must get from the colour what can be painted. And then it always results that when you paint according to the colour, that is the colour which is also an image, you still have not got the inanimate object. You would have only the image—the colour is already that. You would not evoke the representation of the chair, you would have the image of it, if you had to paint it purely from a colour which is image.

So what must you do? You must try to give the image when you are painting still-life, the character of the luster. That is the point. You have to give the colours that have image-character, black, white, green and peach-colour, inner illumination, that is, luster-character. And then you can combine what you have thus vivified with the other lusters, with blue and yellow and red. So you must strip those colours of the image-character they have, and give them luster-character; which means that the painter, if he paints still-life, must really always bear in mind that a certain source of light, a dull source of light lies in the things themselves. He must so to speak think of his canvas or his paper as in a certain sense luminant. Here he requires on his surface the glow of the light which he has to paint on it. If he paints inanimate objects, he must bear in mind, he must contain in his mental make-up the idea, that a kind of illumination underlies inanimate objects, that in a way his surface is transparent and emits lights from within.

Now you see we arrive at the point in painting where in applying the colour, in conjuring the colour on to the surface, we must give the colour the character of reflecting light; otherwise we are not painters. If we always strive more and more to produce a painting out of the colour itself, as after all later human development demands, we shall have to pursue this attempt further and further; namely to get to the root of the essential nature of colour, so as to compel a colour, if it is an image colour, to return and take on again its luster-character, to make it inwardly luminous. If we paint it otherwise, we get no endurable painting of inanimate nature. A wall which is not covered with paint so as to have this inward light is, as a painting, no wall, but only the image of one. We must bring the colours to glow inwardly, and thereby in a certain sense, they become mineralized. Therefore we shall have more and more to find a way of not painting from the palette, smearing the material colour on to the surface, for then we shall never be able to evoke the inner light in the right way, but of painting form the pot (tiegel); we shall have to paint only with that colour which has got the green of liquid because it is watery, (i.e. with liquid colours, Ed.) And generally speaking an inartistic element has been introduced into painting with the palette. Painting from the palette is materialistic, a failure to understand the inner nature of colour which, as such, is really never absorbed by the material body, but lives in it, and must proceed from it. Therefore, when I put it on the surface, I must make it shine.

You are aware that in our building we have tried to bring out this light by using vegetable colours which can most easily be made to develop this inner glow. Any one who has feeling for these things will see how coloured minerals, in different degrees, it is true, show this inner light which we attempt to conjure up when we want to paint a mineral. When we want to paint a mineral according to its colour, we learn to look at it not as a model, naturalistically, but, as is necessary, as in the act of giving light from inside. Now, how does a mineral proceed to give light inwardly? If we have the coloured mineral, its colour appears to us because it is in sunlight. Sunlight in this case does much less than in the case of plants. In plants sunlight conjures up all the colours which occur besides green. In a coloured mineral, or any inanimate coloured object the effect of sunlight is that in the dark, when all cats are grey or black, we do not see the colours; it simply makes the colours visible. But the reason for the colour is, after all, inside. Why? How does it get there? Here we arrive again at the problem from which we started today.

Now, to lead you to the green of plants, I have had to point out to you the breaking away of the moon, as you find it described in my Occult Science. Now I must point out to you the other similar events, which have taken place in the course of the earth's evolution.

If you follow what I have explained in my Occult Science concerning the earth's development, you will find that those universal bodies which surround the earth and belong to its planetary system, were, as you know, in connection with the whole terrestrial planet; they were torn away just as the moon was. Of course that in itself is connected with the sun. But, generally speaking, if we look simply at the earth, we can regard this as an exodus. Observe that the internal colouring of inanimate objects is connected with this departure of the other planets. Solids become coloured, because the earth is freed from those forces which she had while the planets were tied to her, and they effect her from out of the Cosmos, and thereby evoke the inner force of the Cosmos in the coloured mineral bodies. This is, in fact, exactly what the minerals get from the forces which are no more there, but now shed their influence from out of the Cosmos. We see it is a much more hidden occult matter than with the plants' green. But here we have something which just because it is hidden, goes much deeper into its nature and therefore includes not only living vegetation but also the lifeless mineral. And so we are brought—I am only mentioning it here—if we are to consider the colouring of solids, to something of which modern Physics takes no account. We are brought to the workings of the Cosmos. We cannot explain the colouration of inanimate things in any way if we do not know that this is connected with what the terrestrial bodies have retained as inner forces since the other planets have been removed from the earth.

For instance, we explain the reddish colour in some mineral or other by means of the earth's connection with some planet, for example, with Mars or Mercury; a mineral yellow, by means of the earth's connection with Jupiter or Venus, and so on. For this reason the colouration of mineral swill always remain a riddle until we come to think of the earth in conjunction with the extra-terrestrial bodies in the Cosmos.

If we turn to living things, we must turn to sun and moonlight, and thus come to the one green surface colour, and to the surface colours which later become luster and luminosity emitted by the plant. But if we wish to understand that particular light that confronts us from the inside of substances, that element of the otherwise fluctuating spectrum which is constant inside solid bodies, we must remember that at one time what is now cosmic was in the interior of the earth and is thus the origin of those heavy elements in the earth's composition which are more or less liquid. We have to look outside the earth for the origin of what lies hidden under the surface of minerals. That is the essential thing. The surface of the earth admits of an easier terrestrial explanation than what lies under it, which requires an extra-terrestrial explanation. And thus the mineral component parts of our earth flash out at us in those colours which they have retained from the elements which have left the earth for the planets. And these colours remain under the influence of the corresponding planets of the cosmic environment.

This is the reason why, when we apply the lifeless paint to a surface we must, as it were, get the light behind the surface, we must spiritualize the surface and create a secret inner radiance. I mean, we must try to get the downward-streaming planetary influence behind the surface on which we paint the picture, so that the painting gives us organically the impression of the essential, not merely of the pictorial, and so it will depend on imparting the spiritual to the colours, in order to paint inanimate nature. But how to do it?

Recall the scheme which I have given you, in which I said: black is the image of the lifeless in the spiritual. We create the spiritual according to the luster and paint in it the lifeless. And in so far as we colour it, and convert it completely to a luster, we wake its essence. This is in fact the process which must be adopted for the painting of inanimate things.

And now you will find that we can ascend again to the Animal Kingdom. If you want to paint a landscape in which the Animal Kingdom is especially conspicuous, you have something which works as follows—it can be grasped only with your feeling. If you want to introduce animals into your landscape, you must paint their colour rather lighter than reality, and you must spread over it a soft bluish light. Suppose you were painting red animals—rather a rare occurrence—you would have to have a soft bluish sheen over them, and everywhere where you had the animal and the vegetation together, you would have to blend the yellowish sheen into the bluish one.

You would have to base this blending on the points of conjunction and then you get the possibility of painting the animal nature, otherwise it will always give the impression of inanimate representation. So that we may say that when we paint inanimate nature, it must be all luster, it must gleam from inside. When we paint the living plant-life, it must appear as luster-image. We first paint the image, and in fact paint so dark that we deviate from the natural colour. We present the image-character, in fact, by painting rather darker, and then overspreading it with luster, luster-image.

If we paint creatures with souls and even animals, we must paint the image-luster. We must not go straight to the complete picture. This we achieve by painting lighter, that is, by leading the image over to the luster, and adding on top that which in a certain sense dulls the pure transparency. Thus we get the image-luster.

And if we go to a step up to human beings, we must aspire to paint the pure image.

This is what those painters have done who have not yet painted external Nature, they have merely created the pure image. And thus we come to the complete image; that is, we must now include those colours which we have met in pictures as lusters. That happens because we deprive them in a sense of their luster-character when we get to human beings; we treat them as images. This means we paint the surface anyhow and try somehow to find a reason for it. The yellow surface insists on being, as it were, washed out at the edge. In no other way is it permissible to have the yellow, it must be washed out at the edge. In a painting of human beings, one can remove its real colour-nature and convert it into an image. In this way one transforms the luster-colour into colour and thereby reaches the human; when one paints a human being one need worry about nothing except the pure transparency of the medium.

It is true one must develop most particularly the feeling for what colour becomes after its transition into image-character. You see, one penetrates in fact the whole nature of colour—also in so far as this nature is expressed in painting—if one cultivates a sensibility to the difference between the pictorial and that which is to be found in luster. The pictorial really more nearly approaches the quality of thought, and the more so, the further we proceed in the pictorial. When we paint a man, we can really paint only our thoughts of him. But this thought of him must be made evident. It must be expressed in the colour. And one lives in the colour when one is, for example, in a position to introduce somewhere a yellow surface and to say to oneself: this ought really to be shaded off; I transform it into image, and I must therefore modify it where it touches neighboring colours. I must apologize, as it were, in my picture that I do not yield to the will of the yellow.

Thus you see how in fact it is possible to paint from the colour itself; how it is possible to regard the world of colour as such as something which so develops in the procession of our earth's evolution that colour first irradiates the earth as light from the Cosmo; and then, since something in the earth departs from it and returns again as radiation, colour becomes incorporated in the object. And we follow this experience in colour—this cosmic experience, and attain thereby the possibility of ourselves living in the colour. It is living in the colour, when I have it dissolved in the pot, and by dipping the brush in it an applying it to the surface, transform it into something fixed and firm; whereas it is not living in the colour if I stand there with a palette and mix colours together, if, having the colours already solid and material on the palette, I then daub them on the surface. That is not living in the colour, but outside it. I live in the colour only when I must translate it from a fluid to a solid condition. Then I experience in a sense the same that the colour itself has experienced, in developing from the former lunar condition to the terrestrial condition and there becoming solid; for a solid can arise only with the earth. And then again there is this in my relation with colour. My soul must live with colour. I must rejoice with yellow, feel the dignity or seriousness of red; I must share with blue its soft, I might almost say, its tearful mood, I must be able to spiritualize colour, if I want to bring it to inner capabilities. I may not paint without this spiritual understanding for colour, especially not inorganic or lifeless objects This does not mean that one is to paint symbolically, that one must unfold the quite inartistic; this colour means one thing and that means another. The point is not that colours signify something other than themselves; but that one will be able to live with the colour.

Living with the colour ceased when one left the pot colour for the palette colour and because of this change we have all the tailors' dummies which are painted by the portrait-painters from time to time on their respective canvases. They are dolls, dummies and so forth; there is nothing real, nothing with an inner impulse of life, which can be painted only if one understands what living with the colour is.

Such are the few remarks I wanted to make to you in these three addresses. Naturally they could be enlarged endlessly, and this can be done at another opportunity in the future. For the present I wanted only to make these few remarks, and to provide a transition to such studies.

One hears very often, after all, that artists have a proper fear of everything scientific, that they refuse to let knowledge or science interfere in their Art. Goethe already—although he could not get to the inner causes of colouration, still produced the elements of it—rightly said on the subject of this fear in painters: Up till now one has found in painters a fear and a decided antipathy towards all theoretic studies on colour and what belongs to it, with which one cannot reproach them, for till now the so-called theories were groundless, vacillating and tending to empiricism. We should like our efforts to do something to calm this fear and help to stimulate artists to put to practical proof the laws as laid down.

If one proceeds in the right way consciously, one's knowledge becomes raised from the abstract to the concrete in Art, and this is particularly the case with such a fluctuating element as in the world of colour. And it is only the fault of the decadence of our Science that artists rightly have such a fear of theory. This theory is material-intellectual, especially this theory that we come across in modern physical Optics. The element of colour is fluctuating, and the most one can wish is that the painter should not solidify his colour as he does on the palette, but should leave it in a fluid state in the pot. But if the physicist comes along then and draws his lines on the board and says that from his strokes and lines run out here the yellow, there blue—this attitude is enough to drive one mad. That has nothing to do with Physics. Physics must be content with the light that is in the room. You cannot undertake the consideration of colour at all without first lifting it into the region of the soul. For it is sheer nonsense to say: Colour is something subjective which produces an effect on us And if one goes further and says,—and in doing so one conceives an inexact picture of the Ego—that there is some external objective inclination which affects us, our Ego, it is rubbish; the Ego itself is in the colour. The Ego and the human astral body are not to be differentiated from colour, they live in it and are outside the physical human body in proportion as they are bound up with colour out there; they only reproduce the colours in the physical and etheric body. That is the point. So that the whole question of the effect of an objective on a subjective colour is nonsense; for the Ego, the astral body, already exist in the colour, and they enter with it. Colour is the conveyer of the Ego and the astral body into the physical and into the etheric body. So that the whole method of study must come out.

Thus everything which has crept into Physics, and which Physics includes in its diagrammatic lines, must come out. There should first of all be a period in which one abstains altogether from drawing, when one speaks of colour in a discussion on Physics; but one should try to understand colour in its fluctuation, in its life.

That is the important thing. Then you pass of your own accord from the theoretical to the artistic. Then you produce a method of studying colour which the painter can understand; because, if he identifies himself with such a method, and lives wholly in it, it is then no theoretical process of thought, but an element in colour itself. And, since he lives in the colour, he receives from it each time the answer to the question: How am I going to apply it?

Hence the possibility of conducting a dialogue with colours, for they tell you themselves how they want to be applied on the surface. It is this which makes a line of approach aspiring to attain reality enter the sphere of Art. Our Physics had ruined it for us; and therefore it must be emphasized today with all distinctness that such things which above all verge on Psychology and Aesthetics must not be allowed to be further corrupted by the physical view, but that it must be understood that quite another way and method must be employed. We see the spiritual and psychic elements in Goetheanism, which must be carried further. It has not yet, for instance, shown the differentiation of colours into images and lusters. We have to live Goetheanism thoughtfully, in order to proceed further and further. And this we can do only through Spiritual Science.

If one regards the psychic in all movements and life, the varied and manifold world of colour becomes one whole world. One gradually takes one's place in what I should like to call an astral apprehension of the world. Then all visible colour becomes a revelation of the psychic in the world.

Let us look at the green of the plant. When a plant puts on its green we cannot regard the green colour as something subjective and see vibrations in the plant as the physicists do. After all, we no longer have the plant if we think only of the vibrations in the trees which are supposed to cause the colour. These are merely abstractions. In reality we cannot imagine the plant without its green, if we use our living imagination. The plant creates its green out of itself. But how?

Now, lifeless substances are incorporated in the plant, but these lifeless substances are made to live. In the plant are iron, carbon and some silicic acid. There are all kinds of substances which are found also in the Mineral Kingdom: and in seeing how life penetrates through the lifeless, and makes for itself an image by means of the lifeless, i.e. the image of the plant, we get the feeling of green as the lifeless image of life.

Everywhere we look out upon our green surroundings. We know that the lifeless substances of the earth live plants. Life itself we do not perceive. We perceive plants because they contain the lifeless substances. And because of this they are green. The green is the lifeless image of the life that exists on earth.

Now let us look at the green, since in a way we have in it a kind of world-word which tells us how life in the plant weaves and flows.

Then let us look at men. If we examine nature we find the colour that most resembles the healthy human complexion to be the fresh peach-blossom in spring. No other colour in nature is like it. But we feel that the inner health of man is expressed also in this peach-coloured time. We learn from the flesh-colour to know the living health of man which is really endowed by the soul. And we feel that when the colour of the skin becomes green, the man is ill and soul cannot find the right way into the physical body. On the other hand if the soul occupies the physical body too markedly in an egoistical way, as e.g. with avarice, the man becomes pale; as also is the case in fear.

Between paleness and greenness lies the healthy human colour with the suggestion of peach. And as we feel in the plant's green the lifeless image of life, we feel in the characteristic flesh-colour of a sound person the living image of the soul.

You see the world is beginning now to come alive in colours. The living forms itself through the lifeless into the image of green. The psychic forms the human skin into the image of peach or flesh-colour.

Let us look further. The sun appears to us whitish, which we feel to be closely related to light. If we awake at night in darkness we feel that it is not our real human environment in which we can fully feel our ego. For this we need light between us and other objects. We need light between ourselves and the wall so that the wall can have its effect on us from the distance. Our ego-feeling lights up in us if we wake up in light. In the darkness we feel ourselves strange in the world.

I say, light: but I could also take other sense-perceptions. And you will notice an apparent contradiction, because a person born blind never sees light. But it is not a question of seeing light directly, but of how one is organized. Man, even if born blind, is organized for light. And the limitation of ego-energy which is present in the blind, is there because of the absence of light.

Whiteness is related to light. If we feel whiteness in this way, as we feel the ego stimulated in a room by whiteness to its inner strength, we can say, making the thought living and not abstract: Whiteness is the psychic appearance of the spirit. For this reason we always feel, when we see white in pictures, yes, that is meant to be the spirit.

Take, on the other hand, black. When you see black, when we use black somewhere, it can most easily be used to represent the spiritual image of the lifeless, just as we feel ourselves killed, lamed, when our spirit has to find its place on awakening in black darkness. So one can feel black as the spiritual image of the lifeless.

And think now how one can live in colours! We experience the world as colour and light, when we experience green as the lifeless image of life, peach and flesh-colour as the living image of the soul, white as the psychic image of the spirit and black as the spiritual image of the lifeless.

I have really completed a circle by saying this, for observe how I had to describe green as the lifeless image of life; I stopped at life. Peach and flesh-colour = living image of the soul. I stopped at the soul. White = the psychic image of the spirit. I stopped at the soul and go up to the spirit. Black = the spiritual image of the lifeless. I stopped at the spiritual, proceeded to the lifeless, but came back again, since the green was the lifeless image of life. I have completed the circle. Thereby this living participation in colour becomes a real, artistic experience of the astral element in the world.

And if one has this artistic experience, death, life, soul and spirit present themselves as in a wheel of life, for from death one returns to death through the life of the psychic and spiritual; if they present themselves also through light and colour, as I have just described them, one knows one must go outside space, one cannot remain in space, the riddle of space must be solved on a surface.

And one loses the idea of space; as a sculptor has lost the habit of thinking with the head, so we lose now the idea of space. Everything presses on one as light and colour; one becomes a painter. The source of painting is opened of its own accord by means of such a view. And one gets the great inward pleasure of putting on this or that colour and setting the other colour next to it. For then colours become a living revelation of the living, of the lifeless, of the spiritual and of the psychic.

Thus, having passed beyond dead thought, one really arrives at the point of feeling oneself driven no longer to speak in words, no longer to think in ideas, and no longer even to create forms, but to reproduce in colour and light, the reflections of life and death, spirit and soul as they appear in the world.

Of course in treating of things artistic, I must refer not to the abstract understanding, but to artistic feeling. What is artistic must be understood artistically. Therefore I cannot here point out to you by means of some concept-illustration, how green, peach-colour, white and black give one the desire to have an enclosed image. One wants to have a contour and the circumscribed picture inside it. Then these four colours always contain something of shadow. White is the lightest shadow, for it is shadowed light. Black is the darkest. Green and peach-colour are images, that is, self-contained surfaces, which give to the surface something of a shadowy nature.

Thus in these four colours we have image-colours or shadow-colours, and we want to feel them as such.

The case is quite different when we go on to other colours. These other colours are, if I take three nuances of them, red, yellow and blue. With these we have not the desire, if we rely on our purely artistic sensibility, to have them in a circumscribed contour, but we feel the need for the surface to shine in these colours, so that the radiation of the red comes forth from the surface to meet us, or that the mattness of the blue has a calming effect on us, or that the gleam of the yellow shines out form the surface towards us.

And so one can call the four colours, flesh-colour, and green, black and white, the image or shadow-colours; and on the other hand blue, yellow, and red the luster-colours which shine forth from the image of the shadowy.

And when we follow with our sensibility how the world becomes luminous with the three colours, red, yellow and blue, we say again to ourselves, that in the lustrousness of red we want preferably to see the living; the living wants to reveal itself to us in active red; so that we may call red the luster of the living.

If the spirit wants to reveal itself to us not merely in its abstract equality as white, but to speak to us inwardly and intensively—that is to our soul—it will shine yellow. Yellow is the luster of the spirit.

If the soul desires to remain truly inward and this state is to be expressed artistically in colour, then the soul will withdraw itself from outer phenomena and remain, as it were, sealed. This give the soft luminosity of blue, which is thus the luster of the soul.

In this way we live in colour; we understand it with our sensibility and our feeling if we realize everywhere how a world forms itself out of the four image-colours and the three luster-colours. And if one in this manner lives in the luster and the image-character of the world of colour, one becomes a painter, who paints with his inner soul, for one learns to live in the colour.

One learns, for example, what each colour wishes to say to us. Blue is the luster of the psychic. When we paint a surface blue, we are satisfied only if we paint it strong at the edged and weaker in the center.

On the other hand, if we want yellow's message we make it thicker in the middle and lighter towards the edge. The colour itself demands it, and thus what lives in the colour reveals itself gradually. We come to produce the form out of the colour, that is, to paint out of the world of colour itself, through our feeling.

If we experience the world as colour in this way, it will not occur to us if we want, for instance, to represent a figure in a picture as a gleaming white figure, a figure that lives in the spirit, to reveal it in any other colour, but in a yellow, lighter at the edges. It will not occur to use to paint the soul element in a picture otherwise than by using blue shaded off inwards to a softer blue even if it is only in the garment.

If you appreciate from this standpoint the painters of the Renaissance, Raphael, Michelangelo, and even Leonardo, you will find in all of them that at the time they really lived in this way in colour.

And, above all, there was present something else. In the painting which has practically died out in our time, but was still to be found echoed in the Renaissance painting, there was that inner perspective of the picture which lives in the colour. A man who feels the luster of red properly will always feel how the red comes forward out of the picture, how it brings the object it represents near to us; while blue takes the object it represents into the distance. We paint colour-perspective as inner perspective. It is the perspective which still lived in the psychic-spiritual.

It was in the materialistic age—a fact often over-looked—that space-perspective first appeared, the perspective that deals with spatial measurement, so that distance did not become blue, but smaller, the foreground not red, but larger. This perspective is a side-product of the materialistic age which, living in the material element in space, wanted to paint in it also.

We are today again at a time when we must find our way back again to the natural element in painting. For the surface belongs also to the materials of a painter, for he works upon it. But an artist must before all things have a feeling for his material. For instance, if he wants to carve a plastic figure out of wood, he must carve, for example, the man's eyes out of the wood. Whatever is concave he must see with his artist's eye and hollow out. The wood-sculptor hollows out the wood.

The sculptor in marble or some other hard stone does not bother about how the eye goes in. He does not hollow out, but he notices how the brow emerges from the eye. He applies; he keeps the convex in mind. The marble-worker, even if he has made his model in plasticine or clay, must think in terms of his material. He must live in it, so that it speaks to him.

It must always also be the same with colour; one must reckon with the fact that the painter's material is the surface. And the surface can only be felt in this way if the third dimension of space is ignored. It is ignored when one has what is qualitative one the surface as the expression of the third dimension; when one feels blue as a retiring and red as an advancing colour, when, in short, the third dimension is inherent in the colour. Then one really releases matter, whereas in space-perspective matter is only imitated.

I am, of course, not saying anything against spatial perspective; it was natural and self-evident in the middle of the fifteenth century, and indeed added something powerful to the old aesthetics of painting. But the important thing is that after passing through materialism artistically for a time, as expressed in space-perspective, we can return to a more spiritual interpretation of painting also, so that we come back one more to colour-perspective.

In talking about Art, one cannot theorize; one must remain always in the medium of Art itself and the thing that can be of service to us in talking about Art must be artistic sensibility. One cannot speak about Mathematics or Mechanics or Physics from artistic sensibility, but from reason and understanding, by the light of which one can in no wise consider Art, though this is what was done by the aestheticists of the nineteenth century.

Man in his earthly existence varies in his conditions of consciousness; he varies in the conditions of full wakefulness, of sleep, and of dreaming.

Let us first put the question to ourselves: is it an essential part of man to live as earthly being in these three conditions of consciousness?

We must clearly realize that of earthly beings only man lives in these three conditions. Animals live in an essentially different alternation. They do not have that deep, dreamless sleep which man has for the greater part of the time between falling asleep and awaking. On the other hand, animals do not have the complete wakefulness of man between awaking and going to sleep. Animal “wakefulness” is somewhat like human dream; but the experiences of the higher animals are more definite. On the other hand, animals are never so deeply unconscious as man is in deep sleep.

Therefore animals do not differentiate themselves from their surroundings so much as man. They have not got an outer and an inner world, as man has. The higher animals, (Dr. Steiner means by higher animals, the warm-blooded vertebrates, birds and mammals. – Ed.) subconsciously, feel themselves, with their whole inner being, like a part of the surrounding world.

When an animal sees a plant, his first feeling is not: that is outwardly a plant, and I am inwardly a separate being—but the animal gets a strong inner experience from the plant, a direct sympathy or antipathy. It feels as it were, the plant's nature inwardly. The circumstance that people of our time are not able to observe anything that is not obvious, prevents them from seeing in the impulses and behaviour of animals that it is as I have said.

Only man has the clear and sharp differentiation between his inner world and the outer world. Why does he recognize an outer world? How does he come at all to speak of an inner and an outer world? Because every time he sleeps, his ego and his astral body are outside his physical and etheric body: he abandons, so to speak, his physical and etheric bodies and is among those things which are outer world. During sleep we share the fate of outer things. As tables and benches, trees and clouds are during wakefulness outside our physical and etheric bodies and are therefore described as outer world, so, during sleep, our own astral bodies and our ego belong to the outer world. And here something happens.

In order to realize what happens here, let us first start from what happens when we face the world in a perfectly normal condition of wakefulness. There are the various objects outside us. And the scientific thought of man has gradually brought it to the point of recognizing such physical things as belonging certainly to the outer world as can be weighted, measured and counted. The content of our physical science without doubt is determined according to weight, dimension and number.

We reckon with the calculations which apply to earthly things, we weigh and measure them, and what we ascertain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours, and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave themselves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical object, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned—he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the modern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things—sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.

You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not according to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.

But what is there are—if I may so express it—the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of free-moving sound and so on.

If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words, what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.

When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight, we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the rainbow.

If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given—the rainbow is an optical illusion. Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift it up—and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.

He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies, comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the uttermost parts of the Earth. It has a contrary weight. (See Diagram 1) These things of the earth want to go down there to the earth's center (downward arrow); these (upward arrow) want to escape into universal space.

And there is something there similar to a measurement. You get it, for instance, if you have, let us say, a small reddish cloud, and this small reddish cloud is hemmed in by a mighty yellow structure; you then measure, not with a measuring-rule, but qualitatively, the stronger-shining red with the weaker-shining yellow. And as the measuring-rule tells you: that is five yards, the red tells you here: (see Diagram 1): if I were to spread myself out, I should go into the yellow five times. I must expand myself. I must become bigger, then I, too, should become yellow. Thus are measurements made in this case.

If it still more difficult to be clear about counting, because after all in earthly counting we mostly count only peas or apples, which lie side by side indifferently, and we always have the feeling that I we place as second one by the one, this one doesn't mind a bit that another one lies next to it. In human life it is of course different. There is sometimes the case that the one is directed to the other. But this is already verging on the spiritual.

In physical mathematics it is a matter of indifference to divisions what is added to them. But here it is not the case. When a one is of a definite kind, it demands—let us say—some three or five others, according to its kind. It has always an inner relationship to the others. Here number is a reality. And if a consciousness of it begins, as is the case when you are out there with your ego and your astral body, you also get to the point of ascertaining something like dimension, number and weight, but of an opposite kind.

And then, when sight and hearing out there are no longer a mere chaotic mingling of red and yellow and sounds, but you begin to feel things are ordered, then arises the perception of the spiritual beings, who realize themselves in these free-floating sense-experiences. Then we enter the positive spiritual world, and the life and doings of the spiritual beings. As here on earth we enter the life and doings of earthly things, ascertaining them with the scales and the rod and our calculations, so, by adapting ourselves to the purely qualitative, opposite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring colour by colour, etc.—we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also permeate all the realms of nature.

Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he could not recognize an outer world.

It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.

And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.

It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and antipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we had not the possibility of dreaming, nor the continuation of this dream-force in our inner life, we should have no beauty. That we have a disposition for beauty is due to the fact that we are able to dream. For prosaic existence we have to say: we have to thank the power of dreaming that we have a memory. For the art life of man we have to thank the power of dreaming that there is beauty. The manner in which we feel or create beauty is namely very similar to the weaving, creating power of dreaming.

We behave in the experience of beauty and to the creation of it—through the help of our physical body—as we behave outside our physical body or half bound to it, when we dream. There is really only a slight jump from dreaming to living in beauty. And only because in these materialistic times people are of such coarse temperament that they do not notice this jump, is so little consciousness to be found of the whole significance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free movement and life, whereas when one gives oneself up to freedom, to apparent inner compulsion, that is, if one experiences this jump one has no longer the feeling that it is the same as dreaming, that it is the same except that use is made of the powers of the physical body. This generation will long ponder what “chaos” meant in former times. There are most diverse definitions of “chaos.” Actually it can only be characterized by saying: when man reaches a state of consciousness in which the experience of weight, of earthly dimension just ceases, and things begin to become less heavy, but as yet with no tendency to escape into the universe, but maintain themselves still—let us say—horizontally, in equilibrium, when the fixed boundaries get blurred, when the swaying indefiniteness of the world is seen with the physical body still, but already also with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then you see chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos towards man.

In Greece one still had the feeling that one cannot really make the physical world beautiful; it is half a necessity of nature; it is as it is. One cannot set up the Cosmos—which means the beautiful world—out of earthly things, but only out of chaos, by shaping the chaos. And what one makes with earthly things is merely an imitation in matter of the molded chaos.

This is always the case in Art; and in Greece, where the mystery-cults still had a certain influence, one had a very vivid image of this relation of chaos to Cosmos.

But when one looks round in all these worlds—the unconsciousness of sleep, the half-consciousness of dream—one does not find the Good. The beings who are in these worlds are predestined with all wisdom from the very beginning to run their life's course there. One finds in them controlling, constructive wisdom. One finds in them beauty. But there is no sense in speaking of goodness among these beings when as earth-man it is a question of our meeting them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a distinction between inner and outer world, so that the good can follow the spiritual world or not. As the state of sleep is apportioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the Good.

This does not contradict what I have been saying during these days, that when one leaves earthly things and emerges into the Cosmos, one is induced to abandon also earthly concepts so as to speak of the moral world-order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on this earth. Only there the predestination,—that which is appointed,—is spiritual; there is no contradiction.

But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.

Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as regards goodness. In this state we must most certainly arrive at the idea of goodness.

What does modern science achieve when it attempts to explain man? It refuses to rise from truth, through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything in accordance with an external causal necessity which corresponds only to the idea of truth. And here one entirely fails to reach that element in man which weaves and lives when he is awake. One reaches at the most only what man is when asleep. Therefore if you read anthropologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the following impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern science. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed ... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He lies the whole time in bed.

It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the evening.

Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain chiefly from external things.

Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from those which are in common use today.

It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he is. He is really—so ends this materialistic description pathetically—a product of every air-current.

If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist, he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a living man.

Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The opposite pole must be found to that which has been attained. What was achieved during the nineteenth century7, so glorious for materialistic philosophy? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way—we can say it sincerely and honestly—it succeeded in defining the outer world according to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has escaped one.

And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure, number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.

It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e. of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art—it must all go. It is ghastly studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is attached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.

I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics. It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a painter has a true or a false theory of colour.

It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?

If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They devoted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.

Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.

But what was the possibility that came from living in this—I might say—imponderable sensible perception? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos. He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.

Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives everywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the representation. Light quivers through the universe, and the light carries gold. Everywhere in light there is gold. Gold lives and moves in light. And when man lives on earth—you know already that it changes after seven years—his heart is not composed of the cucumber and the salad and the roast veal the man has in the meantime eaten, but these old teachers knew that the heart is built of light's gold, and the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the gold weaving in the light to build up the heart out of the whole universe.

Yes, those people talked differently and you must be aware of this difference, for one must relearn to talk thus, only on another plane of consciousness. In painting, what once was there, but then disappeared, when one still painted by cosmic inspiration, because weight did not yet exist,—this painting has left its last trace in, let me say, Cimabue, and the Russian Icon-painting. The Icon was still painted out of the macrocosm, the whole outer world. It was so to speak a slice out of the macrocosm. But then one began in a blind alley, one could not get further, for the simple reason that this world-philosophy no longer existed among mankind. If one had wanted to paint the Icon with inner sympathy, not merely by tradition and prayer, one would have to have known how to handle gold. The treatment of gold on the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.

There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection. Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe. One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.

This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century. Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.

Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a minimum degree, but still it became heavy. And then arose the Madonna as counter to the Icon—the Icon which ahs no weight, the Madonna which has weight, even if she is beautiful—beauty has survived. But Icons are no longer paintable at all, because man does not feel them. If men today think they can feel Icons, it is an untruth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It becomes dependent on a scheme, on tradition.

Raphael's painting, built as it is on Giotto's development fro Cimabue, can remain Art only so long as the light of beauty streams upon it. To a certain extent it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still sensed something of the gold weaving in the light, and at least gave their pictures the luster of gold, making it irradiate them from outside.

But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.

And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to speak.

If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.

We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical naturalism to free musical Art.

We see how in all provinces it is a question of making an effort, of mankind waking up. It is this we ought to take up—this impulse to awake, to look round and see what is and what is not, and to advance ever onwards wherever the summons calls.

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

I have described how the modern philosopher comes to admit to himself: where does this intellectualism lead? To build a gigantic machine, and place it in the centre of the earth, in order to blow up the earth into all corners of the universe—he admitted it is so. The others do not admit it!

And so I have tried in different places to show how the ideas of only thirty or forty years ago are dissolved through the theory of Relativity—simply melted away like snow in the sun—so I have tried to show you how the summons is to be found everywhere really to strive towards Anthroposophy. For the philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann says: if the world really is as we imagine it—i.e. as he imagined it in the sense of the nineteenth century—then we really must blow it up into space, because we cannot endure any longer on it; and it is only a question of progressing far enough till we are able to do it. We must sigh for this future time when we can blow the world into universal space.

But the Relativists, before that, will see to it that mankind has no concepts left. Space, Time, Movement are abolished. Even apart from this, one can reach such profound despair, that in certain circumstances one sees the highest satisfaction in that explosion into the whole universe.

One must, however, make oneself clearly acquainted with the meaning of certain impulses in our time.

When I wrote my Occult Science, I was compelled to bring the evolution of the earth somewhat into line with present-day ideas. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one could have put it differently. For instance, in a certain chapter of this Occult Science the following might then have been found. One would have spoken otherwise of those beings whom one can describe as the beings of the first hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. One would have called the Seraphim those beings who make no differentiation between subject and object, who would not say: there are objects outside myself, but: the world is, and I am the world and the world is I—who know of their own existence only by means of an experience, of which man has a weak idea when some experience carries him away in glowing rapture.

It is in fact sometimes difficult to explain to modern people what a glowing rapture is, for it was even understood better at the beginning of the nineteenth century than it is now. It still happened then that some poem or other, by this or that poet, was read, and the people acted through rapture—forgive my saying so, but it was so—as if they were mad! So much were they moved, so much were they suffused with warmth.

Nowadays people are frozen just when one thinks they should be enraptured. And this rapture of the soul—which was experienced particularly in Central and Eastern Europe,—if raised as a unifying element into the consciousness gives one an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim.

And we have to imagine the consciousness-element of the Cherubim as a completely purified element in the consciousness, full of light, so that thought becomes directly light, and illumines everything; and the element of the Thrones as bearing up the world in grace.

One would then have said: the choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones act together, in such a way that the thrones constitute a nucleus, and the Cherubim radiate their own luminous nature from it. The Seraphim cover the whole in a mantle of rapture, which streams out into all space.

But these are all beings: in the midst of the Thrones, round them the Cherubim, and in the periphery, the Seraphim. They are beings which mutually interplay and act and think and will and feel. And if a being possessing the necessary susceptibility had traveled through space where the thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim had thus formed a center, he would have felt warmth in different degrees and in different places; now higher, now lower warmth, but yet in a spiritual and psychic way; in such a way, however, that the psychic experience is at the same time a physical experience in our senses. Thus, when the being feels the warmth psychically, there really is present what you feel when you are in a heated room.

Such a union of the begins of the First Hierarchy did exist once upon a time in the universe. And this formed the system and existence of the “Saturnian Age.” Warmth is just the expression of these beings. The warmth is nothing in itself, it is only the evidence that these beings exist.

I should like to use a simile here which may perhaps help as an explanation. Suppose you are fond of somebody, you find his presence warms you. Suppose further there comes another man who has no heart at all and says: that person doesn't interest me in the least; I am interested only in the warmth which he spreads around. He does not say he is interested in the warmth the other sheds, but that nothing but the warmth interests him. He is talking nonsense, of course, for when the person who radiates warmth has gone, the warmth has gone also. It is there only when the person is there. In itself it is nothing. The person must be there for the warmth to be there.

Thus Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones must be there; otherwise warmth is not there either. It is merely the revelation of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now at the time of which I speak, what I have just described to you did in actual fact exist. When one spoke of the element of warmth one was understood to mean really Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones. That was the Saturnian Age.

Then one went further and said that only this highest hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, has the might and the power to produce something of this kind in the Cosmos. And only by reason of the fact that this was done at the beginning of a terrestrial creation could evolution proceed. The Sun, as it were, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones was able to a certain extent to direct the course of it. And this happened in such a way that the Beings produced by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Exusiai and Dynamis—now surged into this space created and warmed in this Saturnian life by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Thus the younger—of course, the cosmically younger—Beings entered in; and theirs was the next influence. Whereas the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones revealed themselves in the element of warmth, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy were seen in the element of light. The Saturnian element is dark, but warm, and within the dark and gloomy world of the Saturnian existence arises light, precisely the thing that can appear through the sons of the Second Hierarchy , through the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

This is the case because the entry of the Second Hierarchy represents an inward illumination, which is connected with a densification of warmth. Air comes forth from the pure warmth-element, and in the revelation of the light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

But you must get this clear: Actually Beings press in. Light is present for a Being with the necessary powers of perception. Light is what distinguishes the paths of these Beings. Under certain circumstances when light appears somewhere, there also appears shadow, darkness, dark shadow. So shadow also arose through the entry of the Second Hierarchy in the form of light. What was this shadow? The air. And actually till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was known what the air is. Today one knows only that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen, etc. which means no more than if one says, for instance, that a watch is made of glass and silver—whereby nothing whatever is said about the watch. Similarly nothing whatever is said about the air as a cosmic phenomenon when you say it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. But a great deal is said if one knows that from the cosmic point of view air is the shadow of the light. So that with the entry of the Second Hierarchy into the Saturnian warmth, one actually has in fact the entry of light, and its shadow, air. And where that happens is Sun. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would really have had to talk in this manner.

The further stages of development are now conducted by the sons of the Third Hierarchy, the Archai, Archangels and Angels. These Beings bring into the luminous element with its shadow of air, introduced by the Second Hierarchy, another element resembling our desire, our urge to acquire something, our longing to have something.

Hence it came about that, let us say, an Archai or Archangel-Being entered and found an element of light, or rather, a place of light. In this place it felt, by reason of its sensitiveness to light, the urge towards and desire for darkness. The Angel-Being carried the light into the darkness, or an Angel-Being carried the darkness into the light. These Beings became the intermediaries, the messengers between light and darkness.

The result was that what formerly shone only in light, an trailed behind it, its shadow, the somber, airy darkness, now began to gleam in all colours, that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light. It was the Third Hierarchy which conjured forth colour from out of light and darkness.

Observe, you have here something as it were historically documented to put before your souls. In the time of Aristotle one still knew—supposing one had pondered within the Mysteries on the origin of colours—that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy had to do with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in his Colour-Harmony that colour was a combined effect of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element was lost—that the First Hierarchy was responsible for warmth, the Second for light and its shadow, the air, and the Third or the shining forth of colour in a world continuity. And there remained nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory of Colour, over which the initiated have smiled up to the eighteenth century, and which then became an article of faith with those who were just expert physicists.

In order to speak in the sense of this Newtonian theory, it is really necessary for one to have no knowledge at all of the spiritual world. And if one is still inwardly spurred by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, one is utterly opposed to it. One states what is correct as Goethe did, then one storms dreadfully. Goethe was never so furious as on the occasion when he castigated Newton; he was simply furious about the wretched nonsense.

We cannot understand such things today, simply because anyone who does not recognize the Newtonian teaching concerning colour is looked upon by the physicists as a fool. But it was not really the case that Goethe stood quite alone in his own time. He alone uttered these things, but even at the end of the eighteenth century the learned knew perfectly well that the origin of colour lay in the spiritual world.

Air is the shadow of light. Just as when light radiates and, under certain circumstances, gives rise to deep shadow, so, if colour is present, and this colour works as a reality in the airy element, not merely as a reflection, not merely as a reflex-colour, but as a Reality; then the fluid, watery element arises from out of the real colour element. As air is the shadow of light, in cosmic thought, so water is the reflection, the creation of the element of colour in the Cosmos.

You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real meaning of colour. Red—well—do you believe that red in its real nature is only the neutral surface on generally regards it? Surely Red is something which attacks one. I have often discussed it. Red makes one want to run away; it pushes one back. Violet-blue one wants to pursue; it continually evades one, and gets ever darker and darker. Everything lives in colours. They are a world of their own, and the psychic element feels in the colour-world the necessity for movement, if it follows colours with psychic experience.

Today man stares at the rainbow. If one looks at it with the slightest imagination, one sees elemental beings active in it. They are revealed in remarkable phenomena. In the yellow certain of them are seen continually emerging from the rainbow, and moving across to the green. The moment they reach the underneath of the green, they are attracted to and disappear in it, to emerge on the other side. The whole rainbow reveals to an imaginative observer an outpouring and a disappearance of the spiritual. It reveals in fact something like a spiritual waltz. At the same time one notices that as these spiritual beings emerge in red-yellow, they do it with an extraordinary apprehension; and as they enter into the blue-violet, they do it with an unconquerable courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see streams of fear, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling that there is the seat of all courage and valor.

Now imagine we have the rainbow in section. Then these being emerge in the red-yellow and disappear in the blue-violet; here apprehension, here courage, which disappears again. There the rainbow becomes dense and you can imagine the watery element arises from it. Spiritual beings exist in this watery element which are really a kind of copy of the beings of the Third Hierarchy.

One can say that in approaching the learned men of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must understand such things in this way. You cannot understand Albertus Magnus if you read him with modern knowledge, you must read him with the knowledge that such spiritual things were a reality to him and then only will you understand the meaning of his words and expressions.

In this way therefore air and water appear as a reflection of the Hierarchies. The Second Hierarchy enters in the form of light, the Third in the form of colour. But in order to enable this to be established, the lunar existence is created.

And now comes the Fourth Hierarchy. I am speaking now with the thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Now the Fourth Hierarchy. We never speak of it; but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one spoke freely of it. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is man himself. But formerly one did not understand by it the remarkably odd being with two legs and the tendency to decay that wanders about the world now; for then the human being of the present day appeared to the scholar as an unusual kind of being. They spoke of primeval man before the Fall, who existed in such a form as to have as much power over the earth as Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, had over the lunar existence; the Second Hierarchy over the solar existence; the First Hierarchy over the Saturnian existence. They spoke of man in his original terrestrial existence, and as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift form the higher Hierarchies of something they first possessed, and preserved, and did not themselves require—Life. And life came into the colourful world which I have been sketchily describing to you.

You will ask—But didn't things live before this? The answer you can learn from man himself. Your ego and your astral body have not life, but they exist all the same. The spiritual, the soul, does not require life. Life begins only with your etheric body; and this is something in the nature of an outer wrapping. It is thus that life appears only after the lunar existence, with the terrestrial existence, in that stage of evolution which belongs to our earth. The iridescent world became alive. It is not only then that Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., felt a desire to bring light into darkness and darkness into light and so called forth the play of colours in the planets, but also they desired to experience this play of colour inwardly, and make it inward; to feel weakness and lassitude when darkness inwardly dominates over light, and activity when light dominates over darkness. For what happens when you r un? When you run it means that light dominates over the darkness in you; when you sit and are idle, the reverse happens. It is the effect of colour in the soul, the effect of colour iridescence. The iridescence of colour, permeated and shot with life, appeared with the coming of man, the Fourth Hierarchy. And at this moment of cosmic growth the forces which became active in the iridescence of colour began to form outlines. Life, which rounded off, smoothed and shaped the colours, called forth the hard crystal form; and we are in the terrestrial epoch.

Such things as I have now explained to you were really the axioms of those medieval alchemists, occultists, Rosicrucians, etc., who, though scarcely mentioned today in history, flourished from the ninth and tenth up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and whose stragglers, always regarded as oddities, existed into the eighteenth century and even into the beginning of the nineteenth. Only then were these things entirely covered up. The philosophical attitude to life of the time led to the following phenomenon:

Suppose I have here a human being. I cease to have any interest in him, merely take off his clothes and hang them on a clothes-dummy with a knob at the top like a head, and thereafter take no more interest in the human being. I say to myself further: That is the human being, what does it matter to me that anything can be put into these clothes; the dummy is, as far as I am concerned, the human being. So it was with the elements of Nature. People are no longer interested that behind warmth of fire is the First Hierarchy, behind light and air is the Second, behind the so-called chemical ether, colour-ether, etc. and water is the Third, behind life and the earth is the Fourth, or Man. Out with the clothes-horse and hang the clothes on it! That is the first Act. The second begins then with the school of Kant!~ Here begins Kantianism, here one begins, having the clothes-horse with the clothes on it, to philosophize concerning what “the thing in itself” of these clothes might be. And the conclusion is that one cannot recognize “the thing in itself” of the clothes. Very perspicacious! Naturally, if you have removed the man first, you can philosophize about the clothes, and this leads to a very pretty speculation: the clothes-horse is there all right, and the clothes hanging on it, so one speculates either in the Kantian fashion—one cannot recognize “the thing in itself”—or in the manner of Helmholtz, saying: these clothes cannot surely have form. There must be crowds of tiny whirling specks of dust, or atoms, in them, which by their movement preserve the clothes in their form.

Yes, this is the turn that later thought has taken. But it is abstract, and shadowy. All the same it is the kind of thought in which we live today; out of it we fashion the whole of our Natural Scientific principles. And when we deny that we think in terms of atoms, we are doing it all the more. For it will be a long time before it is admitted that it is unnecessary to weave a Dance of the Atoms into it, rather than simply to replace man into his clothes. But that is just what the resuscitation of Spiritual Science must attempt.

Today I would like to add a few words to the lectures I have given here in the last few days. In earlier lectures I often spoke of a genius of language. And you already know from my book 'Theosophy' how, when spiritual essence is spoken of in the anthroposophical context, real spiritual essence is meant, and so also in what is referred to as the genius of language, real spiritual essence for the individual languages is meant, into which man lives and which, as it were, gives him the strength from the spiritual worlds to express his thoughts, which initially exist as a dead inheritance of the spiritual world in him as an earthly being. Therefore, it is particularly appropriate in the anthroposophical context to seek a meaning in what appears as formations in language, a meaning that even comes from the spiritual worlds to a certain extent independently of man.

Now, I have already pointed out the peculiar way in which we describe the actual element of the artistic, of beauty, and its opposite. We speak of the beautiful and speak of its opposite in the individual languages, of the ugly. If we were to describe the beautiful in a way that is entirely appropriate to the ugly, then, since the opposite of hate is love, we would have to speak not of the beautiful, but of the lovely. We would then have to say the lovely, that ugly. But we speak of the beautiful and the ugly and, based on the genius of language, make a significant distinction by designating the one and its opposite in this way. The beautiful, if we take it in the German language for the moment – a similar one would have to be found for other languages – is related as a word to that which shines. That which is beautiful shines, that is, carries its inner being to the surface. That is the essence of beauty: it does not hide, but brings its inner being to the surface, to the outer form. So that what is beautiful is that which reveals its inner being in its outer form, that which shines, that which radiates light, so that the light reveals what radiates out into the world, the essence. If we want to speak of the opposite of beauty in this sense, we have to say: that which hides itself, that which does not shine, that which withholds its essence and does not reveal to the outside world in its outer shell what it is. So when we speak of beauty, we are describing something objectively. If we were to speak just as objectively about the opposite of beauty, we would have to describe it with a word that means “that which hides itself, that which appears outwardly as other than it is.” But here we depart from the objective and approach the subjective, and then we describe our relationship to that which hides itself, and we find that we cannot love that which hides itself, we must hate it. That which shows us a different face than it is is the opposite of beauty. But we do not describe it, so to speak, from the same background of our being; we describe it from our emotion as that which is hateful to us because it hides itself, because it does not reveal itself.

If we listen carefully to language, then the genius of language can reveal itself to us. And we must ask ourselves: What are we actually striving for when we strive for the beautiful, in the broadest sense, through art? What are we actually striving for? The mere fact that we have to choose a word for the beautiful that comes from us, from the genius of language – for the opposite we do not go out of ourselves, we remain within ourselves, remain with our emotions, with hatred – the mere fact that we have to go out of ourselves shows that in the beautiful there is a relationship to the spiritual that is outside of us. For what seems? That which we see with our senses does not need to shine for us, it is there. That which shines for us, that is, which radiates in the sensual and announces its essence in the sensual, is the spiritual. So, when we speak objectively of the beautiful as beautiful, we grasp the artistically beautiful from the outset as a spiritual that reveals itself through art in the world. It is the task of art to grasp what appears, the radiance, the revelation of that which, as spirit, permeates and lives through the world. And all real art seeks the spiritual. Even when art, as it may, wants to depict the ugly, the repulsive, it does not want to depict the sensual repulsive, but the spiritual that announces its essence in the sensual repulsive. The ugly can become beautiful when the spiritual reveals itself in the ugly. But it must be so, the relationship to the spiritual must always be there if an artistic work is to have a beautiful effect.

Now, let us look at a single art form from this point of view, let us say painting. We have considered it in the last few days, in so far as painting reveals the spiritual essence through the color grasped, that is, through the radiance of the color. One may say that in those times when one had a real inner knowledge of color, one also surrendered to the genius of speech in the right way in order to place color in a worldly relationship. If you go back to ancient times, when there was an instinctive clairvoyance for these things, you will find, for example, metals that were felt to reveal their inner essence in their color, but were not named after earthly things. There is a connection between the names of the metals and the planets, because, if I may put it this way, people would have been ashamed to describe what is expressed through color only as an earthly thing. In this sense, color was regarded as a divine-spiritual element that is only conferred on earthly things in the sense in which I explained it here a few days ago. When gold was perceived in the color of gold, then one saw in gold not only an earthly thing, but one saw in the color of gold the sun announcing itself from the cosmos. Thus one saw in advance something going beyond the earth, even when perceiving the color of an earthly thing. Only by going up to the living things, one attributed their own color to the living things, because the living things approach the spirit, so there spiritual is also allowed to shine. And with the animals one felt that they have their own colors, because spiritual-soul in them appears directly.

But now you can go back to older times, when people felt artistically not outwardly but inwardly. You see, you don't get any painting at all. It's almost foolish to say, to paint a tree green, to paint a tree – to paint a tree and paint it green, that is not painting; because it is not painting for the very reason that whatever one accomplishes in imitating nature, nature is always more beautiful, more essential. Nature is always more full of life. There is no reason to imitate what is out there in nature. But then, real painters don't do that either. Real painters use the object to, let's say, make the sun shine on it, or to observe some color reflection from the surroundings, to capture the interweaving and interlacing of light and dark over an object. So the object you paint is actually only ever the reason for doing so. Of course you never paint, say, a flower that is standing in front of the window, but you paint the light that shines in through the window and that you see in the same way as you see it through the flower. So you actually paint the colored light of the sun. You capture that. And the flower is only the reason for capturing that light.

When you approach the human being, you can do it even more spiritually. Taking a human forehead and painting it like a human forehead – as you believe you see a human forehead – is actually nonsense, it is not painting. But how a human forehead is exposed to the sun's rays as they fall, how a dull light appears in the highlight, how the chiaroscuro plays – all that, in other words, that the subject provides the occasion for, that passes in the moment, and that one must now relate to a spiritual, to capture with color and brush, that is the task of the painter.

If you have a sense of painting, when you see an interior, for example, it is not at all about looking at the person kneeling in front of an altar. I once visited an exhibition with someone. We saw a person kneeling in front of an altar. You saw him from behind. The painter had set himself the task of capturing the sunlight streaming in through a window just as it would fall on the man's back. Yes, the man who was with me to look at the picture said: I would prefer to see the man from the front! Yes, that's right, there is only a material, not an artistic interest. He wanted the painter to express what kind of person it is and so on. But you are only entitled to do that if you want to express what can be perceived through color. If I want to depict a person on a hospital bed, in a particular illness, and I study the color of the face in order to capture the appearance of the illness through the senses, then that can be artistic. If I also want to depict, let's say, in totality, to what extent the whole cosmos comes to expression in human incarnate, in human flesh color, that can also be artistic. But if I were to imitate Mr. Lehmann, as he sits there in front of me, firstly I wouldn't succeed, would I, and secondly it's not an artistic task. What is artistic is the way the sun shines on him, how the light is deflected by his bushy eyebrows. So that's what matters, how the whole world affects the being I paint. And the means by which I achieve this is chiaroscuro, is color, is capturing a moment that is actually passing and fixing it in the way I described yesterday.

In times not so far removed from our own, people felt these things very keenly, as they could not imagine representing a Mary, a Mother of God, without a transfigured face, that is, without a face overwhelmed by the light and which emerges from the ordinary human condition through the overwhelming of the light. She could not be depicted in any other way than in a red robe and a blue mantle, because only in this way is the Mother of God placed in the right way in earthly life: in the red robe with all the emotions of the earthly, , the soul in the blue cloak, which envelops her with the spiritual, and in the transfigured face, the spiritualized, which is overwhelmed by the light as the revelation of the spirit. But this is not grasped in a truly artistic way as long as one only feels it as I have just expressed it. I have now, so to speak, translated it into the inartistic. One only feels it artistically in the moment when one creates out of the red and out of the blue and out of the light, by experiencing the light in its relationship to the colors and to the darkness as a world unto itself, so that one actually has nothing but the color, and the color says so much that one can get out of the color and the light-dark the Virgin Mary.

But then you have to know how to live with color, color has to be something you live with. Color has to be something that has emancipated itself from the heavy material. Because the heavy material actually resists color if you want to use it artistically. That is why it goes against the whole idea of painting to work with palette colors. They always become so that they still show a heaviness when you have applied them to the surface. You can't live with the palette color either. You can only live with liquid color. And in the life that develops between the person and the color when he has the color liquid, and in the peculiar relationship that he has when he now applies the liquid color to the surface, a color life develops, one actually grasps from out of the color, the world is grasped out of the color. Only then does the picturesque emerge, when you grasp the radiance, the revelation, the radiance of the color as a living thing, and only then do you actually create the shape on the surface from the radiating life. A world emerges all by itself. Because if you understand color, then you understand an ingredient of the whole world.

You see, Kant once said: Give me matter, and I will create a world out of it. Well, you could have given it to him long ago, the matter, you can be quite sure that he would not have made a world out of it, because no world can be created out of matter. But more can be created out of the undulating tools of colors. A world can be created from them, because every color has its immediate, I would say personal and intimate relationship to some spiritual aspect of the world. And today, with the exception of the primitive beginnings made in Impressionism and so on, and especially in Expressionism, but these are just beginnings, the concept of painting, the activity of painting, has been more or less lost to us in the face of the general materialism of the time. For the most part today, one does not paint, but rather one imitates shapes by means of a kind of drawing and then paints the surface. But these are painted surfaces, they are not painted, they are not born out of color and light and dark.

But one must not misunderstand the matter. If someone goes wild and simply tinkers with the colors next to each other, believing that he is achieving what I have called overcoming drawing, then he is not at all achieving what I meant. For by overcoming the drawing I do not mean having no drawing, but to get the drawing out of the color, to give birth to it out of the color. And the color already gives the drawing, one must only know how to live in the color. This living in the colored then leads the real artist to be able to disregard the rest of the world and give birth to his works of art out of the colored.

You can go back, for example, to Titian's “Assumption of Mary”. There you have a work of art that, I might say, consists of the transgression of the old principles of art. There is no longer the living experience of color that one still has with Raphael, but especially with Leonardo; but there is still a kind of tradition present that prevents one from growing too strongly out of this life in color. Experience this “Assumption of Mary” by Titian. When you look at it, you can see that the green cries out, the red cries out, the blue cries out. Yes, but then look at the individual colors. If you take the interaction of the individual colors even in Titian, you still have an idea of how he lived in the colors and how he really gets all three worlds out of the colors in this case. Just look at the wonderful gradation of the three worlds. Below are the apostles who experience the event of the Assumption of Mary. Look at how he manages to capture them in color. You can see how they are bound to the earth in the colors, but you don't feel the heaviness of the colors; instead, you only feel the darkness of the colors at the bottom of Titian's painting, and in the darkness you experience the apostles' being tied to the earth. In the way Mary is treated in color, you experience the intermediate realm. She is still connected to the earth. If you have the opportunity, look at the picture and see how the dull darkness from below is incorporated as a color in the coloring of Mary, and how then the light predominates, how the uppermost, the third realm already receives in full light, I would like to say, the head of Mary, shining with full light, lifting up the head, while the feet and legs are still bound down by the color. Observe how the lower realm, the intermediate realm and the heavenly realm, this reception of Mary by God the Father, is truly gradated in the inner experience of color. You can say that in order to understand this picture, one must actually forget everything else and look only at the color, because the three-tiered nature of the world is brought out of the color here, not conceptually, not intellectually, but entirely artistically. And one can say: It is really the case that, in order to grasp the world in a painterly way, it is necessary to grasp this world of radiant shine, of radiant revelation in chiaroscuro and in color, in order to emphasize, on the one hand, what is earthly-material, to emphasize the artistic aspect of this earthly-material aspect, and yet, on the other hand, not to let it rise to the spiritual. For if it were allowed to reach the spiritual plane, it would no longer be appearance, but wisdom. But wisdom is no longer artistic; wisdom lifts it up into the uncreated realm of the divine.

One would therefore like to say: In the case of the real artist, who depicts something like Titian in his “Assumption of Mary”, when one looks at this reception of Mary, or rather of Mary's head by God the Father, one has the feeling that one should no longer go further in the treatment of the light. It is a very fine line. The moment you start going further, you fall into intellectualism, which is unartistic. You can no longer add a line, I might say, to what is only hinted at in the light, not in the contour. Because the moment you go too far into the contour, it becomes intellectualized, that is, inartistic. Towards the top, the picture is in fact in danger of being inartistic. Painters after Titian also fell prey to this danger. Look at the angels up to Titian. When we go up to the heavenly region, we come to the angels. Look at how carefully the transition from color is avoided. You can still say that the angels in the pre-Titian period, and in a sense in Titian, are just clouds. If you cannot do that, if you cannot distinguish between being and appearance, even in the uncertainty, when you have already fully arrived at the being, at the being of the spiritual, then it ceases to be artistic.

If you go back to the 17th century, it will be different. There, materialism itself is already having an effect on the representation of the spiritual. There you can already see all the angels, I might say, painted with a certain non-artistic, but routine verve in all possible foreshortenings, to which you can no longer say: Couldn't they also be clouds? Yes, here reflection is already at work, here the artistic aspect already comes to an end.

And again, look at the apostles below, and you will get the feeling that, in fact, only Mary is artistic in the “Ascension of Mary”. Above, there is a danger that it turns into pure wisdom, into the formless. If one really achieves this, holding the formless and making it formless, then, I would say, on one side, towards one pole, there is the perfection of the artistic, because it is boldly artistic, because one ventures to the abyss where art ends, where one lets the colors blur from the light, where, if one wanted to go further, one could only begin to draw. But drawing is not painting. So there, towards the top, one approaches the realm of wisdom. And one is all the greater an artist the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the possibility that the angels one paints can still be addressed as concentrated clouds that shimmer in the light in such and such a way and the like.

But if we start at the bottom of the picture and go up through the actual beauty, Mary herself, who is really floating up into the realm of wisdom, then Titian is able to depict her beautifully because she has not yet arrived, but is just floating up. It all appears in such a way that one has the feeling that if she swings up a little more, she will have to enter into wisdom. Art has nothing more to say there. But if we go down a little further, we come to the Apostles, and with the Apostles I said to you: the artist seeks to depict the earthly aspect of the Apostles through the use of color. But there he runs into the other danger. If he were to place his Mary even further down, he would not be able to depict her in her inner, self-sustaining beauty. If Mary were down there, for example, one would not understand the purpose. If she were sitting among the apostles, yes, she could not look as she does in the middle between heaven and earth. She could not look at all like that. You see, the apostles are standing below in their brownish coloration, and Mary does not fit in with them. For we cannot really stop at the fact that the apostles below have the heaviness of the earth in them. Something else must happen. This is where the element of drawing begins to intervene strongly. You can see this in Titian's characterized painting, where drawing begins to intervene strongly. Why is that?

Yes, you can no longer depict beauty in the brown, which actually goes beyond color, as you can in the case of Mary; something that no longer falls entirely within beauty must be depicted. And it must be beautiful in that something other than what is actually beautiful is revealed. You see, if Mary were sitting down there or standing among these apostles in the same coloring, it would actually be insulting. It would be terribly insulting. I am speaking only of this picture. I am not saying that Mary standing on the earth must be artistically offensive everywhere, but in this picture it would be a slap in the face for anyone looking at it artistically if Mary were standing down there. Why? You see, if she were painted in the same colors as the apostles, one would have to say that Mary was portrayed by the artist as virtuous. That is indeed how he portrays the apostles. We cannot have any other idea than that the apostles are looking up in their virtue. But we cannot say that about Mary. With her, it is so self-evident that we must not express her virtue. It would be just as if we wanted to depict God as virtuous. Where something is self-evident, where it becomes something that is being itself, it must not be depicted merely in outward appearance. Therefore, Mary must float away, must be in a realm where she is exalted above the virtuous, where one cannot say of her, in what appears in the color, that she is virtuous, any more than one could say of God himself that he is virtuous. At most, he can be virtue itself. But that is already an abstract sentence, that is already philosophy. It has nothing to do with art. But in the apostles below, we have to say that the artist succeeds in depicting the virtuous people through the color treatment itself in the apostles. They are virtuous.

Let us again try to get close to the matter through the genius of language. Virtue, what does it actually mean to be virtuous? To be virtuous is to be useful; because virtue is related to being useful. To be useful, to be useful, to be good for something, that is to be up to something, to be able to do something, to be able to do something, that is to be virtuous. But of course it ultimately depends on what one means in connection with virtuous, as for example Goethe also presented it, who speaks of a trinity: wisdom, appearance and power, that is, in this sense, virtuousness. Appearance = the beautiful, art. Wisdom = that which becomes knowledge, formless knowledge. Virtue, power = that which is truly useful, that which can do something, whose rule means something.

You see, this trinity has been revered since time immemorial. I could understand when a man told me a good many years ago that he was already sick of it when people spoke of the true, the beautiful and the good, because everyone who wants to say a phrase, an idealistic phrase, speaks of the true, the beautiful and the good. — But one can refer back to older times when these things were experienced with all human interest, with all human soul interest. And then, I would like to say, one sees, but in the manner of the beautiful, of the artistic, in the Titian painting above, wisdom, but not just wisdom, but still shining, so that it is still artistic, so that it is painted; in the middle, beauty; and below, virtue, the useful. Now we may ask the useful a little about its inner essence, its meaning. If we follow these things, we come, through the genius of speech, to the depth of the speech soul that creates among human beings. If we approach it only externally, it might occur to us that someone who had once been to church and listened to a sermon, where the preacher explained to his congregation in an outwardly phrase-like way how everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful. The adult was waiting at the church door and when the pastor came out, he asked him: “You said that everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful according to your idea. Am I also growing well?” The pastor said: “You have grown very well for an adult!” — Well, if you look at things in this external way, you won't get to the depths of them. Our way of looking at things today is in fact so superficial in so many fields. People today fill themselves completely with such external characteristics, namely with such external definitions, and do not even realize how they go around in circles with their ideas. For the virtuous person, it is not about being good at anything at all, but about being good at something spiritual, about placing ourselves in the spiritual world as human beings. The truly virtuous person is the one who is a whole human being because he brings the spiritual within him to realization, not just to manifestation, to realization through the will. But then we enter a region that, although it is human, also enters the religious, but no longer lies in the realm of the artistic, least of all in the realm of the beautiful. Everything in the world is formed in polarity. Therefore, we can say of Titian's painting: at the top he exposes himself to the danger of going beyond the beautiful, where he goes beyond Mary. There he is at the abyss of wisdom. Downwards, he is at the other abyss. For as soon as we depict the virtuous, that which man, as a being of his own essence, is meant to realize out of the spiritual, we in turn come out of the beautiful, out of the artistic. If we try to paint a truly virtuous person, we can only do so by somehow characterizing virtue in outward appearance, for my part by contrasting it with vice. But the artistic portrayal of virtue no longer actually shows any art; in our time it is already a falling out of the artistic.

But where is not everywhere in our time a falling out of the artistic, when, I would like to say, simply life circumstances are reproduced in a raw, naturalistic way, without the relationship to the spiritual really being there. Without this relationship to the spiritual, there is no artistry. Therefore, in our time, this striving in Impressionism and Expressionism is to return to the spiritual. Even if it is often done awkwardly, even if it is often only a beginning, it is still more than that which works with the model in a crude naturalistic way, which is inartistic. And if you grasp the concept of the artistically beautiful in this way, then you will also be able to accommodate tragedy, for example, and grasp tragedy in general in its artistic reach into the world.

A person who lives according to his thoughts, who leads his life in an intellectualistic way, can never become tragic. And a person who lives a completely virtuous life can never truly become tragic either. A person can become tragic if they have some kind of inclination towards the demonic, that is, towards the spiritual. A personality, a person, only begins to become tragic when the demonic is present in him in some way, for better or for worse. Now we are in the age of the freeing of the human being, where the human being as a demonic human being is actually an anachronism. That is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, that the human being grows out of the demonic to become a free human being. But as the human being becomes a free human being, the possibility of the tragic, so to speak, ceases. If you take the old tragic figures, even most of Shakespeare's tragic figures, you have the inner demonic that leads to the tragic. Wherever man is the manifestation of a demonic-spiritual, wherever the demonic-spiritual radiates through him, reveals itself, wherever man becomes, as it were, the medium of the demonic, there the tragic was possible. In this sense, the tragic will have to cease more or less, because humanity, having been set free, must break away from the demonic. Today it does not yet do so. It is falling ever deeper into the demonic.

But this is the great task for our time, the mission of our time, that human beings grow out of the demonic and into freedom.

But if we get rid of the inner demons that shape us into tragic personalities, we will be all the less able to get rid of the external demonic. For the moment man enters into a relationship with the external world, something demonic also begins for the modern human being. Our thoughts must become ever freer and freer. And when, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, thoughts become the impulses for the will, the will also becomes free. These are the polar opposites that can be set free: free thoughts and free will. But in between lies the rest of humanity, which is connected with karma. And just as the demonic once led to tragedy, so too can the experience of karma lead to a deep inner tragedy, especially in modern man. But tragedy will only be able to flourish when people experience karma. As long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves, we can be free. When we clothe our thoughts in words, the words no longer belong to us. What can become of a word that I have spoken! It is taken up by the other person, who surrounds it with different emotions and different feelings. The word lives on. As the word flies through the people of the present, it becomes a force that originated from a person. That is its karma, through which it is connected to the world, which in turn can be discharged back onto it. The word, which leads its own existence because it does not belong to us, because it belongs to the genius of language, can cause tragedy. Today, in particular, we see humanity, I would say, everywhere in the disposition to tragic situations through the overestimation of language, through the overestimation of the word. The peoples are divided according to language, want to be divided according to language. This is the basis for a huge tragedy that will befall the earth before the century is out. This is the tragedy of karma. If we can speak of the tragedy of the past as a tragedy of demonology, we must speak of the tragedy of the future as the tragedy of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if you accept that there is a relationship to the spiritual from the artistic point of view, you will understand that the artistic is something through which one can enter the spiritual world, both in creating and in enjoying. A true artist can create his picture in a lonely desert. It makes no difference to him who looks at the picture, or whether anyone looks at it at all, because he has created in a different community, he has created in the divine spiritual community. Gods have looked over his shoulders. He has created in the company of gods. What does it matter to the true artist whether any human being admires his picture or not? That is why one can be an artist in complete solitude. But on the other hand, one cannot be an artist without really placing one's own creature in the world, which one then also regards in terms of its spirituality, so that it lives in it. The creature that one places in the world must live in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this spiritual connection, then art also changes, but it changes more or less into non-art.

You see, you can only create art if you have the work of art in the context of the world. The old artists were aware of this, who, for example, painted their pictures on the walls of churches, because there these pictures were guides for the believers, for the confessors, there the artists knew that this is in the earthly life, insofar as this earthly life is permeated by the spiritual.

It is hard to imagine something worse than creating for exhibitions instead of for such a purpose. Basically, it is the most terrible thing to walk through a painting exhibition or a sculpture exhibition, for example, where all kinds of things are hung or placed next to each other in a chaotic manner, where they don't belong together at all, where it is actually meaningless that one is next to the other. By painting having found the transition from painting for the church, for the house, to painting, I would like to say, already there, it loses its proper meaning. If you paint something within the frame, you can at least imagine looking out through a window and what you see is outside, but it is no longer anything. But now painting for exhibitions! You can't talk about it anymore. Isn't it true that a time that sees anything at all in exhibitions, sees anything possible, has just lost the connection with art. And you can see simply from what intellectual culture has to happen in order to find the way back to the intellectual-artistic. The exhibition, for example, can certainly be overcome. Of course, individual artists feel disgust for the exhibition, but we live in a time when the individual cannot achieve much unless the judgment of the individual is immersed in a worldview that in turn people in their freedom, in full freedom, as worldviews once permeated people in less free times and led to the emergence of real cultures, while today we have no real cultures.

However, a spiritual worldview must work on the development of real cultures and thus also on the development of real art, and have the highest interest in doing so.

We shall show a series of lantern slides representing a period of Art to the study of which we may presume the human mind will ever and again return. For in the artistic evolution of this period we witness the unfolding of some of the deepest human relationships which the outward course of history reveals in any epoch—provided we perceive in history the outward picture of inner spiritual impulses.

First you will see some picture by Cimabue. Under this name there go, or, rather, used to go—a number of pictures, church paintings, springing from a conception of life altogether remote from our own. Cimabue (or those who worked in the spirit of the school that is named after him)—Cimabue was working at about the time, let us say, of Dante's birth. For external history, what lies before this period in artistic evolution is veiled pretty much in darkness. So far as anything outwardly preserved is concerned, the work of Cimabue emerges in such a way that to begin with in the West, we can find no immediate historic predecessor. Not only so, but as you will presently bear witness for yourselves, in the history of European Art the school of Cimabue remained without succession.

As we try to feel our way into what comes before us in Cimabue's work, we find ourselves directed to influences coming over from the East. I will try to cut a long story short, albeit this will inevitably involve all the inaccuracies which are unavoidable in such a brief description. We must not forget that the time of the origin of Christianity, and the following centuries until the beginning of the second millennium A.D. when Cimabue lived,—that this epoch, when Christianity was slowly finding its way into all spheres of human life and action, was characterised by a turning of man's spiritual faculties towards the Cosmic, the Spiritual that transcends the Earth. To a great extent, all man's thought and interest was directed to the question: How did the higher spiritual Powers break through into this earthly life? What was it that came into this earthly world from spheres beyond? Men wanted to gain a conception of these things. And if one desired to express in pictorial Art what was thus living in the souls of men, it could be no question of copying Nature directly in any sense, or of painting true to Nature, or following this or that artistic ideal. Rather was it a question of calling forth those forces in the human soul—those powers of imagination, among other things—which can, as it were, make visible to eyes of sense the things from beyond this Earth. Now Western humanity did not possess sufficient powers of imagination to bring forth really plastic works of art. We know from earlier lectures that the Romans were an unimaginative people. It was into the unimaginative Roman culture that Christianity, coming from the East, first had to spread. Nevertheless, Christianity as it came over brought with it, along with all the other fertilising influences from the East, the fruits of Oriental imagination. Thus, inner spiritual visions and imaginations were connected with the early Christian conceptions.

Yonder in Greece vivid ideas arose, as to how one should portray the figures that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha and with its workings. Witness the evolution of the forms in which they represented the person of the Redeemer Himself, or the Madonna, the angelic worlds beyond the Earth, the figures of saints and apostles transposed into higher realms. We can see quite clearly how, as Christianity found its way into the West, the Roman unimaginativeness, if I may so describe it, took hold of what came over, so rich in fancy and imagination, from the East. In the very earliest times of Christian Art we find the figure of Christ Jesus and the others around Him permeated still by the rich imagination of the Greeks. We find the Redeemer Himself portrayed in some instances with truly Apollonian features. Moreover, we know of a remarkable controversy that arose in the first Christian centuries. Should the Redeemer be represented in an ugly form, yet so, that through the ugly features there shone the inner life of soul, the mighty event that was being enacted in Him for mankind? This type of the Saviour, and similar types for the other characters connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, were evolved more in the East of Europe and in Greece. While in the West, in Italy, men were more of the opinion that the Saviour and all that were connected with Him should be represented beautifully. Strangely enough, this discussion went on into the time when in the West, under the influence of Rome, men had already lost the faculty to represent real beauty—a faculty which they had still possessed in former centuries under the more immediate influence of Greece. For outwardly though Greece was overcome, in a spiritual sense Rome herself had been conquered by the Grecian culture, which, however, subsequently fell into decay amid the unimaginative Romans. Thus in the succeeding centuries they lost the power to create true plastic beauty.

Thus there came over from Eastern tradition the earliest representations, created, of course, by human imagination, in the effort to express the new world-impulses springing from the Mystery of Golgotha. Enriched by Oriental fancy, this early Christian art was transplanted into Italy. And now,—almost all the earlier work having been lost,—in Cimabue's paintings or in those that go by his name, we see what had become of these impulses by the time of Dante's birth. We see them, as it were, at a final culminating point. Cimabue's paintings are frescoes on a large scale and must be understood as such. The figures they portray appear before us in an altogether unnaturalistic form, their outlines conceived more out of the life of feeling—spread over great surfaces, conceived, as it were, in two dimensions—large surfaces covered with the most eloquent painting. Alas, it is no longer really visible today, not even where Cimabue's own works are before us, for his pictures were for the most part subsequently painted over. The full vividness of his colouring, with its wonderful two-dimensional conception, is probably no longer to be seen at any place. Hence Cimabue's pictures lose least of all when shown in lantern slides. We recognise their character as a whole; these remarkable figures—their outlines, as I said, inspired more out of the feeling-life; colossal figures, conceived at any rate on a colossal scale and with impressive grandeur, so that one would say: From other worlds they gaze into this earthly world; they do not seem to have arisen from this earthly world at all. Such are his pictures of the Madonna. Such, gazing down into this earthly world, are his representations of the Saviour and of saints and angels and the like. We must realise that all these paintings are born of an imagination, in the background of which was still a life of spiritual vision. Such vision knew full well that the impulses of Christianity had come to Earth from another world, and that this unearthly world could not be represented in mere naturalistic forms.

We will now show some of Cimabue's pictures. His works are mostly to be seen in the Lower Church at Assisi; also in Paris and in Florence. We can only reproduce a very few:

Look how the human eye, for instance, is drawn so that you can clearly see: It is not copied, but done by following with inner feeling the forces which were believed to be at work, moulding the eye organically in the body. The inner activity of the eye is feelingly traced out,—this is what inspires the forms. Plastically conceived, it is projected in the spirit on to the flat surface. In the background, as you can still see by these pictures, is the conception (far more familiar in the Orient than in the West) of something working in with abundant power from distant worlds. When in that time men let these pictures with their golden background work upon them, they had the feeling of a mighty overwhelming force pouring in from distant worlds into mankind. It was as though all the human confusion upon Earth was only there to be illumined by the Impulses proceeding from a reality beyond, which was pictured in this way.

Once more a picture of the Madonna. This, then, is what we have of Cimabue.

We now pass on to the study of an artist who, for the external history of art, is, in a sense, Cimabue's successor. The legend has it that Cimabue found Giotto as a shepherd-lad who used to draw on rocks and stones, with the most primitive materials, the animals and other creatures which he saw around him in the fields. Cimabue, recognising the great talents of the boy, took him from his father and trained him in painting. Such legends are often truer than the outward ‘historic’ truth. It is true, as the legend suggests, that Giotto—Cimabue's great follower in the further development of art—was inspired in his inner life by the whole world in which he found himself through all that had been created by those whom we include under Cimabue's name. It is true, indeed, that a whole world of things from beyond the Earth looked down upon Giotto from the walls around him. (All this is no longer extant, for reasons we shall afterwards discuss.) On the other hand, we must never forget that with Giotto an entirely new artistic world-conception arose in the West. Indeed, it is Giotto, above all, who in the realms of art represents the rise of the new age, the 5th post-Atlantean age. In painting, the 4th post-Atlantean age goes down with Cimabue; the 5th begins with Giotto. (I leave out of account whether all the works which a well-founded tradition ascribes to Giotto were actually painted by him; for that is not the main point. It is true that under Giotto's name many works are included of which we can but say that they are painted in his spirit. Here, however, I will not go into this question, but simply ascribe to Giotto what tradition has ascribed to him.)

What was mankind entering into during that time, when we find Dante and Giotto side by side on the scene of history? It was entering into what I have always described as the fundamental characteristic of the 5th Post-Atlantean period: into a life in the midst of earthly-material realities. This must not be taken as a hostile criticism of Materialism. The time had to come to mankind to enter fully into the material reality, taking leave for a time of those things to which they had hitherto looked up and whose light we find reflected still in Cimabue's paintings.

We may ask ourselves this question: Who was the first really genuine materialist? Who was it gave the very first impetus to materialism? Considering the matter from a somewhat higher point of view, we shall arrive at an answer which will, of course, sound paradoxical to modern ears. Nevertheless, for a deeper conception of human history it is fully justified. I mean that the first man to introduce the material way of feeling into the soul-life of mankind was St. Francis of Assisi. I admit it is a paradox to describe the holy man of Assisi as the first great materialist, and yet it is so. For one may truly say: the last great conceptions in which the evolution of mankind is still described from a standpoint beyond the Earth come before us in the Divina Commedia of Dante. Dante's great work is to be regarded as a last expression of a consciousness still directed more to the things beyond the Earth. On the other hand the vision of the soul turned to the Earth, the sympathy with earthly things, comes forth with all intensity in Francis of Assisi, who, as you know, was before Dante's time. Such things always appear in the soul-life of mankind a little earlier than their expression in the realm of art. Hence we see the same impulses and tendencies which seized the artistic imagination of Giotto at a later time, living already in the soul of Francis of Assisi. Giotto lived from 1266 to 1337. Francis of Assisi was a man who came forth entirely from that kind of outer world which Roman civilisation, under manifold influences, had gradually brought forth. To begin with, his whole attention was turned to outer things. He delighted in the splendour of external riches; he had enjoyment in all things that make life pleasant, or that enhance man's personal well being. Then suddenly, through his own personal experiences his inner life was revolutionised. It was at first a physical illness which turned him altogether away from his absorption in external things and turned him to the inner life. From a man who in his youth was altogether addicted to external comfort, splendour, reputation, we see him change to a life of feeling directed purely to the inward things of the soul. Yet all this took place in a peculiar and unique way. For Francis of Assisi became the first among those great figures who, from that time onwards, turned the soul's attention quite away from all that sprang from the old visionary life. He, rather, turned his gaze to that which lives and moves immediately upon the Earth, and above all to man himself. He seeks to discover what can be experienced in the human soul, in the human being as a whole, when we see him placed alone, entirely upon his own resources. St. Francis was surrounded by mighty world-events which also took their course on Earth, if I may put it so, in such a way as to sweep past the single life of man, even as the rich imaginations of an earlier Art had represented sublime Beings gazing down from beyond the Earth into this world of human feeling. For in his youth, and later, too, St. Francis was surrounded by the world-historic conflict of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Here one might say there was a battling in greater spheres, for impulses transcending what the single man on Earth feels and experiences—impulses for which the human being on the Earth were but the great and herd-like mass. Right in the midst of all this life, St. Francis with his ever more numerous companions upholds the right of the single human individuality, with all that the inner life of man can experience in connection with the deeper powers that ensoul and radiate and sparkle through each human soul. His vision is directed away from all-embracing cosmic, spiritual spheres, directed to the individual and human life on Earth. Sympathy, compassion, a life in fellowship with every human soul, an interest in the experiences of every single man, a looking away from the golden background whose splendour, inspired by oriental fancy, had radiated in an earlier art from the higher realms on to the Earth. St. Francis and his followers, looking away from all these things, turned their attention to the joys and sufferings of the poor man on Earth. Every single man now becomes the main concern, every single man a world in himself. Yes, one desires to live in such a way that every single man becomes a world. The Eternal, the Infinite, the Immortal shall now arise within the breast of man himself, no longer hovering like the vast and distant sphere above the Earth.

Cimabue's pictures are as though seen out of the clouds. It is as though his figures were coming from the clouds towards the Earth. And so, indeed, man had felt and conceived the Spiritual World hitherto. We today have no idea how intensely men had lived with these transcendent things. Hence, as a rule, we do not realise how immense a change it was in feeling when St. Francis of Assisi turned the life of the West more inward. His soul wanted to live in sympathy with all that the poor man was; wanted to feel the human being especially in poverty, weighed down by no possessions, and, therefore, valued by nothing else than what he simply is as a man. Such was St. Francis of Assisi; and this was how he sought to feel not only man but Christ Himself. He wanted to feel what Christ is for poor simple men. Out of the very heart of a Christianity thus felt, he then evolved his wondrous feeling for Nature. Everything on Earth became his brother and his sister; he entered lovingly not only into the human heart but into all creatures. Truly, in this respect St. Francis is a realist, a naturalist. The birds are his brothers and his sisters; the stars, the sun, the moon, the little worm that crawls over the Earth—all are his brothers and his sisters; on all of them he looks with loving sympathy and understanding. Going along his way he picks up the little worm and puts it on one side so as not to tread it underfoot. He looks up with admiration to the lark, calling her his sister. An infinite inwardness, a life of thought unthinkable in former times, comes forth in Francis of Assisi. All this is far more characteristic of St. Francis than the external things that are so often written about his life.

So we might say, man's gaze is now made inward and centered upon the earthly life; and the influence of this extends, by and by, to the artistic feeling. For the last time, we might say, Dante in his great poem represents the life of man in the midst of mighty Powers from beyond the Earth; but Giotto, his contemporary and probably his friend, Giotto in his paintings already brings to expression the immediate interest in all that lives and moves on Earth. Thus we see, beginning with Giotto's pictures, the faithful portrayal of the individual in Nature and in Man. It is no mere chance that the paintings ascribed to Giotto in the upper church at Assisi deal with the life of St. Francis, for there is a deep inner connection of soul between Giotto and Francis of Assisi—St. Francis, the religious genius, bringing forth out of a fervent life of soul his sympathy with all the growth of Nature upon Earth; and Giotto, imitating, to begin with, St. Francis' way of feeling, St. Francis' way of entering into the spirit and soul of the world.

Thus we see the stream of evolution leading on from Cimabue's rigid lines and two-dimensional conception, to Giotto, in whose work we see increasingly the portrayal of the natural, individual creature, the reality of things seen; we see things standing more and more in space, rather than speaking to us out of the flat surface.

We will now give ourselves up to the immediate impression of Giotto's pictures, one by one. We shall see his growing appreciation of the individual human character and figure. Giotto shows himself with all the greater emphasis inasmuch as his pictures deal with the sacred legend, and so he tries to reproduce in the outward expression the inmost and intensest life of the soul.

Now, therefore, we shall have before us a series of Giotto's pictures, beginning with those that are generally regarded as his earliest. You will still see in them the tradition of the former time, but along with it there is already the human element, in the way in which he knew it—the way that I have just described.

Thus gradually the whole life of St. Francis was painted by Giotto; and everywhere in his artistic work we find a feeling similar to that of St. Francis himself. Even when you take the visionary elements in these pictures, you will see how his effort is in every case to paint them from within, so that the language of human feeling is far more in evidence than in the pictures of Cimabue, who was concerned only with the gazing inward of transcendent impulses from spheres beyond the Earth. Again, in the faces themselves you will no longer find the mere traditional expression, but you will see in every case: The man who painted these pictures had really looked at the faces of men.

Look at these last two pictures. Their inherent tenderness recalls to us the beautiful fact that is related of the life of St. Francis. He had long been working at his Hymn to Nature—the great and beautiful hymn throughout which he speaks of his brothers and his sisters, of sisters Sun and Moon and the other planets, and of all earthly creatures. All that he had felt in loving, realistic devotion of his soul, in sympathy with Nature, is gathered up so wonderfully in this hymn. But the directness of his union with all earthly Nature finds expression most of all in this beautiful fact that the last verse wherein he addresses Brother Death was written in the very last days of his life. St. Francis could not sing the hymn of praise to Brother Death till he himself lay actually on his deathbed, when he called to his brothers that they should sing around him of the joys of death while he felt himself going out and out into that World which was now to receive his spirit. It was only out of the immediate, realistic experience that St. Francis could and would describe his tender union with all the world. Beautifully this is revealed in the fact that while he had sung the Hymn of Praise to all other things before, he only sang to Death when he himself was at Death's door. The last thing he dictated was the final verse of his great Hymn of Life, which is addressed to Brother Death, and shows how man, when he is thrown back upon himself alone, conceives the union of Christ with human life. Surely it cannot be more beautifully expressed than in this picture, revealing the new conception of human life that was already pouring from out St. Francis, and showing how directly Giotto lived in the same aura of thought and feeling.

I have inserted this later picture, so that you may see the progress Giotto made in his subsequent period of life. You see how the figures here are conceived still more as single human individuals. In the period from which the former pictures were taken, we see the artist carried along, as it were, by the living impulses of St. Francis. Here in this picture, belonging as it does to a later period of his life, we see him coming more into his own. We will presently return to the pictures more immediately following his representations of St. Francis.

This, too, is from his later period, showing a consideraby greater realism than before.

Also of his later period.

In such pictures we see how natural it was to the men of that age to express themselves in allegories. The conditions of life undergo immense changes in the course of centuries. It was a tremendous change when the life that had found expression in pictures at that time, passed over into that in which we live today, which takes its course more in thoughts and ideas communicated through the medium of books. This was a far greater revolution than is generally realised. The desire to express oneself in allegories was especially strong in that age. It is most interesting to see how in such a case artistic realism is combined with the striving to make the whole picture like a Book of the World in which the onlooker may read.

This picture is related once more the earlier art of Giotto—springing as it does from his increasing entry into the whole world of feeling of St. Francis of Assisi.

Beautifully we see how the artist seeks to represent the inner life of St. John, bringing forth out of his heart his inner connection with the great World. This, then, is St. John, writing, or at least conceiving, the Apocalypse.

We will insert, directly after this Madonna by Giotto, the Madonna by Cimabue which we have already seen, so that you may recognise the immense difference in the treatment of the sacred figure. Observe—despite the obvious persistence of the old tradition—the realism of this picture, in the eyes, the mouth, and the whole conception of the Jesus child. We have before us human beings, copied from the reality of earthly life, looking out from the Earth into the World. Compare this with Cimabue's picture, where we rather have before us an original spiritual vision traditionally handed down—where Beings gaze from realms beyond the Earth into this world.

However much in the composition is reminiscent of the former picture, you will see, even in the way the lines are drawn, the immense difference between the two.

It is interesting to compare this picture with the “Mourning for St. Francis” which we saw before. The former was an earlier work, while this belongs to a very late period in Giotto's life. We will now insert the previous one once more so that you may see the great progression. This picture is taken from the chapel in Padua, where Giotto returned once more to the former legend.

Here, then, you see how he treats a very similar subject so far as the composition is concerned, at an earlier and at a much later stage in his career. Observe the far greater freedom, the far greater power to enter into individual details which the later picture reveals.

This picture, the Church Militant, is generally associated with the School of Giotto. Here you see the rise of that compositional element which was to play so great a part in the subsequent history of painting. Quite a new inner life appears before us here. We may describe the difference somewhat as follows:

If we consider the evolution of Christianity until the time of Dante and Giotto, we shall find a strong element of Platonism in its whole way of feeling. Far be it from me to mislead you into the belief that it contained the Platonic Philosophy; but Platonism, that is to say, a feeling and conception of the world which also finds expression in the philosophy of Plato, where man looks up into a sphere beyond the Earth, and does not carry into it anything that proceeds from the human intellect. After Giotto's time a theological, Aristotelian element entered more and more into the Christian world of feeling. Once again I do not say the philosophy of Aristotle, but a theological, Aristotelian quality. Men tried, as it were, to see and summarise the world in systematic conceptions such as you see in this picture, rising upward from a world below to a middle and thence to a higher world. Thus was the whole of life systematised through and through in an Aristotelian manner. So did the later Church conceive the life of man placed in the universal order. Past were the times from which Cimabue still rayed forth, when men's conception of a world beyond the Earth proceeded still from the old visionary life. Now came a purely human way of feeling; yet the desire was, once more, to lead this human feeling upward to a higher life—to connect it with a higher life, only now in a more systematic, more intellectual and abstract way. And so, in place of the Earlier Art, creating as from a single centre of spiritual vision, there arose the new element of composition. See the three tiers, rising systematically into higher worlds from that which is experienced and felt below. Observing this in the immediate followers of Giotto, you will already have a premonition, a feeling of what was destined to emerge in the later compositions. For who could fail to recognise that the same spirit which holds sway in the composition of this picture meets us again in a more highly evolved, more perfect form, in Raphael's Disputa.

See how the spiritual events and processes of earthly life are portrayed in the grouping of the human figures. It is the same artistic conception which emerges in Raphael's great picture, generally known as the 'School of Athens.' Human beings are placed together to express the relationships that hold sway in earthly life.

I beg you especially to observe the unique way in which the fundamental idea comes to expression here: in the background the mighty building of the Church, and then, throughout the picture, the power going forth from the Church dignitaries, poured out into the world of the common people. Look at the expression of the faces. See how the artist's work is placed at the service of this grand idea: The rule of the Church raying out over the Earth. You may study every single countenance. Wonderfully it is expressed—raying outward from the centre—how each single human being partakes in the impulse that is thought to proceed from the Church through all the souls on Earth. The physiognomies are such that we see clearly: The whole thing was done by an artist who was permeated by this idea, and was well able to bring to expression in the countenance of men what the Church Militant would, indeed, bring into them. We see it raying forth from every single face. I beg you to observe this carefully, for in the later pictures which we shall see afterwards it does not come to expression with anything like the same power. Though the fundamental idea of the composition—expressed so beautifully here, both in the grouping of the figures and in the harmony between the grouping and the expressions of the faces—though the fundamental impulse was retained by later artists, nevertheless, as you will presently see for yourselves, it was an altogether different element that arose in their work.

Look at the dogs down here: they are the famous Domini Canes, the hounds of the Lord, for the Dominicans were spoken of in connection with the hounds of Lord. Angelico represents these Domini Canes in many of his pictures.

Here we come a stage further in artistic evolution. The following developments may be said to have proceeded from the stream and impulse of which Giotto was the great initiator. But from this source a two-fold stream proceeded. In the one, we see the realistic impulse emancipating itself more and more from the Spiritual. In Giotto and in the last two pictures the Spiritual still enters in, everywhere; for, after all, this impulse proceeding from the Church Militant throughout the World is conceived as a spiritual thing. Every single figure in the composition is such that we might say: Just as St. Francis himself lived after all in a spiritual world (albeit lovingly, realistically inclined through his soul to the earthly world around him), Giotto and his pupils, with 'however loving realism they grasped the things of this world, still lived within the Spiritual and could unite it with their conception of the single individual on Earth. But now, as we come on into the 14th and 15th century, we see the longing, faithfully to portray the individual and Natural, emancipating itself more and more. There is no longer that strong impulse to see the vision as a whole and thence derive the single figures, which impulse was there in all the former pictures, even where Giotto and his pupils went to the Biblical story for their subjects. Now we see the single figures more and more emancipated from the all-pervading impulse which, until then, had been poured out like a magic broach ever the picture as a whole. More and more we see the human figures standing out as single characters, even where they are united in the compositions as a whole. Look, for example, at the magnificent building here. Observe how the artist is at pains, not so much to subordinate his figures to one root-idea, as to represent in every single one a human individual, a single character. More and more we see the single human characters simply placed side by side. Though undoubtedly there is a greatness in the composition, still we see the single individuals emancipated naturalistically from the idea that pervades the picture as a whole.

Even in this Biblical picture you can see how the expressions of the several figures are emancipated from the conception as a whole. Far more than heretofore, the artist's effort is to portray even the Christ in such a way that an individual human quality comes to expression in Him. Likewise the other figures.

In this picture you can already lose the feeling of one idea pervading the whole. See, on the other hand, the wonderful expressions of the faces in Filippino Lippi's work, both in the central figure of the visionary and in the lesser figures. In every case the Human is brought out. Thus we see the one stream, proceeding from the source to which I just referred, working its way into an ever stronger realism, till it attains the wondrous inner perfection which you have before you in this figure of St. Bernard as he receives his vision.

Here you see a wonderful progression in human feeling. Looking at this work of Masaccio's, you can take a keen interest in every single figure, in every single head of these disciples grouped around the Christ. Look, too, how the Christ Himself is individualised. Think of the tremendous progress in characterisation, from the pictures which we saw before, to this one. Observe the transition in feeling. Heretofore it was absorbed in the Christian cosmic conception. Now it has passed over to the renewed conception of the Roman power. Feel in this composition, in the expressions of the several figures, how the Roman concept of power is expressed. A little while ago we say the Rule of the Church Militant pouring out as a spiritual force over the whole. Here, for the most part, are highly individualised figures—men who desire power and who join together for the sake of power, while in the former case it was a spiritual light which shone through all their faces. In the earlier pictures, each was to be understood out of the whole, while here we can but grasp the whole as a summation of the individuals, each of whom is, in a sense, a power in himself. With all the greatness of the composition—the figures grouped around the mighty one, the Christ, mighty through His pure spiritual Being,—still you can read in the expressions of these men: ‘Ours is, indeed, a kingdom not of this world; yet it shall rule this world,’—and, what is more, rule it through human beings, not through an abstract spiritual force. All this is expressed in the figures of these men. So you see how the human and realistic element becomes more and more emancipated, while the artist's power to portray the individual increases. The sacred legends, for example, are no longer represented for their own sake. True, they live on, but the artists use them as a mere foundation. They take their start from the familiar story, using it as an occasion to represent the human being.

See how the artist's attention is directed not to the Biblical story in itself but to the question: How will human beings look when they have been through the experience of Adam and Eve? We must admit that for his time the artist's answer is magnificent.

I need scarce make a comment. With Ghirlandajo we come to a time when the faculty to portray man as man—to represent what is purely human in his life—has reached a high level of perfection.

Henceforth the Last Supper is no longer merely represented (as in the picture that we saw just now) so that the vision of those that behold it may be kindled to an experience of the sacred action. No; the story of the Last Supper is now taken as an opportunity to represent the human beings. Though it is not yet so much so as in some later pictures, nevertheless, we can already study here the physiognomies of the disciples one by one, observing how their human characters are working under the impression that has been kindled in their souls. Such pictures bring home to us the immense change in the whole artistic conception.

So, too, with the problem of the Madonna: the artists now are more concerned to bring out what is human and feminine in the Madonna than to represent the sacred fact. The sacred legend lives on; and, being familiar to all, is made use of to solve problems of artistic realism and to bring out the individual and human.

In these artists, as the last pictures will illustrate, the Human impulse has already grown so strong that they no longer feel the same necessity to choose their subjects from the sacred legend. You can scarcely imagine the entry into Giotto's pictures of any other than a Christian subject. But when the Christian legend came to be no more than the occasion for the artists to portray the human being, they were presently able to emancipate the human subject from the Christian Legend. So we see them going forward to the art of the Renaissance, growing more and more independent of Christian tradition.

Having shown a number of pictures representing the realistic stream, if so we may call it—the seizing of the Human on the Earth, liberated from the Supersensible—we now come to the second stream above-mentioned, of which Fra Angelico is one of the greatest representatives.

It is, if I may so describe it, a more inward stream,a stream more of the soul. The artistic evolution which we followed hitherto was taken hold of more by the Spirit. In Fra Angelico we see the Heart, the soul itself, seeking to penetrate into the human being. It is interesting to see once more, in the wonderfully tender pictures of this artist, the attempt to grasp the individual and human, yet from an altogether different aspect, more out of the soul. Indeed, this lies inherent in the peculiar colourings of Fra Angelico, which, unhappily, we cannot reproduce. Here everything is felt more out of the soul, whereas the emancipation of the Human which appeared in the other realistic stream, came forth more out of the human Spirit striving to imitate the forms of Nature.

It is by the path of the soul, as it were, that the soul-content of Christianity pours in through Fra Angelico. Hence the phenomenon of Fra Angelico is so intensely interesting. Formerly, as we have seen, a supersensible and spiritual content poured through the evolution of Christianity, and took hold also of the world of Art. Then the attention of man was turned to the world of Nature—Nature experienced by the soul of man. We have seen how the same impulses, living as a simple religious enthusiasm in St. Francis of Assisi, found artistic expression in Giotto. Henceforth, man's vision was impelled more and more to an outward naturalism. But in face of all this realism, his inner life seeks refuge, as it were, in the soul's domain, tending, again, rather to melt away the sharper lines of individuality, but striving all the more intensely to express itself, as a life of soul, in outer form. For the soul's life holds sway, pervading all the details in the work of Fra Angelico. It is as though the soul of Christianity took flight into these tender pictures, so widely spread abroad, though the most beautiful are undoubtedly in the Dominican Monastery at Florence.

Thus while the Spirit that had once held sway in vision of the Supersensible was now expended on the vision of the Natural, the soul took refuge in this stream of Art, which strove not so much to seize the physiognomy—the Spirit that is stamped on the expressions of the human countenance and of the things of Nature—but rather to convey the life of soul, pouring outward as a living influence through all expression.

You will remember the picture of the Last Supper which we showed just now. There, everything depended on an answer to the question: How does Nature reveal the Spirit? How does Nature impress on the external features of men the signature of their experience in this event? Here, on the other hand, you see how all the characters are concentrated on a single feeling, and yet this single quality of soul finds living expression in them all. Here is essentially a life of soul, expressed through the soul; while in the former picture it was a life of the Spirit, finding a naturalistic expression. Down to the very drawing of the lines you can see this difference. Look at the wonderful and tender flow of line. Compare it with what you will remember of the former picture of the Last Supper.

See what a quality of soul is poured like a magic breath over this picture.

It is interesting how in Botticelli the same artistic impulse, which we found in Fra Angelico, is transferred—if I may put it so—to altogether different motives. Botticelli, in a certain respect, is most decidedly a painter of the life of soul. Yet he again emancipates, within the life of soul, the Human from the general Religious feeling which pervades the work of Fra Angelico. He emancipates the human working once more towards a certain naturalism in the expressions of the soul.

Compare this portrait with the head we saw before, by Ghirlandajo. In that case something essentially spiritual found naturalistic expression, while here we see an abundant life and content of the soul even in the drawing of the lines.

Following on Fra Angelico, we have shown a series of Botticelli's so as to gain an impression of the progress in the painting of the soul's life, in contrast to the Spirit which we found in Masaccio and Ghirlandajo. These, then, were the two directions that grew directly out of the impulses proceeding from Giotto—impulses handed down through Giotto, and through Donatello in another sphere, down to these painters.

In the further course of evolution on these lines, we now come to the great Renaissance painters, of whom I still wish to show you a few pictures in this lecture. When we have a picture like this of Botticelli's before us, we realise the extraordinary intensity of progress from the 14th to the 15th and on into the 16th century—from the portrayal of the purely Human, In such artists as Ghirlandajo we see the Spiritual, absorbed into the sphere of Nature, brought to a high level of expression. Here in this other stream we see a rich life of soul, come to expression, even in the draughtmanship. In course of time men had attained the knowledge of the human form, with all its powers of expression. It was as though, from the starting-point of Heaven, Earth had been conquered by mankind. That deepening of life which had come about through Christianity passed more and more into the background, and it was as though the object now were to understand man as such in a far deeper way. The heavenly domain became a path of progress, towards the more perfect expression of the inner being of man as it stamps itself upon his outer features, and upon all that comes forth outwardly in the relationships of men to one another, in their life together. It is the conquest of the realm of Man, by the most varied paths, which comes before us here so wonderfully.

And now we see the union of all these impulses in the great artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Let us observe a few of Leonardo's pictures. We shall find in him a synthesis of the varied strivings which came be ore us in the other pictures. For in a high degree, the Leonardo da Vinci, there is a working-together of the Spiritual with the life of the soul—in his drawing, in his composition and in his power of expression.

To begin with I have selected some sketches and drawings by Leonardo, from which you may see how he endeavoured to study man in a fully realistic way. This, of course, was in a time when all that had been gained in the former periods was there to influence the artist. It is characteristic of Leonardo how radically he seeks to bring out the full expressiveness of man; he tries to seize the human being as a whole, and bring him forth to perfection in his drawing. He seeks to enhance his power of expression to the highest point by studying and holding fast all human needs. This was only possible in the flower of an artistic epoch containing all the works which we have seen today—the penetration of the human being in the Spirit and in soul.

More, as I said, you see united all that had formerly been striven for by separate paths.

These are the heads of the Apostles from the famous fresco at Milan,—the Last Supper, which, also, is scarcely visible today, for only isolated patches of colour now remain. We see that in this great artistic epoch the sacred legend merely provided a foundation for the working-out of human characters. Especially in his Last Supper, Leonardo is at pains to study the single human characters. We see him working very, very long at this wonderful picture, for he wanted to study the human characters in all detail. We know how often he disappointed his clients—the dignitaries of the Church. Thus, after long labour, he had not finished Judas Iscariot, and when the Abbot, high dignitary that he was, kept pressing him to finish it at last, his answer was that hitherto, alas, he had not been able to finish it since he lacked a model for Judas Iscariot; but now the Abbot himself, if he would kindly sit for him, would provide an excellent model for the purpose.

We go on in this classical epoch. I beg you to observe this picture by Perugino, Raphael's teacher, to see how Raphael's art grew out of his predecessor's. In Perugino a new element makes its appearance:—a deep religious quality which tries to find expression in the composition, combined with a powerfully architectural imagination. On this, the greatness of Raphael very largely depended.

Look at these two pictures: You will see the one actually growing out of the other; you will recognise how Raphael, starting from his teacher, attained his greatness, receiving the ripest fruits from the different streams which we have learned to know this evening; Raphael brings soul and Spirit into his pictures and combines them with that element of composition which came from his especial schooling.

You will remember the earlier picture of the 'Vision of St. Bernard' which we saw this evening. Consider the great difference. In the former case there was an effort to make the Spirit powerfully active in all that was brought into the picture. Here we see a pure element of composition, contriving to express what is, indeed, the chosen motif of the picture but does not penetrate it fully. Perugino cannot yet deepen his composition so that a living soul speaks out of it. Nevertheless, we see how great a part this element of composition plays in his school of painting.

Here, then, where Raphael receive' such powerful influences, we see the entry of an element of composition. You will, of course, see how great a part it plays in Raphael. In the former pictures we cannot speak of it in the speak of it in the same way as here. The composition was, rather, the result of a totality,—a totality which the artist felt more as a living organism. Man, too, after all, is composed; but though he is composed of head and arms and legs and so forth, we cannot really call this a 'composition'; for in man everything proceeds as from a centre, and we feel his composition—of arms and legs, of head and trunk—as a natural totality, a thing that goes without saying. Here in this picture you not feel it as a natural totality, a thing that goes without saying. You feel it definitely, purposely composed; whereas you will find the earlier compositions flowing more out of a single whole. Here, you see, the whole is placed together; it is literally composed.

Proceeding, therefore, from the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, we recognise the one stream which seeks to conquer Nature through the Spirit, and leads on to a higher stage of realism. Side by side with it we see another stream which seeks to conquer Nature from the aspect of the soul. And now, coming across from Central and Eastern Italy where Raphael and his predecessors had their home, we see this power of composition, this working from the single parts towards the whole, whereas all the former streams still contained an echo of the working from the whole into the single parts, a thing that you could see most strongly, for example, in that composition representing the spiritual rule of the Church pouring out into the world, where everything was conceived out of a given unity, and nothing was built up out of the single details, as it is in this case.

See how the spiritual element finds its way into the soul of Raphael—I mean, all that has been achieved by that spiritual element which grew into Naturalism.

I have inserted this last picture to show how the element of allegory still worked on. I drew attention to it in Giotto. It worked on along with all the other streams; indeed, it was the one thing that more or less remained of the earlier more spiritual conception. This one thing remains:—this element of abstract allegory which is especially to be found in the pictures in the Campo Santo at Pisa, magnificent as they are in many respects. It belongs, indeed, to an earlier time. Nevertheless, I wanted to show you how this allegorical element still worked on even in a later age.

All these things, then, were living in the feeling of the human being,—a spiritual power and a life of soul poured out into Naturalism; and withal, no longer an ability to grasp the whole as such, but purposeful. composition. Lastly, the remnants of allegory.

In this picture you see once more the working-on of allegory. It is intended to represent the influence of the scholastic doctrine, on the one hand downward to the Earth, even to the conquest of heresy, and on the other hand upward into the heavenly regions where the rays of what is living on the Earth are received into the midst of sacred beings. What was conceived working, as it were, in the spiritual substance of the Earth, is here expressed in allegory. It is an allegory, but one derived from the reality. Here, then, the last-named element—that of allegory—is taken as a starting-point, not for the mere sake of allegory in itself, but, rather, to express in allegory what they conceived as really working, even as they represented it.

Thus we have tried to understand the different streams. I will once more repeat them: The Spirit striving into Naturalism; the life of soul, growing ever more realistic in its expressiveness, even as the artists grew more capable of portraying the soul's life in the outward expression; the element of composition, placing together single features in order that the whole might have a spiritual effect; and, lastly, the element of allegory. We have traced these influences, each and severally. Thus was built up what came at last to full expression in the creations of Raphael, Michelangelo and their successors. Throughout, we see a spiritual force, passing through man by varied ways and channels, seeking to conquer Nature. First we see the Spirit endeavouring to master what comes to expression in the human being through the human Spirit. Then the spiritual faculty of vision enters more and more into man's grasp of outer Nature. Then, in such artists as Fra Angelico and Botticelli, we see the entry of a life of soul. And when the composition was no longer given as a matter of course out of a spiritual vision, we witness the attempt to bring the Spirit to expression by composition deliberately placed together, in which direction Raphael achieved the highest eminence. Lastly, we see how the longing to give voice to the great cosmic process led to Allegory, and how Allegory itself grew into Realism, as you can see in this very picture. Indeed, in Raphael it grew once more into a perfectly natural spirituality, a spirituality that works as a matter of course. I beg you to remember such a composition as his 'St. Cecilia' at Bologna. Here we still see, a central figure is set down with obviously allegorical intention, seeking to represent the soul-life of the human being in its connection with the Universe.

In Raphael's St. Cecilia there is the central figures standing in the midst; yet the thing has gone so far that the allegorical quality is completely overcome, obliterated, as it were, so much so that there is much argument today as to what this 'St. Cecilia' is meant to express, though they need only to look up their Calendars to see how closely the picture adheres to the tradition. For in the legends of the Saint you will find all that Raphael included in this wonderful creation. But to such an extent did he attain Nature's power to express the Spirit and the Soul in form, that we no longer notice all the Allegory that underlies the picture. And that, indeed, is the great thing in this epoch, attained by Michelangelo and Raphael. In all the former streams, the impulses from which they come are recognisable. Here, each and all, they are overcome to perfection, with the attainment of a pure and fresh and free (for that time fresh and free) vision and reproduction of the reality around us, in its natural material content and in its soul and Spirit. The works created by this age were based, indeed, on the preceding evolution which we have described. Here, above all, we recognise how such achievements must be preceded by many lines of evolution, which, only inasmuch as they take their start from the Spirit, lead to the recognition of the Spirit in the outer world. Man must first seek the Spirit, then will he find the Spirit in the outer world. Man must first feel and experience the Soul, then will he find them also in the external Nature. Thus we see how the Spiritual that was still at work in Cimabue, worked on after him in Giotto, who in turn carried it outward as a means to understand the forms of Nature. We see the spiritual content radiating still from Giotto's work, applied still further by his successors to apprehend the Spirit in the world of Nature. We see how the deep soul-impulse that came through Francis of Assisi, taking hold of the life of the soul in man himself, was expressed with a certain artistic perfection in the Christian piety of Fra Angelico. This impulse once again rays forth into the world; we have the essence of Botticelli. Then (if I may so express it), out of a kind of memory of the totality of vision which is lost, the artist tries to piece together the single features into a composition, thus creating a totality once more, so that the Spirit—which was lost to immediate vision, to be used in a new way in the taking hold of Nature,—might work again from the totality. And at length we see, in the quest of Allegory, the search for means of expression, leading in the last resort to the overcoming of all Allegory; to the finding the means of expression even in Nature herself. For to him who first sets out to seek it, the free and open-minded vision of the outer World itself will give what he desires. Nature herself is allegorical; yet does she nowhere impose her allegories on us, or let us see them outwardly as such. Man must learn what is there to be read in the book of Nature. But at first he often has to learn his reading in clumsy devious byways. In such a work as the picture of St. Thomas which we saw before, we witness still a clumsy and unskillful reading of the book of Nature. In Raphael's St. Cecilia, on the other hand, we have a reading which contains no longer any Allegory, no longer any of that abstract element which has not yet arisen to the full height of Art.

Thus I think we shall have gained a conception, how the great epoch of the Italian Renaissance gradually came into being. Again and again, I think, the vision of man will be directed to these times, to this artistic evolution; for it lets us gaze so deeply into the life and working of piety, of Wisdom and of Love in the human soul, combined with the artistic fancy, striving to reproduce Nature with a fresh and open mind. It lies not in the mere imitation of Nature, but in the faculty of Man, with all that he has found in his own soul, to discover again in Nature what is already there in her, akin to the inmost experiences of the human soul. This, I venture to hope, our descriptions today—however brokenly, however imperfectly—may still have brought to light.

In our last lecture we showed the period of Art which finally merged into that of the great masters of the Renaissance. We ended by revealing the connecting threads in the artistic world of feeling, which finally led up to what was so wondrously united in Leonardo, in Michangelo and in Raphael. Yet at the same time, in these three masters we must also see the starting point of the new age, in an artistic sense. It is the dawn of the 5th post-Atlantean age, which is heralded in the realm of Art. All three were living, at the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean age. Leonardo was born in 1452, Michelangelo in 1475 and Raphael in 1483; Leonardo dies in 1519, Raphael in 1520, and Michelangelo in 1564. Here we find ourselves at the starting point of the new age. At the same time, something is contained in these artists which we must undoubtedly regard as a culmination of the spiritual stream of preceding ages, inasmuch as they poured their impulses into the realm of Art. It is true, my dear friends, that in our time people have little understanding for what is important in this respect, for in our time—I do not say this as mere criticism—art has been far too much expelled from the spiritual life as a whole. It is even considered a failing of the historian or critic, if he seeks once more to give Art its place in the spiritual life as a whole. People say that our attention is thus diverted unduly from the artistic or aesthetic impulses as such, attaching an excessive value to the content, to the subject-matter, and yet, this need not be the case at all. Indeed, it is only in our own time that this distinction has acquired so much importance. It had no such direct significance in former epochs—epochs when the artistic understanding was more developed in the ordinary common sense of the people. We must not forget how much has been done to extirpate a true artistic understanding by all the atrocities which have been placed before the human mind of men in recent times, by way of pictorial representation and the like. True understanding for the manner of representation has been lost. European humanity, in a certain sense, no longer cares how a given subject-matter is presented to it. In wide circles, artistic understanding has to a large extent been lost.

Speaking of former epochs, and especially of the epoch to which we are now referring, we may truly say artists such as Raphael, Michelango and Leonardo were by no means one-sidedly artistic, but carried in their souls the whole of the spiritual life of their time and created out of this. In saying this, I do not mean that they borrowed their subject-matter from the spiritual life of their time. I mean far more than this. Into the specifically artistic quality of their creation, in form and colouring, there flowed the specific quality of the world-conception of that time. In our time, a world-conception is a collection of ideas which can, of course, be represented in sculpture or in painting and it is frequently embodied, needless to say, in forms and colours and the like which to the true artistic sense will nevertheless be an atrocity. In this respect, unfortunately, we must repeatedly utter warnings, even within our anthroposophical stream of evolution. The feeling for what is truly artistic is not always prevalent among us. I still remember with a shudder how at the beginning of the theosophical movement in Germany a man once came to me in Berlin, bringing with him reproductions of a picture he had painted. The subject was: Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. It is true there sat a huddled figure under a tree, but the man—if you will pardon me the apt expression—understood as little of Art as an ox, having eaten grass throughout the week, understands of Sunday. He simply thought, here is the subject; let us paint it, and it will represent a work of Art. Of course, it represented something. Namely, he who imagined the scene to himself—“Buddha under the Bodhi Tree”—could see it so, no doubt. But there was absolutely no reason why such a thing should ever have been painted.

It is a very different thing when we say of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, that they bore within them the whole way of feeling which permeated the Italian civilisation of their time. For this civilisation entered livingly into the artistic quality of their work, into their whole manner of presentation; nor can we fully understand these artists if we have no feeling for the civilisation in the midst of which they lived. Today, indeed, people believe the most extraordinary things. They will believe, for instance, that a man can build a Gothic church even if he has not the remotest notion of High Mass. Of course, he cannot do so in reality. Or they believe that one can paint the Trinity even if one has no feeling for what is intended to be living in it. In this way, Art is expelled from its living connection with the spiritual life as a whole. At the same time, on the other hand, people fail to understand the artistic element as such, imagining that with aesthetic views and feelings which happen to be prevalent today they can set to work and ciriticise Raphael or Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose whole way of feeling was quite different. It was only natural (though I should need many hours to say in full what should be said on this point), it was only natural for them to be living in the whole way of feeling of their time. We cannot understand their creative work unless we understand the character which Christianity had assumed at the time when these artists blossomed forth. You need only remember that at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century Italian Christianity witnessed the rise even among the Popes, of men who truly cannot be said to have satisfied even the most rudimentary demands of morality, nor need one be in any way a pietist to say so. And, of course, the whole army of priests were of like character. The idea that a specific moral impulse must be living in what goes by the name of “Christian” had been lost sight of, comparatively speaking. And when in later times it emerged again—in pietist and moralising forms, by no means identical with what I described the other day when speaking of St. Francis,—it was imbued with quite a different feeling of Christianity than inspired those who lived, for instance, under an Alexander VI, a Julius II or a Leo X. If, on the other hand, we consider the Christian traditions, the concepts and ideas (and when I say ideas I include “Imaginations”) connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, we find them still living in the souls with an intensity of which the man of today has little notion. Human souls lived in the ideas connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, as in a world that was their very own, and they saw Nature herself in the midst of this same world. We need but call to mind: In that time, even for the most educated, this Earth, of which the Western half was still unknown (or was only just begining to be known and was not fully really reckoned with),—this Earth was the centre of the whole Universe. Going down beneath the surface of the Earth, one found a subterranean kingdom; going but a little way above, a super-earthly. We might almost say, it was as though a man only need lift his arm, to grasp with his hand the feet of the heavenly beings. Heaven still penetrated down into the earthly element. Such was the conception—a harmony, an interplay of the spiritual above and the Earth beneath it, with the world of the senses which contained mankind. Even their view of Nature was in this spirit.

Those, however, among whom we find the three great masters of the Renaissance were striving forth from yonder age. And the one who harbours within him, as in a seed, all that came forth since then—nay, much that is still destined to come forth,—that one is Leonardo. The soul of Leonardo was equally inclined to the feelings of the former time and of the latter. His soul had most decidedly a Janus head. By his education, by the habits of his life, by all that he had seen, he lived with his feelings still in the olden time. Yet he had a mighty impulse to that conception of the world which only came forth in the succeeding centuries. He had an impulse, not so much towards its width as to its depth. From various indications in my other lectures, you know that the Greeks—and even the men of later times during the 4th Post-Atlantean age—knew life quite differently than we do,—that is to say, out of a different source of knowledge. The sculptor, for example, knew the human figure from within—from a perception of the forces that were at work within himself, the forces which we today describe in Anthroposophy as the etheric. Out of this inner feeling of the human figure the Greek artist created. In course of time this faculty was lost. Another faculty now had to appear: the power to take hold of things with outward vision. Man felt impelled to feel and understand external Nature. I showed you last time, how Francis of Assisi was among the first who sought to perceive Nature through a deep life of feeling. Now Leonardo was the first who endeavoured in a wider sense to add to this feeling of Nature, a conscious understanding of Nature. Because it was no longer given to him, as to the men of former ages, to trace from within outward the forces that are at work in man, he tried to know these things by contemplation from without. He tried to know by outward vision what could no longer be made known by inward feeling. An understanding of Nature as against a feeling for Nature: this is what distinguishes Leonardo da Vinci from Francis of Assisi, and this determines the whole constitution of his spirit. He was all out to understand. And though we need not take it word for word—for the sources, as a rule, relate only the current legends—nevertheless, the legends themselves were founded upon fact, and there is truth in it when we are told how Leonardo took especial pains to study characteristic faces, so that by dint of outward contemplation the working of the formative forces of the human organism might become his own inner experience. Often he would follow a character about for days and days, so that the human being might become as if transparent to him, revealing how the inner being works into the outer form. Yes, there is truth in this,—and that he invited peasants to his house and set before them tasty dishes or told them stories, so that their faces assumed every possible expression of laughter and contortion and he could study them. All this is founded upon fact. And when he had to paint a Medusa he brought all manner of toads and reptiles into his studio, to study the characteristic animal faces. These are legendary anecdotes; and yet they truly indicate how Leonardo had to seek, to discover the mysterious creation of Nature's forces. For Leonardo was truly a man who sought to understand Nature. He tried in an even wider sense to understand the forces of Nature as they play their part in human life. He was no mere artist in the narrower sense of the word; the artist in him grew out of the whole man, standing in the very midst of the turning-point of time. The church of San Giovanni in Florence had sunk a little, owing to a subsidence of the soil. He wished to raise it again—a task that could easily be carried out today; but in that time such a thing was considered absolutely hopeless. He wanted to have it raised bodily, as it stood. Nowadays, as has justly been observed, it would only be a question of the cost; in his time it was an idea of genius, for no one beside Leonardo thought such a thing was possible. He also thought of constructing machines whereby men would be able to fly through the air; and of irrigating great areas of swamp. He was an engineer, a mechanic, a musician, a cultured man in social intercourse, a scientist according to his time. He constructed apparatus so unheard-of in that age that no one else could make anything of them. What poured into his artist's hand was working, therefore, from a many-sided understanding of the world. Of Leonardo we can truly say, he bore his whole Age within him, even as it came to expression in the profound external changes which were then enacted in Italy. Leonardo's whole life—his artistic life included—bears the stamp of this his fundamental character. In spite of the fact that he grew out of the Italian environment, he was not altogether at home there. True, he was a Florentine, but he spent only his youth in Florence, and then went on to Milan, having been summoned thither by the Duke Ludovico Sforza—sommoned by no means (as we might naively imagine) as the great artist whom we recognise in him today, but as a kind of court entertainer. From the skull of a horse, Leonardo constructed an instrument of music, from which he enticed various notes, and was thus able with great humour to entertain the ducal house. We need not say that he was intended as a kind of “fool,” but as an entertainer to amuse the Court, most certainly. The works of Art which he produced in Milan, to which we shall presently refer, were certainly created out of the very deepest impulse of his own being. But he had not been summoned to the Court of the Sforza's for this purpose; and though he entered well into all the life at Milan, we find him afterwards, on his return to Florence, working at a battle-picture, intended to glorify a victory over Milan. Then we see him end his life at the French Court.

The one dominating impulse in Leonardo is to see and feel what interests the human being of his time; the political events, complicated as they were, more or less swept past him. He only skimmed off them, as it were, the uppermost and human layer. Indeed, in many respects he rather gives us the impression of an adventurer, albeit one endowed with colossal genius. He bears his whole Age within him; and out of this feeling of his Age as a whole, his creations arise. We shall present them not in chronological but in a freely chosen order, for in Leonardo the main point is to see how he creates out of a single impulse, and for this reason the chronological sequence is less important.

An altogether different nature, though possessing the characteristics of the Renaissance in common with him, was Michelangelo. If we can say of Leonardo that he bore the whole forces of his time within him (and for this very reason often came into disharmony with it and remained misunderstood, just because he understood it in its depths, in the forces that only found their way to the surface during later centuries), of Michelangelo, on the other hand, we may say: he bore within him, above all, the Florence of his time. What was the Florence of his time? It was, in a sense, a true concentration of the existing order of the world. This Florence he bore within him. Unlike Leonardo, he did not stand remote from political affairs. The complicated political events around him—and the whole world-order of that time played into these politics—entered again and again into the soul of Michelangelo. And when again and again he went to Rome, he bore his Florence with him, and painting and sculpting a Florentine element into the Roman setting. Leonardo bore a universal feeling into the works he created; Michelangelo carried a Florentine feeling into Rome. As an artist he achieved a kind of spiritual conquest over Rome, making Florence arise again in Rome.

Thus Michelangelo entered intensely into all that was taking place through the political conditions in Florence during his long life. We see this in the succession of his life-periods. As a young man, when his career was only just beginning, he witnessed the reign of the great Medici, whose favourite he was, and by whose favour he was enabled to partake in all that the Florence of that time could offer to a man's spiritual life. Whatever of ancient Art and artistry was then available, Michelangelo studied it under the protectorate of the Medici; and it was here that he produced his earliest work. Indeed, he loved his protector, and grew together in his own soul with the soul-nature of the Medici. But presently he had to realise that the sons of his patron were of quite a different kind. He who had done so much for Florence—out of an ambitious disposition, it is true, yet cultivating largesse and freedom—died in 1492; and his sons proved themselves more or less common tyrants. Michelangelo had to experience this change in comparatively early youth. Whereas at the beginning of his career the mercantile spirit of the Medici had allowed free play to Art, he must now witness this mercantile spirit itself masquerading as a political spirit, and striving towards tyranny. Yes, he witnessed on a small scale the rise in Florence of what was afterwards to take hold of all the world. It was a terrible experience for him, and yet not unconnected with the whole surrounding world of the new Age. It was now that he first went to Rome, and we may say: In Rome he mourns the loss of what he has experienced as the true greatness of Florence. We can even recognise how the plastic quality of his work is connected with this great change in his feelings: Into the very line we notice what the political changes in Florence had brought about in his soul. Any one who has a deeper feeling for such things will see in the Pieta in the Vatican a work which in the last resort is born out of the mourning soul of Michelangelo—Michelangelo mourning for the city of his fathers.

Then, when better times returned and he went back to Florence, he stood once more under a new impression. He felt uplifted in his soul,—Freedom had entered into Florence once again. He poured out this new feeling into the indescribably great figure of his David. It is not the traditional David of the Bible. It is the protest of free Florence against the encroaching principle of “great powers,” of mighty States. Its colossal character is connected with this very feeling.

Again, when he was summoned by Pope Julius to decorate the Sistine Chapel, now in a far fuller sense than before, he bore his Florence with him into Rome. What was it that he bore with him? It was a whole world-conception, of which we can say that it shows the rise of the new age, just as truly as we can say, on the other hand, that in the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, representing the creation of the World and the great process of Biblical history, we have the twilight of an ancient world-conception. Thus Michelangelo carries with him a whole world to Rome,—carries with him something that could never have arisen at that time in Rome itself, but that could only arise in Florence: the idea of one mighty cosmic process with all the Prophetic gifts and Sibylline faculties of man. You will find further explanations on these things in earlier lectures. These inner connections could only be felt and realised in Florence. What Michelangelo experienced through all the spiritual life that had reached its height in the Florence of that time, cannot, in truth, be felt today, unless we transplant ourselves through Spiritual Science into former epochs. Hence the usual histories of Art contain so many absurdities at this point. A man can only create as Michelangelo created if he believes in these things and lives in their midst. It is easy for a man to say that he will paint the world's creation. Many a modern artist would credit himself, no doubt, with this ability,—but one who has true feeling will not be able to assent. No one can paint the evolution of the world who does not live in it, like Michelangelo, with all his being.

But when he returned once more to Florence, he was already driven, after all, by the new stream, which—to put it bluntly—replaces the sacramental by the commercial character. True, he was destined still to create the most wonderful works, in the Medici Chapel. But in the background of this undertaking was an element which could not but inspire him with melancholy feelings. The purpose was the glorification of the Medici. It was they who mattered,—who in the meantime had become powerful, albeit less in Florence than in the rest of Italy. Then once more the political changes drove him back. The betrayal of the Malatestas, their penetration into Florence, drove him back again to Rome. And now he painted, as it were, into the Last Judgment, the protest of a Florentine, the great protest of humanity, of the human individual against all that would oppose it. Hence the real human greatness of his Last Judgment, the greatness which it undoubtedly breathed forth, as it proceeded from his hand. For now, also, parts of it have been completely spoiled.

But he still had to undergo experiences which entered very, very deep into all the impulses of feeling in his soul. How many events had he not experienced, how much did they not signify for the development of his picture of the world: For the things I have indicated were of great importance to him. They may be taken abstractly today, but in the soul of Michelangelo they worked without a doubt as very deep soul-impulses. But we must add that I have mentioned the fact that he witnessed, too, the great change which came over Florence through the appearance of Savonarola. This was a protest within the life of the Church against what was characteristic of that time in Christianity. So free an Art as was developed in Leonardo and in many others like him could only unfold in this way inasmuch as the ideas of Christianity were lifted out of their context and taken by themselves. I mean the ideas connected with the Mystery of Golgotha—the conception of the Trinity, of the Last Supper, of the connection between the earthly and the spiritual realms, and so forth. All these conceptions, lifted right out of the moral element, assumed a free imaginative character which the artist dealt with at his pleasure, treating it like any worldly subject, with the only difference that it contained, of course, the sacred figures. These things had been objectified, loosed from the moral element; and thus the Christian thought, loosed from the moral element, slid over by and by into a purely artistic sphere. All this took place quite as a matter of course, and the gradual elimination of the moral element was a natural concomitant of the whole process. Savonarola represents the great protest against this elimination of the moral element. Savonarola appears; it is the protest of the moral life against an Art that was free of morals,—I do not say, void of morals, but free. Indeed, we must study Savonarola's will if we would understand in Michelangelo himself what was due to Savonarola's influence.

But this was not all. You must imagine Michelangelo as a man who in his inmost heart and mind could never think in any other than a Christian way. He not only felt as a Christian; he conceived the order of the World in mighty pictures, in the Christian sense. Imagine him placed in the midst of that time, when the Christian conceptions had, as it were, become objectified and could thus slide so easily into the realms of Art. Such was the world in which he lived. But he experienced withal the Northern protest of the Reformation, which spread with comparative speed, even to Italy; and he also witnessed the great and revolutionary change which was accomplished from the Catholic side as a counter-Reformation, against the Reformation. He experienced the Rome of his time,—a time whose moral level may not have been high, but in which there were free and independent spirits, none the less, who were decidedly agreed to give a new form to Catholicism. They did not want to go so far as Savonarola, nor did they want it to assume the form which afterwards came forth in the Reformation. They wanted to change and recreate Catholicism by continuous progress and development. Then the Reformation burst in like another edition, so to speak, of the Savonarola protest. Rome was seized with anxiety and fear, and they parted from what had pulsated through their former life. Michelangelo among others had built his hopes on such ideas as were concentrated, for example, in Vittoria Colonna, hoping to permeate with high ethical principles what had reached so great a height in Art. With a Catholicism morally recreated and renewed, they hoped to permeate the world once more. Now, however, there arose the great Roman powers, the strong Catholic ideas, the Jesuitical principle, and Paul IV became the Pope. What Michelangelo was now to witness must have been terrible for him, for he saw the seeds of an absolute break with what had still been known to him as Christianity. It was the beginning of Jesuitical Christianity. And so he entered on the twilight of his life.

Michelangelo, as I said, had carried Florence into Rome. With Raphael once again it was different. Of Raphael we may say, he carried Urbino—East-Central Italy to Rome. Here we come to that strange magic atmosphere whose presence we feel when we contemplate the minor artists of that region whence Raphael grew forth. Consider the creations of these artists—the sweet and tender faces, the characteristic postures of the feet, the attitude of the figures. We might describe it thus: Here there arose artistically somewhat later what had arisen earlier in a moralising and ascetic sphere in Francis of Assisi. It enters here into artistic feeling and creation, and leaves a strangely magic atmosphere—this tenderness in contemplating man and Nature. In Raphael it is a native quality, and he continues to express it through his life. This is the feeling which he carries into Rome; it flows from his creations into our hearts and minds if we transplant ourselves into the character they once possessed, for as pictures they have to a great extent been spoilt.

What Raphael thus bears within his soul, having evolved in the lonely country of Urbino, stnads, as it were, alone within the time; and yet taking its start from Raphael, it spread far and wide into the civilisation of mankind. It is as though Raphael with this element were carried everywhere upon the waves of time, and wheresoever he goes he makes it felt—this truly artistic expression of the Christian feeling. This element is everywhere poured out over the influence of Raphael.

Summing up, therefore, we may say: Leonardo lives in the midst of a large and universal understanding. He strikes us, stings us, as it were, into awakeness with his keen World-understanding. Michelangelo lives in the policical understanding of his time; this becomes the dominant impulse of his feeling. Raphael, on the other hand, remaining more or less untouched by all these things, is borne, as it were, upon the waves of time, and bears into the evolution of the ages a well-nigh inexpressible quality of Christian Art. This, then, distinguishes and at once unites the three great masters of the Renaissance; they represent three elements of the Renaissance feeling, as it appears to us historically.

Let us now give ourselves up to the impressions of Leonardo's works. We will first show some of his drawings, which reveal how he creates his forms out of that keen understanding of Nature which I sought to characterise just now. Thereafter, not quite in the historic order, we shall show those of his pictures which have the character of portraits. Only then will we go on to his chief creation, the “Last Supper,” Finally, we shall return and show him once more at his real starting-point. The first picture is a well-known Self-portrait.

This, then, is one of Leonardo's portraits. There follows the other one, still better known.

Here we have a picture from an early period of his development, showing how Leonardo grew out of the School of Verrocchio. Tradition has it that the finely elaborated landscape round this figure here was painted by Leonardo in the School of Verrocchio, and that Verrocchio, seeing what Leonardo could achieve, laid down his brush and would paint no more.

Here, again, you see how Leonardo drew—how he tried, even to the point of caricature, to extract the characteristic features by dint of studious contemplation, as I described just now.

We need not imagine that he stood alone in things like this; they had, indeed, been done by others in his time. Leonardo only stands out through his extraordinary genius, but it was altogether a quest of the time—this search for the strong characteristic features, as against what had come forth in earlier times from higher vision and had grown a mere tradition. It was characteristic of that time to seek for what appears directly to external vision, and thus bring out with emphasis whatever in the outward features of a being is most significant of individual character.

Far more important than the subject-matter, the point was to study and portray with precision the positions of the bones and so forth.

This is the portrayal of a thunderstorm.

The two pictures we now show are not attributed to him with certainty, nor are some others which we shall see presently, but they bear the character of Leonardo and are therefore not without connection.

In this famous picture we see the other aspect of Leonardo, where we might say he seeks to attain the very opposite pole from what was illustrated in the former sketches. There he tried to discover and bring out with emphasis the individual and characteristic in all details. People will often not believe that an artist who can create such a work as the Mona Lisa has any need of going in the other direction to the point of caricature. I have, however, often drawn attention to this fact. Think of the inherently natural impulse whereby our friend the Poet, Christian Morgenstern, went from his sublime, serene creations to the humorous poems with which we are familiar, where he seeks the very extremes of caricature. There is this inner connection in the artist's soul. If he desires to create a work so inwardly complete, harmonious, serene as this, he often has to seek the faculties he needs for such creation by emphasising characteristic individual features even to the point of caricature.

These pictures, which, as I said, are not in historic order, represent Leonardo in the quality of an artist seeking for inner clarity, completeness and perfection.

Here is the Dionysos figure, the God Dionysos. You will find indications on these matters in various other lectures. The painting is based on proven designs and sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. However, it is believed that it was carried out by an unknown student from the workshop of Leonardo and between 1683 and 1693 it was modified and painted to represent Bacchus.

We now come to the Last Supper—which he created, it is true, at an earlier time, and worked upon during a long period. We have often spoken of it. We know what an essential progress in the artistic power of expression is visible in this picture as against the earlier pictures of the Last Supper by Ghirlandajo and others. Observe the life in this picture; see how strongly the individual characters come out in spite of the powerful unity of composition. This is the new thing in Leonardo. The adaptation of the strong individual characters to the composition as a whole is truly wonderful. At the same time each of the four groups of disciples becomes a triad complete and self-contained; and, again, each of these triads is marvellously placed into the whole. The colour and lighting are inexpressibly beautiful. I spoke once before of the part of the colouring in this composition. Here we look deep into the mysterious creative powers of Leonardo. If we try to feel the colours of the picture as a whole, we feel they are distributed in such a way as to supplement one another,—not actually as complementary colours, but in a similar way,—so much so that when we look at the whole picture at once, we have pure light—the colours together are pure light. Such is the colouring in this picture.

We now come to the details of the picture. This is generally considered to be an earlier attempt at the Head of Christ. These reproductions are familiar.

This is Morghan's engraving, from which we gain a more accurate conception of the composition than from the present picture at Milan, which is so largely ruined. You are, of course, familiar with the fate of this picture, of which we have so often spoken.

This is a very recent engraving,—a reproduction which reveals the most minute study. It is frequently admired and yet, perhaps, for one who loves the original as a work of art, it leads too far afield into a sphere of minute and detailed drawing. Still we may recognise in this an independent artistic achievement of considerable beauty.

Here we have a fragment of the battle picture projected by Leonardo, which I mentioned a short while ago.

We will now go on to Michelangelo. Considering Leonardo once again, you will see there is something in him which comes out especially when, instead of taking the chronological order, which is in any case a little uncertain, we take his work in groups, as we have done just now. Then we see clearly what different streams are living in him. The one, which comes out especially in his Last Supper, aims at a peculiar quality of composition combined with an intense delineation of character. It stands apart and alongside of that other tendency in which he does not seek this kind of composition. This other _stream we find expressed in the pictures in the Louvre, and at St, Petersburg and London, which we showed before the Last Supper. It might have come forth at any time; one feels it is almost by chance that the pictures of this kind do not exist from every period in his life. That which comes to expression in these pictures is in no way reminiscent of the peculiar composition in the Last Supper, but aims at a serene composition while seeking to express individual character to a moderate extent.

We now come to Michelangelo. To begin with, his portrait of himself.

Here we have Michelangelo before he reached his independence, working in Florence, perhaps under the influence of Signorelli and others, still, in fact, a pupil.

And now we think of Michelangelo moving to Rome for the first time, under all the influences which I described just now.

Look at this picture and then at the following one; compare the feeling in the two.

Look at this work. Undoubtedly it is created under the feeling of his coming to Rome. A more or less tragic element, a certain sublime pessimism pervades it. Let us return once more to the former one, and you will see the two creations are very similar in their artistic character. They express the same shade of feeling in Michelangelo. We now return once more to the Pieta.

People who feel the story more than the artistic quality as such have often said that the Madonna, for the situation in which she is here portrayed, is far too young. This arose out of a belief which was still absolutely natural in that time and lived in the soul of Michelangelo himself:—the belief that owing to her virgin nature the Madonna never assumed the features of old age.

Here you have the work of which we spoke before. The figure strikes us most of all by its colossal quality, not in the external sense, but a quality mysteriously hidden in its whole artistic treatment.

We now come to the Sistine Chapel. To begin with, we have the Creation of the World,—the first stage, which we might describe as the creation of Light out of the darkness of night.

This picture bears witness to a tradition still living at that time as regards the creation of the World. It was that Jehovah created, in a sense, as the successor of an earlier Creator, whom He overcame, or transcended, and who now departed. The harmony of the net World-creation with the old which it transcended is clearly shown in this picture. Truly, we may say, such ideas as are expressed in this picture have vanished absolutely; they are no longer present.

This, then, is the creation of that which went before mankind.

Here we find the creation of man. There follows the creation of Eve.

We now move more and more away from the theme of World-creation into the theme of History—the further evolution of the human race. This is the fall into sin.

We come to the Sibyls, of whom I have spoken in a former lecture. They represent the one supersensible element in the evolution of man, which is contrasted with the other, the prophetic quality. We shall see the latter presently in the series of the Prophets. Here we have the Sibylline element. In my cycle of lectures given at Leipzig, on “Christ and the Spiritual World,” you will find the fuller description of its relation to the prophetic. That Michelangelo included these things at all, in his series of pictures, proves how closely he connected the earthly life with the supersensible—the spiritual. See now the succession of the Sibyls; observe how a real individual life is poured out into each one: in every detail, each one brings to expression a quite specific visionary character of her own.

Observe the position of the hand. It is no mere chance. Observe the look in her eyes, coming forth out of an elemental life; you will divine many things which we cannot express in words, for that would make the thing too abstract,—but they lie hidden in the artistic treatment.

And now we come to the Prophets.

These are examples of his scenes from the Old Testament.

Here we come to his later period in Florence: to the Medicis and the Chapel at which he had to work for the Medicis under conditions that I described before. I have spoken of these tombs of Juliano and Lorenzo in a lecture which I believe has also been printed.

This is the second tomb, with the figures of Morning and Evening.

Once again we accompany Michelangelo to Rome, where he creates, once more by comman of the Pope, the Last Judgment—the altar-piece for the Sistine Chapel. The greatness of this piece lies in the characterisation, the universal significance of the characters. Consider in this picture all that is destined, as it were, for Heaven, all that is destined for Hell, and Christ in the centre, as the cosmic Judge. You will see how Michelangelo sought to harmonise this cosmic scene. Majestically as it was conceived, with an individual and human feeling. Hermann Grimm drew the head of Christ from the immediate vicinity, and it proved to be very similar to the head of the Apollo of Belvedere. We will now show some of the details.

and another detail, the group above the boat:

And now, though in time it belongs to a somewhat earlier period, we give what Michelangelo created for the monument of Pope Julius; for, in fact, this was never finished, and Michelangelo was working at it in the very latest period of his life and finished portions of it.

It is significant that Pope Julius II, whose character undoubtedly contained a certain greatness, called for this monument to be erected to his efforts. It was to have included a whole series of figures, perhaps thirty in number. It was never completed, but there remained this, the greatest figure in connection with it—Michelangelo's famous figure of Moses, of which we have often spoken,—and the two figures now following:

This was completed in the very latest period of his life. It is hard to say exhaustively how it arose. One thing is certain: the group expresses an idea which Michelangelo carried with him throughout his life. Whether there was another group which has somehow been lost, in which he treated this scene at a very early stage in his career, or whether it was the same block at which he worked again, remodelling it at the end of his life, it is hard to say. But we see it here as his last work. Not only is it the one which he completed when he was a very old man; it corresponds to an artistic idea which he carried throughout his long life, and is connected far more deeply than one imagines with the fundamental feeling of his soul. True, he could not have created it thus at every phase of his life. It would always have turned out a little differently; it would always have reproduced the basic mood of his soul in a somewhat different way. But the deep and pure Christian feeling that lives in Michelangelo comes to expression especially in this particular relationship of Christ to the Mother, in this scene of the entombment. Again and again the idea of the Mystery of Golgotha arises in the soul of Michelangelo in this way:—He feels that with the Mystery of Golgotha a deed of Heavenly Love took place, of an intensity that will hover for ever before the eyes of man as a sublime ideal, but that can never be attained by man even in the remotest degree, and must therefore inspire with a tragic mood him who beholds these World-events.

And now imagine, with this idea living in his soul, Michelangelo saw Rome becoming Jesuitical. With this idea in his soul, he underwent all the feelings of which I spoke; and whatever he saw in the world, he measured in relation to this standard. Truly, he underwent much in his long life. While he was creating his earliest artistic works in Florence, the Pope in Rome was Alexander VI, the Borgia. Then he was summoned to Rome, and painted the Creation of the World for Pope Julius. We see the dominion of the Gorgias in Rome replaced by Pope Julius, and then by the Medici, Leo X. In this connection we must realise that Pope Julius II, although he worked with poison, murder, slander, etc., was none the less in earnest about Christian Art. Pope Julius, who replaced the political Borgia princes, strove for the Papal See in order to make it great through spiritual life. Although he was a man of war, nevertheless, in his inmost soul, even as a fighter, he only thought of himself as in the service of spiritual Rome. Of Julius II we must not fail to realise that he was a man of spiritual aims, thoroughly in earnest with all that lay in his impulse to re-erect the Church of St. Peter, and, indeed, with all that he achieved for Art. He was selflessly in earnest about these things. It may sot strange to say this of a man who in carrying out his plans made use of poison, murder and the like. Yet such was the custom of the time in the circles with whose help he realised his plans. His highest ideal, none the less, was that which he desired to bring into the world through the great artists. For a spirit like Michelangelo it is, indeed, profoundly tragical to feel how a perfect good can never find its realisation in the world, but must always be realised one-sidedly. Yet, this was not all, for he lived to witness the transition to the commercial Popes, if we may call them so—those of the house of Medici, who were, in truth, far more concerned with their own ambitions, and were fundamentally different in spirit from Julius II and even from the Borgias. Certainly, these were no better men. We must, however, judge all these things in relation to the time itself. It is easy nowadays to feel Pope Alexander VI, or his son Caesar Borgia, or Julius II, as human atrocities; for today it is permitted to write of them quite independently and freely, whereas many a later phenomenon cannot yet be characterised with equal freedom: But we must also realise:—The sublime works achieved at that time are not without causal relationship with the characters of all these Popes,—indeed, many things would certainly not have come to pass if Savonarola or Luther had occupied the Papal See. And now we come to Raphael.

Here is the picture of which I spoke last time. We will bring it before our souls once more. On the left we have the same subject treated by Perugino, and on the right by Raphael. It is the Sposalizio or Marriage of the Virgin. Here you can see how Raphael grew out of the School of his teacher, Perugino, and you can recognise the great advance. At the same time, we see in the picture on the left all that is characteristic of this School on the level from which Raphael began. See the characteristic faces, their healthily—as we today call it—sentimental expression. See the peculiar postures of the feet. A certain characterisation is attempted; yet it is all enclosed in a certain aura of which I spoke before,—which appears again in Raphael, transfigured, as it were, raised into a new form and power of composition. You recognise here the growth of this power of composition, too. But if you compare the details, you will find that in Raphael it is grasped more clearly and yet at the same time it is more gentle, it is not so hard.

This whole picture is to be conceived of as a world of dream. It is generally known as the “Dream of a Knight.”

We will now let work upon us a number of Raphael's pictures of the Madonna and of the sacred legend. These—especially the Madonnas—are the works of Raphael which first carried him out into the world.

In all these pictures you still have the old, characteristic postures and attitudes which Raphael took with him from his home country.

These are the Madonnas which bear witness to the further development of Raphael. Ile follow him now into the time when he went to Rome. It is not known historically exactly when that was. Probability is that he did not simply go there in a given year,—1500 is generally assumed—but that he had been to Rome more than once and gone back again to Florence, and that from 1500 onward he worked in Rome continuously. Now, therefore, we follow him to Rome and come to those pictures which he painted there for Pope Julius.

This picture is well-known to you all, and we, too, have spoken of it in former lectures. Many preparatory sketches of it exist. In the form in which you see it here, it was done to the order of the Pope,—the Pope who craved, as I said just now, to make Rome spiritually great.

We must, however, hold fast to one point, which is revealed by the fact that some elements of the motif of this picture appear at a very early stage, even in Perugia, representing this idea, this scene, or, rather, the motif of it.

Thus the idea was already living at that early stage, and was able to take shape in this remarkable corner of East-Central Italy.

We must conceive the motif of the picture as living in the very time itself. Below are the human beings—theologians, for the most part. These theologians are well aware that everything which human reason can discover is related to what St. Thomas Aquinas called the “Praeambula Fidei,” and must be permeated by what comes down from Spiritual Worlds as real inspiration, wherein are mingled the attainments of the great Christian and pre-Christian figures of history, and by means of which alone the secret of the Trinity is to be understood. This mystery, we must conceive, bursts down into the midst of the disputations of the theologians below. We may conceive that this picture is painted out of the will to unite the Christian life quite fundamentally with Rome—to make Rome once more the center of Christianity by rebuilding the derelict Church of St. Peter, according to the desires of Pope Julius. Under the influence of the Pope, wishing to achieve a new greatness of Christianity centered in Rome, such ideas are brought together with the fundamental concept; the secret of the Trinity. This fact explains what I may call, perhaps, the outer trimmings of the picture. (Even in the architectural elements which it contains, we see designs which re-occur in St. Peter's.) It is as though this picture were to proclaim: Now once again the secret of the Trinity shall be taught to the whole world by Rome. There are many preliminary sketches showing not only that Raphael only by and by achieved the final composition, but that this whole way of thinking about the inspiration, the Idea of the Trinity had been living in him for a long time. It was certainly not the case that the Pope said: “Paint me such and such a picture.” He rather said, “Tell me of the idea that has been living in you for so long,” and thus together, so to speak, they arrived at the conception which we now see on the wall of the Segnatura.

Now we come to the picture which, as you know, is commonly named the School of Athens, chiefly because the two central figures are supposed to be Plato and Aristotle. The one thing certain is that they are not. I will not dwell on other views that have been put forward. I have spoken of this picture, too, on previous occasions. But they are certainly not Plato and Aristotle. True, we may recognise in these figures many an ancient philosopher, but that is not the point of the picture. The real point is, that in contrast to what is called “Inspiration” Raphael also wished to portray what man receives through his intelligence when he directs it to the supersensible and applies it to investigate the causes of things. The various attitudes which man can then assume are expressed in the several figures. No doubt Raphael introduced the traditional figures of ancient philosophers, as, indeed, he always tried to make use of this or that tradition. But that is not his real point; the point was to contrast the supersensible Inspiration, the descent of the super-sensible as an inspiration to man, on the one hand; and on the other hand the attainment of a knowledge of the world of causes through the intelligence of man directed to the Supersensible. In this sense, the two central figures are to be understood as follows: On the one hand we have a man still in the younger years of life, a man with less experience of life, who speaks more as a man who looks around him on the Earth, there to perceive the causes of things. Beside him is the old, old. man who has assimilated very much in life, and knows how to apply what he has seen on Earth to heavenly things. And then there are the other figures who, partly by meditation, partly by arithmetical, geometrical or other exercises, or by the study and interpretation of the Gospels and the sacred writings, seek to discover the causes of things by applying their human intellect. I have already spoken of these things and I believe that Lecture, too, has been made accessible. I think if we take the contrast of the two pictures in this way, we shall not be misled into nonsensical speculations as to whether this one is Pythagoras or the other Plato or Aristotle—which speculations are at all events beside the mark and inartistic. Much ingenuity has been applied in deciphering the several figures: Nothing could be more superfluous in relation to these pictures. Rather should we study to observe the wonderful varieties expressed in the search for all that is attainable by the intelligence of man.

You may also compare the two pictures. In this present picture the whole thing is placed in an architectural setting, whereas in the other, the “Disputa,” the wide World is the setting. It is the difference between Inspiration whose house is the great universal edifice and the quest of the human intelligence which, as you see it here, goes on in an enclosed and human space.

We come to what is attainable in the human sphere, without the latter being influenced out of the supersensible.

This is like a commentary to the Disputa—the knowledge of the Divine Mysteries represented in a more allegorical figure, and leading on to the Disputa.

Here we have a picture taken from the whole complex which Raphael did for Pope Julius II in order to inspire the idea that Christianity must gain the victory and all that resists it must be overcome.

This is only another aspect of the same idea.

Also belonging to the same group.

Raphael's Sibyls. If you remember those of Michelangelo, you will observe the immense difference. In the Sibyls of Raphael—I beg you to see it for yourselves—human figures are portrayed, to represent beings standing within the cosmos,—Beings into whom the whole cosmos is working. They themselves are dreaming, as it were, within the cosmos as a very part of it and have not fully come to consciousness. The various supersensible Beings, angelic figures between them, bring them the secrets of the worlds. Thus they are dreamy Beings, living within the universal nexus. Michelangelo, on the other hand, portrays the human and individual in all that his Sibyls are dreaming, or evolving out of their dream-consciousness. Michelangelo has to create out of the individual, nay, we may even say, the personal character of each one. These Sibyls of Raphael, on the other hand, live and move and have their being over and above the individual. Even inasmuch as they are individual, they live and move in a cosmic life.

In this room we have the picture of the Transfiguration. (No picture of room available)

Here is the picture itself. It is even possible that Raphael himself did not complete it, but left it unfinished at his death. Christ is soaring heavenward.

To those who say that Raphael in his latest period painted visionary pictures, we need only reply by pointing to this figure (the figure of the boy). It is portrayed in a perfectly real, Occultly realistic sense, how the figure makes it possible for the scene to become visible to the others. Through what I would call the mediumistic nature of the unconsciousness of madness, this figure influences the others, enabling them to behold such a thing as this.

Here we have the figure of the Christ.

And now, my dear friends, think of all that Raphael had painted. All that has passed before you was contained between his twenty-first and his thirty-seventh year, in which he died. In his twenty-first year he painted the first picture which we showed—the Marriage of the Virgin—contrasting it with Perugino's painting. Hermann Grimm worked out in a beautiful way something that bears eloquent witness to Raphael's free and independent evolution, proving even outwardly to some extent what I just said before. Raphael, although he was carried on the waves of time, and learnt, of course, very much from the world, nevertheless took with him into Rome the peculiar nature of that Middle-Eastern part of Italy. In spite of his youth, he created out of his own inmost nature and progressed undisturbed, with perfect regularity in his evolution. Hermann Grimm pointed out that we come to the chief culminating points in Raphael's creative work if, starting from his twenty-first year, we go forward in successive periods of four years. From his twenty-first year we have his Sposalizio; four years later the Entombment, which we have not shown today—an exceedingly characteristic picture, which, especially when we take into account the related sketches and everything connected with it, expresses a certain climax in the work of Raphael. And then, once more, four years later, we have a climax of creative work in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. Progressing thus by stages of four years, we see how Raphael undergoes his evolution. He stands there in the world with absolute individuality, obeying an impulse connected only with his incarnation, which impulse he steadily unfolds and places into the world something that takes its course with perfect regularity, like the evolution of mankind.

And now consider these three figures all together,—standing out as a summit in the life of Art, in the evolution of mankind. It lies in the deep tragedy of human evolution that this supreme attainment is connected with a succession of Popes—Alexander VI, Borgia, Julius II, Leo X,—men who occupy the first position as regards their artistic aims and who were called upon to play their part in human evolution as rulers in high places. And yet they were of such a character as to take with them into these high places the worst extremes which even that age could nroduce by way of murder, misrepresentation, cruelty and poison. And yet, undoubtedly—down to the Medici, who always retained their mercantile spirit,—they were sincere and in earnest where Art was concerned. Julius II was an extraordinary man, inclined to every kind of cruelty, never scrupling to use misrepresentation and even poison as though it were, in a world-historic sense, the best of homely remedies. Yet it was rightly said of this man that he never made a promise that he did not keep. And to the artists, above all, he kept his promise to a high degree; nor did he ever bind or fetter them, so long as they were able to render him the services which he desired, in the work which he intended.

Consider, alongside of this succession of Popes, the great men who created these works—the three great characters who have passed before our souls today. Think how in the one, in Leonardo, there lived much that has not yet been developed further, even today. Think how there lived in Michelangelo the whole great tragedy of his own time, and of his fatherland, both in the narrower and in the wider sense. Think how there lived in Raphael the power to transcend his Age. For while he was most intensely receptive to all the world around that carried him as on the waves of time, nevertheless, he was a self-contained nature. Consider, moreover, how neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo could carry into their time that which could work upon it fully. Michelangelo wrestled to bring forth, to express out of the human individuality itself all that was contained in his time; and yet, after all, he never created anything which the age was fully able to receive. Still less could Leonardo do so, for Leonardo bore within his soul far greater things than his Age could realise. And as to Raphael—he unfolded a human nature which remained for ever young. He was predestined, as it were, by providential guidance to evolve such youthfulness with an intensity which could never grow old. For, in effect, the time itself, into which all that came forth from his inner impulses was born, first had to grow young. Only now there comes the time when men will begin to understand less and less of Raphael. For the time has grown older than that which Raphael could give to it.

In conclusion, we will show a few of Raphael's portraits.

These, then, are the two Popes who were his patrons.

We have come to the end of our pictures.

In the near future, following on the tree great masters of the Renaissance, we shall speak of Holbein, Durer, and the other masters—the parallel phenomena of these developments in Southern Europe.

Today I wanted especially to bring before our souls these three masters of the Renaissance. I have tried to describe a little of what was living in them, and of their stimulus if, starting from any point of their work, you dwell on the historic factors which influenced and entered into them. You will perceive the necessary tragedy of human history, which has to live itself out in one-sidedness. We can learn much for our judgment of all historic things, if we study how the world-historic process played into that Florentine Age whose greatness is identified with Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Today especially I fancy no one will regret the time he spends in dwelling on a historic moment like the year 1505, when Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were at the same time in Florence—Raphael still as a younger man, learning from the others; and the other two vying with one another, painting battle-pieces, glorifying the deeds that belonged to political history. Especially at the present moment, anyone who has vision for the facts of history in all its domains, and sees the significance of outward political events for the spiritual life, will profit greatly by the study of that time. Consider what was working then:—how the artistic life sought and found its place in the midst of the outer events, and how through these artistic and external events of the time, the greatest impulses of human evolution found their way. See how intimately there were interwoven human brutality and high-mindedness, human tyranny and striving towards freedom. If you let these things work upon you from whatever aspect, you will not regret the loss of time, for you will learn a great deal even for your judgment of this present moment. Above all, you will have cause to rid yourself of the belief that the greatest words necessarily signify that the greatest ideas are behind them, or that those who in our days are speaking most of freedom have any understanding at all of what freedom is. In other directions, too, much can be gained for the sharpening of our judgment in this present time, by studying the events which took place in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century, while under the immediate impression of Savonarola who had just been put to death. We see that Florence in the midst of Italy, at a time when Christianity had assumed a form whereby it slid over on the one hand into the realm of Art, while on the other hand the moral feelings of mankind made vigorous protest against it, was a form fundamentally different from that of Jesuitism which found its way into the political and religious stream immediately afterwards, and played so great a part in the politics of the succeeding centuries down to our day.

Of course, it is not proper at this moment to say any more about these things. Perhaps, however, some of you will guess for yourselves, if you dwell upon the chapter of human evolution whose artistic expression we have today let work upon our