The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The day before yesterday I spoke to you about the fact that we, as members of the human race, live in a sphere which we may designate as the fourth sphere of evolution. We know that the Earth evolution has gradually developed out of the Saturn evolution; the Saturn evolution was followed by the Sun evolution, this in turn by the Moon evolution, out of which, finally came the Earth evolution. If we keep in mind these four sequential formations of the earth planet to which, of course, mankind as such belongs, we must only consider man in so far as he is a head-being. In doing so we must realize that the designation “the head of man” is the symbolic expression of everything that belongs to human sense perception, to human intelligence, of all that in turn flows over into social life through human sense perception, as an intelligent being, must be included in this symbolic expression. Thus, if I say: “man as a head-being,” this is spoken symbolically and refers to everything I have just mentioned.

We speak lightly of the fact that we, as physical human beings, live in the surrounding atmosphere. We must realize that this atmosphere belongs to us. For, is it not true that the air which is now within us was a short time ago outside us? We are not thinkable as human beings outside this atmosphere. But we have become accustomed to believe that men of earlier periods spoke about subjects like the air in the way modern mankind speaks about them. This, however, was not the case. We find it queer if we say that just as we walk in the air so we walk in a sphere which contains the conditions for our existence as sense-beings, intelligent beings, in short, that we possess all that can be symbolically expressed, as has been stated, by virtue of our existence as head-beings. Now, I have told you that this is only one of the spheres in which we exist, for we live in various spheres. Let us now progress in our considerations to a sphere of practical import for mankind and focus our attention upon the fourth sphere in which we now live by virtue of three evolutionary states having preceded our Earth. Let this be characterized by this circular plane (Dr. Steiner makes a drawing on the blackboard) in which we live as in our fourth sphere of evolution. Besides this, we live in yet another sphere of evolution through the fact that this other evolutionary sphere belongs to the spiritual beings that are our creators, just as this fourth sphere belongs to us. If we disregard the human being for a moment and consider those beings which we always have called, in the order of the hierarchies standing above us, the Spirits of Form, the Creative Form Beings, then we shall have to say that we, as human beings, shall only reach the sphere which we ascribe to our Divine Creator Beings when the Earth has passed through three further stages of evolution, which you will find designated in my Occult Science [Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, an Outline, Anthroposophic Press, New York] as Jupiter stage, Venus stage and Vulcan stage, and shall have reached the eighth stage. Thus these Creative Spirits are at the stage which we human beings shall have reached after the Vulcan evolution. This is their sphere which belongs to them just as the fourth sphere belongs to us. But we must think of these spheres as being inserted into one another, as interpenetrating one another. Thus, is I designate the sphere of which I have just spoken as the eighth sphere, we do not live only in the fourth but also in this eighth sphere through the fact that our Divine Creators live in this sphere together with us.

If we now hold this eighth sphere in view, we find living there not only our Divine Creator Spirits, but also the Ahrimanic beings. Thus by living in the surroundings of the eighth sphere we live together with the Ahrimanic beings. In the fourth sphere, the Luciferic beings live together with us. This is the situation concerning the distribution of these spiritual beings. We are able to go into details regarding these things only if we know how we ourselves are related to the corresponding surroundings of this sphere.

Thus, it is revealed to the perception of initiation science that we are perceiving and intelligent beings by virtue of our living in the fourth sphere of our evolution. But we must never forget that the Luciferic power influenced this intelligence in which we must always include sense perceptions. This Luciferic power is intimately connected with the special kind of intelligence which the human being today considers his very own and which he prefers to employ. Yet, man was endowed with this intelligence only through the fact that the higher being of whom I have spoken to you as the Michael-being has cast the Luciferic beings down into the sphere of men, into the fourth sphere of men. Through this the impulse of intelligence arose in human beings.

You can feel what this impulse of intelligence signifies in mankind if you direct your attention to the impersonal element of present-day human intelligence. You know that we human beings have many personal interests, and we are individualized in regard to them. But his individualization comes to a halt before intelligence. As far as intelligence and logic are concerned, all human beings possess the same; we count upon this common possession. We would not have this common possession if the Luciferic influence, mediated by Michael, had not been exerted upon mankind.

We comprehend one another in this simple fashion only by virtue of our having this common intelligence which originates in the Luciferic spirituality. This Luciferic spirituality arose through Michael's having permeated and influenced human beings with the being of Lucifer. These Luciferic influences developed further in human historic evolution. Alongside of them, much else has been developed in the human being. But today this Luciferic spirituality which we call our intelligence is still considered by many people the most distinguished faculty of man.

You must, in order to come to greater clarity in this matter, direct your soul gaze upon something else which may bring human beings together over the whole earth once it has spread. This is the Christ impulse. But the Christ impulse is something different from the intelligence impulse. The intelligence impulse is of coercive nature. You cannot make the intelligence of mankind your personal affair. You cannot suddenly resolve to decide in a personal way what has to be decided by intelligence without appearing insane within social life relationships. Yet, on the other hand, you cannot gain any relation to the Christ impulse other than a personal one. Nobody can interfere with another person's way of relating himself to the Christ. This is an entirely personal matter. But through the fact that the Christ has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha and has united Himself with the Earth evolution the situation has become such that, regardless of how many human beings, independently from one another, make the Christ impulse their personal affair: the Christ impulse, through its very nature, will become the same for everyone. That means, human beings are brought together through something which every one of them makes his own affair, not coercively as in the case of intelligence, but through the fact that precisely through the Christ impulse itself the relationship of every human being to the Christ forms itself in such a way—if it forms itself rightly—that it is the same in every human being. This, you see, is the difference between the intelligence impulse and the Christ impulse. The Christ impulse may be the same for all mankind and yet is a personal matter for every individual human being. Intelligence is not a personal affair.

Now, what was the situation into which the Christ impulse entered? We can answer this from indications which I have already given. We know that the evolution of the head is retrogressive. In regard to his head the human being finds himself in a process of dying. We may thus point to the following cosmic fact: Michael has pushed the Luciferic hosts down into the realm of mankind; they took up their abode in the human head, but in the human head in its state of gradual dying.

These Luciferic beings began to fight against this dying of the human head. And here we touch a well-known secret of human nature, a secret known in the most varied forms, but which is almost completely concealed from modern man. In regard to this divine evolution, man carries in his head a continual death process; but paralleling this continual process of dying is a kindling of life on the part of Lucifer. It is Lucifer's constant endeavor to make our head as living as is the rest of our organism. Seen from the organic aspect, Lucifer would turn mankind away from its divine direction, were he to succeed in making the human head as living as is the rest of the organism.

This is precisely what the divine direction of human evolution has to turn against. Man must remain united with Earth evolution so that he may continue on through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolution. If Lucifer were to reach his goal, man would not continue on his destined path; on the contrary, he would be made part of a cosmos which is intelligent through and through.

Physiologically speaking, it is Lucifer's constant endeavor to send the life forces out of the rest of our organism into our head. Psychically speaking, Lucifer is constantly endeavoring to give to the content of our intelligence which merely comprises thoughts and images the character of substance. What I have stated above from the physical point of view I now state from the point of view of the soul when I say that Lucifer has the constant tendency to give a real substantial content to that which we form as an image in our spirit—anything of an artistic form, for instance; that is, he has the tendency to permeate our thought contents with ordinary earthly reality. If he were to succeed he would bring it about that we as human beings would forsake reality and fly over into a thought reality which would be reality and not mere thoughts. This tendency of letting our fantasies become realities is connected with our human nature, and the greatest efforts imaginable are made to turn our human fantasies into realities.

Now, everything that exists in mankind as causes of internal diseases is connected with this Luciferic tendency. To see through the work of Lucifer in regard to the driving of the vital forces into the dying forces of the human head means, in truth, to be able to diagnose all internal diseases. Scientific-medical development must strive to build its knowledge upon this Luciferic element. To give this impulse belongs to the tendencies of the Michael influence entering our human evolution.

The Ahrimanic influence is the reverse of the Luciferic tendency. It makes itself felt from the eighth sphere out of which the rest of our organism, exclusive of the head, is fashioned; this organism is full of vitality through its very nature. Into these forces of vitality the Ahrimanic powers endeavor to send the forces of death which properly, in the divine process of evolution, belong to the head. Thus, out of the eighth sphere the forces of death come to us through Ahriman as intermediary. This, again, is spoken of from the physical aspect.

Speaking from the soul aspect, I would have to say: everything that sends its influence into us out of the eighth sphere acts upon the human will, not upon intelligence. Wish, desire underlie human willing; all willing contains a certain amount of desire. It is Ahriman's constant endeavor to insert the personal element into the desire-nature which underlies the willing; and through the fact that the personal element is concealed in our desire-nature, our human soul-will activity bears the imprint of our gradual approaching the moment of death. Instead of permitting ourselves to be permeated by divine ideals and letting them enter our desires and thus our will, the personal element is introduced into our wishing, into our willing.

Thus we are actually in a state of equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic element. The Luciferic-Ahrimanic element delivers us to illness and death in the physical; in the soul sphere it develops deception in so far as we consider something a reality which merely belongs to the world of thought, of fantasy. In regard to the spiritual sphere, the desire of egotism penetrates into our human nature on this path.

Thus we see this duality—Lucifer-Ahriman—connected with human nature, and I have shown you by Milton's Paradise Lost, by Klopstock's Messiah, and by Goethe's Faust how modern civilized mankind deceives itself, can deceive itself, in regard to this duality. Now we have to keep in mind that mankind in its development has passed beyond the middle point of Earth evolution. Mankind's evolution was, in the first place, an ascending one; then it reached its climax and is now on the descending path. For certain reasons which we need not discuss today there was a state of balance in the Greco-Latin period up to the fifteenth century. Since that time, however, earth humanity's evolution is on the descending path. Physical Earth evolution has entered the descending path at a much earlier period; already at the time which preceded our last ice age; that is, prior to the Atlantean catastrophe, Earth evolution began to descend in a physical respect. This is a fact which anthroposophists need not announce to the world; for it is already known to geology, as I have frequently mentioned, that as we walk over the earth in numerous regions we walk already over the earth crust in the state of decline. You need only read the descriptions of Earth evolution in good geology books of our day and you will find that physical science has come to the conclusion that the earth is on the descending stage of its evolution. But we human beings, too, are on the descending stage of evolution. We must not expect that any upward trend will arise in our bodily development. We must take hold of the upward trend by looking upon that which leads the human being beyond the Earth evolution to its subsequent evolutionary forms. We must learn to look upon the human being of the future. This means to think in the sense of Michael, to have Michaelic thoughts.

I will characterize more precisely what it means to think in the sense of Michael, to think Michaelically. You see, my dear friends, if you confront your fellow-man today, you actually confront him with a completely materialistic consciousness. You say to yourselves, even though you do not say it aloud nor even in thought, but you say to yourselves in the more intimate recesses of your consciousness: This is a man of flesh and blood; this is a man of earth substances. You say the same in the case of the animal, the same in the case of the plant. But what you thus say to yourselves when confronting man, animal and plant, you are justified in saying only in regard to the mineral nature. Let us deal at once with the most extreme case, with man. Let us consider man in regard to his external form. That which constitutes his external shape you do not really see, you do not confront it at all with your physical capacity of observation, for it is filled with more than ninety percent of fluid, of water. That which fills the form as mineral substance is what you see with your physical eyes. That which man unites with himself of this outer mineral world is what you see; the human being who does the uniting you do not see. You speak correctly only if you say to yourself: What confronts me here are the particles of matter which the human spirit shape stores up in itself; this makes the invisible being which stands here before me visible. You all as you are sitting here are invisible to physical senses. A certain number of shapes are sitting here; they have, through a certain inner power of attraction collected particles of matter. These particles of matter are what we see; we merely see the mineral. The real human beings that are sitting here are invisible, are super-sensible. To say this to oneself with full consciousness at every moment of waking life constitutes the Michaelic mode of thinking; to cease conceiving of the human being as a conglomerate of mineral particles which he but arranges in a certain way, as is also assumed of animals and plants and from which only the minerals are excepted, and to become conscious of the fact that we walk among invisible human beings—this means to think Michaelically.

We speak of Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings, we speak of the beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so forth. These are invisible beings. We learn to know them by their effects. We have discussed many of these effects, even during the last few days. We learn to know these beings by their deeds. Well, is the matter different with the human being? We learn to know the human being—who is invisible—here in the physical world through the fact that he arranges mineral particles in a human-like shape. But this is only an activity of the human being, an effect of his nature. The fact that we have to become clear about the effects of Ahriman and Lucifer, of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so forth, in another way means simply that we have to learn to know them in a different manner. But in regard to the super-sensible character of these beings there is no difference between them and human beings if we employ reason in our thinking about the being of man.

To comprehend that we are not different in our essential being from the super-sensible beings means to think in the spirit of Michael. Mankind was able to get along without this insight as long as it still received something from the mineral world. But since the mineral world is in a declining evolution, the human being must gradually acquire a spiritual conception of himself and the world. Since the seventies of the nineteenth century he is able, in growing measure, to find the inner strength to develop the consciousness that man is not a well-ordered conglomeration of particles of matter but that he is a super-sensible being, and that these particles of matter are only a gesture of the external mineral world, indicating: here is a human being. Only because of the Ahrimanic influences which I have characterized in a recent lecture [Lecture of November 15, 1919, Dornach] does the human being fend off this inner consciousness, does he try to avoid it. One thing is connected with another in human life. And just as we labor under the delusion that man is a sensuous and not a super-sensible being, so do we labor under other delusions. We speak of evolution and imagine that one thing proceeds from the other in a continuous progressive development. You know that it was not possible to follow such a thought in depicting evolution artistically in our Building. [See Rudolf Steiner, Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum, with 104 photographs of the first Goetheanum.] When I developed the forms for the capitals, I had to show the first, second, and third capital in an ascending evolution, the fourth stood in the middle, the fifth began the declining evolution, the sixth was still simpler, the seventh the most simple. I had to add to the ascending evolution the declining evolution.

Our head is in this declining evolution, whereas the rest of our organism is still in the ascending evolution. If we believe that evolution signifies a continuous ascent we forsake true reality. We then hold the view of Haeckel who, under the influence of a certain delusion, maintained that there are, first, simple beings, as evolution progresses, more and more complicated beings, more and more perfect beings, and so on and on, ad infinitum. This is nonsense. Every evolution that progresses also turns back and retrogresses. Every ascent is followed by a descent; every ascent bears in itself the germ for the descent. It belongs among the most insidious deceptions of modern mankind that it is unaware of the connection between evolution and devolution, between progressive development and retrogressive development. For from every ascending evolution there must result the disposition for retrogressive evolution. At the moment when progressive evolution begins to become retrogressive, the physical passes over into the spiritual evolution. For as soon as the physical begins to become retrogressive, there is room for spiritual development. In our head there is room for spiritual development because physical development is on the retrogressive path. Only when we are in the position to see these things in the right light, that is, only when we see the connection of our intelligence with the Luciferic development shall we really understand the being of man and thereby the world. For then we shall evaluate these things correctly and shall know that our intelligence needs a new impulse if it is to lead man to his goal. Through the Christ principle Lucifer must be prevented from making the human being desert his predestined divine course.

I said before: One thing is connected with the other. Human beings are today under the influence of the same delusion which attributed to the divine powers certain Luciferic qualities. The same delusion creates today the inclination in human beings to see an ideal in the one-sided representation, of the beautiful, for instance. To be sure, it is possible to represent the beautiful as such. But we must be conscious of the fact that were we as human beings merely to surrender ourselves to the beautiful, we would cultivate those forces in us which lead into Luciferic channels. Just as there is no one-sided progressive evolution in the real world, but evolution is followed by devolution, so likewise there exists no one-sided beauty in the real world. The merely beautiful used by Lucifer in order to fascinate and blind human beings would set human beings free of Earth evolution; it would sever their connection with it. Just as there is an interplay of evolution and devolution, so we have in reality to do with an interplay of beauty and ugliness; in truth, there is a hard battle between beauty and ugliness. And if we wish really to take hold of art we must never forget that the ultimate in art in the world is the interplay of the beautiful and the ugly, the presentation of the battle of the beautiful with the ugly. For only by looking upon the state of equilibrium between the beautiful and the ugly do we stand within reality; then we do not exist within a one-sided Luciferic or Ahrimanic reality not belonging to us, into which, however, Lucifer and Ahriman strive to place us. It is very necessary that such ideas as I have just put forward enter human cultural evolution. You know that I have often spoken to you with great enthusiasm about Greek culture, yet in ancient Greece it was still possible to devote oneself one-sidedly to the cultivation of beauty, for mankind at that time had not yet been taken hold of by the decline of Earth evolution, at least not the Greeks. Since that time, however, man must not any longer indulge in the cultivation of the merely beautiful. This would be a flight from reality. He must, boldly and courageously, confront the real battle between beauty and ugliness. He must be able to feel, and experience the dissonances in their battle with the consonances of the world.

This will bring strength into mankind's evolution, and from this strength will spring the possibility of attaining that inner condition of consciousness which lifts us above the delusion that the human being consists in his true essence of heaped-up matter, of mineral particles of substance which he has drawn together into himself. Even from the physical aspect it can be said today that man does not bear in his being the signature of mineral nature, of external physical nature. The outer mineral is heavy. But that which gives us, for instance, the possibility of developing the soul element—I do not refer here to intelligence—that which makes us capable of developing soul qualities is not bound to gravity but to its opposite, to what is called the levity of fluids. I have on other occasions described to you how our brain swims in the cerebral fluid. If this were not so, the blood corpuscles contained in it would be crushed. You know from your lessons in physics that Archimedes, sitting in his bath, discovered that he became lighter, and he was so pleased about this that he called out his famous “Eureka!” In regard to our soul, we do not live by being pulled downward, but by being pulled upward. Not by our brain being heavy, but by our brain being lighter through its swimming in the cerebral fluid do we live physically. We live by means of what draws us away from the earth. This may be stated today even from the physical aspect.

However, what I wanted to point out to you in the present lectures was and is that, confronting modern life, we need a condition of soul which really, at every moment of day-waking life, is conscious of the super-sensible in the immediate surroundings, and which does not surrender to the delusion that the human being is real because he can be seen, and the spirits are not real because they cannot be seen. For the truth is that we do not see the human beings either. This is precisely the delusion that we believe we see the human beings. We do not differ at all from the beings of the higher hierarchies. To learn to grasp the similarity between the beings of the higher hierarchies and ourselves, and even the animals and plants, is the task put to modern mankind.

We say that through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ impulse has entered Earth evolution, has entered mankind's evolution, to begin with, and is henceforth united with it. People say: We do not see it. Indeed, they will not see it as long as they deceive themselves about man himself, as long as they consider man to be something quite different from what he really is. The moment this is no longer a theory but a vividly felt reality of the soul which enables us to see in man a super-sensible being, we cultivate within us the faculty of perceiving the Christ impulse in our midst, everywhere, and of being able to say with full conviction: do not seek for Him in external manifestation; He is among you everywhere. But mankind would have to develop the belief, modestly and humbly, that it takes a great effort to cultivate the consciousness which, right from the outset, sees in man a super-sensible being. For if we do this only in theory it is of no avail. Only if we really do not believe that what confronts us physically is the real human being, only if we feel this to be an absurdity, have we acquired the state of soul I am referring to.

My dear friends, if you were to go to our building lot outside and collect all kinds of scrap that is lying about there and through clever handling of it were able to hold it in front of you in such a way that a person who met you could not see you but only the scraps of wood or brick—you would not maintain that these scraps of brick and wood are the human being. But the matter is in no way different in regard to the mineral substances with which you confront your fellow-men, arranged in a certain way. Yet you say: these mineral substances—since your physical eyes see them—are the human being! In truth they are only the gesture which points to the real human being.

If we look back into pre-Christian times we shall find that God's Messenger came down to earth, visibly, as it were, revealing and making himself understood to the human being. The greatest Messenger of God Who came down to the earth, the Christ, was at the same time the One Who was able to reveal Himself in the greatest earth event as the last one of those who could reveal themselves without the human beings' assistance. Now we live in the age of the Michael Revelation. It exists like the other revelations. But it does not force itself upon the human being because man has entered his evolution of freedom. We must go out to meet the revelation of Michael, we must prepare ourselves so that he sends into us the strongest forces and we become conscious of the super-sensible in the immediate surroundings of the earth. Do not fail to recognize what this Michael revelation would signify for men of the present and the future if men were to approach it in freedom. Do not fail to recognize that men of today strive for a solution of the social question out of the remnants of ancient states of consciousness.

All the problems that could be solved out of the ancient states of human consciousness have been solved. The earth is on the descending stage of its evolution. The demands which arise today cannot be solved with the thinking of the past. They can only be solved by a mankind with a new soul constitution. It is our task so to direct our activity that it may assist the rise of this new soul constitution in mankind. The fact that human beings cannot free themselves from the concepts which have been fostered for millennia oppresses our souls like a terrible nightmare. We see today how the results of these age-old concepts which are divested of all content and are nothing more than mere word hulls run their course almost automatically. Everywhere there is talk about human ideals. But these ideals have not real content, they are merely sounding words, for mankind needs a new soul constitution. Once upon a time the call resounded to mankind which, translated into our language, says: “Change your thinking, for the time is at hand!” At that time, however, human beings were still able to change their thinking out of their old soul constitution. Now this possibility has ceased; if what at that time was begun will have to be fulfilled today, it must be fulfilled out of a new soul constitution. Michael transmitted to human beings the Yahve-tradition, the Yahve-influence. Since the end of the seventies of last century he is engaged—if we but go to meet him—in transmitting the comprehension of the Christ-Impulse in the true sense of the word. But we must go to meet him. And we do come to meet him if we fulfill two conditions.

In regard to our own soul constitution we can say to ourselves: We have to overcome a certain error. I do not wish to burden you unduly with narrow abstractions and philosophical world conceptions, but I have to draw your attention to such a symptom of modern human evolution as the philosopher Cartesius (Descartes) who lived at the dawn of the modern age. He still knew something of the spiritual which plays through the dying nervous system of man. But he made at the same time the statement: “I think, therefore I am.” That is the opposite of the truth. When we think we are not; for in thinking we have merely the image of reality. Thinking would be of no consequence for us if we would exist within reality with our thinking, if thinking were not merely an image. We must become conscious of the mirror-character of our world of mental images, of our world of thoughts. The moment we become conscious of this mirror character we shall appeal to a different source of reality within us. Of this, Michael wills to speak to us. That means, we must try to recognize our thought world in the mirror-character; then we shall work against the Luciferic evolution. For the latter is greatly interested in pouring substance into our thinking, in trying to delude us with the erroneous belief that thinking is permeated by substance. Thinking contains no substance, but merely image. We shall take substance out of other and deeper levels of our consciousness. That is the one condition. We only need to be conscious that our thoughts make us weak, then we shall appeal to the strength of Michael; for he is to be the spirit who points us to that which is stronger in us than thought, whereas we have learned through modern civilization chiefly to look upon thought, and by doing so have become weak human beings because we have considered thought itself to be something real. We may imagine that we are turning ever so far away from mere abstract intelligence, but this is an illusion; for as modern human beings we are in the bondage of intelligence and do not send out of the deeper levels of our being into thoughts themselves that which ought to be in them.

The second condition is that we introduce into our wishes, and thus into our will, that which results from a reality which we must recognize as super-sensible. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha in its super-sensible character has not been taken absolutely seriously has had dire consequences. I have often mentioned it here. I have, for instance, drawn your attention to the views of the liberal theologian, Adolf Harnack. There are many such liberal theologians who openly confess: through historical documents there cannot be found any proof of the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Indeed, my dear friends, it is impossible to prove historically the existence of the Christ Jesus in the same way it is possible to prove the existence of Caesar or that of Napoleon. Why? Because in the Mystery of Golgotha an event was to be placed before mankind to which it should have only super-sensible access. It was not to have access to it through the senses. In order that mankind might learn, precisely through the Mystery of Golgotha, to raise itself to the super-sensible, there was not to be any external, sensible, historical proof.

We have thus indicated two things toward which we must strive. First, to recognize the super-sensible in the immediate sense world, that is, in the world of man, animal, and plant: this is the Michael path. And its continuation is to find in the world which we ourselves recognize as super-sensible, the Christ impulse.

In describing this to you, I am describing to you at the same time the deepest impulses of the social question. For the abstract League of Nations will not solve the international problem. Such abstractions do not bring the people together all over the earth. But the spirits who lead the human beings into the super-sensible, and of whom we have spoken during these days, will bring people together.

Externally, mankind approaches today serious battles. In regard to these serious battles which are only at their beginning—I have often mentioned it here—and which will lead the old impulses of Earth evolution ad absurdum, there are no political, economical, or spiritual remedies to be taken from the pharmacy of past historical evolution. For from these past times come the elements of fermentation which first, have brought Europe to the brink of the abyss, which will array Asia and America against each other, and which are preparing a battle over the whole earth. This leading ad absurdum of human evolution can be counteracted alone by that which leads men on the path toward the spiritual: the Michael path which finds its continuation in the Christ Path.

IN PURSUANCE of the considerations I placed before you in the lectures of last week I should like today to prepare the ground for what I shall develop in detail tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It will be a matter of calling back to your memory, in a way different from the one heretofore employed, of much that we shall need in order to pursue our present theme.

If we try to make clear to ourselves the way in which Earth evolution unfolded we can do so best by considering and arranging the various events in relation to the central point of Earth evolution; for through such an arrangement we arrive at a certain structure in man's own evolution. This central point, this center of gravity is, as you know, the Mystery of Golgotha through which the whole Earth evolution received its meaning, its true inner content.

If we go back in the evolution of occidental humanity which received the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha from the orient, we must say: approximately in the fifth century before the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha there begins, out of Greek culture, a kind of preparation for this Mystery of Golgotha. This uniform trend is introduced through the figure of Socrates, finds its continuation in Greek culture in its entirety—also in art the same trend is discernible—it is continued by the mighty and outstanding personality of Plato and receives a more scholarly character, as it were, in Aristotle.

You know from various lectures I delivered before you that the Middle Ages, mainly in the time after St. Augustine, were especially bent on using the guidance that could be gained from the Aristotelian mode of thinking in order to comprehend what prepared the Mystery of Golgotha and what followed it. Greek thinking became of such great importance precisely for the Christian evolution of the occident up to the end of the Middle Ages through the fact that it was used for the comprehension of the real nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is well that we should realize what it was that took place in Greece during these last centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What took place in the thinking, feeling and willing of the Greek was the last echo of a primeval culture of mankind no longer appreciated today. Historical considerations can no longer see these things in their proper light, for our historical considerations do not reach back to those times in which a Mystery culture that extended over the civilized earth of that age permeated all human willing and feeling. We must go back into those millennia into which history does not reach, we must go back with the methods which you find indicated in my book, Occult Science, an Outline, (Anthroposophic Press, New York) in order to see what was the nature of this human primeval culture. It had its origin in the ancient Mysteries into which those human beings who were found to be objectively suited for direct initiation were admitted by great leading personalities. The knowledge which was thus imparted to those initiates in the Mysteries flowed, through them, out to other human beings. One cannot understand ancient culture in its entirety if one does not focus one's attention upon the maternal soil of the Mysteries. If one is willing to do so, this maternal soil of the Mysteries can be clearly discerned in the works of Aeschylos. It can be sensed in Plato's philosophy. But the revelations concerning the Divine which mankind received from the Mysteries have been lost historically. Only in the most primitive fashion are they still contained in that which has become historically demonstrable culture. We can best judge what has happened here if we make clear to ourselves what it is that has remained, in the post-Socratean age of Greek civilization, of the primeval Mystery culture in which Greek civilization was rooted. What has remained is a certain mode of thinking, a certain way of visualizing.

As you know, outer history relates how Socrates founded dialectics, how he was the great teacher of thinking, of that thinking which, later on, Aristotle developed in a more scientific way. But this Greek mode of thinking is only the last echo of the Mystery culture, for this culture of the Mysteries was rich in content. Spiritual facts which are the fundamental causes for our cosmic order were adopted into man's entire view of things. These sublime and mighty contents were gradually lost. But the way of thinking developed by the Mystery pupils has remained and has become historical, first, in Greek thinking, then, again, in Medieval thinking, in the thinking of the Christian theologians who acquired this Greek thinking in order to grasp with the thought forms, with the ideas and concepts which were a continuation of Greek thinking, that which has flowed into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. Medieval philosophy, so-called scholasticism, is a confluence of the spiritual truths of the Mystery of Golgotha and Greek thinking. The elaboration, the thought-penetration of the Mystery of Golgotha has been carried out—if I may use the trivial expression—with the tool of Greek thinking, of Greek dialectics. Up to the Mystery of Golgotha, about four and one half centuries elapsed from the time when the content of the Mysteries was lost and the merely formal element, the mere thought element of the ancient Mysteries was retained. We may say, approximately, four and one half centuries. Thus we have to visualize the following: In a pre-historical age, the culture of the Mysteries extends over the civilized earth of that time. In the course of evolution only a distillate of it remains, namely, Greek dialectics, Greek thinking. Then the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. In the occident this is, at the outset, comprehended by means of this Greek dialectics. Anyone who wishes to familiarize himself with the science, let us say, even of the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth century, which still comprises theology, must employ his thinking in a way that is quite different from the present-day natural-scientific mode of thought. Most human beings who today pass an opinion on scholasticism cannot do it justice because they only have a natural-scientific training, and scholasticism requires a training of thought that is different from modern natural-scientific training.

Now, my dear friends, today we live at a point of time in which again four and one half centuries have elapsed since this natural-scientific mode of thinking took hold of mankind. In the middle of the fourteenth century, human beings of the Occident begin to think in the way we find developed, already to the degree of brilliancy, in Galileo or in Giordana Bruno. This, then, is carried over into our age. Indeed, my dear friends, it is, seemingly, the same logic as that of the Greeks; yet, in reality, it is a completely different logic. It is a logic which is gradually derived from the nature processes in the way the Greek logic was derived from that which the Mystery pupils beheld in the Mysteries.

Let us now try to make clear to ourselves the difference that exists between the four and one half centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha in the civilized world of that time, which was almost limited to Greece, and the four and one half centuries in which humanity was trained for natural-scientific thinking. It is easiest for me to describe this to you graphically. Visualize the culture of the Mysteries like a kind of mountain summit of human spiritual culture in very ancient times. This culture of the Mysteries—I shall proceed step by step—then becomes logic in Greece, up to the Mystery of Golgotha. This, then, finds its continuation in the Middle Ages through scholasticism.

During four and one half centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we have the last ramification, the echo of the ancient Mystery culture. With the fifteenth century A.D. a new way of thinking begins which we might call thinking in the style of Galileo. The period of time that elapsed between this starting point and our present day is of the same length as that which elapsed between the appearance of the Greek way of thinking and the Mystery of Golgotha. But while the latter period is a final echo, an evening glow, as it were, the former is a prelude, something that has to be evolved, that has to be brought to a certain height. Greek culture stood at an end. We stand at a beginning.

We shall only gain a complete understanding of this placing, side by side, of an end and a beginning if we observe the evolution of mankind from a certain spiritual-scientific point of view.

I have repeatedly stated that it is not without reason that in the present age the attempt toward self-knowledge of mankind is made, the tools for which are offered by the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. For the large majority of mankind confronts a significant future possibility. In this connection it is important that we take seriously the fact that the evolving historical humanity is an organism that develops continuously. Just as in the case of the single organism we have puberty, and also later epochal transitions, so likewise, in human history, we have epochal transitions. Today, human beings still meet the doctrine of repeated earth lives with the objection that human beings do not remember their previous earth lives.

Anyone who, in a factual manner, conceives of the evolutionary history of mankind as of an organism, as I have just indicated, should not be surprised that human beings do not today, in their ordinary knowledge, remember their former earth lives. For I ask you: what does man remember in ordinary life? That which he first has thought. What he has not thought he cannot remember. Just think how many events of a day remain unobserved by you. You do not remember them because you did not think them in spite of their having taken place in your surroundings. You can only remember what you have thought.

Now, in the former centuries and millennia of mankind's evolution, human beings did not attain to any factual clarity about their own nature. To be sure, since the appearance of Greek thinking the “know thyself” exists like a longing, but this “know thyself” will only be fulfilled through real spiritual cognition. Only through the fact that human beings once employ one life in order to comprehend in thought their own self—and humanity has only become ripe for this in our age—is memory prepared for the next earth life. For we must first have thought about that which we are to remember later. Only those who, in earlier ages, through initiation (which need not have been acquired in the Mysteries) could look factually upon their own self are able in the present age to look back upon former earth lives. And there are not so few human beings who are able to do this. Nevertheless, the situation is such that man, also with respect to his purely bodily evolution, undergoes a transformation. These things cannot be observed externally in physiology, but they can be observed spiritual-scientifically. Mankind today does not have the same bodily constitution it had two thousand years ago, and in two thousand years from today it will again have a different constitution. I have talked to you about this subject repeatedly. Human beings live toward a time in the future in which their brains will be constructed in a way that is quite different from the way their brains are constructed today in an external sense. The brain will have the possibility of remembering former earth lives. But those who have not prepared themselves today through reflection upon their own self will sense this faculty—which will be theirs mechanically—merely as an inner nervousness, if I may use the current expression, as an inner deficiency. They will not find what they are lacking, because mankind in the meantime will have become ripe, in regard to its corporeality, to look back upon its previous earth lives, but if it has not prepared this retrospect, it cannot look back; it then will sense this faculty only as a deficiency. Therefore, proper knowledge of the present-day powers of transformation of mankind indicates by its very nature that human beings are brought to self-knowledge through the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. Now, it is possible, and today I shall only indicate this, it is possible to point out the nature of this special experience which will suggest to human beings to take into account previous earth lives.

Today we live in an age in which those shades of feeling which will become more and more prevalent are indicated only in a few human beings; but still, they are indicated in these few human beings. Not much attention is paid to them yet. I shall describe them to you in the way in which they will appear eventually. Human beings will be born into the world and they will say to themselves: by living with other human beings, I am educated, consciously or unconsciously, for a certain way of thinking. Thoughts arise in me. I am born into and educated for a certain way of thinking, of visualizing. But at the same time I look at my outer surroundings: my thinking, my visualizing does not properly fit this outer surrounding world.—this shade of feeling is already present today in individual human beings. They must think in a direction which makes it appear to them as if outer nature said something entirely different, as if outer nature demanded something completely different from them. Whenever such human beings appeared that have felt this discrepancy between what they must think and what external nature says, they have been ridiculed. Hegel, for instance, is a classical example for this. He has expressed certain thoughts about nature—and not all of Hegel's thoughts are foolish!—and has arranged them systematically. Then the philistines came and said: Well, these are your ideas concerning nature; but just look at this or that process in nature: it does not agree with your ideas. Then Hegel answered: Too bad for nature!

Naturally, this seems paradoxical; nevertheless, subjectively this feeling is well founded. It is absolutely possible that one surrenders, without prejudice, to one's innate thinking and says: if nature were really to correspond to this thinking, she would have to take on a different form. To be sure, after some time one will also become accustomed to that which nature teaches. Most people who find themselves in such a position do not notice that by having acquired nature observation they really bear two souls within themselves, two truths, as it were. Those who do notice it may suffer greatly from this discrepancy brought into their soul life. What I am describing to you here and which is present in some human beings today although they are not aware of it will become ever more present. Human beings will say to themselves more and more: through what I am by birth, my head really forces me to form a picture about nature. But this does not coincide with nature herself. Then, as I become more familiar with life, I also acquire in the course of time what nature herself teaches. I must find a way out of this.

These discordant sensations will arise in our souls when they return again to earth. A source of inner thoughts and sensations will arise in us which will cause us to say: you sense clearly how the world ought to be; it is, however, different. Then, again, we shall familiarize ourselves with this world; we shall learn to know a second kind of law, and we shall have to seek a balance between the two.

Let us assume the human being enters physical existence through birth. He brings with him in his thinking and feeling the result of his previous earth life. While he was not united with the life of the earth, this external earth life has actually undergone a change. He senses a discrepancy between his thinking, the effects of which he brings from his previous life, and the things as they have developed in the period during which he was absent from the earth. His thinking does not harmonize with them. And now gradually he adjusts himself to his new life, but he does by no means completely take up into this consciousness what he may learn from his surroundings. He only takes it up as though through a veil. He elaborates it only after death, and then, again, carries it into his next life. Man will constantly live in this duality of his soul life. He will always become aware of the following: You are bringing with you something in regard to which the world into which you have grown through birth is new. But through your physical being you now receive something from this world which does not completely penetrate your soul, which you will have to work over, however, after death.

The human being of the present day ought to become thoroughly acquainted with the way of experiencing life. For only by familiarizing himself with such a thing does he become aware of the forces which pulse through our existence and which otherwise remain entirely unnoticed. We are drawn into the web of these forces. But if we do not try to penetrate them with our consciousness, they make us to a certain degree sick in our soul. This falling apart the human being will perceive more and more: the falling apart of that which has stayed with him from the previous life and that which is prepared in the present life for the next one. And since man will sense this duality more and more, he will be in need of an inner mediation, a real inner mediation. And the great question will become ever more burning: Where must we look for this inner mediation? We can only find an answer to this question if we consider the following:

I have often told you that we human beings are completely awake only in our thinking in the period between awaking and falling asleep of ordinary life. The life of thought means complete wakefulness. We are not completely awake, even in waking life, in regard to our feelings. Our feelings are at the stage of dream consciousness, even though we are fully awake in our conceptions and thoughts. He who is able to make research in this field knows through direct perception that feelings have no greater vitality than have dreams; only, the conception through which feelings are represented makes it appear differently. But the life of feelings as such arises out of the depths of consciousness like the surging up of dreams. And the actual life of will is asleep in us, even in our waking life; in regard to the will we are asleep. Thus, also in waking life, we carry these three states of consciousness within us. During the day, we walk around with a waking life of thoughts; we deceive ourselves in believing that we are awake also in our will because we have thoughts about that which the will performs. Not the experience of the will itself, but only its mental image is what enters our consciousness. We dream our feelings, we sleep our willing. But if imaginative knowledge raises up what otherwise dreams in the feelings and makes it a matter of complete, clear world cognition, then we become aware of the fact that wisdom is contained not only in our thoughts—let us call it “wisdom” although with many human beings it is “un-wisdom”—but that wisdom is also contained in our feelings, and that it is also contained in our willing. In regard to present-day human existence we can only speak clearly about that which is contained in our thought life. In regard to the world of feelings mankind today entertains thoughts which hardly differ from those it entertains in regard to dream life; and yet, wisdom is also contained in the life of feeling.

My dear friends, the person who earnestly applies to his own soul the exercises which are described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Anthroposophic Press, New York) will come closest to experiencing a certain inner soul-surging which takes its course in a dreamlike manner, as it were. For most human beings it will not contain more regularity than ordinary dreaming; but it is possible, at a comparatively early moment, to bring so much order into this inner experiencing that one becomes aware of the fact that, although this inner experience is not governed by ordinary logic—indeed, it is sometimes governed by a very grotesque logic, and the most varied fragments of thought arrange themselves and occur in a dreamlike fashion—one becomes aware of the fact that something real takes place there. This first inner experience, which is still very primitive, may be recognized by the one who applies, even to some degree, to his own soul life what has been described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. When the human being dives down into this surging of waking dreams, a new reality emerges in contrast to the ordinary reality of external life. Comparatively soon the human being may become aware of this arising of a new reality. And also comparatively soon may he become aware that wisdom is contained in all this, but a wisdom he cannot take hold of, for which he does not feel himself mature enough to become fully conscious of it. It escapes him time and again, and he does not understand it. But he becomes aware, or at least, may become aware of the fact that wisdom does not only flow through the upper stratum of his consciousness which permeates him in ordinary waking day-life, but that below this there lies another stratum of his consciousness which appear illogical to him for the simple reason that he himself calls it that since he cannot yet take hold of its wisdom. We may say: the moment we have completely acquired imaginative cognition, these waking dreams cease to be as grotesque as they appear to ordinary life; they then permeate themselves with a wisdom that points to another content of reality, to a world different from the sense world which we fathom with ordinary wisdom.

You see, my dear friends, in ordinary life only the world of feeling surges up into our every-day consciousness out of this substratum of our consciousness. And out of a still deeper stratum, which lies below the one just mentioned, there surges up the world of will which is also permeated by wisdom. We are connected with this wisdom, but we are not at all aware of it in ordinary consciousness. Thus we may say: We human beings are governed by three strata of consciousness. The first is our conceptual consciousness in which we live every day. The second is an imaginative consciousness. And the third is an inspired consciousness which remains very deeply hidden, which works in us, to be sure, but whose nature we do not recognize in ordinary life. If only modern philosophy were less perplexed in its concepts—I am not referring here to people who have nothing to do with philosophy, but philosophers should grasp such matters, yet they refuse to do so—if only modern philosophy were less confused it would have to notice the great difference that exists between truths that are arrived at purely upon the basis of external observation of nature and the truths that are found in the sciences, such as mathematics and geometry, which are employed in the endeavor to understand external nature.

We are in a sense justified in saying that in regard to the truths which man acquires through external observation—this has so often been stressed in the history of philosophy that a special reference to it ought to be superfluous for the philosopher—in regard to the truths of external observation we can never speak of actual certainty. Kant and Hume have elaborated this especially clearly by their grotesque assertion that, although it is true that we observe that the sun rises, we cannot, however, assert from this observation that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only can conclude from the fact that the sun has risen up to now every day that is will also rise tomorrow. This is the way with all truths which we derive from external observation. But it is not so in the case of mathematical truths. If we have once grasped them we know they are valid for all future times. Whoever knows and is able to prove, out of inner reasons, that the square above the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the two other sides of the right-angled triangle knows that it would be impossible to draw a rectangular triangle for which this law does not hold good.

These mathematical truths are different from the truths we arrive at through external observations; we know the facts, but with the means of present-day research we are unable to grasp the underlying reason. The reason is to be found in the fact that mathematical truths originate deep down in the inner being of man, that they arise on the third level of consciousness, in the lowest stratum and, without his being aware of it, shoot up into man's upper consciousness, where he then perceives them inwardly. We possess mathematical truths through the fact that we ourselves behave mathematically in the world. We walk, we stand, and so forth; we describe certain lines on the earth. Through this will relationship to the external world we actually receive the inner perception of mathematics. Mathematics arises below in the third consciousness and shoots up from there.

Conceptual life: Complete Wakefulness: Wisdom

Feeling: Dreaming: Wisdom

Will: Sleeping: Wisdom

I. Conceptual Life

II. Imaginations

III. Inspirations

Thus, although we are not conscious of its origin, we have very clear concepts of at least one part of this lowest stratum of consciousness: we are aware of the mathematical and geometrical concepts. The middle stratum is of a dreamlike and confused character. And here, “in the upper story,” where the day-waking conceptual life takes place, we are clear again. What plays up from the third stratum of consciousness is also clear in us. What lies between the two reaches most human beings like a confused waking dreaming. It is very significant that we should make this fact clear to ourselves. For, you see, the Greeks, during the four and one half centuries (number one), which they had retained as the remainder of the Mystery culture. And this is a purely Luciferic element. I have described it to you recently: it is the intellectualistic culture. Clarity rules in our head. It is permeated by wisdom, generally valid wisdom. But this is the Luciferic element in us.

And, again, that which exists here below and which is so much beloved by modern scientists and was so much beloved by Kant that he said: in regard to nature, science exists only in as far as it contains mathematics—this is the purely Ahrimanic element, which arises from below through our human nature. It is the Ahrimanic element.

It does not suffice, my dear friends, to know of something that it is correct. We know that the things we comprehend intellectually through our head are correct; but this is a gift of the Luciferic element. And we know that mathematics is correct; but this sovereign correctness of mathematics we owe to Ahriman who sits in us. The most uncertain element is in the middle. It consists of seemingly illogical, billowing dreams.

I will describe to you another symptom so that you may grasp the full significance of this matter. In reality, the whole mathematical conception of the world as it arose with Galileo and Giordano Bruno stems from this deepest stratum of consciousness. Four and one half centuries have elapsed since we have begun to acquire this world conception, since we have begun to introduce this Ahrimanic element into our human thinking and sensing. Whereas in Greek thinking the last echo of the Mystery culture shone into the clearest brightness of consciousness, there arises in our deepest, darkest strata of consciousness that which only in the future will reach its climax. This is beginning to arise down there.

I. Conceptual Life (Lucifer)

II. Imaginations (consciousness)

III. Inspirations (Ahriman)

Our soul life is like a scale beam which has to try to establish equilibrium, on one hand the Luciferic, on the other the Ahrimanic element. The Luciferic element lies in our clear head, the Ahrimanic element below in the wisdom which permeates our will. Between the two, we have to try to establish a state of balance in an element which at first does not seem to be permeated by anything.

How does wisdom enter this middle part of man? Man is placed in the world at present in such a way that his head is supported by Lucifer, his metabolic wisdom, his limb-wisdom by Ahriman. That which we have described as the middle state of consciousness is dependent upon our heart organization and the human rhythmical system (read what I saw concerning this fact in my book, Von Seelenraetseln). This sphere of our existence must gradually become just as ordered as the head wisdom became ordered through logic and the Ahrimanic wisdom through mathematics, geometry, through external rational nature observation. What will bring inner logic, inner wisdom, inner power of orientation into this middle part of our human nature? The Christ impulse, that which passed over into the earth culture through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus you see, we have a spiritual-scientific anatomy which shows us what is culture of the head, what is culture of metabolism, which also shows us the nature and needs of that sphere of our organism which lies between the two. That man permeates himself with the Christ impulse is a requisite part of his nature.

Let us for a moment hypothetically assume that the Mystery of Golgotha had not entered Earth evolution: the human being would have his head wisdom. He also would have what has arisen since the fifteenth century A.D. But in regard to his central being he would be desolate and void. He would feel more and more the disagreement between the two inner spheres mentioned above. He would be unable to bring about the state of equilibrium. We can only bring about this state of equilibrium by permeating ourselves more and more with the Christ impulse which calls forth the state of balance between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element.

From this you will see that we may say: In the pre-Christian four and one half centuries there was bestowed upon the human being, like a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, the last ramification of the ancient Mystery culture, which has settled like a head-memory of this ancient culture. And in our modern age, the human being passed through four and one half centuries of preparation for a new spirit direction, for a new kind of Mystery culture. But in order that these two might be connected in the historical evolution of mankind, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place as an objective fact in mankind's evolution. Internally, however, this evolution takes its course in such a way that human beings grow and develop until, beginning with the fifteenth century A.D. they receive the new impulse which I have characterized as an Ahrimanic impulse, and through which they will feel more and more: we need the possibility of building a bridge between the two periods.

In this way we may inwardly comprehend the threefold human being. And we shall comprehend him still more accurately if we join to what I have said today something which I have repeatedly mentioned. It was impossible for the ancient Greeks who retained the remnants of ancient Mystery culture to be an atheist—although it happened in a few abnormal cases, but not to the degree it occurs today. Atheism has only arisen in more recent times, at least in its radical form. For the Greek who was really imbued with dialectics felt the Divine holding sway in thinking, even in thinking void of content.

If we know this and then look upon the appearance of atheism, upon the complete denial of the Divine, we shall find the reason for this atheism. Only those human beings, my dear friends—naturally, we need the methods of spiritual science in order to recognize this—only those human beings are atheists in whose organism something is organically disturbed. To be sure, this may lie in very delicate structural conditions, but it is a fact that atheism is in reality a disease.

This is the first thing we have to hold fast: atheism is a disease. For, if our organism is completely healthy, the harmonious functioning of its various members will bring it about that we ourselves sense our origin from the Divine—ex deo nascimur.

The second point, to be sure, is something different. Man may sense the Divine but may have no possibility to sense the Christ. In this respect we do not differentiate carefully enough today. We are satisfied with words, also in other spheres. For, if we test today the actual spiritual content of the view of many human beings of the occident and are not influenced by their words—they say they agree with Christian precepts, they believe in the freedom of the will, and so forth—we shall find that the whole configuration of their thinking contradicts what they thus express. Only through their participation in cultural life have they become accustomed to speak of Christ, of freedom, and so forth. In reality, my dear friends, a great number of human beings living among us are nothing but Turks; for the content of their faith is the same as the fatalistic content of faith of the Mohammedans—although this fatalism is often described as a necessity of nature. Mohammedanism is much more prevalent than we think. If we do not focus our attention upon the words but upon the spirit-soul content, we shall find that many Christians are Turks. They call themselves “Christians” even though they cannot find the transition from the God they sense to the Christ.

I only need to draw your attention to the classical example of a modern theologian, Adolf Harnack, who wrote the book, Wesen des Christentums. (Essence of Christianity.) Please, make the following test: scratch out in this book the name of Christ wherever it occurs and replace it by the name of God, this will change nothing in the content of this book. There is no necessity that what this man states should refer to the Christ. What he states refers to the general Father god who lies at the foundation of the world. There is no need at all that he should refer to the Christ with what he states. Wherever he proves something it is externally and internally untrue as he borrows the various communications from the Gospels. In the way he elaborates these communications there can be seen no reason whatsoever for connecting them with the Christ. We must acquire the possibility of conceiving of the Christ in such a way that we do not identify Him with the Father god. Many of the modern evangelical theologians are no longer able to differentiate between the general concept of God and the concept of the Christ. To be unable to find the Christ in life is a different matter from being unable to find the Father God—You know that it is not here a matter of doubting the Divinity of the Christ. It is a matter of clear differentiation, in the sphere of the Divine, between the Father God and the Christ God. This comes to expression in the soul of man. Not to find God the Father is a disease; not to find the Christ is a misfortune. For the human being is so connected with the Christ as to be inwardly dependent upon this connection. He is, however, also dependent upon that which has taken place as a historical event. He must find a connection with the Christ here upon earth, in external life. If he does not find it is a misfortune. Not to find the Father god, to be an atheist, is an illness. Not to find the Son God, the Christ, is a misfortune.

And what does it mean if we do not find the Spirit? To be unable to take hold of one's own spirituality in order to find the connection of one's own spirituality with the spirituality of the world signifies mental debility; not to acknowledge the Spirit is a deficiency of mind, a psychic imbecility.

Please remember these three deficiencies of the human soul constitution. Then we shall be able to continue tomorrow in the right way. Remember what I have told you today about the three kinds of consciousness; remember that it is a disease if we are an atheist, if we do not find the God out of whom we are born and whom we must find if we possess a completely sound organism; that it is a misfortune if we do not find the Christ; that it is a psychic deficiency if we do not find the Spirit.

This is also the way in which the paths that lead man to the Trinity differ from one another. It will become more and more necessary for mankind to enter into these concrete facts of soul life and not to remain stuck in general, nebulous notions. People are specially inclined today toward these nebulous notions. To replace this inclination by the inclination to enter into concrete facts of soul life is an essential task of our age.

ONLY THROUGH a knowledge of the most important and essential laws of human evolution can man attain a real consciousness that supports his soul. He must learn to know the events of human evolution and make them part of his question of taking fully into account—I made this remark already a few days ago—that the evolution of mankind is itself an evolution of a living entity. Just as there is ordered growth in the single human individual, so is there ordered growth in the evolution of the whole human race. And since the present is the moment when we have to become conscious of certain things, and since the human being has participated, during his repeated earth lives, in the various configurations of humanity's evolutionary history, it is also necessary to develop an understanding for the different human soul moods in the various epochs of mankind's evolution. I have often stated that what we call history today is really a fable convenue, a fable agreed upon, for the reason that the abstract recounting of events and the searching for cause and effect in historical processes in an external sense does not take into account the transformations, the metamorphoses of human soul life itself. When, from this point of view, we make tests, we can easily show that it is a prejudice to believe that the soul mood of modern man prevailed also in the times to which the first historical documents reach back. This is not the case. Human beings, even the simplest, most primitive, of the ninth and tenth post-Christian centuries had a soul mood completely different from that of human beings after the middle of the fifteenth century. We can trace this right into the lower strata of the human race, but also into the upper levels. Try, for instance, to familiarize yourselves with Dante's curious work about “Monarchy.” If you read such a thing, not as an oddity, but with a certain cultural-historical sagacity, then you will notice that such a book of a representative of his time contains things which could not possibly have been spoken out of the soul of a modern human being.

In this book, which was intended as a serious treatise about the legal and political foundations of monarchy, Dante tries to show that the Romans were the most excellent people of the world, as far as it was known at that time, was the primeval right of the Romans. He tries to show that the conquest of the whole earth by the Romans constituted a right greater than for instance the right of independence of single, smaller peoples; for it was the will of God that the Romans should rule over the various smaller peoples, for the latter's own good. Dante offers many proofs, out of the spirit of his time, why the Romans were justified in ruling the earth. One of these proofs is the following: He says: The Romans descend from Aeneas. Aeneas married three times. First, Creusa; through this marriage he acquired the right, as progenitor of the race, to rule Asia. Secondly, he married Dido; through this marriage he acquired the right, as ancestor of the Romans, to rule Africa. Then he married Lavinia; through this he acquired the right for the Romans to rule Europe. Herman Grimm, who once discussed this matter, made the telling remark: How fortunate that at the time America and Australia were not yet discovered!

But this sort of conclusion was something quite self-evident for an enlightened spirit of the time of Dante, indeed, for the most outstanding spirit of that time. This was a juridical presentation at that time. Now I ask you to imagine that any lawyer of the present age would draw such conclusions. You cannot imagine it. And you can just as little imagine that the mode of thought which Dante employs in regard to other subjects could arise in the soul constitution of a man of the present age.

Thus a quite obvious fact shows that we have to take into consideration the transformation of the soul constitutions of human beings. To fail to understand these things was tolerable in a certain way up to our time. But it will no longer do in our time, and quite especially will it not do for mankind in the future, for the simple reason that mankind, right up to our time, or at least up to the end of the eighteenth century, had certain instincts; (since the French Revolution matters have gradually changed, but still, old remnants remained of the soul constitutions in question.) Out of these instincts mankind was able to develop a consciousness which supported the soul. But in the present state of the constantly changing organism of mankind these instincts no longer exist and man must consciously acquire the connection with the whole of humanity. This is, after all, the deeper significance of the social question in our present time. What people state in their party platforms are only superficial formulations. That which surges in the depths of human souls expresses itself in such formulas; mankind feels that it is necessary to acquire a conscious relationship of the individual to the whole of humanity, that is, to acquire a social impulse.

Now, we cannot do so without focusing our attention upon the law of evolution. Let us do this once more after having done so repeatedly in regard to other questions. Let us take the time from the fourth post-Christian century up to the sixteenth post-Christian century. We see how Christianity bears the character of which I spoke yesterday and on previous occasions. We find that great care is taken during this period to understand the secrets of Golgotha through human concepts and ideas as they had been transmitted by Greek culture. Then a changed form of evolution sets in. We know that it really set in at an earlier time, around the middle of the fifteenth century; but it became clearly discernible only in the sixteenth century. At that time the natural-scientifically orientated thinking began to take hold of the upper level of mankind and to spread further and further.

Let us focus our attention upon this natural-scientific thinking in regard to a certain quality. There are many qualities of natural-scientifically orientated thinking which might be mentioned, but today we want to emphasize one quality in particular. It is the following: If we are a really efficient, modern thinker in the present sense, we are unable to cope with the problem of the necessity of nature and human freedom. The natural-scientific thinking of the modern age pressed onward more and more toward conceiving of the human being as a member of the rest of nature, the latter being considered a stream of causes and effects determining one another. Certainly, there exist today many human beings who see clearly that freedom, the experience of freedom, is a fact of human consciousness. But this does not prevent them from being unable to cope with this problem as they steep themselves in the special configuration of natural-scientific thinking. If we think about the being of man in the way modern natural science demands we are unable to reconcile this thinking with the thinking about human freedom. Some people take it very easy in regard to human freedom, in regard to the sense of human responsibility. I knew a professor of criminal law who began his lectures on criminal law every time with the following remarks: Gentlemen, I have to lecture to you on criminal law. Let us begin by assuming the axiom that there is human freedom and responsibility. For, if there were no human freedom and responsibility, there could be no criminal law. However, criminal law exists, for I have to lecture on it to you; therefore, responsibility and freedom exist also.—this argumentation is somewhat simple, but it points to the difficulty that arises for human beings when they have to ask the question: How can the necessity of nature be reconciled with freedom? It shows, in other words, how the human being has been forced more and more through the evolution of the last few centuries to acknowledge a certain omnipotence of the necessity of nature. One does not express it in these words; nevertheless, a certain omnipotence of natural necessity is conceived of. What is this omnipotence of natural necessity?

We shall understand one another best if I remind you of something which I have mentioned frequently. Modern thinkers believe that they act—or, rather, think—without prejudice, merely as scientific researchers, when they assert that man consists of body and soul. People, all the way up to the great philosopher Wilhelm Wundt—who is great, however, merely through the graces of his publisher—people maintain: if we think without prejudice, we have to consider man as consisting of body and soul, if we ascribe any validity to the soul at all. And only timidly does the truth make its appearance, namely, that man consists of body, soul, and spirit. The philosophers who consider themselves unbiased in their belief that man consists of body and soul do not know that their concept is merely the result of a historical process which had its starting point in the eighth Œcumencial council of Constantinople when the Roman-Catholic church abolished the spirit by establishing the dogma that henceforth the orthodox Christian was to think of man as consisting of body and soul, the soul having some spiritual qualities. This was a church law; philosophers still teach it today and do not know that they are merely following a church law. They believe they carry on unprejudiced science. This is the situation today in regard to many things called “unprejudiced science.”

The matter is similar in regard to the necessity of nature. During the whole evolution between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries the concept of god took on a quite particular form. If one takes into account the more intimate aspects of the spiritual evolution of these centuries, one will become aware of the fact that a quite definite concept of God was more and more elaborated in human thinking, a concept of God which culminated in the dictum: God, the Omnipotent, the All-Mighty. Few people know that it would have had no meaning for human beings prior to the fourth post-Christian century to speak of God, the All-Mighty. My dear friends, we do not engage in catechism truths; there you will, naturally, find: God is all-mighty, all-wise, all-benevolent. All these are things which have nothing to do with realities. Prior to the fourth century, nobody would have thought of considering omnipotence as a fundamental quality of the Divine Being if he had an understanding of these matters and really lived with them. For at that time the after-effect of the Greek concepts still held sway. In thinking about the Divine Being, people would not have spoken of God, the All-Mighty, but of God, the Omniscient, the All-Wise.

God, the All-Mighty

(Previously: God the All-Wise)

fourth century sixteenth century

Wisdom was considered the fundamental attribute of the Divine Being. The concept of Omnipotence only gradually penetrated the idea of the Divine Being, from the fourth century onward. It continued to develop. The concept of personality was abandoned and the predicate was transmitted to the mere order of nature, which is conceived of more and more mechanically. And the modern concept of the necessity of nature, the omnipotence of nature, is nothing but the result of the evolution of the concept of God from the fourth to the sixteenth century. Only, the qualities of personality were abandoned and that which constituted the concept of God was taken over into the structure of thinking about nature.

Now, my dear friends, the genuine natural scientists of today would oppose such statements vigorously. Just as many philosophers believe they are thinking without prejudice about man by considering him as consisting of body and soul, whereas in truth they merely follow the eighth Œcumenical Council of Constantinople in 869,—just as these philosophers are dependent upon a historical stream, so all the Haeckeleans, Darwinists, physicists with their natural order are dependent upon the theological stream that developed in the period from St. Augustine to Calvin. These things have to be comprehended. It is the peculiar character of every evolutionary stream that it comprises evolution as well as involution or devolution. And while the concept “God the All-Mighty” developed, there existed a sub-current in the subconscious spheres of human soul life, which then became the leading upper current: the nature necessity. (See diagram, red) And since the sixteenth century there exists a new sub-current which prepares precisely in our time to become an upper current. (blue.)

It is characteristic of the Michael age that that which has been prepared in the form of a sub-current of nature-necessity must henceforth become an upper current. But if we wish to acquire a possible concept of what it is that has thus prepared itself, we must understand the inner spirit of Earth evolution.

I recently drew your attention to the fact that what takes place in the evolution of the earth and of mankind in particular moves in a descending line. Earth humanity and the evolution of the earth itself is on the path of decadence. I drew your attention to the fact that this is today a recognized geological truth, that geologists who are to be taken seriously admit that the earth crust is in a process of decay. Mankind itself, in particular, is in a process of decay through the sensuous-earthly forces. And mankind, in its evolutionary process, must receive spiritual impulses which counteract decadence. Therefore a conscious spiritual life must enter mankind. We must be clear about the fact that we have already passed beyond the pinnacle of Earth evolution. In order that it may proceed, the spiritual must be taken up more and more clearly and distinctly.

At the outset, this seems an abstract fact. But for the spiritual researcher this is not an abstract fact. You know that we can trace the evolution of the Earth through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon states right into the Earth state. This evolution may also be characterized in the following way: if we speak of present mankind, we may consider the evolution of mankind through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods as a preparation, as a pre-state. Only upon the Earth itself did man, as he received his ego, gain his true humanhood, and he will receive further elements into his true being during the subsequent evolutionary stages of the Earth.

Now you know that the so-called Archai, the present Spirits of Personality or Time Spirits, were in the Saturn state at the stage of evolution at which the human being is today, although in quite different forms, with a completely different outer aspect. I have expressed this in my books by saying: what we designate today as Archai, as Spirits of Personality, was man during the Saturn period. The Archangeloi were man during the Sun period, the Angeloi during the Moon period. During the Earth period we are man.

Our own evolution, of course, went on alongside all this, by way of preparation. If we go back to the Moon state we must say: Here the Angeloi were human beings, human beings, to be sure, with an appearance quite different from ours, for there were quite different conditions upon the ancient Moon. But alongside these Moon men, the Angeloi, we developed in a pre-state of the Earth evolution, in a very advanced state, so that we had to be taken into consideration by the Angeloi. Especially during the descending phase of the Moon evolution did we, at times, constitute a troublesome concern for the Angeloi. The same, however, is the case with us in descending Earth evolution: since the Earth evolution has entered its descending phases, other beings make themselves felt. My dear friends, it is a significant, an important result of spiritual-scientific research which is to be taken very, very seriously, that we have already entered the period of Earth evolution when certain beings make themselves felt who upon Jupiter—the next state of Earth evolution—will have advanced to the form of man, a different form of man, to be sure, but which, nevertheless, may be compared with the being of man. For we will be different beings on Jupiter. These so-to-speak Jupiter men exist already now just as we existed upon the Moon. They exist, of course not externally visible; but I explained to you recently what it means to be externally visible, and that man is also a super-sensible being. Supersensibily these beings are very decidedly present.

I emphasize once more: it is an extremely serious truth that certain beings make themselves felt which exist in the environment of mankind. They make themselves felt more and more since the middle of the fifteenth century. These beings possess chiefly the impulse of a force which is very similar to the human force of will, that force of will of which I told you yesterday that it exists in the deeper strata of the human consciousness. These invisible beings are related to that element of which ordinary consciousness thus remains unconscious today; but they already make themselves very strongly felt in the development of present-day humanity.

For the person who takes spiritual research truly seriously this is a problem of great magnitude. I was confronted with this problem especially strongly—at the time I spoke to a number of our friends about it in one or another form—I was confronted with this problem in a demanding fashion, as it were, when, in the year 1914, this war catastrophe broke in upon us. One had to ask oneself: How did an event overtake European mankind which it is impossible to gauge as to its causes in the way that is customary in regard to previous historical events? The one who knows that not more than thirty or forty people participated in Europe in the decisive events of the year 1914, and who also knows the soul condition in which most of these people were, will be confronted by this significant problem. For most of these people, as strange as it may sound today, my dear friends, most of these people had a dulled, obscured state of consciousness. During the last few years much has occurred that was caused by a dulled human consciousness. In the decisive places of the year 1914 we see everywhere that the most important decisions of the end of July and the beginning of August were reached with an obscured consciousness; and this has continued on right into our present day. This is a problem, terrifying in its nature. If we investigate it spiritual-scientifically, then we find that these obscured consciousnesses were the gateways through which precisely these will-beings were able to take possession of the consciousness of these men; they took possession of the obscured, veiled consciousness of these human beings and acted with their consciousness. And these beings who thus took possession, who are still sub-human beings, what kind of beings are they? We have to pose this question very seriously: What kind of beings are they?

Well, my dear friends, we have asked about the origin of human intelligence, about the origin of human intelligent behavior which, stating it simply, has its instrument in our head organism. And we have seen that this intelligent constitution of our soul stems from that deed of the Archangel Michael which is commonly presented in the symbol of the fall, the casting down of the Dragon. This is actually a very trivial symbol. For, if we really conceive of Michael and the Dragon, we have to visualize, first, the Michael Being, and, secondly, the Dragon who, in reality, consists of all that which enters into our so-called reason, into our intelligence. Not into a hell does Michael cast his opposing hosts, but into the human heads; there this Luciferic impulse continues to live. I have characterized human intelligence as an actual Luciferic impulse. Thus we may say: if we look back into the evolution of the Earth, we find the Michael-deed, and to this Michael-deed is joined the illumination of man by his reason.

The sub-human beings whose main character consists of an impulse which strongly coincides with human willing, with the human power of will, now appear from below, as it were, whereas the hosts of forces cast down by Michael came from above; and while these latter took possession of the human power of will; they unite themselves with it and are beings produced by the realm of Ahriman. Ahrimanic influences acted through those obscured consciousnesses. Indeed, my dear friends, as long as one does not take into consideration these forces as forces objectively existing in the world just as one takes into consideration what today is called magnetism, electricity, and so forth, one will not gain an insight into that nature which, according to Goethe's prose Hymn to Nature, comprises man. For nature, as it is conceived of in today's natural science does not contain man, but merely the human physical self.

At the beginning of Earth becoming we have to do with a downfall of Luciferic beings; today we have a rise of Ahrimanic beings. The former beings influence the Luciferic power of thought, the latter the human power of will; we have to recognize the arrival of these latter beings within the evolution of mankind. We have to realize that these beings arrive and that we have to reckon with a conception of nature which, to be sure, for the time being only includes man; for the animal kingdom will only be included later on in the Earth period. Upon the animal these beings have no influences as yet. We shall not comprehend the human race without taking these beings into consideration. And these beings, who are, as it were, pushed from behind, for behind them there stands the Ahrimanic power which endows them with their strong will power, which pours into them their directive forces,—these beings who as such are sub-human beings are controlled in their totality by higher Ahrimanic spirits and thus contain something which far surpasses their own nature and being. Therefore they show something in their appearance which, if it takes the human being captive, acts much more strongly, very much more strongly than that which the weak human being can control today, if he does not strengthen it through the spirit. What is the aim of this host? Well, my dear friends, just as the hosts which Michael has pushed down have aimed at human illumination, at human permeation with reason, so these hosts aim at a certain permeation of human willing. And what do they want? They burrow, as it were, in the deepest stratum of consciousness in which the human being is still asleep today in his waking state. Man does not notice how these beings enter his soul and also his body. Here they suck in, with their power of attraction, everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christ-permeated. This they can reach: this they can take possession of.

My dear friends, our time raises these problems for us. We must no longer pass by these things. They are not convenient. For it has become convenient for human beings to think differently, that is, not to think at all about man, not to take him into consideration at all. And it is not without danger to speak about these things in complete truth at a time when many people do not at all love the sense for truth, quite apart from the fact that false sentimentality might find these things a psychic cruelty.

The result of the comprehension of these things, however, will be a thorough grasp of the necessity of the Christ impulse. One must recognize where the Christ impulse is lacking. Yesterday we showed that in the middle stratum of consciousness the Christ impulse takes hold of the middle stratum of consciousness, if man really permeates himself with the Christ, then these Ahrimanic powers cannot penetrate through this middle stratum, upward, and they cannot, with their spiritual forces, pull down the intellectual forces. Everything depends on that.

It is very necessary today that we recognize the nature of the influences which come to us from extra-human, sub-human beings which in turn are influenced by other beings. They are just as important as many influences which are only rooted in the world of man. A week ago I talked to you about the Michael influence. I have characterized this Michael influence for you. It is a very necessary one. For just as it is true that the Michael influence has brought about the Luciferic influencing of human intelligence, so true is it that now the counter-pole arises, namely, the appearance of certain Ahrimanic beings. And only through the constant activity of Michael is the human being armed against that which arises there. Even physiologically it is dangerous today to cling to mere nature necessity, to that kind of fatalism which is expressed in nature necessity. For education, through school and through life, in the concepts which are merely based upon nature necessity, upon the omnipotence of nature necessity, weakens the human head, and human beings become thereby so strongly passive in regard to their consciousness, that other forces are able to enter this consciousness, and human beings will fail to acquire the strength that is necessary for the reception into the human soul of the Christ impulse in its present form.

It is my duty, as it were, my dear friends, to speak at this time of the subject of which I have begun to speak today (I shall continue it tomorrow): of the appearance of certain Ahrimanic beings, which we have to take into account. Of this appearance numerous people upon earth are cognizant today. But they give it the wrong interpretation. They interpret it wrongly for the reason that they know nothing of the real triad Christ-Lucifer-Ahriman, or do not wish to know anything about it, but jumble up Ahriman and Lucifer. Then discrimination is impossible; then it is impossible properly to recognize the true fundamental character of these Ahrimanic beings who now arise. Only if we clearly elaborate the Ahrimanic element and know the nature of the super-sensible influences which now arise as the counterpart, as it were, of Michael's casting down of the Dragon. It is like a lifting up, out of Ahrimanic depths, of certain beings. And these beings find special points of attack in the human being if the latter yields to unbridled instinctive impulses and does not strive for clarity in relation to them.

Now, there exists today a method I might call it an anti-method, of concealing the instinctive element, by putting down a concept and pushing another over it, so that it is impossible to form a proper judgment concerning it. Just think of the battle cry of the proletariat of the modern age. Behind this battle cry there stand very justified demands of mankind—I have often dealt with this. But these demands are not, to begin with, appealed to. In our idea of the three-fold social order they are appealed to for the first time. Something essentially different is appealed to: Proletarians of all countries, unite! What does this mean? It means: Foster your antipathy against the other classes, foster, as individuals, what resembles hate, and unite; that means, love one another, unite your feelings of hate, look for the love of one class, search among you for the love of the members of one class out of hate. Love one another out of hate, on the basis of hate.—There you have put down two concepts of opposing poles. This pushing back of instincts makes man's conceptions so nebulous, rendering him unable to know what he is dealing with in his own self. There actually exists a kind of anti-method, if I may use the paradoxical expression, in order to obscure, through present-day human thinking, the holding sway of an instinctive life which offers especially strong points of attack for the described Ahrimanic beings.

YOU HAVE seen from my lectures of the last few days that it is necessary, for a complete understanding of the human being, to distinguish the various members of the human organism and to realize the incisive difference between that which we may call the human head organization and that which constitutes the rest of the human organization. As you know, the rest of the human organization consists of two members, so that on the whole we obtain a three-fold membering, but for the comprehension of the significant impulses in mankind's evolution with which we are faced at the present time and in the immediate future the differentiation between head man and the organization of the rest of man is primarily important.

Now, if we speak spiritual-scientifically about the human being by differentiating between head man and the rest of man, then these two organizations are, at the outset, pictures for us, pictures created by nature herself for the soul element, for the spiritual element, whose expression and manifestation they are. Man is placed in the whole evolution of earth humanity in a way which becomes comprehensible only if one considers how different is the position of the head organization in this evolution from that of the rest of the human organization. Everything connected with the head organization, which chiefly manifests as man's life of thought, is something that reaches far back in the post-Atlantean evolution of mankind. When we focus our attention upon the time which followed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, that is, the time of the sixth, seventh, eighth millennium before the Christian era, we shall find a soul mood holding sway in the regions of the civilized world of that period which can hardly be compared with our soul mood. The consciousness and whole conception of the world of the human being of that time can scarcely be compared with that which characterizes our sense perception and conceptual view of the world. In my Occult Science, an Outline {Anthroposophic Press, New York} I have called this culture which reaches back into such ancient times, the primeval Indian culture. We may say: the human head organism of that time was different from our present head organism to a great degree and the reckoning with space and time was not characteristic of this ancient people as it is of us. In surveying the world, they experienced a survey of immeasurable spatial distances, and they had a simultaneous experience of the various moments of time. The strong emphasis on space and time in world conception was not present in that ancient period.

The first indications of this we find toward the fifth and fourth millennium in the period we designate the primeval Persian period. But even then the whole mood of soul life is such that it can hardly be compared with the soul and world mood of the human being of our age. In that ancient time, the main concern of the human being is to interpret the things of the world as various shades of light, brilliancy, and darkness, obscurity. The abstractions in which we live today are completely foreign to that ancient earth population. There still exists a universal, all-embracing perception, a consciousness of the permeation of everything perceptible with light and its adumbration, shading, with various degrees of darkness. This was also the way the moral world order was conceived of. A human being who was benevolent and kind was experienced as a light, bright human being, one who was distrustful and selfish was experienced as a dark man. Man's moral individuality was, as it were, aurically perceived around him. And if we had talked to a man of this ancient, primeval Persian time about that which we call today the order of nature, he would not have understood a word of it. An order of nature in our sense did not exist in his world of light and shadow. For him, the world was a world of light and shadow; and in the world of tones, certain timbres of sounding he designated as light, bright, and certain other timbres of sounding he designated as dark, shadowy. And that which thus expressed itself through this element of light and darkness constituted for him the spiritual as well as the nature powers. For him, there existed no difference between spiritual and natural powers. Our present-day distinction between natural necessity and human freedom would have appeared to him as mere folly, for this duality of human arbitrary will and the necessity of nature did not exist for him. Everything was to be included for him in one spiritual—physical unity. If I were to give you a pictorial interpretation of the character of this primeval-Persian world conception, I would have to draw the following line. (It will receive its full meaning only through that which will follow.)

Then after this soul mood of man had held sway for somewhat more than two thousand years, there appeared a soul mood, the echoes of which we can still perceive in the Chaldean, in the Egyptian world conception, and in a special form in the world conception whose reflection is preserved for us in the Old Testament. There something appears which is closer to our own world conception. There the first inkling of a certain necessity of nature enters human thoughts. But this necessity of nature is still far removed from that which we call today the mechanical or even the vital order of nature; at that time, natural events are conceived of as identical with Divine willing, with Providence. Providence and nature events are still one. Man knew that if he moved his hand it was the Divine within him, permeating him, that moved his hand, that moved his arm. When a tree was shaken by the wind, the perception of the shaking tree was no different for him from the perception of the moving arm. He saw the same divine power, as Providence, in his own movements and in the movements of the tree. But a distinction was made between the God without and the God within; he was, however, conceived of as unitary, the God in nature, the God in man; he was the same. And it was clear to human beings of that time that there is something in man whereby Providence that is outside in nature and Providence that is inside in man meet one another.

At that time, man's process of breathing was sensed in this way. People said: If a tree is shaking, this is the God outside, and if I move my arm, it is the God inside; if I inhale the air, work it over within me, and again exhale it, then it is the God from outside who enters me and again leaves me. Thus the same divine element was sensed as being outside and inside, but simultaneously, in one point, outside and inside; people said to themselves: By being a breathing being, I am a being of nature outside and at the same time I am myself.

If I am to characterize the world conception of the third culture period by a line, as I have done for the primeval Persian world conception by the line of the preceding drawing, I shall have to characterize it through the following line:

This line represents, on the one hand, the existence of nature outside, on the other hand, human existence, crossing over into the other at the one point, in the breathing process.

Matters become different in the fourth age, in the Graeco-Latin age. Here the human being is abruptly confronted by the contrast outside-inside, of nature existence and human existence. Man begins to feel the contrast between himself and nature. And if I am again to draw characteristically how man begins to feel in the Greek age, I will have to draw it this way: on the one hand he senses the external and on the other the internal; between the two there is no longer the crossing point.

What man has in common with nature remains outside his consciousness. It falls away from consciousness. In Indian Yoga an attempt is made to bring it into consciousness again. Therefore Indian Yoga culture is an atavistic returning to previous evolutionary stages of mankind, because an attempt is made again to bring into consciousness the process of breathing, which in the third age was felt in a natural way as that in which one existed outside and inside simultaneously. The fourth age begins in the eighth pre-Christian century. At that time the late-Indian Yoga exercises were developed which tried to call back, atavistically, that which mankind had possessed at earlier times, quite particularly in the Indian culture, but which had been lost.

Thus, this consciousness of the breathing process was lost. And if one asks: Why did Indian Yoga culture try to call it back, what did it believe it would gain thereby? one has to answer: What was intended to be gained thereby was a real understanding of the outer world. For through the fact that the breathing process was understood in the third cultural age, something was understood within man that at the same time was something external.

This must again be attained; on another path, however. We live still under the after-effects of the culture in which a twofold element is present in the human soul mood, for the fourth period ends only around the year 1413, really only about the middle of the fifteenth century. We have, through our head organization, an incomplete nature conception, that which we call the external world; and we have through our inner organization, through the organization of the rest of man, an incomplete knowledge of ourselves.

That in which we could perceive a process of the world and at the same time a process of ourselves is eliminated; it does not exist for us.

It is now a question of consciously regaining that which has been lost. That means, we have to acquire the ability of taking hold of something that is in our inner being, that belongs to the outer and the inner world simultaneously, and which reaches into both.

This must be the endeavor of the fifth post-Atlantean period; namely, the endeavor to find something in the human inner life in which an outer process takes place at the same time.

You will remember that I have pointed to this important fact; I have pointed to it in my last article in Soziale Zukunft (The Social Future) {Soziale Zukunft, Vol. III: Geistesleben, Rechtsordnung, Wirtschaft (Spiritual Life, Rights order, Economy), Vol. IV: Dreigliederung und soziales Vertrauen (The Threefold Social Order and Social Confidence) (not translated into English) where I seemingly dealt with these things in their importance for social life, but where I clearly pointed to the very necessity of finding something which the human being lays hold of within himself and which he, at the same time, recognizes as a process of the world. We as modern human beings cannot attain this by going back to Yoga culture; that has passed. For the breathing process itself has changed. This, of course, you cannot prove clinically; but the breathing process has become a different one since the third post-Atlantean cultural period. Roughly speaking, we might say: In the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch the human being breathed soul; today he breathes air. Not only our thoughts have become materialistic; reality itself has lost its soul.

I beg you, my dear friends, not to see something negligible in what I am now saying. For just consider what it means that reality itself, in which mankind lives, has been transformed so that the air we breathe is something different from what it was four millennia ago. Not only the consciousness of mankind has changed, oh no! there was soul in the atmosphere of the earth. The air was the soul. This is it no longer today, or, rather, it is soul in a different way. The spiritual beings of elemental nature of whom I have spoken yesterday, they penetrate into you, they can be breathed if one practices Yoga breathing today. But that which was attainable in normal breathing three millennia ago cannot be brought back artificially. That it may be brought back is the great illusion of the Orientals. What I am stating here describes a reality. The ensouling of the air which belongs to the human being no longer exists. And therefore the beings of whom I spoke yesterday—I should like to call them the anti-Michaelic beings—are able to penetrate into the air and, through the air, into the human being, and in this way they enter into mankind, as I have described it yesterday. We are only able to drive them away if we put in the place of Yoga that which is the right thing for today. We must strive for this. We can only strive for that which is the right thing for today if we become conscious of a much more subtle relation of man to the external world, so that in regard to our ether body something takes place which must enter our consciousness more and more, similar to the breathing process. In the breathing process, we inhale fresh oxygen and exhale unusable carbon. A similar process takes place in all our sense perceptions. Just think, my dear friends, that you see something—let us take a radical case—suppose you see a flame. There a process takes place that may be compared with inhalation, only it is much finer. If you then close your eyes—and you can make similar experiments with every one of your senses—you have the after-image of the flame which gradually changes—dies down, as Goethe said. Apart from the purely physical aspect, the human ether body is essentially engaged in this process of reception of the light impression and its eventual dying down. Something very significant is contained in this process: it contains the soul element which, three millennia ago, was breathed in and out with the air. And we must learn to realize the sense process, permeated by the soul element in a similar way we have realized the breathing process three millennia ago.

You see, my dear friends, this is connected with the fact that man, three millennia ago, lived in a night culture. Yahve revealed himself through his prophets out of the dreams of the night. But we must endeavor to receive in our intimate intercourse with the world not merely sense perceptions, but also the spiritual element. It must become a certainty for us that with every ray of light, with every tone, with every sensation of heat and its dying down we enter into a soul-intercourse with the world, and this soul-intercourse must become significant for us. We can help ourselves to bring this about.

I have described to you the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha in the fourth post-Atlantean period which, if we wish to be accurate, begins with the year 747 B.C. and ends with the year 1413 A.D. The Mystery of Golgotha occurred in the first third of this period, and it was comprehended at the outset, with the remnants of the ancient mode of thought and culture. This ancient way of comprehending the Mystery of Golgotha is exhausted and a new way of comprehension must take its place. The ancient way does no longer suffice, and many attempts that have been made to enable human thinking to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha have proved unsuitable to reach up to it.

You see, dear friends, all external-material things have their spiritual-soul aspect, and all things that appear in the spiritual-soul sphere have their external-material aspect. The fact that the air of the earth has become soul-void, making it impossible for man to breathe the originally ensouled air, had a significant spiritual effect in the evolution of mankind. For through being able to breathe in the soul to which he was originally related, as is stated at the beginning of the Old Testament: “And God breathed into man the breath as living soul,” man had the possibility of becoming conscious of the pre-existence of the soul, of the existence of the soul before it had descended into the physical body through birth or through conception. To the degree the breathing process ceased to be ensouled the human being lost the consciousness of the pre-existence of the soul. Even at the time of Aristotle in the fourth post-Atlantean period it was no longer possible to understand, with the human power of comprehension, the pre-existence of the soul. It was utterly impossible.

We are faced with the strange historical fact that the greatest event, the Christ Event, breaks in upon the evolution of the earth, yet mankind must first become mature in order to comprehend it. At the outset, it is still capable of catching the rays of the Mystery of Golgotha with the remnants of the power of comprehension originating in primeval culture. But this power of comprehension is gradually lost, and dogmatism moves further and further away from an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Church forbids the belief in the pre-existence of the soul—not because pre-existence is incompatible with the Mystery of Golgotha, but because the human power of comprehension ceased to experience the consciousness of pre-existence as a force, the air having become soul-void. Pre-existence vanishes from head-consciousness. When our sense processes will become ensouled again, we shall have established a crossing point, and in this crossing point we shall take hold of the human will that streams up, out of the third stratum of consciousness, as I have described it to you recently. Then we shall, at the same time, have the subjective-objective element for which Goethe was longing so very much. We shall have the possibility of grasping, in a sensitive way, the peculiar nature of the sense process of man in its relation to the outer world. Man's conceptions are very coarse and clumsy, indeed, which maintain that the outer world merely acts upon us and we, in turn, merely react upon it. In reality, there takes place a soul process from the outside toward the inside, which is taken hold of by the deeply subconscious, inner soul process, so that the two processes overlap. From outside, cosmic thoughts work into us, from inside, humanity's will works outward. Humanity's will and cosmic thought cross in this crossing point, just as the objective and the subjective element once crossed in the breath. We must learn to feel how our will works through our eyes and how the activity of the senses delicately mingles with the passivity, bringing about the crossing of cosmic thoughts and humanity's will. We must develop this new Yoga will. Then something will be imparted to us that of like nature to that which was imparted to human beings in the breathing process three millennia ago. Our comprehension must become much more soul-like, much more spiritual.

Goethe's world conception strove in this direction. Goethe endeavored to recognize the pure phenomenon, which he called the primal phenomenon, by arranging the phenomena which work upon man in the external world, without the interference of the Luciferic thought which stems from the head of man himself; this thought was only to serve in the arranging of the phenomena. Goethe did not strive for the law of nature, but for the primal phenomenon; this is what is significant with him. If, however, we arrive at this pure phenomenon, this primal phenomenon, we have something in the outer world which makes it possible for us to sense the unfolding of our will in the perception of the outer world, and then we shall lift ourselves to something objective-subjective, as it still was contained, for instance, in the ancient Hebrew doctrine. We must learn not merely to speak of the contrast between the material and the spiritual, but we must recognize the interplay of the material and the spiritual in a unity precisely in sense perception. If we no longer look at nature merely materially and, further, if we do not “think into it” a soul element, as Gustave Theodore Fechner did, then something will arise which will signify for us what the Yahve culture signified for mankind three millennia ago. If we learn, in nature, to receive the soul element together with sense perception, then we shall have the Christ relationship to outer nature. This Christ relationship to outer nature will be something like a kind of spiritual breathing process.

We shall be aided by realizing more and more, with our sound common sense, that pre-existence lies at the basis of our soul existence. We must supplement the purely egotistical conception of post-existence, which springs merely from our longing to exist after death, by the knowledge of the pre-existence of the soul. We must again rise to the conception of the real eternity of the soul. This is what may be called Michael culture. If we move through the world with the consciousness that with every look we direct outward, with every tone we hear, something spiritual, something of the nature of the soul element stream out into the world, we have gained the consciousness which mankind needs for the future.

I return once more to the image: You see a flame. You shut your eyes and have the after-image which ebbs away. Is that merely a subjective process? Yes, says the modern physiologist. But this is not true. In the cosmic ether this signifies an objective process, just as in the air the presence of carbonic acid which you exhale signifies an objective process. You are dealing here with the objective element; you have the possibility of knowing that something which takes place within you is at the same time a delicate cosmic process, if you become but conscious of it. If I look at a flame, close my eyes, let it ebb away—it will ebb away even though I keep my eyes open, only then I will not notice it—then I experience a process which does not merely take place within me, but which takes place in the world. But this is not only the case in regard to the flame, if I confront a human being and say: this man has said this or that, which may be true or untrue, this then constitutes a judgment, a moral or intellectual act of my inner nature. This ebbs away like a flame. It is an objective world process. If you think something good about your fellow-man: it ebbs away and is an objective process in the cosmic ether; if you think something evil: it ebbs away as an objective process. You are unable to conceal your perceptions and judgments about the world. You seemingly carry them on in your own being, but they are at the same time an objective world process. Just as people of the third period were conscious of the fact that the breathing process is a process that takes place simultaneously within man and in the objective world, so mankind must become aware in the future that the soul element of which I spoke is at the same time an objective world process.

This transformation of consciousness demands greater strength of soul than is ordinarily developed by the human being of today. To permeate oneself with this consciousness means to permit the Michael culture to enter. Just as it was self-evident for the man of the second and third pre-Christian millennium to think of the air as ensouled—so must it become self-evident for us to think of light as ensouled; we must arouse this ability in us when we consider light the general representative of sense perception We must thoroughly do away with the habit of seeing in light that which our materialistic age is accustomed to see in it. We must entirely cease to believe that merely those vibrations emanate from the sun of which, out of the modern consciousness, physics and people in general speak. We must become clear about the fact that the soul element penetrates through cosmic space upon the pinions of light; and we must realize, at the same time, that this was not the case in the period preceding our age. That which approaches mankind today through light approached mankind of that former period through the air. You see here an objective difference in the earth process. Expressing this in a comprehensive concept, we may say, Air-soul-process, Light-soul-process. This is what may be observed in the evolution of the earth. The Mystery of Golgotha signifies the transition from the one period to the other.

My dear friends, it does not suffice, for the present age nor for the future age of mankind, to speak in abstractions about the spiritual, to fall into some sort of nebulous pantheism; on the contrary, we must begin to recognize that that which today is sensed as a merely material process is permeated by soul.

It is a question of learning to say the following: there was a time prior to the Mystery of Golgotha when the earth had an atmosphere which contained the soul element that belongs to the soul of man. Today, the earth has an atmosphere which is devoid of this soul element. The same soul element that was previously in the air has now entered the light which embraces us from morning to evening. This was made possible through the fact that the Christ has united Himself with the earth. Thus, also from the soul-spiritual aspect, air and light underwent a change in the course of the Earth evolution.

My dear friends, it is a childish presentation that describes air and light in the same manner, purely materially, throughout the millennia in which Earth evolution unfolded. Air and light have changed inwardly. We live in an atmosphere and in a light sphere that are different from those in which our souls lived in previous earthly incarnations. To learn to recognize the externally-material as a soul-spirited element: this is what matters. If we describe purely material existence in the customary manner and then add, as a kind of decoration: this material existence contains everywhere the spiritual! This will not produce genuine spiritual science. My dear friends, people are very strange in this respect; they are intent on withdrawing to the abstract. But what is necessary is the following: in the future we must cease to differentiate abstractly between the material and the spiritual, but we must look for the spiritual in the material itself and describe it as such; and we must recognize in the spiritual the transition into the material and its mode of action in the material. Only if we have attained this shall we be able to gain a true knowledge of man himself. “Blood is quite a special fluid,” but the fluid physiology speaks about today is not a “special fluid,” it is merely a fluid whose chemical composition one attempts to analyze in the same way any other substance is analyzed; it is nothing special. But if we have gained the starting point of being able to understand the metamorphosis of air and light from the soul aspect, we shall gradually advance to the soul-spiritual comprehension of the human being himself, in every respect; then we shall not have abstract matter and abstract spirit, but spirit, soul, and body working into one another. This will be Michael-culture.

This is what our time demands. This is what ought to be grasped with all the fibers of the soul life by those human beings who wish to understand the present time. Whenever something out of the ordinary had to be introduced into human world conception it met with resistance. I have often quoted the following neat example: In 1837 (not even a century ago), the learned Medical College of Bavaria was asked, when the construction of the first railroad from Fuerth to Nuremberg was proposed, whether it was hygienically safe to build such a railroad. The Medical College answered (I am not telling a fairy tale, the documents concerning it exist): Such a railroad should not be built, for people who would use such a means of transportation would become nervously ill. And they added: Should there be such people who insist on such railroads, then, it is absolutely necessary to erect, on the right and left side of the tracks, high plank walls to prevent the people whom the train passes from getting concussion of the brain. Here you see, my dear friends, such a judgment is one thing; quite another is the course which the evolution of mankind takes. Today we smile about such a document as that of the Bavarian Medical College of 1837; but we are not altogether justified in smiling; for, if something similar occurs today, we behave in quite the same manner. And, after all, the Bavarian Medical College was not entirely wrong. It we compare the state of nerves of modern mankind with that of mankind two centuries ago, then we must say that people have become nervous. Perhaps the Medical College has exaggerated the matter a bit, but people did become nervous. Now, in regard to the evolution of mankind it is imperative that certain impulses which try to enter Earth evolution really should enter and not be rejected. That which from time to time wishes to enter human cultural development is often very inconvenient for people, it does not agree with their indolence, and what is duty in regard to human cultural development must be recognized by learning to read the objective facts, and must not be derived from human indolence, not even from a refined kind of indolence. I am concluding today's lecture with these words because there is no doubt that a strongly increasing battle will take place between anthroposophical cognition and the various creeds. We can see the signs for this on all sides. The creeds who wish to remain in the old beaten tracks, who do not wish to arouse themselves to a new knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, will reinforce their strong fighting position which they already have taken up, and it would be very frivolous, my dear friends, if we would remain unconscious of the fact that this battle has started.

I myself, you can be sure, am not at all eager for such a battle, particularly not for a battle with the Roman Catholic Church which, it seems, is forced upon us from the other side with such violence. He who, after all, thoroughly knows the deeper historical impulses of the creeds of our time will be very unwilling to fight time-honored institutions. But if the battle is forced upon us, it is not to be avoided! And the clergy of our day is not in the least inclined to open its doors to that which has to enter: the spiritual-scientific world conception. Remember the grotesque quotations I read to you recently where it was said that people should inform themselves about anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science through the writings of my opponents, since Roman-Catholics are forbidden by the Pope to read my own writings. This is not a light matter, my dear friends; it is a very serious matter! A battle which arises in such a manner, which is capable of disseminating such a judgment in the world, such a battle is not to be taken lightly. And what is more; it is not to be taken lightly since we do not enter it willingly. Let us take the example of the Roman-Catholic Church, my dear friends; matters are not different in regard to the Protestant Church, but the Roman-Catholic church is more powerful—and we have to consider time-honored institutions: if one understands the significance of the vestments of the priest when he reads the Holy Mass, the meaning of every single piece of his priestly garments, if one understands every single act of the Holy Mass, then one knows that they are sacred, time-honored establishments; they are establishments more ancient than Christianity for the Holy Mass is a ritual of the ancient Mystery culture, transformed in the Christian sense. And modern clergy who uses such weapons as described above lives in these rituals! Thus, if one has, on the one hand, the deepest veneration for the existing rituals and symbolism, and sees, on the other hand, how insufficient is the defense of and how serious are the attacks against that which wishes to enter mankind's evolution, then one becomes aware of the earnestness that is necessary in taking a stand in these matters. It is truly something worth deep study and consideration. What is thus heralded from that side is only at its beginnings; and it is not right to sleep in regard to it; on the contrary, we have to sharpen our perception for it. During the two decades in which the Anthroposophical Movement has been fostered in Middle Europe, we could indulge in sectarian somnolence which was so hard to combat in our own ranks and which still today sits so deeply embedded in the souls of the human beings who have entered the Anthroposophical Movement. But the time has passed in which we might have been allowed to indulge in sectarian somnolence. That which I have often emphasized here is deeply true, namely, that it is necessary that we should grasp the world-historical significance of the Anthroposophical Movement and overlook trifles, but that we should also consider the small impulses as serious and great.

One who looks around a little in Germany today, and not at externals but with the eye of the soul; one who sees not only what offers itself to the casual visitor, who seldom learns the true conditions during his visit; one who does not cling to the fact that a few chimneys are smoking again and the trains are running on time; one who can to some degree see into the spiritual situation; such a person sees a picture which is symptomatic not only for this territory but for the whole decay of our world-culture in the present cycle. I would like today to point out to you, in an introductory way, a psycho-spiritual symptom which is far more significant than many sleeping souls even in Germany allow themselves to dream.

In old Germany decay and decline rule today, and the external things which I have mentioned cannot deceive us about this. But this is not what I want to point to now, for in the course of world-history we often see decay set in and then out of the decay there again spring upward impulses. But if we judge externally, basing our opinion on mere custom and routine and saying that here again everything will be just as it has been before, then we do not see certain deeper-lying symptoms. One such symptom (but only one of many), a psycho-spiritual symptom which I want to bring before you, is the remarkable impression made by Oswald Spengler's book The Decline of the West, which is already symptomatic in having been able to appear in our time. It is a thick book and widely read, a book which has made an extraordinarily deep impression on the younger generation in Germany today. And the remarkable thing is that the author expressly states that he conceived the basic idea of this book, not during the war or after the war, but already some years before the catastrophe of 1914.

As I have said, this book makes a particularly strong impression on the younger generation. And if you try to sense the imponderables of life, the things which are between the lines, then you will be particularly struck by such a thing. In Stuttgart I recently had to give a lecture to the students of the technical college, and I went to this lecture entirely under the impression made by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. It is a thick book. Thick books are very costly now in Germany, yet it is much read. You will realize their costliness when I tell you that a pamphlet which cost five cents in 1914 now costs thirty-five cents. Of course, books have not risen in the same proportion as beer, which now costs ten times as much as in 1914. Books must always be handled more modestly, even under the present impossible economic conditions. Still the price increase on books shows what has happened to the economic system in the last few years.

The contents of this book may be easily characterized. It demonstrates how the culture of the Occident has now reached a point which, at a certain period, was also reached by the declining cultures of the old Orient, of Greece, and of Rome. Spengler calculates in a strictly historical way that the complete collapse of the culture of the Occident must be accomplished by the year 2200. In my public lecture in Stuttgart I treated Spengler's book very seriously, and I also combatted it strenuously. But today the contents of such a thing are not so important. More important than the contents or the psycho-spiritual qualities of a book is whether the author (no matter what view of life he may adopt) has spiritual qualities, whether he is a personality who may be taken earnestly, or even highly esteemed, in a spiritual way. The author of this book is, beyond any doubt, such a personality. He has completely mastered ten or fifteen sciences. He has a penetrating judgment on the whole historical process, as far as history reaches. And he also has something which men of today almost never have, a sound eye for the phenomena of decline in the civilizations of the present day. There is a fundamental difference between Spengler and those who do not grasp the nature of the impulses of decline and who try all kinds of arrangements for extracting from the decayed ideas some appearance of upward motion. Were it not heart-rending it might be humorous to see how people with traditional ideas all riddled with decay meet today in conferences and believe that out of decay they can create progress by means of programs. Such a man as Oswald Spengler, who really knows something, does not yield to such a deception. He calculates like a precise mathematician the rapidity of our decline and comes out with the prediction (which is more than a vague prophecy) that by the year 2200 this Occidental culture will have fallen into complete barbarism.

This combination of universal outward decline, especially in the psycho-spiritual field, with the revelation by a serious thinker that such decline is necessary in accordance with the laws of history—this combination is something remarkable, and it is this which has made such a strong impression on the younger generation. We have today not only signs of decay, we have theories which describe this decay as necessary in a demonstrable scientific way. In other words, we have not only decay but a theory of decay, and a very formidable theory too. One may well ask where we shall find the forces, the inner will-forces, to spur men to work upward again, if our best people, after surveying ten or fifteen sciences, have reached the point of saying that this decay is not only present but can be proved like a phenomenon in physics. This means that the time has begun when belief in decay is not represented by the worst people. We must stress again and again how really serious the times are, and what a mistake it is to sleep away this seriousness of the times.

If one grasps the entire urgency of the situation, one is driven to the question: How can we orient thinking so that pessimism toward western civilization will not appear to be natural and obvious while faith in a new ascent seems a delusion? We must ask if there is anything that can still lead us out of this pessimism. Just the way in which Spengler comes to his results is extremely interesting for the spiritual-scientist. Spengler does not consider the single cultures to be as sharply demarcated as we do when, for example, within the post-Atlantean time we distinguish the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin, and present-day cultures. He is not familiar with spiritual science, but in a certain way, he too considers such cultures. He looks at them with the eye of the scientific researcher. He examines them with the methods which in the last three or four centuries have grown up in occidental civilization and been adopted by all who are not prejudiced by narrow traditional faith, Catholic, Protestant, Monadistic, etc. Oswald Spengler is a man who is completely permeated by materialistic modern science. And he observes the rise and fall of cultures—oriental, Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, modern occidental—as he would observe an organism which goes through a certain infancy, a time of maturity, and a time of aging, and then, when it has grown old, dies. Thus Spengler regards the single cultures; they go through their childhood, their maturity, and their old age, and then they die. And the death-day of our present Occidental civilization is to be the year 2200.

Only the first volume of the book is now available. One who lets this first volume work upon him finds a strict theoretical vindication and proof of the decline, and nowhere a spark of light pointing to a rise, nothing which gives any hint of a rise. And one cannot say that this is an erroneous method of thought for a scientist. For if you consider the life of today and do not yield to the delusion that fruit for the future can grow out of bodiless programs, then you see that an upward movement nowhere appears in what the majority of men recognize in the outer world. If you regard rising and declining cultures as organisms, and then look at our culture, our entire Occidental civilization, as an organism, then you can only say that the Occident is perishing, declining into barbarism. You find no indication where an upward movement could appear, where another center of the world could form itself.

The Decline of the West is a book with spiritual qualities, based on keen observation, and written out of a real permeation with modern science. Only our habitual frivolity can ignore such things.

When a phenomenon like this appears, there springs up in the world-observer that historical concern of which I have so often spoken and which I can briefly characterize in the following words: One who today makes himself really acquainted with the inner nature of what is working in social, political, and spiritual life, one who sees how all that is so working strives toward decline—such a person, if he knows spiritual science as it is here meant, must say that there can only be a recovery if what we call the wisdom of initiation flows into human evolution. For if this wisdom of initiation were entirely ignored by men, if it were suppressed, if it could play no role in the further development of mankind—what would be the necessary consequence? You see, if we look at the old Indian culture, it is like an organism in having infancy, maturity, aging, decay, and death; then it continues itself. Then we have the Persian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greco-Latin, and our own time, but always we have something which Oswald Spengler did not take into account. He has been reproached for this by several of his opponents. For a good deal has already been written against Spengler's book, most of it cleverer than Benedetto Croce's extraordinarily simple article. Croce, who has always written cleverly apart from this, suddenly became a simpleton with Spengler's book. But it has been pointed out to Spengler that the cultures do not always have only infancy, maturity, aging, and death, they continue themselves and will do so in this case also; when our culture dies in the year 2200, it will continue itself again. The singular thing here is that Spengler is a good observer and therefore he finds no moment of continuation and cannot speak of a seed somewhere in our culture, but only of the signs of decay which are evident to him as a scientific observer. And those who speak of cultures continuing themselves have not known how to say anything particularly clever about this book. One very young man has brought forward a rather confused mysticism in which he speaks of world-rhythm; but that creates nothing which can transform a documented pessimism into optimism. And so it follows from Spengler's book that the decline will come, but no upward movement can follow.

What Spengler does is to observe scientifically the infancy of the organism which is a culture or civilization, its maturity, decline, aging, death. He observes these in the different epochs in the only way in which, fundamentally, one can observe scientifically. But one who can look a little deeper into things knows that in the old Indian life, apart from the external civilization, there lived the initiation-wisdom of primeval times. And this initiation-wisdom of primeval times, which was still mighty in India, inserted a new seed into the Persian culture. The Persian mysteries were already weaker, but they could still insert the seed into the Egypto-Chaldean time. The seed could also be carried over into the Greco-Latin period. And then the stream of culture continued itself as it were by the law of inertia into our own time. And there it dries up.

One must feel this, and those who belong to our spiritual science could have felt it for twenty years. For one of my first remarks at the time of founding our movement was that, if you want a comparison for what the cultural life of mankind brings forth externally, you may compare it with the trunk, leaves, blossoms, and so forth, of a tree. But what we want to insert into this continuous stream can only be compared with the pith of the tree; it must be compared with the activating growth-forces of the pith. I wanted thereby to point out that through spiritual science we must seek again what has died out with the old atavistic primeval wisdom.

The consciousness of being thus placed into the world should be gained by all those who count themselves a part of the anthroposophical movement. But I have made another remark, especially here in recent years but also in other places. I have said that, if you take all that can be drawn out of modern science and form therefrom a method of contemplation which you then apply to social or, better still, to historical life, you will be able to grasp thereby only phenomena of degeneration. If you examine history with the methods of observation taught by science, you will see only what is declining, if you apply this method to social life, you will create only the phenomena of degeneration.

What I have thus said over the course of years could really find no better illustration than Spengler's book. A genuinely scientific thinker appears, writes history, and discovers through this writing of history that the civilization of the Occident will die in the year 2200. He really could not have discovered anything else. For in the first place, with the scientific method of contemplation you can find or create only phenomena of degeneration; while in the second place the whole Occident in its spiritual, political, and social life is saturated with scientific impulses, hence is in the midst of a period of decline. The important thing is that what formerly drew one culture out of another has now dried up, and in the third millennium no new civilization will spring out of our collapsing Occidental civilization.

You may bring up ever so many social questions, or questions on women's suffrage, and so forth, and you may hold ever so many meetings; but if you form your programs out of the traditions of the past, you will be making something which is only seemingly creative and to which the ideas of Oswald Spengler are thoroughly applicable. The concern of which I have spoken must be spoken of because it is now necessary that a wholly new initiation-wisdom should begin out of the human will and human freedom. If we resign ourselves to the outer world and to what is mere tradition, we shall perish in the Occident, fall into barbarism; while we can move upward again only out of the will, out of the creative spirit. The initiation-wisdom which must begin in our time must, like the old initiation wisdom (which only gradually succumbed to egoism, selfishness, and prejudice), proceed from objectivity, impartiality, and selflessness. From this base it must permeate everything.

We can see this as a necessity. We must grasp it as a necessity if we look deeper into the present unhappy trend of Occidental civilization. But then you also notice something else; you notice that when a justified appeal is made it is distorted into a caricature. And it is especially necessary that we should see through this. Now in our time no appeal is more justifiable than that for democracy; yet this is distorted into a caricature as long as democracy is not recognized as a necessary impulse only for the life of politics and rights and the state, from which the economic life and the cultural life must be dissociated. It is distorted into a caricature when today, instead of objectivity, impartiality, and selflessness, we find personal whims and self-interest made into cultural factors. Everything is being drawn into the political field. But if this happens, then gradually objectivity and impartiality will disappear; for the cultural life cannot thrive if it takes its directions from the political life. It is always entangled in prejudice thereby. And selflessness cannot thrive if the economic life creeps into the political life, because then self-interest is necessarily introduced. If the associative life, which can produce selflessness in the economic field, is spoiled, then everything will tend to leave men to wander in prejudice and self-interest. And the result of this will be to reject what must be based on objectivity and selflessness—the science of initiation. In external life everything possible is done today to reject this science of initiation, although it alone can lead us beyond the year 2200.

This is the great anxiety as regards our culture, which can come over you if you look with a clear eye at the events of the present. On this basis, I regard Spengler's book as only a symptom, but can anyone possibly say today: “Ah yes, but Spengler is wrong. Cultures have risen and fallen; ours will fall, but another will arise out of it.”? No, there can be no such refutation of Spengler's views. It is falsely reasoned, because trust in an upward movement cannot today be based on a faith that out of the Occidental culture another will develop. No, if we rely on such a faith nothing will develop. There is simply nothing in the world at present which can be the seed to carry us over the beginning of the third millennium. Just because we are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, we must first create a seed.

You cannot say to people—Believe in the Gods, believe in this, believe in that, and then all will be well. You must confess that those who speak of, and even demonstrate, the phenomena of degeneration are right with regard to what lives in the outer world. But we, every individual human being must take care that they shall not remain right. For the upward movement does not come out of anything objective, it comes out of the subjective will. Each person must will, each person must will to take up the spirit anew, and from the newly received spirit of the declining civilization each person must himself give a new thrust; otherwise it will perish. You cannot appeal today to any objective law, you can appeal only to the human will, to the good-will of men. Here in Switzerland, where things have unrolled themselves differently, there is little to be seen of the real course of events (although it is also present here); but if you step over the border into Middle Europe you are immediately struck, in all that you observe with the eye of the soul, by what I have just described to you. There comes before your soul the sharp and painful contrast between the need for adopting initiation-wisdom into our spiritual, legal, and economic life and the perverted instincts which reject everything which comes from this quarter. One who feels this contrast must search hard for the right way to describe it, and one who does not choose words haphazardly often has trouble in finding the right expression for it. In Stuttgart I spoke on Spengler's book and I used this expression, “perverted instincts of the present.” I have used it again today because I find it is the only adequate one. As I left the stand that day I was accosted by one of those who best understand the word “perverted” in a technical sense, a physician. He was shocked that I had used just this word, but out of curious reasons. It is no longer commonly supposed that one who speaks on a foundation of facts, out of reality, chooses his words with pain; rather is it supposed that everyone forms his words as they are usually formed out of the superficial consciousness of the times. I had a talk with this physician, told him this and that, and then he said he was glad that I had not meant this word “perverted” in any elegant literary sense. I could only reply that this was certainly not the case, because I was not in the habit of meaning things in an elegant literary way. The point is that the man in the street today never assumes that there is such a thing as a creation out of the spirit; he simply believes, if you say something like “perverted instincts,” that you are speaking on the same basis as the last litterateur. That tone dominates our minds today; our minds educate themselves by it. Just in such an episode you can see the contrast between what is so necessary to mankind today—a real deepening, which must even go back as far as the basis of initiation-wisdom—and that which, through the caricature of democracy, comes before us today as spiritual life. People are much too lazy to draw something up from the hidden forces of consciousness within themselves; they prefer to dabble at tea-parties, in beer-gardens, at political meetings, or in parliaments. It is the easiest thing in the world now to say witty things, for we live in a dying culture where wit comes easily to people. But the wit that we need, the wit of initiation-wisdom, we must fetch up from the will; and we will not find it unless the power of this initiation-wisdom flows into our souls. Hence, we cannot say that we have refuted such a book as Spengler's. Naturally, we can describe it. It is born out of the scientific spirit. But the same is true of what others bring to birth out of the scientific spirit. Thus he is right if there does not enter into the wills of men that which will make him wrong. We can no longer have the comfort of proving that his demonstration of decline is wrong; we must, through the force of our wills, make wrong what seems to be right.

You see, this must be said in sentences which seem paradoxical. But we live in a time when the old prejudices must be demolished and when it must be recognized that we can never create a new world out of the old prejudices. Is it not understandable that people should encounter spiritual science and say they do not understand it? It is the most understandable thing in the world. For what they understand is what they have learned, and what they have learned, is decay or leading to decay. It is a question, not of assimilating something which can easily be understood out of the phenomena of decline, but of assimilating something to understand which one must first enhance his powers. Such is the nature of initiation-wisdom. But how can we expect that those who now aspire to be the teachers or leaders of the people should discern that what gives man a capacity for judgment must first be fetched out of the subconscious depths of soul-life and is not sitting up there in the head all ready-made. What really sits up there in the head is the destructive element.

Such is the nature of the things which you encounter wherever the consequences have already been drawn, where you have only to look at this seeming success. It is comprehensible that in the decline of occidental civilization our consciousness cannot easily enter into this field. Hence, we stand today entirely under the influence of this contrast which has been described to you; on the one side the need for a new impulse to enter into our civilization, and on the other side a rejection of this impulse. Things simply cannot improve if a sufficiently large number of people do not grasp the need for this impulse from initiation-wisdom. If you lay weight on temporary improvement you will not notice the great lines of decline, you will delude yourself about it, and you will march just so much more surely toward decline because you fail to grasp the only means there is to kindle a new spirit out of the will of men. But this spirit must lay hold of everything. Above all, this spirit must not linger over any theoretical philosophical problems. It would be a terrible delusion if a great number of people—perhaps just those who were somewhat pleased by the new initiation-wisdom and derived therefrom a somewhat voluptuous soul-feeling—should believe it would suffice to pursue this initiation-wisdom as something which was merely comfortable and good for the soul. For just through this the remainder of our real external life would more and more fall into barbarism, and the little bit of mysticism that could be pursued by those whose souls had an inclination in that direction would right soon vanish in the face of universal barbarism. Everywhere, and in an earnest way, initiation-wisdom must penetrate into the various branches of science and teaching, and above all into practical life, especially practical will. Fundamentally everything is lost time today that is not willed out of the impulses of initiation-wisdom. For all strength which we apply to other kinds of willing retards matters. Instead of wasting our time and strength in this way, we should apply whatever time and strength we have to bringing the impulse of initiation-wisdom into the different branches of life and knowledge.

If something is rolling along with the ancient impulses, no one will stop it in its rolling; and we should have an eye to how many younger people (especially in the conquered countries) are still filled with old catch-words, old chauvinism. These young people do not come into consideration. But those young people do come into consideration on whom rests the whole pain of the decline. And there are such. They are the ones whose wills can be broken by such theories as those of Spengler's book. Therefore, in Stuttgart I called this book of Oswald Spengler's a clever but fearful book, which contains the most fearful dangers, for it is so clever that it actually conjures up a sort of fog in front of people, especially young people.

The refutations must come out of an entirely different tone than that to which we are accustomed in such things, and it will never be a faith in this or that which will save us. People recommend one happily nowadays to such a faith, saying that if we only have faith in the good forces of men the new culture will come like a new youth. No, today it cannot be a question of faith, today it is a question of will; and spiritual science speaks to the will. Hence it is not understood by anyone who tries to grasp it through faith or as a theory. Only he understands it who knows how it appeals to the will, to the will in the deepest recesses of the heart when a man is alone with himself, and to the will when a man stands in the battle of daily life and in such battle, must assert himself as a man. Only when such a will is striven for can spiritual science be understood. I have said to you that for anyone who reads my Occult Science as he would read a novel, passively giving himself to it, it is really only a thicket of words—and so are my other books. Only one who knows that in every moment of reading he must, out of the depths of his own soul, and through his most intimate willing, create something for which the books should be only a stimulus—only such a one can regard these books as musical scores out of which he can gain the experience in his own soul of the true piece of music.

We need this active experiencing within our own souls.

When some time ago the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West appeared, there could be discerned in this literary production something like the will to tackle more intensively the elemental phenomena of decay and decline in our time. Here is a man who felt in much that is now active in the whole western world an impulse toward decline that must necessarily lead to a condition of utter chaos in western civilization, including America; and it could be seen that the man who had developed such a feeling—a very well-informed person, indeed, with mastery of many scientific ideas—was making the effort to present a sort of analysis of these phenomena.

It is clear, of course, that Spengler recognized this decline; and it is evident also that he had a feeling for everything of a declining nature exactly because all his thinking was itself involved in this decline; and because he felt this decadence in his very soul, I might say, he anticipated nothing but decadence as the outcome of all mass civilization. That is comprehensible. He believed that the West will become the prey of a kind of Caesarism, a sort of development of individual power, which will replace the differentiated, highly-organized cultures and civilizations with simple brute-force.

It is evident that Spengler, for one, had not the slightest perception of the fact that salvation for this western culture and civilization can come out of the will of mankind, if this will, in opposition to all that is moving headlong toward destruction, is directed toward the realization of something that can yet be brought forth out of the soul of man as a new force, if the human being of today wills it so. Of such a new force—naturally a spiritual force, based on spiritual activity—Oswald Spengler had not the slightest understanding.

Thus we can see that a very well-informed, brilliant man, with a certain penetrating insight, and able to coin such telling phrases, can actually arrive at nothing beyond a certain hope for the unfolding of a brute-power, which is remote from everything spiritual, from all inner human striving, and which depends entirely upon the development of external brutish force.

However, when the first volume appeared, it was possible to have at least a certain respect for the penetrating spirituality (I must use the expression again)—an abstract, intellectualistic spirituality—as opposed to the obtuseness of thinking which by no means is equal to the driving forces of history, but which so often gives the keynote to the literature of today.

Oswald Spengler's second volume has now appeared, and this indeed points out much more forcefully all that lives in a man of the present which can become his world-conception and philosophy, while he himself rejects, with a sort of brutality, everything genuinely spiritual. This second volume is likewise brilliant; yet in spite of his clever observations, Spengler shows nothing more than the dreadful sterility of an excessively abstract and intellectualistic mode of thought. The matter is extraordinarily noteworthy because it shows what a peculiar configuration of spirit can be attained by an undeniably notable personality of today.

In this second volume of Spengler's Decline of the West, it is primarily the beginning and the end that are of exceptional interest. But it is a melancholy interest which this beginning and end arouse; they really characterize the whole state of this man's soul. You need to read only a sentence or two at the beginning in order to estimate at once the soul-situation of Oswald Spengler, and likewise of many other people of the present time. What is to be said of it has not merely a German-literary significance, but an altogether international one.

Spengler begins with the following sentence: [The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; Volume II: Perspectives of World History. Translated by Atkinson (Knopf). The above citation, however, and all others used herein are translated from the original of Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, by the translator of this lecture. Ed.] “Observe the flowers in the evening, when in the setting sun they close one after the other; something sinister oppresses you then, a feeling of puzzling anxiety in the presence of this blind, dreamlike existence bound to the earth. The mute forest, the silent meadows, yonder bush, and these tendrils, do not stir. It is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free. It still dances in the evening light; it moves whither it will,” and so on.

Notice the starting-point from the flowers, from the plants. Now when I have wished to point to what gives its significance to the thinking of the present, I have again and again found it necessary to begin with the kind of comprehension applied today to lifeless, inorganic, mineral nature. Perhaps some of you will remember that in order to characterize the striving of present-day thinking for clarity of view, I have often used the example of the impact of two resilient balls, where from the given condition of one ball you can deduce the condition of the other by pure calculation.

Of course, anyone of the Spenglerian soul-caliber can say that ordinary thinking does not discover how resilience works in these balls, nor what the relations are in a deeper sense. Anyone who thinks thus does not understand upon what clarity of thought depends at the present time. For such an objection would have neither greater validity nor less than would an assertion by someone that it is impossible for me to understand a sentence written down on paper without first having investigated the composition of the ink with which it is written. The important thing is always to discover the point at issue. In surveying inorganic nature, the matter of concern is not what may eventually be discovered behind it as force-impulse, just as the composition of the ink is not the important thing for the understanding of a sentence written with it; but the matter of importance is whether clear thinking is employed.

This definite kind of thinking is what humanity has achieved since the time of Galileo and Copernicus. It shows first that man can grasp by means of it only lifeless, inorganic nature; but that, on the other hand, only by yielding himself to it, as to the simplest and most primitive kind of pure thinking, can he develop freedom of the human soul, or any kind of freedom for man. Only one who understands the character of clear, objective thinking, as it holds sway in lifeless nature, can later rise to the other processes of thinking and of seeing—to that which permeates thought with vision, with inspiration, with imagination, with intuition.

Therefore, the first task confronting one who wishes to speak today with any authority on the ultimate configuration of our cultural life is to observe what it is that the power of present-day thinking rests upon. And those who have become aware of this power in the thinking of our time know that this thinking is active in the machine, that it has brought us modern technical sciences, in which by means of this thinking we construct external, lifeless, inorganic sequences, all of whose pseudo-intelligence is intended to contribute to the outer activities of man.

Only one who understands this begins to realize that the moment we start to deal with plant-life, this kind of thinking, grasped at first in its abstractness, leads to utter nonsense. Anyone who uses this kind of crystal-clear thinking—appropriate in its abstractness to the mineral world alone—not as a mere starting point for the development of human freedom, but instead employs it in thinking about the plant-world, will have before him in the plant-world something nebulous, obscure, mystical, which he cannot comprehend. For as soon as we look up to the plant-world we must understand that here—at least to the degree intended by Goethe with his primordial-plant (Urpflanze), and with the principle by means of which he traced the metamorphosis of this primordial-plant through all plant-forms—here at least in this Goethean sense, everyone who approaches the plant-world with a recognition of the real force of the thought holding sway in the inorganic world must perceive that the plant-world remains obscure and mystical in the worst sense of our time, unless it is approached with imagination—at least in the sense in which Goethe established his botanical views.

When anyone like Oswald Spengler rejects imaginative cognition and yet starts describing the plant-world in this way, he reaches nothing that will give clarity and force, but only a kind of confused thinking, a mysticism in the very worst sense of the word, namely materialistic mysticism. And if this has to be said about the beginning of the book, the end of it is in turn characterized by the beginning. The end of this book deals with the machine, with that which has given the very signature to modern civilization—the machine, which on the one hand is foreign to man's nature, yet is on the other precisely the means by which he has developed his clear thinking.

Some time ago—directly after the appearance of Oswald Spengler's book, and under the impression of the effect it was having—I gave a lecture at the College of Technical Sciences in Stuttgart on Anthroposophy and, the Technical Sciences, in order to show that precisely by submersion in technical science the human being develops that configuration of his soul-life which makes him free. I showed that, because in the mechanical world he experiences the obliteration of all spirituality, he receives in this same mechanical world the impulse to bring forth spirituality out of his own being through inner effort. Anyone, therefore, who comprehends the significance of the machine for our whole present civilization can only say to himself: This machine, with its impertinent pseudo-intelligence, with its dreadful, brutal, demonic spiritlessness, compels the human being, when he rightly understands himself, to bring forth from within those germs of spirituality that are in him. By means of the contrast the machine compels the human being to develop spiritual life.

But as a matter of fact, what I wished to bring out in that lecture was understood by no one, as I was able to learn from the after-effects.

Oswald Spengler places at the conclusion of his work some observations about the machine. Well, what you read there about the machine finally leads to a sort of glorification of the fear of it. We feel that what is said is positively the apex of modern superstition regarding the machine, which people feel as something demonic, as certain superstitious people sense the presence of demons. Spengler describes the inventor of the machine, tells how it has gradually gained ground, and little by little has laid hold of civilization. He describes the people in whose age the machine appeared.

“But for all of them there also existed the really Faustian danger that the devil might have a hand in the game, in order to lead them in spirit to that mountain where he promised them all earthly power. That is what is meant by the dream of those strange Dominicans, like Peter Peregrinus, about the perpetual motion device, through which God would have been robbed of His omnipotence. They succumbed to this ambition again and again; they extorted his secret from the Divinity in order to be God themselves.”

So Oswald Spengler understands the matter thus: that because man can now control machines, he can through this very act of controlling, imagine himself to be a God, can learn to be a God, because, according to his opinion, the God of the cosmic machine controls the machine. How could a man help feeling exalted to godhood when he controls a microcosm!

“They hearkened to the laws of the cosmic time-beat in order to do them violence, and then they created the idea of the machine as a little cosmos which yields obedience only to the will of man. But in doing so they overstepped that subtle boundary where, according to the adoring piety of others, sin began; and that was their undoing, from Bacon to Giordano Bruno. True faith has always held that the machine is of the devil.” Now he evidently intends at this point to be merely ironic; but that he intends to be not only ironic becomes apparent when in his brilliant way he uses words which sound somewhat antiquated. The following passage shows this:

“Then follows, however, contemporaneously with Rationalism, the invention of the steam-engine, which overturns everything and transforms the economic picture from the ground up. Till then nature had given service; now it is harnessed in the yoke as a slave, and its work measured, as in derision, in terms of horse-power. We passed over from the muscular strength of the negro, employed in organized enterprise, to the organic forces of the earth's crust, where the life-force of thousands of years lies stored as coal, and we now direct our attention to inorganic nature, whose waterpower has already been harnessed in support of the coal. Along with the millions and billions of horse-power the population increases as no other civilization would have considered possible. This growth is a product of the machine, which demands service and control, in return for which it increases the power of each individual a hundredfold. Human life becomes precious for the sake of the machine. Work becomes the great word in ethical thinking. During the eighteenth century it lost its derogatory significance in all languages. The machine works and compels man to work with it. All civilization has come into a degree of activity under which the earth quivers.

“What has been developed in the course of scarcely a century is a spectacle of such magnitude that to human beings of a future culture, with different souls and different emotions, it must seem that at that time nature reeled. In previous ages, politics has passed over cities and peoples; human economy has interfered greatly with the destinies of the animal and plant world—but that merely touches life and is effaced again. This technical science, however, will leave behind it the mark of its age when everything else shall have been submerged and forgotten. This Faustian passion has altered the picture of the earth's surface.

“And these machines are ever more dehumanized in their formation; they become ever more ascetic, more mystical and esoteric. They wrap the earth about with an endless web of delicate forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more immaterial, even more silent. These wheels, cylinders and levers no longer speak. All the crucial parts have withdrawn to the inside. Man senses the machine as something devilish, and rightly so. For a believer it indicates the deposition of God. It hands over sacred causality to man, and becomes silent, irresistible, with a sort of prophetic omniscience set in motion by him.

“Never has the microcosm felt more superior toward the macrocosm. Here are little living beings who, through their spiritual force, have made the unliving dependent upon them. There seems to be nothing to equal this triumph, achieved by only one culture, and, perhaps, for only a few centuries. But precisely because of it the Faustian man has become the slave of his own creation.”

We see here the thinker's complete helplessness with regard to the machine. It never dawns on him that there is nothing in the machine that could possibly be mystical for anyone who conceives the very nature of the unliving as lacking any mystical element.

And thus we see Oswald Spengler beginning with a hazy recital about plants, because he really has no conception at all of the nature and character of present-day cognition—which is closely related to the evolution of the mechanical life—because to him thinking remains only an abstraction, and on this account he is also unable to perceive the function of thinking in anything mechanical. In reality, thinking here becomes an entirely unsubstantial image, so that the human being in the mechanical age may become all the more real, may call forth his soul, his spirit, out of himself by resisting the mechanical. That is the significance of the machine-age for the human being, as well as for world-evolution.

When anyone intending to begin with metaphysical clarity starts out instead with a hazy recital about plants, he does so because in this mood he is in opposition to the machine. That is to say, Oswald Spengler has grasped the function of modern thinking only in its abstractness, and he sets to work on something that remains dark to him, namely, the plant-world.

Now taking the mineral, the plant, the animal, and the human kingdoms, the last-named may be characterized for the present time by saying that since the middle of the fifteenth century we have advanced to the thinking that makes the mineral kingdom transparent to us. So that when we look at the human being of our time, as he is inwardly, as observer of the outer world, we must say that as human being he has at this precise time developed the conception of the mineral kingdom. But then we must characterize the significance of this mineral-thinking in the way I have just now characterized it.

But when someone who knows nothing of the real nature of the mineral kingdom takes his start from the plant kingdom, he gets no farther than the animal kingdom. For the animal bears in itself the plant-nature in the same form we today bear the mineral nature. It is characteristic of Oswald Spengler, first, that he begins with the plant, and in his concepts in no way gets beyond the animal (he deals with man only in so far as man is an animal) ; and second, that thinking really seems to him to be extraordinarily comprehensible, whereas, in reality, as I have just explained, it has been understood in its true significance only since the fourteenth century. He thus lets his thinking slide down just as far as possible into the animal world. We see him discovering, for example, that he has sense-perception, just as has the animal, and that this sense-perception, even in the animal, becomes a sort of judgment. In this way he tries to represent thinking merely as something like an intensification of the perceptive life of the animal.

Actually no one has proved in such a radical way as this same Oswald Spengler that the man of today with his abstract thinking reaches only the extra-human world, and no longer comprehends the human. And the essential characteristic of the human being, namely, that he can think, Oswald Spengler regards only as a sort of adjunct, which is inexplicable and really superfluous. For, according to Spengler, this thinking is really something highly superfluous in man.

“Understanding emancipated from feeling is called thinking. Thinking has forever brought disunion into the human waking state. It has always regarded the intellect and the perceptive faculty as the high and the low soul-forces. It has created the fatal contrast between the light-world of the eye, which is designated as a world of semblance and sense-delusion, and a literally-imagined world, in which concepts with slight but ever-present accent of light pursue their existence.”

Now in setting forth these things Spengler develops an extraordinarily curious idea; namely, that in reality the whole spiritual civilization of man depends upon the eye, that it is really only distilled from the light-world, and concepts are only somewhat refined, somewhat distilled, visions in the light, which are transmitted through the eye. Oswald Spengler simply has no idea that thinking, when it is pure thought, not only receives the light-world of the eye, but unites this light-world with the whole man. It is an entirely different matter whether we think of an entity which is connected with the perception of the eye, or speak of conceptions or mental pictures. Spengler has something to say also about conceptions, or mental pictures (Vorstellen); but at this very point he tries to prove that thinking is only a sort of brain-dream and rarified light-world in man.

Now I should like to know whether with any kind of thinking that is not abstract, but is sound common sense, the word “stellen” (to put or place), when it is experienced correctly, can ever be associated with anything belonging to the light-world. A man “places” himself with his legs; the whole man is included. When we say “vorstellen” (to place before, to represent), we dynamically unite the light-entity with what we experience within as something dynamic, as a force-effect, as something that plunges down into reality. With realistic thinking, we absolutely dive down into reality. Consider the most important thoughts. Aside from mathematical ones, thoughts always lead to the realization that in them we have not merely a light-air-organism, but also something which man has as soul-experience when he causes a thought to be illuminated at the same time that he places both feet on the earth.

Therefore, all that Oswald Spengler has developed here about this light-world transformed into thinking is really nothing but exceedingly clever talk. It is absolutely necessary that this should be stated: the introduction to this second volume is brilliant twaddle, which then rises to such assertions as the following:

“This impoverishment of the sense-faculties involves at the same time an immeasurable deepening. The human waking existence is no longer mere tension between the body and the surrounding world. It is now life in a closed, surrounding light-world. The body moves in observable space. The experience of depth is a mighty penetration into visible distances from a light-center. This is the point which we call ‘I’, ‘I’ is a light-concept.”

Anyone who asserts that “I” is a light-concept has no idea, for example, how intimately connected is the experience of the I with the experience of gravity in the human organism; he has no notion at all of the experience of the mechanical that can arise in the human organism. But when it does arise consciously, then the leap is made from abstract thinking to the realistic, concrete thinking that leads to reality.

It might be said that Oswald Spengler is a perfect example of the fact that abstract thinking has become airy, and also light, and has carried the whole human being away from reality, so that he reels about somewhere in the light and has no suspicion that there is also gravity; for example—that there is also something that can be experienced, not merely looked at. The onlooker standpoint of John Stuart Mill, for instance, is here carried to the extreme. Therefore, the book is exceedingly characteristic of our time.

One sentence on page 13 [Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. II.] appears terribly clever, but it is really only light and airy: “One fashions conception upon conception and finally achieves a thought-architecture in great style, whose edifices stand there in an inner light, as it were, in complete distinctness.”

So Oswald Spengler starts out with mere phraseology. He finds the plant-world “sleeping”; that represents first of all the world around us, which is thoroughly asleep. He finds that the world “wakes up” in the animal kingdom, and that the animal develops in itself a kind of microcosm. He gets no farther than the animal, but develops only the relation between the plant-world and the animal-world, and finds the former in the sleeping state and the latter in the waking state.

But everything that happens in the world really comes about under the influence of what is sleeping. The animal—therefore, for Oswald Spengler, man also—has sleep in himself. That is true. But all that has significance for the world proceeds from sleep, for sleep contains movement. The waking state contains only tensions—tensions which beget all sorts of discrepancies within, but still only tensions which are, as it were, just one more external item in the universe. Actually, an independent reality is one which arises from sleep.

And in this broth float all sorts of more or less superfluous, or savory and unsavory blobs of grease—which is the animal element; but there could be broth without these blobs of grease, except that these bring something into reality. In sleep the Where and the How are not to be found, but only the When and the Why. So that we find the following in the human being, who contains the plantlike as well—of the role played by the mineral element in the human being Oswald Spengler has no notion—so that in man we find the following: in as far as he is plantlike, he lives in time; he takes his stand in the “When” and the “Why,” the earlier being the Why of the later. That is the causal factor. And by living on thus through history man really expresses the plantlike in history. The animal-element—and therefore the human as well—which inquires as to the “Where” and the “How,” these (the animal and human elements) are just the blobs of grease that are added to it. (This is quite interesting as far as the inner tensions are concerned, but these really have nothing to do with what takes place in the world.) So we can say: Through cosmic relationships the “When” and the “Why” are implanted in the world for succeeding ages.

And in this on-flowing broth the grease-blobs float with their “Where” and “How.” And when a man—just one such drop of grease—floats in this broth, the “Where” and the “How” really concern only him and his inner tensions, his waking existence. What he does as a historical being proceeds from sleep.

Long ago it was said as a sort of religious imagination: The Lord giveth to his beloved in sleep. To the Spenglerian man it is nature that gives in sleep. Such is the thinking of one of the most prominent personalities of the present time, who, however—in order to avoid coming to terms with himself—plunges into the plant kingdom, thence to emerge no farther than the animal kingdom, into which the human also is stirred.

Now one would suppose that this concoction with its cleverness would avoid the worst blunders that thinking has made in the past; that is, that it would somehow be consistent. If the plant-existence is to be poured out over the history of humanity, then let the concoction be confined to the plant kingdom. It would be difficult, however, to enter upon a historical discussion concerning the man of the plant kingdom. Yet Oswald Spengler does discuss historically, even very cleverly, the plantlike activity of humanity during sleep. But in order that he may have something to say about this sleep of humanity, he makes use of the worst possible kind of thinking, namely, that of anthropomorphism, artificially distorting everything, imagining human qualities into everything. Hence, he speaks—as early as on page 9—of the plant, which has no waking-existence, because he wants to learn from it how he is to write history, and also give a description of the activity of man that arises from sleep.

But let us read the first sentences on page 9: “A plant leads an existence with no waking state”—Good. He means: “In sleep all beings become plants,” that is, man as well as animal—All right.—“the tension with the surrounding world is released, the measure of life moves on.” And now comes a great sentence: “A plant knows only the relation to When and Why.” Now the plant begins not only to dream, but to “know” in its blessed sleep. Thus one faces the conjecture that this sleep, destined to spread perpetually as history in human evolution, might now begin to wake up. For then Oswald Spengler could just as well write a history as to attribute to the plants a knowledge of When and Why. Indeed this sleep-nature of the plant has even some highly interesting qualities:

“The thrusting of the first green spears out of the winter-earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole force of blossoming, of fragrance, of glowing, of ripening—this is all desire for the fulfilment of a destiny and a constantly yearning query as to the Why.”

Of course history can very easily be described as plantlike, if the writer first prepares himself to that end through anthropomorphisms. And because all this is so, Oswald Spengler says further:

“The Where can have no meaning for the plantlike existence. That is the question with which the awakening human being daily recalls his world. For only the pulse-beat of existence persists through all the generations. The waking existence begins anew with each microcosm. That is the distinction between procreation and birth. The one is guarantee for permanence, the other is a beginning. And therefore, a plant is procreated but not born. It exists, but no awakening, no first day, spreads a sense-world around it ...”

If anyone wishes to follow Spenglerian thoughts, he must really, like a tumbler, first stand on his head and then turn over, in order mentally to reverse what is thought of in the human sense as right side up. But you see by concocting such

metaphysics, such a philosophy, Spengler arrives at the following: This sleeping state in man, that which is plantlike in him, this makes history. What is this in man? The blood—the blood which flows through the generations.

Well, in this way Spengler prepares a method for himself, so that he can say: The most important events developed in human history occur through the blood. To do this he must of course cut some more thought-capers:

“The waking existence is synonymous with ‘ascertaining’ (Feststellen), no matter whether the point in question is the sense of touch in one of the infusoria or human thinking of the highest order.”

Certainly when anyone thinks in such an abstract way, he simply fails to discover the difference between the sense of touch in one of the infusoria and human thinking of the highest order. He comes then to all sorts of extraordinarily strange assertions, such as: that this thinking is really a mere adjunct to the whole human life, that deeds originate in the blood, and that out of the blood history is made. And if there are still a few people who ponder about this, they do so with purely abstract thinking that has nothing whatever to do with actuality.

“That we not only live, but know about life, is the result of that observation of our corporeal being in the light. But the animal knows only life, not death.”

And so he explains that the thing of importance must come forth out of obscurity, darkness, out of the plantlike, out of the blood; and he claims that those people who have achieved anything in history have done so not at all as the result of an idea, of thinking—but that thoughts, even those of thinkers, are merely a by-product. About what thinking accomplishes, Oswald Spengler has no words disparaging enough.

And then he contrasts with thinkers all those who really act, because they let thinking be thinking; that is, let it be the business of others.

“Some people are born as men of destiny and others as men of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart from the ‘spiritual’ man” (Spengler puts ‘spiritual’ in quotation marks), “from the saint, the priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist, regardless of whether he is destined thereto by the power of his thinking or through lack of blood. Existence and being awake, measure and tension, instincts and concepts, the organs of circulation and those of touch—there will seldom be a man of eminence in whom the one side does not unquestionably surpass the other in significance.

“... the active person is a complete human being. In the contemplative person a single organ would like to act without the body or against it. For only the active man, the man of destiny” (that is, one whom thoughts do not concern)—“for only the active man, the man of destiny, lives, in the last analysis, in the real world, the world of political, military, and economic crises, in which concepts and theories count for nothing. Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art.”

That is a plain statement; in fact, plain enough for anyone to recognize who said it: that it is definitely written by none other than a “scribbler and book-worm,” who merely puts on airs at the expense of others. Only a “scribbler and bookworm” could write:

“Some people are born as men of destiny and some as men of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart from the ‘spiritual’ man, from the saint, the priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist” ... As if there had never been confessionals and father confessors! Indeed, there are still other beings from whom all those classes of men glean their thoughts. In the society of all such people as have been mentioned—statesmen, generals, men of the world, merchants, fencers, gamblers, and so on—there have even been found soothsayers and fortune-tellers. So that actually the “world” that is supposed to separate the statesman, politician, etc., from the “spiritual” man is in reality not such an enormous distance. Anyone who can observe life will find that this sort of thing is written with utter disregard of all life-observation. And Oswald Spengler, who is a brilliant man and an eminent personality, makes a thorough job of it. After saying that in the realm of real events a blow is worth more than a logical conclusion, he continues thus:

“Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art. Let us speak unequivocally: Understanding liberated from feeling is only one side of life, and not the decisive side. In the history of western thought, the name of Napoleon may be omitted, but in actual history Archimedes, with all his scientific discoveries, has perhaps been less influential than that soldier who slew him at the storming of Syracuse.”

Now if a brick had fallen on the head of Archimedes, then, according to this theory, this brick would be more important, in the sense of real logical history, than all that originated with Archimedes. And mind you, this was not written by an ordinary journalist, but by one of the most clever people of the present time. That is exactly the significant point, that one of the cleverest men of the present writes in this way.

And now exactly what is effective? Thinking? That just floats on top. What is effective is the blood. Anyone who speaks about the blood from the spiritual viewpoint, that is, speaks scientifically, will ask first of all how the blood originates, how the blood is related to man's nourishment. In the bowels blood does not yet exist; it is first created inside the human being himself. The flow of the blood down through the generations—well, if any kind of poor mystical idea can be formed, this is it. Nothing that nebulous mystics have ever said more or less distinctly about the inner soul-life was such poor mysticism as this Spenglerian mysticism of the blood. It refers to something that precludes all possibility, not only of thinking about it—of course that would make no difference to Oswald Spengler, because no one really needs to think, it is just one of the luxuries of life—but one should cease to speak about anything so difficult to approach as the blood, if one pretends to be an intelligent person, or even an intelligent higher animal.

From this point of view, it is perfectly possible, then, to inaugurate a consideration of history with the following sentence:

“All great historical events are sustained by such beings of a cosmic nature, as dwell in peoples, parties, armies, classes; while the history of the spirit runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, educational classes, tendencies—in ‘isms.’ And here it is again a matter of destiny whether such a group finds a leader at the decisive moment of its greatest efficiency, or is blindly driven forward, whether the chance leaders are men of high caliber or totally insignificant personalities raised to the summit by the surge of events, like Pompey or Robespierre. It is the mark of the statesman that he comprehends with complete clarity the strength and permanence, direction and purpose of all these soul-masses which form and dissolve in the stream of time; nevertheless, here also it is a question of chance as to whether he will be able to rule them, or is dragged along by them.” In this way a consideration of history is inaugurated which lets the blood be the conqueror of everything that enters historical evolution through the spirit! Now:

“One power may be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and against money, there is no other” (but blood, he means). “Money is vanquished and deposed only by blood. Life is the first and last, the illimitable cosmic flux in microcosmic form. It is the fact in the world as history. Before the irresistible rhythm of successive generations, everything that the waking life has built up in its worlds of spirit finally disappears. The fact of importance in history is life, always only life, the race, the triumph of the will to power, and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money. World-history is world-judgment. It has always decided in favor of life that was more vigorous, fuller, more sure of itself, in favor, that is, of the right to live, whether it was just or not in the waking life; and it has always sacrificed truth and righteousness to power, to race, and has condemned to death men and whole peoples to whom truth was more precious than deeds, and justice more essential than power. Thus another drama of lofty culture, this whole wonderful world of divinities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities, closes with the primeval facts of the eternal blood, which is one and the same with the eternally circling, cosmic, undulating flood. The clear, form-filled waking existence plunges again into the silent service of life, as demonstrated by the Chinese epoch and by the Roman Empire. Time conquers space, and time it is whose inexorable passage imbeds on this planet the fleeting incident—culture, in the incident—man, a form in which the incident—life, flows along for a time, while behind it in the light-world of our eyes appear the flowing horizons of earth-history and star-history.

“For us, however, whom destiny has placed in this culture at this moment of its evolution when money celebrates its last victories, and its successor, Caesarism, stealthily and irresistibly approaches, the direction is given within narrow limits which willing and compulsion must follow, if life is to be worth living.”

Thus does Oswald Spengler point to the coming Caesarism, to that which is to come before the complete collapse of the cultures of the West, and into which the present culture will be transformed.

I have put this before you today because truly the man who is awake—he matters little to Oswald Spengler—the man who is awake, even though he be an Anthroposophist, should take some account of what is happening. And so I wished from this point of view to draw your attention to a particular problem of the time. But it would be a poor conclusion if I were to say only this to you concerning this problem of our time. Therefore, before we must have a longer interval for my trip to Oxford, I will give another lecture next week Wednesday.

The author whom I discussed here the last time should really provide much food for thought for those very people who count themselves in the Anthroposophical Movement; for Oswald Spengler is a personality who has a scientific mastery of a very large part of all that can be known today. It can be said that he has complete command of the great variety of thoughts that have become the possession of civilized humanity in the course of recent centuries. Spengler can be regarded as a man who has assimilated a large number of the sciences, or at least the ideas contained in them.

The thought-combinations he achieves are sometimes dazzling. He is in the highest degree what may be called in Central Europe a brilliant man—not in France, but in Central Europe; Oswald Spengler's thoughts are too heavy and too dense for western—that is, French—genius; but, as has been said, in the Central European sense he may undoubtedly be regarded as a brilliant thinker. He can hardly be called an elegant thinker in the best meaning of the word, for the investiture of his thoughts, in spite of all his cleverness, is certainly extremely pedantic. And it can even be seen in various places that out of the sentence-meshes of this gifted man the eye of a Philistine unmistakably peers forth. In any case, there is something unpolished in the thoughts themselves.

Well, this is more what might be called an esthetic consideration of the ideas; but the important point is this: we confront here a personality who has thoughts, and they are in keeping with the spirit of the time, but he really has a poor opinion of thinking in general. For Oswald Spengler regards as decisive for the real happenings in the world not what results from thinking, but in his opinion the more instinctive life-impulses are the deciding factors. So that with him thinking really floats above life, as something of a luxury, we might say; and from his point of view, thinkers are people who ponder on life, from who's pondering however nothing can flow into life. Life is already there when thinkers appear who are ready to think about it. And in this connection, it is entirely correct to say that in the world-historical moment when a thinker masters the special form of present-day thoughts with something of universality, at that very moment he senses their actual sterility and unfruitfulness. He turns to something other than these unfruitful thoughts, namely, to what bubbles up in the instinctive life, and from the point of view thus provided he sees the present civilization. This really appears to him in such a way that he says: Everything that this civilization has brought forth is on the way to ruin. We can only hope that something instinctive will emerge once again from what Spengler calls “the blood,” which will have nothing to do with what constitutes present civilization, will even crush it, and put in its place a far-reaching power arising only from the instinctive realm.

Oswald Spengler sees that people of the modern civilization have gradually become slaves of the mechanistic life; but he fails to see that just through reaction, human freedom can result within this mechanistic life—that is, technical science in general—because it is fundamentally devoid of spirit. He has no notion of this; but why is this so?

You know that in the last lecture I quoted the passage in which Spengler says: The statesman, the practical man, the merchant, and so on, all act from impulses other than those that can be gained from thinking; and I said more or less jokingly: Oswald Spengler never seems to have noticed that there are also father-confessors, and others in similar positions. Neither has Spengler adequately observed something else, in regard to which the relation to the father-confessor represents only a decadent side-issue, from a world-historical point of view.

When we go back in humanity's evolution, we find everywhere that the so-called men of action, those people who have outwardly something to do in the world, turned, in later times to the oracles, and in earlier times to what can be recognized in the Mysteries as the decrees of the spiritual world. We need only to observe the ancient Egyptian culture to see that those who learned in the Mysteries the decrees of the spiritual world transmitted what they discovered by spiritual means to those who wished to become, and were intended to be, men of action. So that we have only to look back in the evolution of humanity to find that it is out of the spiritual world, not out of the blood—for this whole theory of the blood is about as mystically nebulous as anything could be—it is not, then, out of the obscure depths of the blood that the impulses were derived which entered into earthly deeds, but out of the spirit. In a certain sense the so-called men of action of that time were the instruments for the great spiritual creations whose directions were learned in the spiritual research of the Mysteries. And I might say that echoes of the Mysteries, which we see everywhere in Greek history, play a part in Roman history, and they are also unmistakably to be found even in the early part of the Middle Ages. I have called your attention, for instance, to the fact that the Lohengrin-legend can be understood only if one knows how to follow it back from the external physical world into the citadel of the Grail in the early, or properly speaking, in the middle part of the Middle Ages.

It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the true progress of humanity's evolution when Oswald Spengler supposes that world-historical events originate in any way in the blood, and that what the human being acquires through thoughts has nothing to do with these events. Looking back into ancient times we find that when people had tasks to perform, they were to a large extent dependent upon research in the spiritual world. The designs of the Gods had to be discovered, if we may so express it. And this dependence upon the Gods existing in ancient times made the human being of that time unfree. Men's thoughts were completely directed toward serving as vessels, as it were, into which the Gods poured their substance—spiritual substance, under whose influence men acted.

In order that men might become free, this pouring of substance into human thoughts on the part of the Gods had to cease; and as a result, human thoughts came more and more to be images. The thoughts of the humanity of earlier times were realities to a far greater degree; and what Oswald Spengler ascribes to the blood are those very realities which lay hidden in the thoughts of ancient humanity, those substances which still worked through men in the Middle Ages.

Then came modern times. The thoughts of men lost their divine, substantial content. They became merely abstract thought-images. But it is only thoughts of this kind that are not constraining and coercive; only by living in such thought-images can man become free.

Now throughout recent centuries and into the twentieth century there was organically present in man scarcely more than the disposition to fashion such thought-images. This is the education of man toward freedom. He did not have the atavistic imaginations and inspirations of ancient times: he experienced only thought-images, and in these he could become ever more and more free, since images do not compel. If our moral impulses manifest in images, these impulses no longer compel us as they once did when they lay in the ancient thought-substance. They acted upon human beings at that time just as nature-forces; whereas the modern thought-images no longer act in this way. In order, therefore, that they might have any content whatsoever, the human being had, on the one hand, either to fill them with what natural science knows through ordinary sense-observation, or, on the other, to develop in secret societies, in rites or otherwise, something which was derived more or less from ancient times through tradition. By means of sense-observation he thus gained a science which filled his thoughts from without, but these thoughts rejected more and more anything from within; so that if man's thoughts were to have any inner content at all, he was compelled to turn to the ancient traditions, as they had been handed down either in the religious denominations or in the various kinds of secret societies which have flourished over the whole earth. The great mass of mankind was embraced in the various religious denominations, where something was presented whose content was derived from ancient times, when thoughts still had some content. Man filled his thoughts from without with a content of sense-observation, or from within with ancient impulses which had become dogmatic and traditional.

It was necessary for this to occur from the sixteenth century up to the last third of the nineteenth; for during that time human cooperation throughout the civilized world was still influenced by that spiritual principle which we may call the principle of the Archangel Gabriel, if we wish to employ an ancient name (it is only a terminology; I intend to indicate a spiritual Power); this Being, then, influenced human souls, albeit unconsciously in modern times. Human beings had themselves no inner content, and because they accepted a merely traditional content for their spirit-soul life, they were unable to feel the presence or influence of this Being.

The first really to become aware of this utter lack of spiritual content in his soul-life was Friedrich Nietzsche; but he was unable to reach the experience of a new spirituality. Actually his every impulse to find a spirit-soul content failed, and so he sought for impulses as indefinite as possible, such as power-impulses and the like.

People need not merely a spiritual content which they may then clothe in abstract thoughts, but they need the thorough inner warming which may be occasioned by the presence of this inner content. This spiritual warming is exceedingly important. It was brought about for the majority of people through the various rituals and similar ceremonies practiced in the religious denominations; and this warmth was poured into souls also in the secret societies of more recent times.

This was possible in the time of Gabriel, because practically everywhere on the earth there were elemental beings still remaining from the Middle Ages. The farther the nineteenth century advanced the more impossible it became—entirely so in the twentieth century—for these elemental beings, which were in all natural phenomena and so forth, to become parasites, as it were, in the human social life. In most recent times there has been much which has unconsciously resisted this condition.

When in these secret societies which followed ancient tradition—it is really unbelievable how “ancient” and “sanctified” all the rituals of these societies are supposed to be—but when rituals were arranged or teachings given, in the sense of ancient tradition, when something was developed in these societies which had been carried over as an echo of the ancient Mysteries, no longer understood, conditions were exactly right for certain elemental beings. For when people went through all sorts of performances—let us say, when they attended the celebration of a mass, and no longer understood anything about it, the people were then in the presence of something filled with great wisdom; they were present, but understood nothing at all of what they saw, although an understanding would have been possible. Then these elemental beings entered the situation, and when the people were not thinking about the mass, the elementals began to think with the unused human intellect. Human beings had cultivated the free intellect more and more, but they did not use it. They preferred to sit and let something be enacted before them from tradition. People did not think. Although conditions are becoming entirely different, it is still true today that people of the present time could do a vast amount of thinking if they wished to use their minds; but they have no desire to do this; they are disinclined to think clearly. They say rather: Oh, that requires too much effort; it demands inner activity.

If people desired to think they would not enjoy so much going to all sorts of moving pictures, for there one cannot and need not think; everything just rolls past. The tiny bit of thinking that is asked of anyone today is written on a great screen where it can be read. It is true that this lack of sympathy with active inner thinking has been slowly and gradually developed in the course of modern times, and people have now almost entirely given up thinking. If a lecture is given somewhere which has no illustrations on the screen, where people are supposed to think somewhat, they prefer to sleep a little. Perhaps they attend the lecture, but they sleep—because active thinking does not enjoy a high degree of favor in our time.

It was precisely to this unwillingness to think, lasting through centuries, that the practices of the various secret societies were in many ways adapted. The same kind of elemental beings were present that had associated with human beings in the first half of the Middle Ages—when experiments were still going on in alchemistic laboratories, where the experimenters were quite conscious that spiritual beings worked with them. These spiritual beings were still present in later times; they were present everywhere. And why should they not have made use of a good opportunity?

In most recent centuries a human brain was gradually developed which could think well, but people had no wish to think. So these elemental beings approached and said to themselves: If man himself will make no use of his brain, we can use it. And in those secret societies which cherished only the traditional, and always kept emphasizing what was old, these elementals approached and made use of human brains for thinking. Since the sixteenth century an extraordinary amount of brain-substance has been thus employed by elemental beings.

Very much has entered human evolution without man's cooperation—even good ideas, especially those appertaining to human social life. If you look around among people of our time who would like to be more or less informed about civilization, you will find that to them it has become an important question to ask what it is, really, that acts from man to man. People should think, but do not; what does act, then, from man to man? That was a great question, for instance, with Goethe, and with this in mind he wrote his Wilhelm Meister. In this story your attention is constantly drawn to all sorts of obscure relations of which people are unconscious, which nevertheless prevail, and are half unconsciously taken up by one and another and spread. All kinds of threads are interwoven; and these Goethe tried to find. He sought for them, and what he could find he aimed to describe in his novel, Wilhelm Meister.

This was the condition existing in Central Europe throughout the nineteenth century. If people today had any kind of inclination to spend more time with a book than between two meals—well, that is speaking figuratively, for usually they go to sleep when they have read one-third between two meals; then they read the next third between the next two meals, and the final third between the next two—and in that way, it is somewhat scattered. It would be good for people if even those novels and short stories that can be read between two meals, or between two railroad stations, stimulated reflection. We can hardly expect that at the present time; but if, for example, you should look up Gutzkow, and see how in his book, The Magician of Rome, and in his The Champions of the Spirit he has searched for such relations; if you take the extraordinarily social concatenations sought by George Sand in her novels, you will be able to notice that in the nineteenth century those threads, arising from indeterminate powers and working into the unconsciousness, everywhere played a part; you will notice that the authors are following up these threads, and that in their efforts they—George Sand, for example—are in many ways absolutely on the right track.

But in the last third of the nineteenth century it gradually came about that these elementals—who in the first place thought with the human brain and then, when they had taken possession of human minds and brought about the social conditions of the nineteenth century, really spun these threads—that these beings now at last had enough. They had fulfilled their world-historical task—we might better say, their world-historical need. And something else occurred which particularly hindered their continuing this kind of parasitic activity. This proceeded exceedingly well at about the end of the eighteenth century, then remarkably so in the nineteenth—but after that point of time these elemental beings attained their aims less and less; this was because an increasing number of souls descended from the spiritual world to the physical plane with great expectations regarding the earth-life.

When people have screamed and kicked as little children—and now in more recent times have had their meager education, they have by no means become conscious that they were equipped with very great expectations before they descended to earth. But this lived on nevertheless in the emotions, in the entire soul-organization, and still continues to live today. Souls really descend to the physical world with exceedingly strong expectations; and thence come the disillusionments which have been unconsciously experienced in the souls of children for some time past, because these expectations are not satisfied.

Chosen spirits who had especially strong impulses of anticipation before descending to the physical plane were the ones, for example, who observed this physical plane, saw that these expectations are not being satisfied here, and who then wrote Utopian schemes of how things should be, and what could be done. It would be exceedingly interesting to study, with regard to entrance through birth into physical existence, how the souls of great Utopianists—even the lesser ones and the more or less queer fellows, who have thought out all kinds of schemes which cannot even be called Utopian, but which reveal much goodwill to form a paradise for people on earth—how these souls who have descended from spiritual worlds were really constituted with regard to their entrance upon the physical earth-plane.

This descent filled with anticipation is distressing for the beings who are to make use of such human brains. They do not succeed in using the brain of the human being when he descends to earth with such anticipation. Up to the eighteenth century those descending had far less expectation. Then the use of the brain by those other beings, not human, went well. But just during the last third of the nineteenth century it became exceedingly uncomfortable for the beings who were to make use of the brains of people descending with such expectations, because these led to unconscious emotions, which were felt in turn by the spiritual beings when they wanted to make use of the human brain. Hence, they no longer do this. And now it is a fact that there exists in modern humanity a very wide-spread and increasing disposition for human beings to have thoughts, but to suppress them. The brain has been gradually ruined, especially among the higher classes, by the suppression of thoughts. Other beings, not human, who formerly took possession of these thoughts no longer approach.

And now—now human beings have thoughts, it is true, but they have no idea how to use them. And the most significant representative of the kind of people who have no understanding of what to do with their thoughts is Oswald Spengler. He is to be distinguished from others—well, now how shall we express it in order not to give offense when these things are repeated outside, as they always are—perhaps we must say that others completely neglect their minds in their early years, so that their brains tend to allow thoughts to disappear in them. Spengler differs from others in that he has kept his mind fresh, so that it has not become so sterile; he is not absorbed only in himself, occupied always with himself alone.

It is true, is it not, that a great part of humanity today is inwardly jellied (yersulzt, if I may make use of a Central European expression that perhaps many may not understand. Sulze is something that is made at the time of hog-slaughter from the various products of the killing which are not of use otherwise, mixed with jelly-like ingredients—what cannot even be employed for sausage-making is used for Sulze.) And I might say that as a result of the many confusing influences of education the brains of most people become thus versulzt. They cannot help it; and of course, we are not speaking at all in an accusing sense, but perhaps rather in an excusing sense, feeling pity for the jellied brains.

I mean to say, when people have only the one thought: that they have no idea what to do with themselves; when they are as if squashed together, compressed and jellied—then these thoughts can be very nicely submerged in the underworlds of the brain, and from there plunged more deeply into the lower regions of the human organization, and so on. But that is not the case with such people as Oswald Spengler. They know how to develop thoughts. And that is what makes Spengler a clever man: he has thoughts. But the thoughts a man may have amount to something only when they receive a spiritual content. For this result a spiritual content is needed. Man needs the content that Anthroposophy wants to give; otherwise he has thoughts, but is unable to do anything with them. In the case of the Spenglerian thoughts it is really—I might almost say—an impossible metaphor comes to me—it is as if a man, who for the occasion of a future marriage with a lady has procured all imaginable kinds of beautiful garments—not for himself, but for the lady—and then she deserts him before the wedding, and he has all those clothes and no one to wear them. And so you can see how it is with these wondrously beautiful thoughts. These Spenglerian thoughts are all cut according to the most modern scientific style of garment, but there is no lady to wear the dresses. Old Boethius still had at least the somewhat shriveled Rhetorica and Dialectica, as I said some weeks ago. These no longer had the vitality of the muses of Homer and of Pindar, but at any rate all seven arts still figured throughout the Middle Ages. There was still someone upon whom to put the clothes.

I might call what has arisen, Spenglerism, because it is something significant; but with it the time has arrived when garments have come into existence, so to speak, but all the beings who might wear these beautiful thought-garments are lacking—in other words, there is no lady. The muse comes not; the clothes are here. And so people simply announce that they can make no use of the whole clothes-closet of modern thoughts. Thinking does not exist at all for the purpose of laying hold on life in any way.

What is lacking is the substantial content which should come from the spiritual worlds. Precisely that is wanting. And so people declare that it is all nonsense anyway; these clothes are here, after all, only to be looked at. Let us hang them on the clothes-racks and wait for some buxom peasant-maid to come forth out of the mystical vagueness, and ... well, she will need no beautiful clothes, for she will be what we may look for from the primordial Source.

This represents Spenglerism: he expects impulses from something indeterminate, undefined, undifferentiated, which need no thought-garments, and he hangs all the thought-garments on wooden racks, so that at least they are there to be looked at; for if they were not even there to be seen, no one could understand why Oswald Spengler has written two such thick books, which are entirely superfluous. For what is anyone to do with two thick books if thinking no longer exists? Spengler allows no occasion to become sentimental, or we should find much that is amusing. A Caesar must come! but the modern Caesar is one who has made as much money as possible, and has gathered together all sorts of engineers who, out of the spirit, have become the slaves of technical science—and then founded modern Caesarism upon blood-borne money or upon money-borne blood. In this situation thinking has no significance whatever; thinking sits back and occupies itself with all sorts of thoughts.

But now the good man writes two thick books in which are contained some quite fine thoughts; yet they are absolutely unnecessary. On his own showing, no use whatever can be made of them. It would have been far more intelligent if he had used all this paper to ... let us say, to contrive a formula by which the most favorable blood-mixtures might come into existence in the world, or something like that. That is what anyone with his views should do.

What anyone should do corresponds not at all with what he advocates in his books. Anyone reading the books has the feeling: Well, this man has something to say; he knows about the downfall of the West, for he has fairly devoured this whole mood of destruction; he himself is quite full of it. Those who are wishing to hasten the decline of the West could do no better than make Oswald Spengler captain, even leader, of this decline. For he understands all about it; his own inner spirit is completely of this caliber. And so he is extraordinarily representative of his time. He believes that this whole modern civilization is going to ruin. Well, if everyone believes likewise, it surely will! Therefore, what he writes must be true. It seems to me that it contains a tremendous inner truth.

This is the way the matter stands; and anyone whose basis is Anthroposophy must really pay attention to just such a personality as Oswald Spengler. For the serious consideration of spiritual things, the serious consideration of the spiritual life, is precisely what Anthroposophy desires. In Anthroposophy the question is certainly not whether this or that dogma is accepted, but the important thing is that this spiritual life, this substantial spiritual life, shall be taken seriously, entirely seriously, and that it shall awaken the human being.

It is very interesting that Oswald Spengler says: When he thinks, a man is awake (that he cannot deny), but anything truly effective comes from sleep, and that is contained in the plant and in the plantlike in man. Whatever in the human being is of a plantlike nature, he really brings forth in a living state: sleep is what is alive. The waking state brings forth thoughts; but the waking existence results only in inner tensions.

Thus it has become possible for one of the cleverest men of the present to indicate something like this: What I do must be planted in me while I sleep, and I really need not wake up at all. To awake is a luxury, a complete luxury. I should really only walk around and, still sleeping, perform what occurs to me in sleep. I should really be a sleep-walker. It is a luxury that a head is still there continually indulging in thinking about the whole thing, while I go about sleep-walking. Why be awake at all?

But this is a prevailing mood, and Spengler really brings it to very clear expression, namely: The modern human being is not fond of this being awake. All sorts of illustrations come to me. For instance: When, at the beginning of the Anthroposophical Society years ago, a lecture was given, there were always in the front rows people who even outwardly accentuated sleeping a little, so that proper participation might be visible in the auditorium, so that properly devoted participants might be visible. Sleeping is really exceedingly popular, is it not? Now most people do it silently: on the occasions I have mentioned the people were well-behaved in this regard; if there are no specific sounds of snoring, then people are well-behaved, are they not? That is, they are at least quiet. But Spengler, who is a strange man, makes a noise over what other people are quiet about. The others sleep; but Spengler says: People must sleep; they should not be awake at all. And he makes use of all his knowledge to deliver an entirely adequate thesis for sleep. So what it comes to is this: that an exceedingly clever man of the present time really delivers an adequate thesis for sleep!

This is something to which we must pay attention. We need not make a noise about it, as Spengler does; but we should consider this, and realize how necessary it is to understand the waking state, the state of being more and more awake, which is to be attained precisely through something like the spiritual impulses of Anthroposophy.

It must be emphasized again and again that it is necessary for wakefulness, actual, inner soul-wakefulness, gradually to become enjoyable. Dornach is really felt to be unsympathetic, because its purpose is to stimulate to wakefulness, not to sleep, and because it would like to take the waking state quite seriously. It would really like to pour awakeness into everything, into art, into the social life, and most of all into the life of cognition, into the whole conduct of life, into everything to which human life is in any way inclined.

You may believe me, it is indeed necessary to call attention to such things now and then; for at least in such moments as this, when we are together again only to interrupt these lectures for a short time until my return from Oxford, it must be pointed out, as so often, that precisely among us a certain inclination to be awake must gain a footing. There must be an appropriation of what Anthroposophy contains, in order to relate it to man's waking existence. For that is what we need in all spheres of life: to be truly awake.

Oswald Spengler has now issued the second volume of his Decline of the West. He calls it Perspectives of World History¹ One feels compelled to compare the beginning and end of these perspectives.

The beginning directs our observation toward nature. “Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you—a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free—he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will. A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in which an accident made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of every flower—these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.”

Throughout the whole book one feels that the “world-historic perspectives” are colored by this glance at the sleeping plant-life to which we are exhorted at the very beginning. Just why should we look at this? Is this what the man of the present is naturally driven to when the riddles and disturbances of his epoch rage in his mind? Is the mood provoked by this gaze at nature especially suited to penetrating the essence of present-day culture in such a way that it can be evaluated?

At the very end of the volume one is placed before the whole tragedy of the man of the present. “The passion for invention declares itself as early as the Gothic architecture—compare this with the deliberate form-poverty of the Doric!—and is manifest throughout our music. Book-printing appeared, and the long-range weapon. On the heels of Columbus and Copernicus come the telescope, the microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly the immense technological corpus of the early Baroque. Then followed, however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the invention of the steam-engine, which upset everything and transformed economic life from the foundations up. Till then nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke as a slave, and her work was, as though in contempt, measured by a standard of horse-power. ... As the horse power runs to millions and billions, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a product of the machine, which insists on being used and directed, and in return centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of the machine, human life becomes, precious ... The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it ... And what now develops, in the space of hardly a century, is a drama of such, greatness that men of a future Culture, with other souls and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that in our times nature herself was tottering ... And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric ... Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little life-units have by sheer force of their intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves ... But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation ... The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the machine has bred and trained up in the course of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and tne factory-worker.”

Why should man, who seems to be placed in such a relation to the machine, undertake to evaluate this position with the gaze directed toward the sleeping life of the plant?

It was certainly not gazing in this direction that brought man into the midst of wheels, cranks, motors, and so forth. Much more was it looking at lifeless nature. Ever since man approached this with a contemplation which wanted its objects to be as transparent as those of mathematics, he has moved toward modern technology. The newer thinking has trained itself to look at the spiritually transparent. This thinking learns something about itself when it understands how it conceives the impact of two elastic balls or the trajectory of a body. In the same way as it conceives these it would fain grasp all the phenomena which confront it in a physical or chemical laboratory. Spiritually transparent phenomena are what it desires. If someone objects that the impact of two elastic balls is not spiritually transparent because the force of elasticity remains dark and impenetrable, we may justifiably answer that this is not the point, that we need not know the nature of the ink in which a letter is written when we want to understand the letter.

In lifeless nature man sees in complete clarity all that he needs to construct a machine. For that purpose, he needs ideas which can dispense with all but what inorganic nature shows in full transparency.

But in the soul of man these ideas are mere pictures. Our consciousness recognizes them as such. They live without force in our consciousness; they are related to what they portray as mirror-pictures are related to the objects which stand before the mirror. One mirror-picture does not strike another, yet together they may give a coherent picture of a blow. In this picture-knowledge modern thinking has its greatness and its deficiency. If it understands itself in its greatness and deficiency, it is plunged into riddles and disturbances.

This picture-knowledge has its transparency. One who feels this will confess that all knowledge worthy of the name must be thus transparent. But already in the plant-world this transparency is no longer present if one seeks only for the same cognition as in the case of the pictures of lifeless nature. Goethe felt this. Therefore, he sought a differently formed cognition for the plant-world. He sought for the picture of the archetypal plant, out of which the single plant-form may be grasped as the single physical phenomenon is grasped out of “natural laws.”

We can cognize the living as thoroughly as the lifeless only if we expand our faculties of comprehension. In the cognition of the lifeless, men saw for the first time what knowledge could really be. But this cognition reveals only what is foreign to the real human essence. We cannot advance from the grasp of the lifeless to the experiencing of the true human essence if we cling to this method.

In the machine we have something which is transparent but which is foreign to us. We have bound up our lives with this foreign element. The machine stands there cold and alien, a triumph of “reliable” cognition. Besides it stands man himself, with only darkness before him if he looks into himself with this cognition.

Nevertheless, men had to acquire this insight into the dead-and-transparent if they were to be fully awake. They need the picture-knowledge of what is alien to their nature in order to wake up. All previous knowledge was drawn out of the darkness of man's own nature. It becomes clear for the first time when the human soul becomes simply a mirror, reflecting only pictures of things alien to man. Formerly when a man spoke of knowledge he had in his mind the impulses and contents of his own nature, which cannot be clear. His ideas were permeated with life, but they were not clear. The pictures of the lifeless world are clear. In such pictures, however, he has not only a revelation of the lifeless, but inner experiences as well. Pictures can cause nothing through their own nature. They are impotent. But if a man experiences his moral impulses in the picture-world as he has trained himself to experience lifeless nature, then he raises himself to freedom. For pictures cannot influence the will as passions and instincts do. The epoch which developed this mathematical picture-thinking in the lifeless is the first which can lead man to freedom.

Cold technology gives human thinking a stamp which leads to freedom. Among the gears and levers and motors there is only a dead spirit: but in this realm of death the free human soul awakes. It must awaken in itself the spirit which previously dreamed more or less as it ensouled nature. Thinking rises from its dream through the coldness of the machine.

Waking vision, which can be directed toward the machine, again becomes dreaming if, as in Spengler's contemplation, it is driven back to the plant. For this contemplation does not, like Goethe's, go forward to achieve transparency in observing plants; on the contrary it retreats into the twilight in which life appears when we look at it as men looked at the lifeless in the pre-technical period.

The observation to which we are challenged at the beginning of Spengler's contemplation allows technics to appear as something devilish. But this is only because he denies the clarity which is achieved through technics. Through this denial man recoils from his own wakefulness. In place of winning from this clearness the strength to kindle the free human spirit through the machine, this plant-contemplation calls up a fear which says: “These wheels, cylinders, and levers no longer speak. Everything which is decisive withdraws into the inner realm. Man feels the machine to be devilish, and rightly so.” But it seems necessary to drive the devil out of the machine. May one, if one intends to do that, thus frame the beginning and end of his thinking, and place “world-perspectives” in between as Spengler does? We will seek an answer to this question in the continuation of this article.

• 1. The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; Volume II: Perspectives of World History. Translated by Atkinson. (Knopf).

Spengler speaks of the sleeping plant-life and uses expressions such as these: “A plant has Being without Waking-being. In sleep all beings become plants: the tension with the environment is extinguished, the rhythm of life goes on. A plant knows only the relation to the When and Why. The pressing of the first green tips out of the winter-earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blossoming, giving out aroma, shining, ripening: all this is the wish for the fulfilling of a destiny and a continuous yearning question after the When.”

In contrast to this is the awakeness of animals and men. Awakeness develops an inner life. But this is torn away from cosmic being. It seems as though, in the experiences of awakeness, nothing remains of the urging, driving cosmic forces which become destiny in the plant-world. This feeling of being torn away is fully worked out in Spengler's views.

In the life of men, the plant-like element continues to work. It rules in the subconscious activities which appear as the results of the mysterious forces of the “blood.” Out of the “blood” arises what lives as the element of destiny in mankind. In contrast to this, what is formed by waking consciousness appears as a chance addition to the true Being. Spengler finds sharply etched words to describe the insignificance of waking consciousness in relation to the really creative plant-like forces in human nature: “Thinking gives itself much too high a rank in life because it does not notice or recognize other methods of apprehension and thereby loses its unprejudiced view. In truth all professional thinkers—and in all cultures almost these alone are vocal—have, as. a matter of course, held cold abstract reflection to be the activity by which men attain to ‘last things’.” Rather than being profound, it is a fairly easily achieved insight which Spengler expresses with the words: “But though man is a thinking being he is far from a being whose whole life consists in thinking.” This is as true as “that two and two are four.” But for any truth it is important just how one places it into life-connections. And Spengler never once inserts thinking into life: he places it beside life. He does this because he grasps it only in the form in which it appears in modern scientific research. There it is abstract thinking. In this form it is reflection on life, not a force of life itself. Of this thinking one may say that what works formatively in life comes out of the sleeping plant-element in man; it is not the result of waking abstraction. It is true that “The real life, history, knows only facts. Life-experience and human knowledge address themselves only to facts. The acting, willing, struggling man, who daily asserts himself against the facts and makes them useful to himself or succumbs to them, looks down on mere truths as something insignificant.”

But this abstract thinking is only a phase in the development of human life. It was preceded by a picture-thinking, which was bound up with its objects and pulsed in the deeds of men. Admittedly this thinking works in a dreamlike way in conscious human life, but it is the creator of all the early stages in the various cultures. And if one says that what appears as the deeds of men in such cultures is a result of the “blood” and not of thinking, then one abandons all hope of grasping the driving impulses of history and plunges into a clouded materialistic mysticism. For any mysticism which explains the occurrence of historical events through this or that quality of soul or spirit is clear in comparison to the mysticism of the “blood.”

If we take up such a mysticism, we cut off the possibility of rightly evaluating that period of time in which human evolution progressed from the earlier pictorial forms of thinking to the abstract method. This is not, in itself, a force which drives us to action. While this worked toward the formation of scientific research, men were subject, in their actions, to the after-effects of the old impulses springing from picture-thinking. It is significant that in occidental culture during recent centuries abstract thinking continually grows while action remains under the influence of the earlier impulses. These take on more complicated forms but produce nothing essentially new. Modern men travel on railroads in which abstract thoughts are realized, but they do so out of will-impulses which were working already before railroads existed.

But this abstract thinking is only a transitionary stage of the thinking capacity. If we have experienced it in its full purity, if we have absorbed in a full human way its coldness and impotence, but also its transparency, then we shall not be able to rest content with it. It is a dead thinking, but it can be awakened to life. It has lost the picture-quality which it had as a dream-experience, but it can attain this again in the light of an intenser consciousness. From the dream-like picture, through fully conscious abstraction, to an equally fully conscious imagination: this is the evolutionary course of human thinking. The ascent to this conscious imagination stands before the men of the Occident as the task of the future. Goethe gave a start toward it when, for the understanding of the forming of plants, he demanded the idea-picture of the archetypal plant. And this imaginative thinking can engender impulses to action.

One who denies this and stops with abstract thinking will certainly come to the view that thinking is an unfruitful appendix to life. Abstract thinking makes the cognizing man a mere spectator of life. This spectator-standpoint shows itself in Spengler. As a modern man he has lived himself into this abstract thinking. He is a significant personality. He can feel how, with this thinking, he stands outside of life. But life is his main interest. And the question arises in him: What can a man do in life with this thinking? But this points us to the tragedy in the life of modern man. He has raised himself to the level of abstract thinking, but he does not know how to do anything for life with it. Spengler's book expresses what is a fact for many persons, but which they have never noticed. The men of our culture are fully awake in their thinking, but with their awakeness they stand there perplexed.

Spengler's Decline of the West is a book of perplexity. The author has a right to speak of this decline. For the forces of decay, to which others passively succumb, work actively in him. He understands them, yet he refuses to come to those forces of ascent which can be achieved in waking. Therefore, he sees only decline and expects the continuation of this in the mystic darkness of the “blood.”

An alarming trait runs through Spengler's presentation. Accomplished intellectual soul-constitution, grown confused concerning itself, approaches the events of the historical life of man only to be repeatedly overpowered by these facts. The agnosticism of modern times is taken with such complete earnestness that it is not only formulated theoretically but raised to a method of research. The various cultures are so described that each sets before us a picture which drives us to flee from our own Waking-being. But this flight is not into the fruitful dreams of the poet, which plunge into life and transform cold thinking into spirit; much more is it a flight into an artificial and oppressive nightmare. Glittering abstract thinking, which is afraid of itself and seeks to drown itself in dreams!

Especially brilliant is the world-historic perspective in which Spengler sees the state. He would like to grasp it in its reality. But he does not succeed in rightly evaluating the unconscious, instinctive human relations out of which the life of the state first evolves. This is because it lies entirely outside his method of observation to seek for real spiritual forces in that unconscious something which in primitive conditions links one man to another. He finds the connections to be caused in the blood. But he does not see how the spirit works in the blood, how it expresses itself in the instincts.

As the spirit becomes gradually more conscious to man, it appears to the consciousness in a more and more abstract form. It becomes what Spengler has described it as: mere truth, the inefficacious soul-content of the contemplative man; nothing for the acting man who lives in facts.

Thus Spengler's inquiry into the origins of human community life finds the active nobility, which spends itself entirely in the world of facts, living in the stream of history and making history: and the meditative priesthood, which lives only in truths and really carries on its existence outside of history.

Spengler does not rightly evaluate the priesthood which in early cultures is the inspirer of the deed-men and which, by counselling and giving direction, works further in the deed-men. If he could rightly evaluate this he would see how the deed-men only execute with their arms what the deed-determining spirit-men plan.

Spengler achieves a right historical evaluation only with those facts in which the influence of the impulses of the spirit-men ceases and the outer side of historical life becomes more visible; in those cases in which it seems as if the bearers of the fact-stream did not trouble themselves about the inspiration of the spirit-men. For this is only a seeming. Through a thousand channels the impulses of the “counsellors” flow into the deeds. It is as though Spengler were entirely blind to these channels. For only thus can he continue to speak everywhere of the “blood.” Only thus can he come to the view which he expresses in the words: “The nobility is the true Estate, the sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form.”

If we place ourselves at the point of departure of Spengler's perspectives in order to see what can be seen in them, we must confess that his presentation is brilliant. He depicts half-truths, which appear in this perspective with especially sharp contours. He describes acutely how the priesthood slips out of the sphere of spiritual impulses and achieves an efficacy which comes from the forces of the blood: “The history of the papacy, right into the eighteenth century, is that of a few noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found princely family-fortunes. This is equally true of Byzantine dignitaries and English prime ministers (witness the family-history of the Cecils) and even of many leaders of great revolutions.”

For Spengler, “history” is what wells out of the blood of the ruling Estates. [The German word Stand seems best translated as Estate, especially since he follows the traditional grouping into three estates, nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie.] In the “state” this stream is only as it were materialized. The reality of the onward-moving facts, which spring from the Estates, is crystallized into a sort of illusion in the state, which seeks to hold fast in space (with a diminished reality) what the Estates are continually creating in time. For Spengler that which works itself out between the Estates in the cooperation and clashes of the blood-forces becomes history. “It follows from this that true history is not cultural; in the sense of anti-political, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all beginning civilizations assert. On the contrary, it is breed history, war history, diplomatic history, the history of being-streams in the form of man and woman, family, people, estate, state, reciprocally attacking and defending in the wave-beat of grand facts.” Certainly Spengler is ten times right in thus describing the cultural-historic standpoint which derives its facts from what men think although these facts are only the economic, artistic, or scientific expression of what the Estates work out among themselves. But he has no eye for the way in which, half conscious and half unconscious, the spirit works through men and brings itself to manifestation in the blood. And this spirit is not what Spengler has in mind when he says (rightly in his way:) “A Culture is Soul that has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms, but these forms are living and evolving.” For the efficacious spirit is what appears, as a living rather than an abstract truth, in weaving thoughts as the basis for every human deed.

Thus what Spengler sees as history correctly portrays only those Cultures [We capitalize Cultures and Civilizations because of the special way in which Spengler uses and distinguishes the two terms.] which are an expression of the blood-based deed-forming faculty of the Estates and classes.

Therefore, Spengler cannot find the deepest impulses of the present. And just this is important to him. He contemplates the past of the various Cultures in order to gain perspective into the future. But present-day humanity, in all significant Cultures and Civilizations, has reached the point where man, as man, frees himself from those historical associations whose birth, maturing, and aging Spengler sees as history. Man is about to develop, out of his own individual inner faculties, what formerly was developed into him by Estates and classes. This world-historic moment, which is here despite all decline in the Cultures, and on account of which just those Cultures which alone Spengler recognizes as such are crashing down, this world-historic moment must be taken up by a living, active, spirit-borne will. (In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I tried to characterize man within this world-historic moment as a will-being supported by moral thought-intuitions.) But for Spengler there is no longer any deed-impulse for man when he frees himself from the old associations. Spengler's ideas become sharp and incisive when, out of his perspective, he describes this loosening of the bond. “The nobility of every spring-time has been the Estate in the most primary sense, history become flesh, race at highest potential. The Bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name of people, populus, demos, rallies nobility and priesthood, money and mind, craftsman and wage-earner, as constituents of itself. This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the Fourth Estate, the Mass, which completely rejects the Culture and its matured forms. ... Thus the Fourth Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the history-less. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.”

But in this nullity the world-historic moment of the present must seek the historical “all,” not in the Fourth Estate or in any other, but in Man (of all Estates) who now for the first time must find, out of the deepest inner sources, the true force of freedom. But we do not smooth the way to this freedom when, purely out of the blood-relationships in Spengler's historic perspectives we describe freedom thus: “It was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that from the tenth century B.C. (and ‘contemporaneously’ in other Cultures) drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of freedom. ... Of this freedom the city is the expression; the city-spirit is understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual, social, and national movements that bursts forth in late periods under the name of Freedom leads back to an origin in this one prime fact of detachment from the land.”

In Spengler's perspective, this seems to be true, but it is equally untrue from a wider standpoint. For the process of becoming inwardly aware of the deepest soul-forces of humanity, which process lives itself out in the impulse of freedom, is a historical moving force which founded cities in order to experience freedom in an external fact.

Only one who can see this moving force will be able to see in the present time the beginning of a period which will fetch history out of the innermost parts of man and will thus be an advance over the epochs which inserted history into man. One who cannot see this will, like Spengler, see only an end, which is the expression of all that this distinguished representative of the modern method of thought has found in the preceding cultures. “With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring ... The mighty ones of the future may possess the earth as their private property—for the great political form of the Culture is irremediably in ruin—but it matters not, for formless and limitless as their power may be, it has a task. And this task is the unwearying care for the world as it is, which is the very opposite of the interestedness of the money-power age, and demands high honor and conscientiousness. But for this very reason there now sets in the final battle between Democracy and Caesarism, between the leading forces of dictatorial money-economics and the purely political will-to-order of the Caesars. ... The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon democracy. ... For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development—the moment when money is celebrating its last victories and Caesarism, its heir, is approaching with quiet, firm step—our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits.”

In face of this one can only say: may the men of the present and the near future find the force of the spirit, so that out of free will this will not become history! May a time come when a spiritually oriented view will not say, as Spengler does: “And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.” Rather let us hope that a time may come in which what the individual can form in freedom out of his world-experience will become historical necessity. Spengler is a personality who has great wit, but who takes it to be his mission to sweep away everything spiritual in nature and history.