The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last lecture the endeavour was made to show how necessary it is for men of the present day to turn the eye of the soul towards spiritual science, to those spheres of existence, of reality, in which the rule of the spirit within human evolution is clearly perceptible to anyone who has the faculty of sight in such regions.

As I said, the middle of the fifteenth century brought with it a complete change in the relation of civilized man's soul to the three Hierarchies next above man, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. Hitherto it has been out of their own interests and impulses that they worked in human evolution. In our times, this connection has come to an end. They have for the moment no interest in continuing to work as before on the evolution of man. They will only enter into a new relationship to us when human beings begin to develop an interest in the spiritual worlds, out of free will and of their own accord. If we would not lose all connection with the spiritual worlds, we must occupy ourselves with them in the near future, for the spiritual beings who have been connected with us so far have of themselves no reason to be further interested in us. We can only arouse their interest anew if out of our own souls we again concern ourselves with the spiritual world, fostering thoughts, sentiments, and impulses of will, into which spiritual forces can flow. The question may and must be asked, how can human beings manage so to concern themselves with the spiritual worlds as to maintain their connection with the higher Hierarchies as the Earth evolution proceeds. The answer may deal with things which apparently have little to do with the question; but we shall see that they do provide the foundation on which we can rebuild onwards into the future our, connection with the spiritual world.

The first thing which we must examine is the effect of the various confessions, the creeds, existing among civilized people. Hitherto they were necessary, to guide the heart and, mind to spiritual realms, but in future they will help to detach man from the spiritual world, unless they admit something entirely new into their efforts. Fundamentally speaking, the creeds of the present day are based on the egoism of man, as we shall realize if we put before our souls one question of such great importance that it forms, and always must form, a touchstone for their views, the question of the immortality of the human soul. We can see, from the way in which this question is generally handled by the creeds, that they appeal largely to man's egoistic instincts. Of course there are deeper foundations for their speech, but these we are not discussing today: as a rule the creeds speak of the “continued existence of the soul after death"—that is, the continuation of the life of the human soul.

To deal with the subject of immortality from this point of view is comparatively easy, for human egotism asserts itself there emphatically. Man simply cannot bear—apart from all truth about the question—the thought of utter extinction at death, so that a certain response is always to be found in man’s soul when "life after death" is mentioned. The treatment generally given today to the idea springs from an egoistic interest in people. They would prefer not to die as souls at physical death. Naturally, the soul's continued existence after death will be assumed in all our future discussions on immortality, but the way in which anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of the continued existence of the soul after death is very far from being accepted by the creeds.

But this also is important: that people of our day must hear a very different language about immortality from that to which they are accustomed. One who discusses the question of immortality should not only speak of life after death, but also of that life which is lived here in the physical world between birth and death. For as you know, this life is also a "continuation"; it is a continuation of the life passed between our last death and that birth through which we are now in the physical world. That is the view which men must learn to hold—that the life here is a continuation of the spiritual life before birth. In the growth of a child from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, we must notice forces from the spiritual world arising from its inner being, forces which have come with birth and work so as gradually to form the being of man as time goes by. In a sense we lift the veil of the God in man when we enter into the life of the child to develop it. Social relations must take on something of a religious impulse permeating the whole of life between man and man. For this the important, the essential thing is an attitude which never forgets that physical life is a continuation of a pre-natal life, of spirit and soul.

Many things will follow on this. For one thing we shall recognize that our real humanity lies in the depths of our being, gradually emerging. I have referred to ancient times of human evolution, known from an anthroposophical standpoint as the first and second post-Atlantean epochs. People in those days were as capable of development right into their old age as only the young are nowadays. A child goes through a physical evolution about its seventh year with the change of teeth; through another metamorphosis when puberty occurs; but after that what goes on in his evolution is outwardly less noticeable. In olden times this was not so; what man went through in soul and spirit expressed itself into much later stages of life. Nowadays old age sets in at seventeen or eighteen, and we are amazed at its evidences. Here is an example: a short time ago, in Stuttgart, at a meeting of the Cultural Committee where present-day education was discussed from the most varied points of view, a young man got up (let us call him "a young man" though he might equally well be called an "old boy"!) who told us we needed instructing about the true ideals of education! He began by uttering some very high-sounding words, then read out the programme of a modern Educational Society. After much stumbling he finally broke down, and, having no more to say, gathered up the threads with "I must there­fore claim to have proved that old age no longer understands its own youth," and went out. I replied that I quite saw we had not understood him, for the simple reason that his speech and behaviour had been those of an old man; he had in fact enunciated as principles, like an ancient grey-beard, the last word in abstractions. Old age, nowadays, means the limit up to which a man can develop. Up to a particular age a person can absorb all sorts of things, and is not ashamed to develop himself. But at about twenty years of age he feels shame at the idea of developing farther. Seldom nowadays do we find people with grey hair and wrinkles welcoming with joy the dawn of each year because each year brings new possibilities of development to the organism and new knowledge, unattainable before, is within reach. At the inconsiderable age of thirty men are ashamed to make themselves capable of development, or to learn anything more. The point is that we should actually retain the possibility, all through life, of rejoicing in the coming year, because each year charms forth the divine-spiritual content of our own inner being in ever new forms.

I want to emphasize this point. We should really and truly learn to experience our life as capable of development not only in youth, but through its whole span between birth and death. For this a new education will be necessary. We elders find that to look back at our own schooldays evokes few pleasant thoughts. We must manage to shape school­days for the children of today so that to remember them will provide an ever new and invigorating source of life. Now this will bring, as you can see, the possibility of opening for mankind real perception of the soul-spiritual within themselves, of experiencing something extending beyond the everyday life which is stirred and stimulated from without.

Other knowledge will be recognized as necessary. There is a secret, intimately connected with the present stage of human evolution, which is not known today. In earlier times, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to take much notice of it, but today it must be reckoned with. This mystery of life is that man, constituted as he is today in body, soul and spirit, every night looks, to a certain extent, at the events of the coming day, but without always carrying that vision over into full day-consciousness. It is his "Angel" who has that clear consciousness. But what is experienced at night in community with that being whom we call the Angel is a pre-vision of the coming day. This is no subject for human curiosity, but a matter for practical life. Only when the feeling of this fact fills our inner being can we make right decisions and bring right thoughts into the course of daily life. Let us assume that a man has something definite to do, say at noon. This that he has to do has already been arranged by his Angel and himself during the preceding night, though the fact is not necessarily kept in consciousness and human curiosity has no part in it. People should be filled with the conviction that during the day they should realize in a fruitful way what they have arranged at night in co-operation with this Angel being.

Much that has happened of late might draw men's attention with almost shattering force to what I have just said. The last four or five years of agony should have taught men that the consciousness of their association with higher beings through the experiences of the night did not, alas! exist. If the feeling had permeated men that their doings in the day were in harmony with the decisions made with their Angels in the preceding night, how different events would have been! These things must be spoken of now, to point out how man must learn to regard this life between birth and death as a continuation of the life of spirit and soul which was his before birth. It must be made known that man in future should be able to experience throughout his whole life the revelation of the Divine in his own being, and that through all his life in the day this vivid consciousness should persist as: "What I do from morning till evening I have discussed with my Angel, while I slept." Men must turn to feelings which are more concrete with regard to the spiritual world than the modern abstractions of various creeds, which at the same time claim that they appeal to unselfish, not to egoistic human instincts. From such feelings will arise that which will provide the necessary relation to the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels, who will once more be able to interest themselves on our behalf. Men's attitude to the spiritual world must move in this appointed direction.

Yet again we must observe something. The creeds speak much about "God" and "The Divine." What do they really mean? Surely something of which a vague conscious­ness, at least, exists in the soul of man. After all, it is not, what name is given to a thing that matters, but what it means to a man's soul. Men talk of “God" and of "Christ," but all the time they only mean the "Angel"—the Angel to which they turn because they meet a response in their souls. Whatever the creeds may speak of today, whether of God or Christ or other divine being, the substance of the thought only relates to the Angel Beings who are connected with man, the Angeloi. Higher it cannot rise, since people are disinclined to seek any wider relation to the spiritual world than an egoistic one. The relation to the Archangeloi, the Hierarchy of the Archangels, must indeed be sought in another way. Men's interests today must be considerably widened. I will show you how that extension must take place, so that from making response only to the Angeloi, they may rise in their feelings to the Archangeloi.

They must realize that they have passed through terrible experiences all over the civilized world during the last few years. Many have asked about the "causes" of, these events, with mutual imputations of "guilt " and " innocence ": yet we need only look below the mere surface of things and we shall have little interest in all this talk about “causes " and "war-guilt" or " innocence," simply because we can see that what has come up to the surface in these last four or five years is, like waves of the sea, always there, but brought up from the depths to the surface by the forces below. An upheaval of human forces had been going on; one people after another shared in the enormous folly of those years; one could but say: "Some turmoil of elemental forces is surging upwards into view. The sea of human life has become unquiet—What is it?"

We shall never get things clear if we do not connect this fact of humanity's unrest with the whole period we call "history." We must convince ourselves that the armed struggle of the last few years is only the beginning of events which will take place in quite other spheres, but which have never before existed among us in this particular form. We are not at the end of a stage of evolution—only superficial observation could lead to that conclusion—we stand at the beginning of the greatest conflicts, the greatest spiritual conflicts of the civilized world, and we must put forth our best efforts to be equal to them. Increasing opposition is threatened in the soul-attitude of East and West in the near future, for East and West have developed in two quite different directions. If we would see into these things, we must set before our­selves certain phenomena in their deepest, most fundamental form as riddles to be solved.

For decades we have heard repeated in socialist circles holding the Marxian theory, that everything man experiences as art, religion, custom, law or science is just "Ideology " (I have discussed this at greater length in the first chapter of The Threefold Commonwealth). This means that a view which had been developing amongst the middle classes for the last three or four hundred years, but which they were too timid to admit, has been frankly acknowledged by the socialists of the last half-century. They assert that the genuine reality of social life consists in actual happenings; therefore the real lies only in the economic forces. All conceptions of art, religion, custom, science, law, morality, merely form a kind of vapour rising from true reality, and are mere ideology, with nothing but a semblance of reality. The socialists conclude that it is only necessary to change economic life and all other changes will ensue, since everything else—morality, law, religion and so forth—is only an unreal vapour arising from the events in the economic sphere, which is the "only reality."

If, however, the world be considered in no restricted sense but as a great whole, we shall defend this word "ideology " which, but for their timid dislike of facts, the middle classes might have been using for three or four hundred years. They did feel that the economic life was the "only reality" and what displayed itself as science, art or religion was like a vapour; all life was based on this, and it was reserved for their pupils to carry their reasoning to its logical conclusion. Socialists are, after all, only extreme pupils of the middle-class world. This is the view which, forming in the West, reached its climax in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Other impulses have formed the Eastern view of the world, and an Oriental would say: "I look at what is going on in the external world: I see what my senses convey to me, what I use as an instrument for transforming the world around, what shines down on me from the stars, and what I myself am as to my bodily nature—what is it all? It is Maya! What then is reality, and not illusion? Only what is experienced in the human soul—that is reality!" One who does not translate in terms of a dictionary, but according to the inner meaning, knows that the words "Maya" in the East and "Ideology " in the West mean one and the same thing. For thousands of years the Oriental has regarded the outer world which affects the senses—including economics—as Maya. The Westerner, on the other hand, sees his reality in what for the Oriental is "Maya," and what arises in his soul is for him "Ideology." Both views of the world have developed to a certain point. Talk with the leading men in the socialist parties especially in those places where the first Revolution (known here as the "November " Revolution) has not yet taken place, and it is evident that this revolution altered their ideas somewhat, but not their feelings. You hear the same views as obtained right up to the war, that it is not necessary to con­tribute anything from the will towards trans­forming, revolutionizing the world, but that all that will happen of itself. Something fatalistic has appeared in the West. People are convinced that they need only wait until the means of production are sufficiently developed, and then by a natural metamorphosis all that is concentrated in private capital will pass over into other forms. Thinking of this sort is as sensible as saying: "This room is full of bad air. I cannot breathe. The window could be opened, but I am not going to open it; I am waiting until the air improves of itself."

Fatalism of the West, Fatalism of the East—we know them well. In the East, though not at the very beginning, men fell into complete fatalism, as the philosophy of Maya developed. Every world-philosophy has, in its inner law, the impulse towards fatalism at some time, but we stand today at a point where we must get rid of fatalism. We must pass from mere observation and contemplation to the exertion of will and intention. We must rouse our wills by developing impulses from the truths I have described regarding birth as a continuation of pre-natal life, remaining young notwithstanding white hair and wrinkles, the playing in of the nightly work of the Angel into daily life. Man needs to acquire impulses for his life of will by widening his sphere of interest, by seeing not only what touches his own personal life but what affects the civilized world in manifold forms. Look­ing at the West, to which we ourselves belong, we see the inner world as ideology, the outer world as reality: in the East, ideology, Maya, in the outer world, reality in the inner world alone.  In the interaction of human beings at the present time, we have the task of finding the way of escape from that aspect of these philosophies which has already turned to fatalism. We must look for this way, and we shall only find it if we are in earnest about something which annoys people terribly today.

There was a remarkable example of this once, when my hearers were greatly vexed by something I said in a lecture in a South German town, though it was a truth necessary for the present time. The context of my lecture necessitated the remark that the leading classes of the present day have a decadent physical brain. Such statements are unpleasant both to utter and to listen to, but it is necessary that people should realize this fact. The very people to whom the present con­figuration of our times is due have, in achieving it, acquired a decadent physical brain. It is so, and we are in one sense in the same case as were the people of Europe during the, great migrations and the spreading of Christianity. The Christian impulse came over from the East, by way of Greece and Rome. Naturally the Greek and Roman world was far more highly developed than the. German. The Germans were barbarians. But the brains of the Greeks and Romans were decadent, there­fore the surge of Christianity was not absorbed by them in the same way as it was when it reached the Germans. That is a migration of peoples which went horizontally. today it is "vertical." today a wave of spiritual life is coming from the spiritual world. Just as Christianity was at first reflected from the Greeks and Romans, so the spiritual world is reflected from the bourgeoisie today, and that is decadent. The proletariat are not so yet; they are still able to understand what is meant by the spiritual world. But the others will need preparation through anthroposophy, through that part of the brain which is not yet physical that is the etheric brain. We are at present confronted with the fact that the leading classes are not only menaced with a decadent brain, but with entire decadence, if they do not realize that they must grasp the spiritual view of the world by supersensible means.

The tragedy of the bourgeois system is that it would grasp everything "physically," whereas our task today is to grasp things with the etheric brain, to take spiritual truths into our being. Modern humanity must steer in this direction, and the West must take the lead. Here we must take into account some­thing very important.

Observe the development of language, passing from East to West. Take the German language, today dreadfully misused. If we look back at the language of Goethe, of Lessing, we can see that not so long ago in the very words, through their peculiar quality, it was possible to express what of spiritual life lay within them. today we have dreadfully neglected our language, degraded it into phrases only; but that it can no longer express spirituality is not due to the language alone. The farther West we go as regards language, the more we find in speech, with its tunes and sounds, even with its grammar, a complete rejection of what is really spiritual. From this rejection of the quality of soul and spirit from the Anglo-American idiom follows the mission of the Anglo-American peoples. Their world­ mission consists in this: in learning, maybe instinctively, yet still learning (as they listen to other men, in course of acquiring world dominion), not only to comprehend the sound, but to interpret the gesture of the language, to hear more than the mere physical sound, to hear something which passes from man to man in speech, going beyond the spoken word. That works from etheric body to etheric body. Here lies the secret of the Western languages, that in them the physical tone loses its significance, while the spiritual gains it. It is part of their task to let the spirit filter into speech, not merely to hear physically, but to hear intuitively more than passes over into the sound. In the West, the spiritual must be sought behind language itself.

If we look at the East, we shall notice an ever-increasing urge among the peoples who, as we have seen, sink themselves into their own inner being, not to be bound by the old forms of conception as to "Karma," " Reincarnation," and so forth, but to look out into the world, and in that outer world to perceive something spiritual, even to establish a sort of Philosophy of Nature.

These are only trivial instances through which we can widen our interests from our own personality and our nationality to take in the whole of humanity, saying to ourselves "Here in the West is Ideology, though quite another Ideology from the Eastern one," and seeing how elemental forces are stirred up within earthly humanity as a result, of these antitheses. We learn to take our stand within the whole civilized world, and when we develop such knowledge of our position within it at the same time we build in our souls the means of acquiring feelings which lead higher than the sphere of the Angeloi. Our interests will be so much extended that we shall incline to ideas which ascend to the sphere of the Archangeloi, for all that I have been saying about the opposition of Ideology-Maya, etc., works in its primal force in the sphere beyond that of the Angeloi. We can see from this what is really needful for modern humanity. What will the so-called clever people call anyone who speaks of these things—Maya, Ideology and so forth—as having primal forces which function in the sphere of the Archangeloi? Just a fool, quite naturally, since men are so hide-bound by their acquired spiritual outfit that they feel no concern in the wider interests of mankind. That can only be achieved from a spiritual standpoint, by penetrating into everything which works for the great interests of humanity.

I have given you an idea of how to work up into the sphere of the Archangeloi. It is possible to rise stilt higher, and present-day humanity must learn that also. Our educated classes have, always been taught to look back to Ancient Greece. Young men (and in recent times young women also) have had to go through a certain schooling to absorb Greek culture, and have thus acquired an impulse which was enough to lead them to feel more and more deeply into the Greek world. This has a great significance for our civilization, that in our most important years of development we have learnt what Greece accomplished for the world. The Greeks did otherwise; it never entered their heads to teach their children the Egyptian tongue: they occupied themselves with immediate reality, for which they possessed a clear, sense. We occupy our young people, not with instruction concerning their environment and the impulses of reality, but with those of an olden time. We have no idea what we are really doing. It is not only that we teach our young children (I suppose I should say our "young ladies " and "young gentlemen ") the Greek language: for in a language, in the configuration of its sounds and its grammar, lies also the character of a whole people. In absorbing the Greek language, as is done today, man acquires the same soul-attitude in the world as was held in Greece. There all cultural life was such that only a small top-stratum shared in the culture; the rest were slaves. In Greece no occupation was worthy of a free man but science, politics and—even then in a supervisory capacity agriculture: everything else was a matter for slaves. This is hidden in the language, and when we take Greek culture and language into our own spiritual education, we unite aristocracy with it at the same time. For the Greek it was quite natural to construct his whole social organism in accordance with his intellectual tendency, for in his case that was connected with his blood. There were the ordinary masses: then those people of a higher type, who possessed the higher life of the mind through their blood. This finds expression even in Greek sculpture. Compare the position of nose and ears in the Hermes-type with that of the Zeus- or Athene-type. The Greeks knew perfectly well what they wanted to express when they set the Hermes-type over against the Aryan Zeus-type.

We are permeated with all this more than we think. When we form our views of the world, we really construct ideas still suited to what in the Greeks came through the blood. Our intellectual, our cultural life is saturated with what we absorb from the Greeks. Hellenism intrudes into our times luciferically. Hellenism, in the period which immediately followed it, was metamorphosed into Roman­ism. Compared with the Greeks the Romans were dull, prosaic people, but they did develop other aspects of life. They lived out in an abstract fashion what came to the Greeks from the blood. Unlike the Greeks they made even man into an abstraction, a "citizen of the State." A man, in the Roman sense, is not really "man"; he is a citizen of the State: an incomprehensible thing to the Greeks. To be born a human being did not make him a man, but being registered in some kind of State archives. This sometimes appears today in grotesque fashion. I once had an old friend, sixty-four years of age; one day he said to me that he had saved such and such a sum—he had always been very poor—and that he wanted to marry the love of his youth. He had become engaged at eighteen, but had no money to marry, and the couple had vowed to wait until they could. He returned to his birthplace, now that the way was open, but found that the marriage could not, take place because his community doubted his existence. Years before, the parsonage, with all the parish registers, had been burned down and there was no one alive who could give evidence as to his identity. My friend assumed that his existence was proved by his presence, but he had no "legal evidence." It is true the marriage did eventually take place, but the difficulties had shown him the much greater importance of a "birth-certificate " than of his own personality.

Men then are "citizens." They are what they are in an abstract connection. This view is essentially Roman, as is everything of this sort which we come across in ordinary life. Our education has been taken in hand by the State, which is already abstract, but will become more so under socialist influence. People are not educated today to take their place in the world as free human beings, but to have a professional calling and take their place in that. The State takes young people in hand, not at once, for then they are too “shapeless," so it leaves them for a time to their parents, then, stretching out its talons, it trains them to be useful to it, taking good care that they are so. It gives them an economic life, gives them everything prescribed, and then pensions them off. It means a great deal when a man can assure himself of a pension as well as an income—something substantial, which binds him to the abstract State and affects the rest of his mental attitude. The Roman attitude has passed into men of other times. Say to a man today: "to partake of immortality needs an activity of soul, that thou thyself mayst carry thy soul wide awake through the gates of death"; he will not understand. He has been made wholly un­accustomed to direct his understanding to such a question. Instead of this he is told: "You need only believe in Christ and in what the State does." First he will be looked after by the State, with a pension when he has worked long enough then the Church goes one bit farther; it offers a pension for his soul after death, so that neither in his lifetime need he do anything for his own soul nor when he carries it through the gate of death: A man is "registered " nowadays, and the political essence of Rome, already taken into our own being, will increase.

All sorts of dreadful experiences are possible because of this. Helping with the institution of the Waldorf School at Stuttgart, I have had to look at the various School Regulations. Looking back, I must admit that in the 'seventies and 'eighties of last century, the regulations were very small: they included what had to be studied in each class, the aim and the subject matter being given, but in everything else the teacher was left quite free. Nowadays we get an enormous syllabus with "Official," "Ordinance," written on the first page, and specific instructions as to the manner of teaching. So that what should only work on one living personality from out of another, is set down in rules and orders; it has become "official," it is "decreed "! That is the death of mind and spirit, directly traceable from Central Europe to Ancient Rome. This is the second thing we have absorbed—with Romanism, the politico­legal element.

In addition to this, however, there is some­thing which could not be transplanted from the old life into the new—the economic life, which can only be modern. It is possible to chew the cud of Greek knowledge, to allow the Roman political ideas to influence us, but we cannot "eat" what the Greeks and Romans have eaten. Economic life must be modern. We have gradually woven into our economic life the Greek life of intellect and the Roman life of rights, and our task is to disentangle them again. To understand that these three strata brought out of different epochs have, as it were, been joined together and must be separated means to extend one's interest in time (as, in the East and West in space) down to the present; that means to make ourselves capable of feelings which can raise us to the Archai! How few develop an interest for these things, an impartial interest in how the Zeitgeist (Time-Spirit) acts by thrusting one period into another. I spoke at Stuttgart on the artificial nature of our classical education. It may have been mere coincidence that a few days after there appeared in the papers great announcements signed by all kinds of Zöpfen—professors—(I beg their pardon!) to the effect that a classical education should not be undervalued, seeing that it had contributed to the greatness of the German people, so gloriously displayed in the latter days. This, literally, was to be read as the alleged opinion of educationists in April, 1919—after what happened in October, 1918! And to think that this and other things should be possible in our times!

Unless we reach a stage at which we can see things so as to absorb the impulses which work into our physical world out of the spiritual—unless we realize that man, just as he is connected through his bodily organization with the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, is also connected in his spiritual organization with the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai (Angeloi as the guardians of personal development, Nation Spirits as guardians of development of peoples in space, Spirits of Time as guardians of development through­out the ages)—unless we can understand these things from their spiritual foundations, we can advance no farther. Everything depends on man having courage and force today to look into the spiritual world. We are at the beginning of a hard struggle, in which will be stirred up all the instincts spring­ing from the one half-truth that economic reality is the only reality, that everything belonging to soul and spirit is Ideology; and from the other half-truth that the only reality is the psychic spiritual, all outside it is Ideology, Maya. These contradictions will let loose in human nature such instincts that the spiritual conflict will blaze for long periods in forms of which people at present have no idea. We must grasp this; and, further, learn how we are to raise ourselves, in harmony with our time, to a view of the spiritual world as we conceive it. It is this which the times themselves ordain and demand; to this we must turn our attention.

I have told you how at the present epoch in the history of human evolution men are confronted with great tests, though for the most part what these tests bring goes on in sub­conscious experience.

Men, as I said, can know, and must know what it means "to pass over the Threshold of the invisible world," when they go: through some kind of initiation and enter it consciously; but something like it—naturally not to-day or tomorrow but in course of a longer period of time—happens with humanity itself, in that it has to experience separation of the hitherto-interwoven forces of thinking, feeling and willing, when they fall apart, just as they become independent in the individual who passes the Threshold of the supersensible world. All this is bound up with significant changes in the depths of human nature, and it is one of the tasks of our age to make these changes part of our consciousness. The great obstacle to be overcome is the desire for comfort in man to-day, the unwillingness to know what is going on in humanity, the continued living in illusions and, in fact, dreaming about life.

We shall get the best understanding of my subject to-day by calling to mind some of the facts of supersensible life which have long been known to us. Let us recollect how the human ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies as we fall asleep and return to them as we awake. That is a general description, a sort of sketch of the process. We can say in a general way that on waking man returns to his physical and etheric bodies, but then this return takes place in varying degrees. For instance, it can never be said of a little child that the ego and the astral body plunge fully into the physical and etheric bodies and become completely one with them as to activity. There is always something in his astral and ego which does not so unite. Yes, and if we look back into earlier times of human development, to the important dividing line which occurs in the middle of the fifteenth century, we must admit that, until that definite point, in human life as a whole there existed no complete immersion of the ego and astral body during the conscious waking hours.

The really important feature of our post­Atlantean age is that soul and spirit—the ego and astral body—have only recently been able to plunge entirely into the physical and etheric, and even so, not until after the 27th or 28th year. Conditions will change again with time. This is a significant mystery, in the evolution of mankind. What is the meaning of this complete immersion in the physical body? It signifies that by means of it we are able to develop thoughts and unfold ideas of the scientific, materialistic type prevalent since the days of Galileo and Copernicus. For these ideas and this scientific view of the world the physical body is the right instrument. The identification had not been achieved in earlier centuries, therefore there was no scientific thinking which is wholly bound up with the physical body. With this fact is connected everything else I have mentioned about the activity men must unfold in their spiritual-scientific attitude in order to regain the interest of the Beings of the three higher Hierarchies standing nearest to mankind. We owe it to them that we have the power to plunge completely into the physical body and therewith learn of the dead mineral external world through natural science.

It is man's duty to-day to become aware of these things. At our present stage of culture, without such a consciousness men live in a kind of sleep. That is why events happening around them do not penetrate into their drowsy minds. We simply must let these concrete facts work upon our souls in order to acquire a consciousness of what forces are dominant and active in our particular phase of evolution. In the extended span of time which we may call "the present," much must be made new—above all, the aims of education. I have already spoken of this from our own point of view. We must educate people from childhood onwards so that they can rightly enter. into an age marked by this complete plunging into the physical body, educate them to be able to take the complete plunge. Wherein will consist the success of our efforts towards a renewal of educational methods? In giving man, who is entering a new stage of development, preparation for the experience it brings. Anyone observing life to-day will know that at the present time there are a remarkable number of "broken” natures to be met with, natures unfitted to cope with life. Why are they not equal to it? Because, they cannot look back, as I have described, to the experiences of their education. Certain forces can only be developed in childhood. Once developed they remain throughout life; we have them, and can cope with it. If we have them not, we lack that power. It is in this sense that we must understand the feeling of responsibility we ought to foster with regard to education.

Further, we must fully realize that the Christ-Impulse entered into humanity in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which began in, the eighth century B.C. and lasted until the fifteenth century A.D. When about a third of this period had elapsed, there entered into human evolution what gives meaning to the whole Earth-development—the Christ-Impulse, the Mystery of Golgotha. Man was then in process of developing the Rational or Mind soul, Gemüt-Seele, in which human thought and experience were more instinctive than they are to-day: this development was superseded in the fifteenth century by that of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul, the period in which we live. The way in which the Event of Golgotha appeared as an impulse in world-history and human- evolution was suited, in the first instance, to the instinctive conditions of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and was thus understood by the men of that time. It was natural for this instinctive understanding to believe that in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ Being lived, He Who had descended from cosmic heights in order to unite Himself with that body for earthly activity. Through feeling, everyone could realize that a great, important and super­sensible occurrence had, in the Event of Golgotha, entered human life. With the passage of time the capacities of the Rational Soul became less and less. The understanding of the Event of Golgotha which existed in the first Christian centuries could not last: it was bound to vanish with the altered soul­ constitution of civilized man. In consequence, with the uprising of the Consciousness Soul, the Event of Golgotha itself came to be regarded more materially. We see that the evolution of civilized mankind in the course of the last four or five hundred years so proceeded that the understanding of what really happened on Golgotha—the indwelling of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth—became fainter and fainter. This great Mystery, perceived instinctively through the first centuries, was less and less understood, more and more materialistically regarded, until in our times it has become possible to take as a sign of progress that men no longer desire to know anything of the supersensible, cosmic Christ, but talk of Jesus of Nazareth simply as a man, an extraordinary man perhaps, but constituted exactly like other men.

Here, too, we stand at a turning-point. A new understanding of Christ must arise. It can only come if sought by the means provided by Spiritual Science, so sought that super­sensible means may discover what can only be accomplished within the supersensible and reveal itself in the sensible. The new understanding of Christ must arise from such depths in human nature that, confronted with these depths, differences of creeds, hitherto dominant amongst civilized mankind, will be as wreaths of vapour. These differences lie in a part of the soul more on the surface than that which to-day, out of the depths of Spiritual Science, must lead to a new understanding of Christ Jesus. Nor will understanding be complete, really satisfying the needs of man's soul to-day, unless it can bridge the differences among men imposed on humanity by the various creeds. Some­thing there is as a hope from this new Christ-Impulse, something we must all long for if we are serious and worthy in our wishes for humanity, something which is actually being sought in other spheres though very unintelligently.

Nowadays men talk of the so-called “League of Nations " and hope for something from it. It is remarkable how they long to understand reality by means of abstractions. Whence is to come the impulse, working through the peoples, which can evoke a unity such as this "League of Nations" is supposed to represent? Look at everything which has been produced in the way of spiritual impulses towards its establishment—nothing but a few abstractions. Yet men sleep through such things—how soundly, we may see from a fact like the following:

Woodrow Wilson, discoverer or at least rediscoverer of the League, announced at a time when America was not taking part in world-events as she does now, that the League could only be properly established if as a result of the catastrophe of the war there were no "victors" and no "vanquished."  That was an essential condition. Taken as earnest, that makes it impossible to take seriously what is said about the League now; the two cannot be reconciled, but that is not noticed. Here is a thing which militates against' a healthy development of mankind;  men are willing to accept the most impossible contradictions if only an interval of time separates them. It is as though present-day man in no way partakes with his soul in what is really happening.

The League is a nonentity, for what has to be established in humanity must well up from the depths of man's being to the surface. New comprehension of the Christ-Impulse alone can develop what is needed to-day in the whole civilized world, from human impulses suited to the times, on a basis which will not rest on the differences between peoples. The civilized nations, torn asunder by hatred and misunderstanding, can only be united by the Christ-Impulse, as presented by Spiritual Science. This f act must sink deeply, deeply as a conviction into the soul. All else, which does not lead in this direction, is only hindering the evolution of mankind. The needs of human evolution must be dealt with from its depths, not by any trivial speech. The Earth acquired its own meaning in relation to that evolution through the Event of Golgotha, and now the time has come when this meaning must be grasped in a different way. Until men realize the duty of this understanding there will be no remedy for the wounds of our times. What is designed can no longer be brought to fruition by nations side by side, but by nations as one. It is impossible: to establish a League of Nations by outside political arrangement. These things must come from within, arising from the deepest impulse, the Christ-Impulse in man.

Anthroposophical  Spiritual Science has the duty of pointing out what each man, merely as a personal individual being, can awaken in himself—but which simply must be awakened. Directly we touch on these things, the seriousness of our times strikes us with full force. It is tragic to see how little it is felt, how men avoid approaching the great knowledge or recognition that must be definitely incorporated in human conscious­ness. The epoch through which we have passed has led us away from that inner urge which could bring us to the knowledge necessary to-day. Suppose you asked a natural scientist of the day, what the evolution of the Earth would be if man had taken no part in it. Thinking logically on the basis of his hypotheses and opinions, he could but reply that even if man were absent, the Earth would develop without him, bring forth its minerals, plants and animals: things would go on more or less as they do now, except that man would not be there, and no cities or houses would be built. Therefore, from the standpoint of natural science, we should have to say that the Earth would have developed without man, just as it has done with him.

Yet this is a complete error. If you put together the various things to be found in our twenty years of lecturing, you will feel what I am saying as a self-evident fact, but attention must be drawn to it. The physical body of man is permeated during his existence be­tween birth and death by the soul; and in this present epoch it is so interwoven in a particular way: the ego and astral body plunge completely into the physical. Again, when either by cremation or burial, we give over the corpse of the physical body to the earth, it means to present-day science no more than that the body has consisted of various substances which at death are added to the earth and go their way according to the various principles established by organic and, more especially, by inorganic, chemistry. But that is all pure nonsense. It is emphatically not without significance, that from birth to death this human body is inhabited by a human soul-spirit being. We give the corpse over to the earth in a form and condition which it has only acquired from this fact—the indwelling from birth to death of a being, man's soul and spirit, which before birth (or conception) lived in the spiritual world. The Earth in its evolution would long ago have fallen into decay and desolation if it had not received as a ferment—whether through burial or fire-the human bodies which have been the dwellings of souls, though now deserted by them. In olden days when bread was baked (nowadays the thing is more artificial) a little of the dough was kept back, to be added as yeast at the next baking that was a necessary part of the process. In the same way the Earth would not be able to develop unless it received human bodies (not the animal body !) as a sort of ferment. By their means the Earth, which would otherwise long ago have turned to dust, is enabled to bring to completion what lies within its evolution. Man does have a share, and especially just now, in the whole evolution of the Earth, and even what we relinquish to the Earth at our death is important for it.

The other thing which happens to man, especially at this epoch of his evolution, is that when he passes a certain age of maturity, 27 to 28, he is in his waking life, as regards his physical body, in a relationship which works in a particular way on the spiritual, super-earthly world. This is a remarkable polarity in man's evolution. If he passes through the gate of death and leaves his body behind him, he releases something from the body which serves the Earth as a ferment in its develop­ment, whereas if he lives through the period from 28 to 35 on Earth, he gives the spiritual world something which it needs. (Things are somewhat modified in the case of people who die before 28—to consider this to-day would take us too far.) What we give to the spiritual world is the most important thing that we come upon-again when in the spiritual world we live our life backwards. We really do give something to the super-earthly world, just as we relinquish our body to the earthly world at death.

This is one of the secrets bound up with evolution, and nowadays it is essential that men should absorb them into their conscious­ness. These are certainly not sensational bits of knowledge—much more than that. To take them seriously and experience them in, the soul with full import brings an unusual earnestness of outlook on life, a deepened seriousness which is necessary to-day. The external understanding of what is included in our idea of the Threefold Commonwealth can and must be given to the outer, exoteric world, but the real, fundamental understanding which will lead to conscious co-operation in social evolution must begin with the seriousness based on the view of life gained through anthroposophical spiritual science. Otherwise we do not understand things deeply enough. All that is connected , with the Threefold Commonwealth must be proclaimed in the external world. In our movement we should awaken the needful enthusiasm and fire, so that the necessary understanding may be given to others through the personal conviction of those who can attain the right; comprehension from the standpoint of spiritual science. The ordinary superficial knowledge possessed by people in the external world, of the kind which leads, for instance, to the belief that the Earth could evolve even if man were not concerned in it, cannot produce the necessary understanding for our time. So it is that as we pass through our cities our heart bleeds when we realize the complete lack of contact with what is really going on in the evolution of humanity.

The immediate culmination, led up to by all these facts, was what we called the World War, that whirlpool into which were poured all the results of the superficial views which had begun to gather force. To-day it is man's duty to reach the triple deepening of which I spoke in the last lecture, concerning the beings of the three Hierarchies next above us. We must learn to see that we live and move among such a complex of facts. Humanity, and we as part of it, must go through the epoch in which, the ego and astral body plunge their deepest into the physical and etheric bodies and are exposed to the strongest temptations, which have their origin in the fact that as human beings we are so closely united with the physical. There are two forms in which this temptation can arise; one I would call the "Western," the other the "Eastern." We carry the Western form with peculiar strength in our own nature, but we see it more and more definitely the further West we turn our gaze. It lies in the fact that, as we plunge more and more deeply into the physical body, we come into inner connection with the earth forces with which it is associated. Our physical body is connected with these forces, and is only released from them when we consciously overcome the force of gravity and all the kindred forces which bind it to the Earth. People do not really know how, through their organization, they overcome the forces which are active in them. I once mentioned an illustration of this in the human brain, which is so heavy that if it exerted its full weight it would crush the blood­-vessels immediately below it: there is, how­ever, a remarkable arrangement in the human organization whereby the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. Now according to ' the principle of Archimedes, a body floating in water loses as much weight as that of the water it displaces; therefore the pressure on the blood-vessels is reduced, because the brain floats in the brain water and the weight of the brain is overcome. Thus we overcome much.

The same thing may be noticed in other parts of the body. Forces which are but little noticed show, even in the physical frame, what a cosmic wonder exists in the organization of man. We are necessarily connected with the forces of the earth, but we must not come into immediate contact with them. The temptation to make too close a connection with these forces is to be found in the Western world, in all the Western attitude towards life. This temptation is an Ahrimanic one. We can only combat it by gradually so deepening our knowledge as to become able to survey humanity's historical development and understand the Event of Golgotha as a real fact in the centre of it—just as we comprehend the position of Caesar Augustus or Socrates in history. For the Western world the only safeguard against this temptation and its consequences is to take the Christ into its scientific, exact view of things, that He should penetrate the entire Western view of the world. The Eastern view is exactly the opposite. The Oriental remains, in a sense, at the level of childhood, not allowing his astral body and ego to plunge down into the physical and etheric bodies although  at the present epoch it is fore-ordained that humanity should do so. The Oriental shuns this immersion. It is interesting to see the most important features of the day from this point of view. A number of Rabindranath Tagore's beautiful speeches have been translated. Read them and you will find in them an atmosphere quite different from anything spoken by a Westerner. An entirely different spirit speaks. Just as the perspective in an Eastern drawing or painting differs from a Western one, so the entire soul-mood of Rabindranath Tagore differs from that of a European or an American. This is due to the fact that even the educated Easterner of to-day, if rooted in Eastern culture, shuns the connection with the physical body. In this case the temptation is Luciferic—not to make proper use of the physical body, but to leave it unused. While the American strives to use the body to excess, the Oriental strives to make as little use of it as possible.

In this sense we must come to understand race-psychology. In the same sense, too, we ought for decades to have perceived the relation between the Eastern and Western peoples of Europe if the World War was to be avoided. It was not for nothing, but of purpose, that in 1910 I lectured in Christiania on the Folk-spirits. If you read those lectures you will find many indications of what has happened in the catastrophe of the last five years. The great thing in all these things is to prepare, earnestly and fully, not to shun reality, but to comprehend it in such a way that men can take their place in the development of the world, not selfishly subsisting alone, or bounded by their own immediate interests. We cannot fulfill our task to-day unless we develop the good will to take part in the whole development of humanity—at least in our consciousness. None of this is intended as a criticism of the past, for I have often said that such criticism is useless from the point of view of spiritual science. What matters is that we should act and think differently in the future from the past and be prepared to trans­fer into the future what we have gained from spiritual knowledge.

I have shown you during these few days how man should regard his entire life between birth and death. At birth we take over the forces of the supersensible world from our super­sensible existence into the physical sense-world. These forces continue their effect—a fact which is very hard for men of to-day to understand. How do they work? They work in all that man develops as spiritual life in this, world. There would be no possibility of poets being born among us, of philosophy or science, or of impulses towards the education of men—in fact, no possibility of developing any spiritual life at all, if we did not carry with us through birth those impulses which come from our pre-natal life. All that belongs to our spiritual life is of pre-natal origin. On the other hand, what we ourselves develop within the economic life, through our will-impulses, brotherliness love for humanity, thought and work for others, rather than for ourselves, what in a sense we do "on our own" because we are part of the economic life, all that provides the most important impulses, for what we carry over into the spiritual world. Just as we carry with us out of that world the forces which above all build our spiritual life here, so we take the forces developed in the economic life by human love and brotherliness back into the spiritual world at death.. There they accompany us and are our most important impulses. Looking at what emerges in a child's life from year to year, we see the inheritance of what is given from the spiritual world to enable man to unfold all that is spiritual on earth; and looking, in the economic life, at the results of our will to work for others, there presents itself the fruit we carry through the gate of death into the spiritual world. To the view of one who can see the spiritual world, these are the two opposite poles of development. In my book Theosophy, in the account of the soul-land and spirit-land, you will find this expressed in ideas which spring entirely from a living view of these conditions. We build up our own spiritual life with forces derived before birth or conception; the economic life we develop so that we can convey the forces belonging to it into the spiritual world; but the State, what constitutes the sphere of "rights" is the opposite of the impulses existing between death and a new birth; what is developed here on earth and belongs to the earth only is the life of polities, law, the State. That has no relation to the spiritual world.

We simplify matters by interpreting things of this kind as we find convenient. There are plenty of people who apply to the present day (perhaps with the idea of showing a little monarchical tendency in these republican times) the Biblical saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's "—but it is a misapplication. The saying cannot be understood apart from the circumstances belonging to it. In those days the Roman Caesar was held to be "God" and demanded divine honours. Caligula enacted such worship for the statues of the Greek Gods which he trans­ported to Rome, beheaded, and adorned with his own head in exchange, as he deemed fit and proper. (The Zeus statue alone escaped this fate.) Even at the time when Jesus of Nazareth spoke them, these words meant "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and reserve something for the God Whom you must seek in another being than Caesar." In many passages of the Gospels it is necessary in our time that they are correctly interpreted, and not as they usually are; so that we may be able thereby to struggle nearer to the conception of reality needed by our times.

During these few days it has been my task to show you, from various points of view, that the problem confronting mankind to-day is how to conduct this struggle, how to reach this view of reality, which can only be attained by grasping spiritual reality as something concrete, as concrete as sense-reality. Nothing does so much harm in the present day as shutting our eyes to reality. Men have gone on long enough with the policy of ignoring the truth, shutting their eyes to it. Anthroposophical spiritual science aims in seriousness at opening eyes to reality. To-day they are all but closed. Man's defective sense of reality is witnessed by the amazing things that are given out. I am obliged to draw attention to such things because they throw light on our times. A number of people, closely associated with the events which have brought such misery over Mid-Europe (misery not at its end, but only just beginning) have only disclosed their real countenances when the awful events of the summer, and particularly the autumn, of 1918, occurred. It was then that many men showed themselves in their true colours. They had arrived at remarkable positions, remark­able because so very different from their  earlier ones. I have known people who look with a sort of pity at personalities bearing such responsibility and yet never ask whether millions in the world are not worse off, in body and soul, than these responsible men who now hold a position so different from their former one. In these things it is important to have our eyes open and to have a sense of reality in our knowledge of the present. It is perverse fantasy to cling to our own pet ideas because they please us, without listening to the voice of truth. It is not pleasant to speak the truth about these things, but when we see with bitterness of soul how, these things have developed, how perverted fantasy appears where one hoped for practical help for life; how this fantasy asserted itself with shattering force while those who faced reality were called Utopian idealists, we are compelled to speak. No pity should prevent us, now that things are clear and we have their own confessions, from speaking our mind about such fanatics, in this tormented Central Europe, who have never deigned to see reality as it is but wish to mould it according to their own comfortable ideas. In this sphere, also, reality must be seen in the true light, for it is no small reckoning we have to make. All the miserable endeavours to justify themselves before the world are the strongest accusations against them. There will be no healing, no peace, until the necessity for earnestness is realized and for a serious recognition of reality. I did not come here to say these things from any desire to be clever: rather, as being associated with a serious spiritual movement, I feel it a duty—a necessity—to speak. We have seen (but could not talk of what we saw, for our lips were sealed) that men of absolute incompetence were called to positions of authority—standing like shadows beside the great truths destined to stream through mankind. I know many people still feel offended when told the truth, but this shutting of the eyes to facts must have an end; it is only by looking honestly at these things that the force can arise which is needed for human progress.

We need such a force. We must grasp something essentially different from the mental outfit of the men to whom we owe our present position. We must have the courage to lay hold of something new.

It is with a view to preparing this new out­look, even in outer reality, that I have spoken here and in other gatherings of the Anthroposophical Movement, not to give a kind of superior Sunday-evening sermon, but to emphasize the gravity of the times. He alone is an Anthroposophist, in the real sense of the word, who is gripped by the central purpose of his time and wills the truth, rejecting the lies which have entangled us so terribly in the conditions of to-day. I could wish that the few words in which I have given an outline of what is necessary might penetrate your hearts—it is not your minds only that I would reach, for it is from hearts that must arise the deep understanding so necessary for the times. We have to discover the impulse which will set humanity upright again, and to do that we must first of all learn how thoroughly we are ensnared by mere phrases and by untruth in all directions. From the spirit the truth will come. Wisdom lies in truth and truth alone—that should be graven deeply into our souls.

I have said a little about what is characteristic of our epoch of evolution from a spiritual standpoint. I have laid these matters before you because I believe that through them the most essential need of the present can be brought near to the human heart—the mood of soul from which that earnestness comes which is necessary in order to live in the service of humanity to-day. My aim this time has been to arouse such earnestness.

It is beyond doubt that the War and all its terrible accompaniments have given the social question a new aspect for men to-day. True, this change is not recognized by a sufficient number of people in the way one could wish; but it is there and will become more and more significant.

The members of the classes hitherto accustomed to lead and rule will find them­selves compelled by force of circumstances, in dealing with the social question, to abandon limited ideas and measures which deal with it piecemeal. They will be forced to turn their thoughts and direct their will to the social problem as the most important in the life of mankind, both to-day and in the immediate future. While they will only understand their times by adopting a wholly new conception of their problem in all their thinking, feeling and willing, on the other hand it will be necessary for the masses, the proletariat, to achieve an essentially different attitude to it.

For more than fifty years the mass of the people have been acquiring social and socialist ideas. Unless we have gone through the last ten years with our eyes shut we must have noticed what changes have come about inside the ranks of the proletariat with regard to the social question. We saw what form it took at the moment of the outbreak of the appalling catastrophe we know as the World War. Then came the end of that fearful disaster. The proletariat found itself in a new position, no longer confined by a social order dominated, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, by the old ruling powers. It was itself called upon, to a considerable extent, to set its hand to building a new form of social organization. And just in face of this fact, wholly new in history, we experienced some­thing extraordinarily tragic.

The ideas to which for years the proletariat had devoted itself with its heart's blood proved inadequate when realization became possible, and at this point occurred a great historical opposition, even a conflict. The facts of world-history taking place about us might have become the great instructors of mankind. They showed that the hitherto ruling classes had, during the last three or four hundred years, developed no ideas which can, or could, be any guide for all that was forcing its way out in the economic and other social facts of human experience. The remarkable thing was that those who had power to act in the world of affairs had arrived at the state of letting them take their own course. Their thoughts and ideas had become so restricted that they could not stretch them to include the facts, which had grown above their heads, out of reach. This had been evident for some time, especially in the economic life, in which protection and similar ideas had been superseded by competition for a free market as the only motive for regulation; in which ideas were active, not moulding the economic life solely with regard to production, distribution and consumption of goods, but unfailingly leading to continual crises owing to the hazard of the "free market." He who will is able to see that since the social impetus of these ungovernable facts had spread over the great imperial states, the affairs of these states had acquired their movement, susceptible to control neither by thought nor by any efforts towards adjustment.

Man should consider such things to-day, should be able to keep before his spiritual eye to-day's necessity of looking more deeply into human activities and of grasping such a thing as the "Social Question " with more intensity of purpose than is customary. It is, after all, obvious that ideas have become inadequate for the developing facts, yet men will not see it. Three or four hundred years of routine in business and public affairs have accustomed them to account it practical life and to regard anyone who sees a little further and can judge of things through longer vision, as Utopian or unpractical. I give you an illustration of this; for to-day, when the destiny of the individual is so closely bound up with the destiny of mankind, only examples drawn from personal experience and honestly meant can be sufficient illustration of the impulse and motives to be found in public life—therefore I may be pardoned if I give you one of my own. It is not intended in a personal sense. In the spring of 1914, in a series of lectures I gave in Vienna on spiritual-scientific subjects, I was forced, months before the outbreak of the so­ called World War, in the presence of a small audience (a bigger one might have laughed me to scorn) to sum up what seemed to me the view we ought to hold about the social development of the present conditions. I then said that for anyone looking with open eyes at what was going on in the public life of the civilized world, it appeared as infected by a social tumour, a malignant social illness or cancer; and this illness within our economic and. social life must express itself in a terrific disaster.

Now how was one regarded who, in the early spring of 1914, spoke of an imminent catastrophe, from his observation of events going on under the surface? He was "an unpractical idealist," not to say a fool. What I was then obliged to say was a great contrast to what at that time, and indeed even later, the so-called practical men were giving out—those men who were not practical at all, only revolutionists who scorned anyone who tried to comprehend the history of the time from some knowledge of its underlying idea. What did these "practical" men say? One such person, a Foreign Minister of one of the Central Euro­pean States, announced to the enlightened representatives of the people that the general relaxation of tension in the political situation was making pleasing progress, so that they could be assured of peaceful conditions - in Europe in the near future. He added that the relations with St. Petersburg were the most friendly possible. Thanks to the Government's efforts the Russian Cabinet took no heed of the publications of the Press, and our relations with St. Petersburg would continue friendly, as before. Negotiations with England were expected to be concluded in the near future on such a basis as to produce the best possible relationships. What a difference between "practical outlook " and "gloomy theory”!

Many more examples might be given to illustrate the view of, or rather the insight into, the facts at the beginning of the period which held such terrible things for humanity. It is very instructive to let the facts speak: these practical men spoke of peace and the next months brought a peace in which the civilized world occupied itself for several years in killing, at a low estimate, ten to twelve million men and crippling three times as many. I am not saying this to re-new a sensation: it must be mentioned because we can see by this how inadequate men's thoughts have become, that they are no longer far-reaching enough to master facts. We shall only see these events in the right light when we recognize in facts the strongest indication that for the healing of our social conditions what we need is not a small change in this or that arrangement, but a vast alteration in thinking and learning: not a trivial but a tremendous settling up with the old which is too foul and decayed, to be allowed to mingle with what the future may bring.

We might say the same thing about the life of rights or the economic life in detail as about the wider institutions of mankind. Every­where men's words betray that their thoughts are inadequate to master facts. We may say that the former leading and dominant class has the practical experience but lacks the effective ideas necessary to the practice of life. Opposed to these circles stands the great mass of the proletariat which has educated itself in a rigorous school of Marxian thought for half a century. It is not enough to-day merely. to look round on the proletariat to find out how they are thinking. It is comparatively extraordinarily easy to refute logically what the masses and their leaders think about economic institutions. That does not much matter: what does matter is the historical fact that in their heart and soul lies a sort of precipitate, formed out of the intensely active thoughts which have been converted into a "proletarian theory." This theory, which might, after the break-down of the old order have proved itself much more effective than it has in actual practice, shows a peculiarity which is quite comprehensible. For as a result of the way in which the social evolution of mankind has moved under the influence of the capitalist order and modern technical science during the last three to four hundred years—especially during the nineteenth century—the masses have been more and more closely confined within the economic system, so confined that each man was restricted to one small, limited piece of work. This strictly limited piece of work was fundamentally all he saw of the reality of the increasingly extending economic life.

What wonder that the workman experienced, in the effect on body and soul, that under the influence of technical science and private capital, developed by the new life of economics, he could not see the mainsprings which moved it. He might be the "worker" in this life, but his social position prevented him from looking rightly into its ordering, into the way in which it was controlled. It is quite comprehensible that as a result of such facts something grew up of which the fruits are before us; certain subconscious impulses and demands of the masses became a far-reaching socialist theory, really fundamentally alien to econo­mic and other social facts, since the proletariat could gain no insight into the actual driving forces behind the facts and simply had to accept the one-sided ideas derived from Marx. So we find that in the course of years, various things have eaten into the feelings of the masses which may in reality be ever so deeply justified but which, all the same, miss the facts. I should like to, give as an example the enormous effect of one slogan, amongst others poured out over the proletariat by its leaders. "In future no production for the sake of producing—production only, for consumption." Certainly a remark to the purpose, with the merit (rare in slogans) of being absolutely true; but becoming an unreal abstraction, elusive, when carried to its logical conclusion with practical sense and real insight into economic conditions. The chief thing in practice is "how things are made"—there is no meaning in the clamour" produce only for consumption" from a practical point of view. It calls up in the soul the idea of how beautiful the economic life could be if profit were ignored and consumption only were of consequence! But there is no indication whatever in this phrase as to how the structure of the economic life could be arranged so as to give effect to what is expressed in these words. Many other catchwords (of which we shall touch on some) have the same defect. They often have their origin in deep truths yet, when adopted as party slogans of the proletariat, have become abstractions, just Utopian pointers to an indefinite future. If we would be honest with the proletariat, we must say that this unfortunate proletariat which is raising its just claims lives as in a cloud of views which are theory, it is true, but remote from the facts of life, because they have no contact with the facts and are placed in an isolation from whence they can survey only a single corner of life.

That is the conflict to which I would draw your attention—on the one side the attitude of the ruling classes who have power over the facts, but no idea how to use it to control them: on the other, the proletariat with its acquired, abstract ideas which have no correspondence with the facts.

If we try to describe the genesis of all this in a few words, taking note of active forces and impulses, more essentially important than anything that has occurred hitherto in the course of human history, we can only rightly estimate expressions like "the lack of ideas in the practice of our leaders " and "the un­practical theory of the proletariat" if we have a feeling of the torrent pouring in the present-day development of humanity with such vigour and mutually destructive force. The existence of such a contrast between the attitude of soul of the dominant classes and that of the proletariat leads, and has led, to a deep cleavage between the thinking, feeling, willing and actions of the former and all the longings, wishes and impulses of the latter. We do not even understand adequately what is the demand of our age, of which we hear the first faint tone from the proletariat. We may understand the form of the words when they mention the theory of surplus-value, i.e., the theory that we should produce only for consumption, or that of transformation of private ownership into common property; but what are they in reality as expression of their wishes and ideas? Can they be regarded merely as a subject for logical criticism by the leaders of the well-to-do? It is hard to find a more naïve response than that of a director of some company who hears the "surplus value” theory from his work-people and answers that the surplus, made up of banknotes, etc., is so small that, divided among them, there would be no share for each worth having. I repeat, it is hopelessly naïve to deal in this way with the theory of "surplus value." The "calculation " of the directors is obvious and incontrovertible, but that is not the real point. To try to refute what are the actual words of the proletarian theory is just like having a thermometer in a room to indicate the temperature and applying a flame to the tube because it registers too low a temperature to please us. By this temporary expedient of tampering with the thermometer we do not occupy our­selves with the root-cause of the trouble. To take proletarian theory to-day and try to refute it is simple-minded, for such theories are nothing really but to use a classroom word—"indices" of something lying much deeper. Just as a thermometer indicates the temperature of a room, but does not produce it, so proletarian theories are a sort of instrument by which we can recognize the forces active in the social question from this aspect, now and in the immediate future. In this we are much too easy-going. The question has been regarded as purely economic because it first meets us in the economic sphere, based on the demands of the proletariat, hitherto entangled in economic life during the epoch of private capitalism and technical science: we have not seen lying behind the theories all that is betokened by them concerning capital, labour and goods. The workman experiences the whole sphere of human life in the economic field; therefore the social question appears to him entirely in an economic perspective.

Anybody who has the opportunity to acquire wider views is bound to see how clearly three spheres of life are to be distinguished, in which three fundamental aspects of the social question present themselves. To have learnt through his life's destiny not only to think about the masses or have feelings concerning them, but to think and feel with them, will have taught him to observe what is seething in the soul-depths of their best members, even in the phrases which run through all socialist theories - as their keywords. What are these?

First we have the phrase "surplus value," of which I have already spoken. Association as man to man with the proletariat is enough to show how deeply this phrase has sunk into their hearts. It is this sinking-in that matters, not the verification of any theory. Anyone who, like myself, has worked in Berlin at the ‘Workers' School founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, while decisive events were taking place within the social movements of the new era, will know more about this question that I have, touched upon, through practical life, than perhaps some captain of industry does, especially if the latter should be—how shall I phrase it inoffensively—a revolution-profiteer, a superficial chatterer about revolution, even as we had war-profiteers. "Surplus value" was generally taken to mean something of this sort: the proletariat works productively and produces goods of some kind: the capitalist puts them on the market and gives the worker just sufficient wage to keep him alive, in order that he may continue to produce. Anything over and above this is "surplus value." As Walter Rathenau says—although in social questions he falls into great errors—it is true that this surplus value, divided, would not improve the condition of the masses at all; but through processes of calculation which float in space we do not arrive at the facts; we must deal with this surplus value correctly as to its social significance. Can it have as little, real existence as Rathenau, for instance, “accurately" reckons? In that case there would be in Berlin no theatres, no high schools, no public school, nothing of what we call cultural life, the life dealing with the human spirit; since that, for the most part, is really con­tained in the "surplus value." It does not really matter how this value is forced to the surf ace as "goods" or "cash in circulation": it is in this catchword itself that we find expressed the whole relation of our modern cultural life to the wide masses of the people who cannot directly participate in it.

Anyone who has taught for years amongst the workers and has taken the trouble to teach directly out of our common human feelings, speaking as man to man, will know what a spiritual education must be like if it is to be universally human and, further, how the form of education will differ from our present one, which has grown up during the last three or four hundred years under the influence of an economic order based on private capital and technical organization. If I may once again speak personally, to illustrate the general fact—I was well aware when I spoke to the workers, in lecturing or teaching, that in their souls kindred strings were sounding and that they were receiving a knowledge which they could absorb. But a time came when the proletariat had to follow the fashion and share in "education"—that education which was, from a spiritual point of view, the outcome of the dominant culture. They had to be taken to the museums and shown what had developed out of the experience of the ruling middle classes. Then if men were honest they must have known (if not, they invented all sorts of phrases about "popular education " and the like) that there was no bridge between the spiritual culture and education of the ruling classes and the spiritual needs and longings of the proletariat. Art, science, religion can only be understood if they issue from circles with which one has some common social ground, so that one can share their social feelings and attitude: not where there is an abyss between those who are supposed to enjoy culture, and those who can actually enjoy it. Here there was a vast cultural lie, and nowadays no benevolent mask must be spread over these things, but they must be brought into clear daylight. The lie consisted in setting up "People’s High Schools" or “Educational Schools" in which an education was to be shared by the masses without any possible bridge over which it could pass to them. The proletariat stood on one side of the abyss, looked over it at the art, science, religion, ethics, which had been produced by the leading classes, did not understand them, and took them to be something which only concerned those classes, a sort of luxury. There they saw the practical application of the "surplus value" which they had talked about, but they actually felt quite different from what was spoken in this "thermometer" language about surplus value. They felt: here is a spiritual life created by what we produce, by our labour, from which, however, we are excluded!

This is the way in which we must approach the question of the surplus-value, not theoretically, but as it really and vitally exists in life. Then, too, we can see the essential problem of the social question taken as a whole—its spiritual side. We can see that, side by side with the rise of the new technical science and new capitalist economics, arose an intellectual life only capable of living within the souls of men who were divided by a deep golf from the great masses to whose ,education they gave inadequate attention and from which they held aloof. The tragedy of it! The ruling classes discuss these problems in well-warmed, mirrored rooms, speaking of their brotherly love for all men, our duty to love all men, or of the Christian virtues, while a fire warms them which is fed with coals from the mines into which children of nine, eleven, thirteen years of age are sent down. In the middle of the nineteenth century this was literally so (things have improved since then, not, through any merit of the ruling classes but through the demands of the proletariat); these children went down before sunrise and only came up again after sunset, so that they actually never saw the sun the whole week through.

We are assumed to be agitating nowadays if we talk like this. Not at all! We have to say these things to show how the cultural life of the last few hundred years is separated from the real life of men. People have talked in abstractions about morality, virtue, religion, while their real practical life was in no way touched by the talk of brotherliness, love of one's neighbour, Christianity and so forth. Here, then, confronts us, as a distinct aspect of the social question, the spiritual problem. We stand before the whole sweep of the spiritual life especially as it relates to men of the present age and the immediate future in the realm of teaching and education. As a result of the way in which the territories of dukes or princes have been formed into single state-economics, the intellectual life in its wider form has been absorbed by the State organization. It is to-day a source of pride. that education has torn itself away, as regards science, as regards intellectual life generally, from its medieval association with religion and theology. Proudly it is asserted and repeated: "In the Middle Ages the intellectual and scientific life were in leading-strings to religion and theology." Of course we do not want to have these times back; we must move forward, not backward. We are living in different times: we must not simply point in pride to the way in which intellectual life was train-bearer to the Church in the Middle Ages. Something different is demanded. Let us take an example not so very far away.

A very distinguished scientist, for whom I have great respect (I do not mention these things in order to disparage people)—the Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences—was speaking of the relation of this Academy to the State. He said, in a well-considered speech, that the members of this Academy regarded it as one of their highest distinctions to be "the scientific bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns." That is only one example of what might be repeated a thousand fold, bringing to our lips the question: "What nowadays has taken the place of the Church which formerly used intellectual life as its train-bearer?” Nor were things so bad in the recent past as they must become, if such State regulations were to be made as would favour the growth of that appalling State-regulation of teaching which has arisen in Eastern Europe and which has conclusively proved that it would bring about the death of all culture. We must look not only into the past, but above all into the future and assert that the time has come when intellectual and spiritual life must exist as a self-dependent part of the social organism and must be under its own control.

When a thing like this is mentioned, we are met by all sorts of prejudices, and we are reckoned mad if we cannot appreciate the enormous blessings to be found in State-control of education. But healthy conditions will never be found until education and everything connected with instruction, including , the teachers from the lowest form to the highest grade in the public schools, passes from the control of the State into its own control. That is one of the great objectives we must specially aim at to-day.

The men who first showed me any friendliness when it came actually to fitting the idea of the threefold organization into the present age are those to whom we owe the first really free Einheitsschule in Stuttgart. In connection with the Waldorf-Astoria Factory, we are establishing the first model Einheitsschule, based on the science of pedagogy and teaching which has its origin in the true and real knowledge of the growing human being. Social class and rank make no real difference to him between the seventh and fifteenth years—all human beings are at the same stage. But to be able to teach and educate him means learning first to understand him. As it fell to me to give the preliminary course to the teachers working at the school, there came under my notice certain things which are nowadays taken as a matter of course. The serious significance of such an acceptation is not realized. It has only developed fully in the last decades. Since these things are the subject of practical life-work and must form its experience, I may remark, on such an occasion as this, that my comments on them arise from no irresponsible youthful mind, I speak as one who has already reached the sixties. I can remember how in days gone by the syllabus was short: the subject of teaching was presented by means of lectures, books and the experiences of men who had living ideas of education, who were creative spiritually. But to-day we have no short syllabus; instead, we have thick books which not only direct us to take one subject in one year, another in another, but tell us how to teach it. What should be the subject of free instruction is to be—indeed is—a matter of regulations. Unless we have a clear, adequate feeling of how unsocial all this is, we shall not be ready to collaborate in the real healing of mankind. Therefore, in the establishment of a spiritual, intellectual life which is free and independent of the State lies the first, central problem of the social question. This is the first of the three self-dependent members of the threefold organism which we have to set up. If we represent these facts, pointing out how healthy it may be to have no authority within the spiritual part of the social organism save that of those who take some active part in it, then the teaching of the future will be seen to have little kinship with that of the present-day unitary State. The whole of life will resemble a model republic. Teaching will be created out of the spirit, to satisfy the demands of education, not given according to the claims of regulations. We shall not merely enquire what standard shall be set in the socialized State for a pupil of thirteen or seventeen, but what lies deeply in man himself, which we can draw out of him in such a way that when these forces, liberated from the depths of his being, are at his disposal, he will not be weak-willed or crushed, as so many men are to-day, but will be equal to his destiny and able to direct his forces with determination to the tasks of his life. This points us to the first member of the threefold social order.

To give utterance to such thoughts as these brings questions, objections, like the one I had to meet in a South German city. I was answered in the discussion at the end of a lecture by a secondary school teacher, some­what in this wise: "We Germans shall be a poor nation in the future, and here is a man who wants to make the spiritual and intellectual life independent: a poor people cannot pay for that, there will be no money, there­fore we shall have to draw on the national exchequer and pay for education out of the taxes. What becomes of independence then? How can we refuse the right of the State to inspect, when the State is the source of income? " I could only reply that it seemed strange to me for the teacher to believe that what was drawn from the Treasury as taxes grew there somehow or other, and would not in future come out of the pockets of the "poor nation." What strikes me most is the lack of thought everywhere. We need to develop a real practical thinking which sees into the facts of life. That will give us practical suggestions which can be carried out.

Further, just as on the one hand the spiritual life, in education, etc., must become independent, so on the other hand must the economic life. Now, two demands, rather remarkably, have lately arisen from the depths of human nature, the one for Democracy, the other for Socialism. They contradict one another. Before the War the two contradictory impulses were thrust into each other's company and a party was even founded with the title "Social Democratic." You might as well talk of "wooden iron." They are contradictory, yet both are noble and honest demands of our times. Since then, the catastrophe of the War has passed over us, with all its con­sequences, and now there is a new form for the social demands and a "democratic Parliament " is rejected. When such a theoretical demand, entirely unaccompanied by know­ledge of the facts, with its catchwords of an abstract kind, like " the seizure of political power " or " the dictatorship of the proletariat " and the like, is pushed forward, this originates in the depths of socialist feeling, but it shows that people have come to realize the contradiction between that attitude and the democratic one. In future, we shall have to take into account the realities of life, not be content with catchwords: we shall realize that a socialist is quite right when he feels there is something repellent about democracy. And the democrat is right when he finds "the dictatorship of the proletariat " an alarming prospect. What are the real facts in this sphere?

We must observe the economic life in its connection with the State in the same way as we did the life of the mind and spirit. A common idea of modern times, especially amongst people who consider themselves advanced thinkers, is that the State should more and more participate in industry. Post office, railways, should be under State control, and its authority should be even more widely extended. This is a very comprehensive sub­ject to touch upon in a few words; and since I must limit myself to a short lecture, I must risk being charged with superficiality in making these remarks, which are, however, really to the point, and can be supported by countless instances from modern history. They are far from being superficial. This idea of the "advanced" thinkers will reveal itself in its true form if we take socialism seriously. Moreover, we can ascertain that true form if we so regard a remark made by Friedrich Engels in one of his most brilliant moments, in his book The Development of Socialism from Utopianism to Science. There he says "If we survey the State, in its present development, we find that it includes management of branches of production and control of the distribution of goods; but, inasmuch as it has undertaken economic management, at the same time it controls men." The State laid down the laws according to which men who stand within the economic life must act whether within or outside of their economic activities. In future this must become different.

Engels was quite right. It was his opinion that within the sphere of economic production itself there should be no more control of men: control should be limited to the production and distribution of goods. A right view, but only half or one-quarter of the truth: because the laws effective within the economic sphere have hitherto coincided with the life of the State, and if the State is removed as controller and manager of economics, the economic sphere must have a place of its own, not one from which men shall be ruled from a centre, but where they will rule themselves democratically.

That means that these two impulses, democracy and socialism, point to the fact that by the side of the independent spiritual member of the social organism there must be two other separate spheres, covering what remains of the function of the former type of State. These two spheres are the control of economic life and the domain of public rights, this latter including everything on which a man is entitled to give judgment when he is of age. What is the meaning of the demand for democracy? It means that, as a matter of history, humanity is becoming capable of deciding, in the sphere of the free State and public rights, everything in which all men are equal, every question on which any man who is of age can pronounce, whether directly through a referendum, or indirectly by representation. In future, therefore, we must have an independent sphere of rights, which will take the place of the old State built up of power and might. We can never have a proper State based on law and right, unless the sphere of law is limited to those matters on which every adult human being is capable of judgment. There has been a good deal of talk on this subject among the workers, though, once again, we can only take their words as a social thermometer. There is a remark of Karl Marx which has sunk deeply into their feelings: "It is an existence unworthy of a human being when a worker must sell his labour-­power in the market, as if it were a commodity: we pay for a commodity at its market price and we pay for labour-power by means of wages which are the price of this commodity, labour-power."

This is a remark which has been significant in the development of modern humanity, not so much through its actual content as through the electrical effect it has had on the proletariat, an effect of which the ruling classes can hardly form any idea. What is at the bottom of it all? In the economic circuit, i.e., in the production, distribution and consumption of goods, which alone belong to this circuit, the regulation of labour, according to amount, time and character, etc., has been placed. We shall never have a healthy condition of things in this sphere until the character, amount and time of human work has been taken out of the economic circuit, whether the work be physical or intellectual. The actual regulation of labour-power does not belong to the economic life, in which the economically stronger can impose the type of work upon the economically weaker. The regulation of work as between man and man, what one man does for another, should belong to the sphere of law and right, where each adult human being is on a level with every other. How much work one human being has to do for another ought never to be decided on economic grounds, but solely on principles which will develop in the State of the future, the State of Rights as opposed to the present State of Might.

Here again we meet with a mass of prejudices. It is a commonplace nowadays to maintain that so long as the economic order is settled by the conditions of a free market, so long will it be natural for labour to depend on production and the price of commodities. But if we imagine that things must always go on as they do now, we are shutting our eyes to the different demands which are growing up as history unrolls. In future we shall see, for instance, how foolish it would be for men in control of some industry to meet and, examining their accounts for a certain year, to say: "We produced so much last year. This year, to equal that total we shall need so many days of rain, so many of sunshine, etc." We cannot dictate to Nature to accommodate herself to our prices; prices must be subject to Nature-conditions. On the one side economic life is bounded by natural conditions, on the other by the State of Law or Rights, through which, as we have seen, labour has to be regulated. Hours of work must be settled on purely democratic grounds and prices will follow them, regulated according to natural conditions, as is the case in agriculture. We have not to consider alteration in a few minor details of the system: we must change our whole way of thinking and learning. The unrest created at present in our industrial life will never disappear until labour-power is judged on an independent democratic basis, when one adult human being stands over against his fellow as equal and can, as free man, bring his work into the independent economic life, in which agreements about production will be made, not about work. This must be understood.

I can but touch on these things in the short time at my disposal. I would gladly give a whole course of lectures to deal with them, but that is impossible. I must just indicate what form this third member, the economic life, must take in the threefold social organism of the future.

In this economic sphere there must not be, as in the past, control of capital, of land, of means of production (which incidently is control of capital) and of labour: we may only admit control of the production, distribution and consumption of goods. And how is the essential fact of an economic life which is to be based only on knowledge of facts and on practical ability—this "settling of prices"—to be achieved? It must not be decided by the chances of a free market as has been the case hitherto in both national-economy and world- economy. By means of the Associations which will come into being to suit the circumstances existing between the various branches of production and consumption—Associations which will be composed of men whose position is justified by their knowledge of facts and practical ability—we shall obtain organically and rationally what is nowadays attained through crises in the chances of a free market. In the future, when a decision as to the kind and character, of human labour has to be made in the Rights State, it will happen in the economic life that a man will receive in return for his product enough exchange-values to supply his needs until he can produce another such product. To give a rough superficial example, I might explain that, supposing I produce a pair of boots, I must be able, through the mutually-fixed values, to get as much goods in exchange for my boots as I shall require for my needs until I have made another pair. There will have to be arrangements within the society for supplying the needs of widows, orphans, the sick, of education, etc., but the actual regulation of prices in this way—and that alone will be the task of the economic organization—will depend on the formation of Corporations (whether elected, or nominated from the Associations formed among the various branches of production combined with the Associations of consumers) whose business it will be to get at true prices in real life.

This can only be achieved if the whole economic life (not planned after a Möllendorff scheme, but in a living fashion) is so ordered that, for instance, notice is taken of actual conditions. Say that some particular article shows a tendency to become too expensive: that means that it is too scarce. Workmen must be diverted to that branch of production, through some form of agreement, in order to produce more of it. If some article is too cheap, factories must close down and the workers be transferred to other factories. “It is all very difficult," people reply when we mention this sort of thing to-day: but they should realize that to reject it as difficult, and to prefer to play about with minor improvements in social conditions, means to preserve present conditions as they are. What I have said shows you that, as a result of the Associations created simply out of the economic life, economic life can be made self-dependent, controlled only by the economic forces them­selves instead of being under the aegis of the State: and in such a way that within this self-dependent control the initiative of the individual will be maintained as much as possible. This cannot be done by a planned economy, by the establishment of a common organization of the means of production, but only by the Associations belonging to such free branches of production and their agreement with the consumers' Associations.

It would be a terrible mistake to push to extremes the State control which has hitherto been under the direction of the ruling classes, and extend "Corporations" over the whole life of the State, using the framework of the State for the purpose, a procedure which could but undermine all connection between such a planned economy and the economic forces outside it. The Associations, on the other hand, as part of the Threefold Organization, would aim particularly at maintaining the free initiative of those engaged in industry and at keeping open everything which unites a closed economic circuit with other economic circuits without.

Many things would look very different—for example, something I can only indicate by an analogy. Socialist doctrine demands "the abolition of private property " and "trans­formation of private possessions into communal, property "—mere unmeaning words, which can signify nothing to a man with practical knowledge of affairs. Yet they might have a meaning—which I can describe to you in pictorial fashion. We are very proud nowadays, for instance, of our philosophers, and in one way they do think fairly accurately, that is, where intellectual or spiritual work is concerned. In the material sphere they do not manage to think in the same healthy way. In the matter of intellectual possessions it is realized that what is produced in that realm by anyone is his own work, he has to be present. Nobody talks of its being produced by some common economy or corporate industry. Everything here must be left to the individual, for we get the best result when he is present with his faculties and talents at the work, not when he is cut off from it; but from a social aspect we think that thirty years or less after his death the spiritual product should no longer be the property of his heirs, but of any person who can best make it accessible to the community. That seems natural to us, because we do not value spiritual product as anything peculiar. But we make no effort, in the case of material property, to treat it in the same way, and see that it should only remain private as long as a man is in contact with it with all his faculties. When this is no longer the case it should pass over—not to the community (which has no real being) bringing fearful corruption in its train, but to the man who could in his turn by use of his faculties put it to the best use for the community.

It is easy enough to see clearly if we think impartially. We have undertaken to found a school for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, at Dornach, near Basel, in Switzerland. This has been its title ever since the world became "Woodrow-Wilsonized" and it became necessary for Germany's spiritual life-treasure to be boldly displayed before the world. A very different thing, this, from ordinary Chauvinism—a Goetheanum in a foreign country as the representative of German spiritual life. Fur­ther, it is being built, and it will be controlled, by those who have the capacities to call it into being; but to whom will it belong when these people are no longer among the living? It will not pass by inheritance to anyone, but to those who can control it best in the service of humanity. Actually it belongs to nobody. Social thought in economics will bring into being the things which are necessary for health in the future. I have dealt more fully with the circulation of private property in my Three­ fold Commonwealth, where I have shown how the social organism must be divided into three members, separate but co-operating as such:

(a) The spiritual organization with control of itself on the basis of a free spiritual life.

(b) The organisation of the State with political rights and with democratic control based on the judgment of every grown-up person.

 (c) An economic life placed under the control only of individuals, who have shown themselves expert and competent, and their Associations and Corporations.

All this seems so new that once when I was talking of it in Germany, someone objected that, I was dividing the State (which must be a unity) into three parts. I could only ask in reply whether I should be dividing a horse into parts if I said it must stand on its four legs? Or is a horse a unity only if it stands on one leg? Just as little can one expect that the social life should be an abstract unity, if such a unity could exist at all. We must not in the future allow ourselves to be hypnotized by the abstract idea of the "unitary State"; we must see that it must be divided into three members on which it can be supported—into a free spiritual sphere controlling itself, an organization of rights with democratic legislation, and an economic organization with expert and competent economic control.

One-half of a great truth was uttered more than a hundred years ago in Western Europe, in the words: "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," three ideals which were capable of being graven deep into the hearts and souls of men: but it was not fools or madmen who maintained in the nineteenth century that these ideals were really contradictory, that where absolute equality rules, neither freedom nor fraternity can exist. These objections were sound, but only because they were made at a time when men were obsessed by the idea of the so-called "unitary State." Directly we free ourselves from the hypnotism of this idea and can understand the necessity for the three­fold social organism we shall speak otherwise.

I hope you will allow me in closing, to sum up in a comparison what I fain would discuss at greater, length. I have only been able to give an outline sketch of what I meant: I know I have but hinted at what needs a comprehensive description to be understood; but in conclusion I should like to point out what a hypnotic effect the "unitary State " idea has had on men, and how they have let the unitary State be dominated by the three great ideals of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." We shall have to change that idea. At present people look on the Unitary State as a sort of divinity. In this, their attitude is like Faust's attitude towards the sixteen-year-old Gretchen. It is like the lessons which Faust gave to the child Gretchen, suited to her years, but usually regarded by philosophers as something highly philosophical. There Faust says, "The All­-enfolding, the All-upholding, folds and up­holds he not thee, me, Himself? " (Faust, Part I, Scene XVI) This is almost the same view as of the Unitary State. Men are hypnotized by it as by an idol of unity and cannot see that this unitary picture must become threefold for the health of mankind in the future. Many a manufacturer would be only too glad to speak to his work-people about the State as Faust speaks to Gretchen: "The all-enfolding, all-upholding State, does it not enfold and uphold you, myself, itself? "—only he would have to clap his hand over his mouth lest he should say "myself " too loudly! The necessity of the threefold ordering must be realized, especially amongst the workers, but that will only be when their eyes are opened to the need. In future it will not be the cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," with all the contradictions involved in these ideals. They will hold sway, but the independent spiritual life will be the domain of "Liberty " for there it is justified. "Equality" will be the rule in the democratic State, where all grown men will be equal in rights; finally, "Fraternity " will hold dominion in the economic life, independently controlled, supporting and sustaining every one. Thus applied to the three divisions of the social organism the three ideals no longer contradict each other.

And now, though we look in agony at what has happened at Versailles, seeing in it the starting-point of much misery, poverty and pain, yet we can still hope. Things external can be taken from us, yet if we have the vigour to reach back over the years in which we were false to our own past to the Goetheanism of the period at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and others were active in other spheres: if we have the vigour to reach back in our time of need, in the strength of our own inner being, to the great glories of Central Europe, then, in spite of the stress of our times, will peal forth from Central Europe the complement to the half­truth of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity " which rang out a hundred years ago, the other half—perhaps in external dependence, but certainly in inner freedom and independence.

Liberty in the Life of the Spirit.
Equality in the democratic Life of Rights.
Fraternity in the Economic Life.

In these words we can sum tap what men must think and say and feel if they are to comprehend the Social Question in its entirety. May it be received and grasped by many, many minds, so that what is only a question to-day may be the practice of tomorrow.

Today and the day after tomorrow I propose to discuss a few of the more important facts relating to consciousness and to karmic connections.

If you cast even a superficial glance at that which exists in your soul from awaking in the morning to falling asleep at night—in the form of ideas, moods, impulses of will, adding of course all the impressions that approach the soul from without—then you have everything that may be called the objects of ordinary consciousness.

It must be clear to us that all these details of our conscious activity are dependent, under ordinary conditions, upon the instrumentality of the physical body. The immediate, irrefutable proof of this is that one must awake in order to live within these facts of the usual consciousness. For us this means that the human being must submerge himself in the physical body with what is outside it during sleep, and his physical body must be at his disposal with its instruments. He must be able to make use of them if the activities of the ordinary consciousness are to go on.

The following question then arises: In what way does the human being, as a soul and spiritual entity, make use of his physical instruments, his organs of sense, his nervous system? In what way does he use his bodily organs in order to exist in his ordinary consciousness? In the outer, materialistic world there is, first of all, the belief that the human being possesses in his physical instruments that which produces the facts present to consciousness. It has been frequently pointed out that this is not the case; that it is no more sensible for us to imagine that our inner corporeality, our sense organs or brain, bring forth the details of consciousness than to imagine that a candle creates the flame. The relation of what we call consciousness to the bodily mechanism is quite otherwise. We might compare it with the relation of a man to the mirror in which he sees himself. When we sleep our state of consciousness is comparable, let us say, to walking straight ahead in a certain space. If we do this we do not see ourselves, how our nose or forehead looks, and so forth. Only when someone steps forward with a mirror and holds it before us do we behold ourselves. But then we are confronted by what has always belonged to us. It is then there for us. It is the same with the facts of our ordinary consciousness. They exist continually within us, and have, as they exist there, nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body—as little as we ourselves have to do with the mirror mentioned above. The materialistic theory in this field is simply nonsense; it is not even a possible hypothesis. For the materialist in this field affirms nothing less than would be asserted were someone to declare that because he sees himself in a mirror the mirror created him.

If you wish to give yourself up to the illusion that the mirror creates you because you see yourself only when it is held before you, then you may also believe that parts of the brain or the sense organs produce the content of your soul-life. Both statements are equally intelligent and true. That the mirror creates the human being is just as true as that the brain produces thoughts. The facts of our consciousness persist. It is necessary for our ordinary organization that we be able to perceive these existing details of consciousness. To this end we must encounter that which reflects them—our physical body. We have thus in our physical body what we may call the reflecting apparatus for the facts of our ordinary consciousness. These facts exist in our soul and spiritual entity. We cannot perceive them psychically any more than we can perceive ourselves without a mirror. We become aware of that which lives within us and is a part of us by having held before us the mirror of our bodily nature. That is the actual state of things, except that one has not to do with a passive reflector in the case of the body, but with something that contains processes of its own. Thus it may be imagined that instead of the mirror which is silvered to produce reflection, the physical body has behind it all sorts of processes. The comparison suffices to show the relation of our spirit and soul being to the body. We will hold before our minds the fact that for all we experience in normal, everyday consciousness, the physical body is an adequate reflector. Behind or, let us say, below all the details of this usual consciousness lie the things that rise up into our ordinary soul-life, and which we must designate as facts within the hidden depths of the soul.

Some of that which exists in the hidden depths of the soul is experienced by the poet or the artist who knows—if he is a genuine poet or artist—that he does not conceive his works by means of logic or outer observation. He knows instead that they emerge from unknown depths, and are there, really there without having been gathered together by the forces of ordinary consciousness. But from these hidden depths of soul-life other things also emerge which, although in everyday life we are unaware of their origin, play a part in our everyday consciousness.

We saw yesterday that we can go down deeper, into the realm of half-consciousness, the realm of dreams, and we know that dreams lift something up out of the depths of soul-life which we cannot lift up by straining the memory in the simple usual way. When something long buried in memory stands before a human soul in a dream picture—which happens again and again—the individual in most cases could never, through recollection alone, lift these things up from the hidden depths of soul-life because the ordinary consciousness does not extend so far down. But that which is inaccessible to this surface consciousness is quite within reach of the subconsciousness, and in the half conscious dream state much that has remained or been preserved, so to say, is brought up or rises up.

Only those things strike upwards that have failed to produce their effects in the way usual to that emanation of human experience which sinks into the hidden depths of the soul. We become healthy or ill, moody or gay, not due directly to our ordinary course of life, but because a bodily condition results from that which has sunk down from our life experience. It is no longer remembered, but there below in our soul this sunken something works, and makes us what we become in the course of our lives. Many a life would be quite comprehensible to us, if we but knew what hidden elements had descended throughout its course into these subconscious depths. We should be able to understand many a man in his thirties, forties, or fifties, should know why he has this or that tendency, why he feels so deeply dissatisfied in certain connections without being able to say what causes this discomfort. We should understand a great deal if we were to follow the life of such a man back into childhood. We should be able then to see how in his early years his parents and environment had affected him, what was called forth of sorrow and joy, of pleasure or pain, perhaps entirely forgotten, but acting upon his general condition. For that which rolls down, and surges out of our consciousness into the hidden depths of soul life continues its operation there. It is a curious fact that the force, acting in this way, works primarily upon ourselves, does not leave, so to speak, the sphere of our personality. Therefore when the clairvoyant consciousness descends, (and this happens through what is called imaginative cognition), when the clairvoyant consciousness descends to the realm where, in the subconsciousness, things rule which have just been described, the seeker always finds himself. He finds that which exists and surges within him. And that is good; for in true self-knowledge the human being must learn to know himself in order that he may observe and become acquainted with all the driving forces that work within him.

If he gives no heed to these facts; if when he gains clairvoyant consciousness through exercises in imaginative cognition, and forces his way down into the subconscious—if he does not recognize that in everything working within him he finds only himself—then he is exposed to manifold errors. For he cannot become aware of this in any way comparable to the ordinary activities of consciousness. There arises for the human searcher the possibility, at one step or another, of having visions, of seeing shapes which are quite new and do not resemble those with which he has become acquainted in average experience. This may happen, but to believe that such things are part of the outer world would be a serious mistake. These phenomena of the inner life do not present themselves as in the ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache it is a fact of the ordinary consciousness. One knows it to be located in one's own head. If anyone has a stomachache he is aware of it within himself. If we descend into what we call the hidden depths of the soul, we remain absolutely within ourselves, and yet what we encounter may present itself objectively, as if it were in the outside world.

Let us consider a striking example: Let us assume that someone has a longing to be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. (I have already stated that I have counted during my lifetime twenty-four such Magdalenes!) Let us assume also that this wish is not as yet admitted: we do not need to admit to ourselves our own wishes, that is not necessary. But a woman reads the story of Mary Magdalene, and it pleases her exceedingly. The desire to be Mary Magdalene may arise at once in her subconscious mind while in the surface consciousness nothing is present but the attraction of this character. It pleases the person in question. In the subconsciousness, unknown to its possessor, there is a growing desire to be this Mary Magdalene. This individual goes through the world, and as long as nothing intervenes in her upper consciousness, that is to say, as far as she knows, she is simply pleased with Mary Magdalene. The ardent desire to be Mary Magdalene is in her subconscious mind, but she knows nothing about that, so it does not trouble her. She is guided by the details of the ordinary consciousness, and may go through the world as though she had no such injurious subconscious desire. But let us assume that, as a result of employing this or that occult method of reaching the subconscious, this woman succeeds in descending into herself. She might not become aware of a desire to be Mary Magdalene as she would of a headache. If she did her attitude towards her desire would be the same as towards a pain: she would just try to get rid of it. But in the case of an irregular penetration this desire presents itself as something outside the personality. The vision pretends to say: Thou art Mary Magdalene! It stands before her, projecting itself as a fact, and a human being, as evolution is today, is unable to control such a condition with the ego. With good, correct, and careful schooling this cannot happen, for then the ego goes along into every sphere; but as soon as something enters the consciousness without the accompanying presence of the ego it is produced as an objective fact. This observer believes that she recalls events surrounding Mary Magdalene, and identifies herself with her.

This is a real possibility. I emphasize this today in order that you may gather from it the fact that only careful schooling, and caution in regard to your entrance into the domain of occultism can save you from falling into error. It is to be understood that you must first see a whole world before you, must note objects around you, excluding however that which you relate to yourself, or which is within you, even though it appears as a world tableau—if you know that it is well to regard what you first see only as the projection of your own inner life, then you have a good corrective for the errors along the way. This is the best of all: regard, as a general rule, everything as phenomena emanating from yourself. Most of them arise out of our wishes, vanities, from our ambitions, in short, from characteristics relating to the egotism of humanity. These things project themselves, for the most part, outward, and you may now raise the question: How can we avoid these errors? How can we save ourselves from them?

We cannot save ourselves from these errors by the ordinary facts of consciousness. The deception arises from the fact that, although the human being is confronted in reality by a world-tableau, he cannot escape from himself, is all entangled in himself. From this you may see that it depends upon our coming, in one way or another, out of ourselves that we learn to differentiate: here you have a vision and there another. The visions are both outside ourselves; one is perhaps only the projection of a desire, the other is a fact, but they do not differ as radically as in ordinary life when someone else says he has a headache, and you have it yourself. Our own inner life is projected into space, just as the inner life of another person. How shall we learn to distinguish the one from the other?

We must undertake research within the occult field, and learn to distinguish true from false impressions, although they appear confused and all make the same claim to authenticity, as though we looked into the physical world and saw besides ordinary trees, imaginary ones. The real objective facts and those which arise from our own inner life are mixed together. How are we to learn to separate two realms which are so intermingled?

We do not learn this primarily through our consciousness. If we remain entirely within the confines of our mental life there is then no possibility of differentiation. This possibility lies only in the slow occult training of the soul. As we go on further and further we acquire real discrimination. This means that we learn to do in the occult realm what we would have to do in the physical world if trees born of phantasy and genuine trees stood side by side. If we run against phantasy-trees they let us pass through without resistance, but if we encounter real trees we bruise ourselves against them. Something similar, although of course only as a spiritual fact, must confront us in the occult field.

We can, if we go about it properly, learn in a comparatively simple way to distinguish between the true and false within this field, not however through ideas, but by resolution of will. This resolution may be brought about in the following way: If we look over our life we find in it two distinctly different groups of occurrences. We often find that this or that in which we succeed or fail is related to our abilities. That is to say, we find it comprehensible that in a certain field we do not succeed very well because in it we are not particularly bright. Where we assume on the contrary that we have ability, we find success quite natural.

Perhaps we need not always discern so distinctly the connection between what we carry out and our abilities. There is also a less definite way to realize this connection. If, for example, anyone in his later years is pursued by this or that blow of fate and, thinking back says to himself: “As a man I did little to make myself energetic”—or must say to himself: “I was always a careless fellow”—he may also say: “Well, the connection between my lack of success and my other omissions is not immediately apparent, but I do see that things cannot really succeed for a careless, lazy person to the same degree they are possible for one who is conscientious and industrious.” In short, there are successes and failures which we can comprehend and find natural, but there are others which happen in such a way that we cannot discover any connection, so that we say to ourselves: “Although in accordance with certain abilities this or that should have succeeded, it nevertheless did not succeed.” Thus there is distinctly a type of success or failure whose connection with our capacities we cannot see.

That is one thing. The other is that in regard to some things in the outside world which strike us as blows of fate, we can sometimes say: “Well yes, that appears to be just, for we furnished all the predisposing conditions;” but some other things that happen we cannot discover that we are in any position to explain. We have thus two types of experience; those whose relation to ourselves and our capacities we realize, and the other type just characterized, for which we cannot see that we are responsible. Our external experiences fall likewise into two classes: those of which we cannot say that we have produced the determining conditions, in contrast to others which we know we have brought about.

Now we may look around a little in our lives. That is a useful experiment for everyone. We could gather together all the things whose causes we cannot see, whose success led us to say “a blind chicken has found a kernel of corn”—things whose success we cannot attribute to ourselves. But we can remember and collect also failures in the same way, and those seemingly accidental outer events for which we know of no modifying influence. And now we make the following soul experiment: We imagine that we constructed for ourselves an artificial human being who, through his own abilities, brought about all our successes whose cause we do not understand. If something succeeded for us requiring wisdom just where we ourselves are stupid, then we conceive a person who is particularly clever in this field, and for whom the enterprise simply had to succeed. Or for an outer event we proceed in this way: let us say a brick falls on our head. We can see no reason, but we conceive someone who brought it about by running up to the roof and loosening the brick, so that he needed only to wait a little for it to fall. He runs down quickly, and the brick strikes him. We do this with certain events which we know have not been brought about by us in any ordinary way, and which happen very much against our will. Let us assume that at some time in our life we were struck by someone. In order that we may not find this too difficult we may place this event back in our childhood; we can pretend that then we contrived to be beaten by someone, that is, we had done everything to bring it about. In short, we construct for ourselves a human being who brings down upon himself everything for which we cannot account. You see, if progress in occultism is desired many things must be done which run contrary to ordinary events. If you do only what generally seems reasonable you get no further in occultism, for that which relates to higher worlds may seem to ordinary people quite foolish. It does no harm if the method does seem foolish to the prosaic outer man.

Well, we construct for ourselves this human being. At first it seems to us a merely grotesque performance, something the object of which we perhaps do not understand; but we shall make a discovery about ourselves, in fact everyone will who tries it, namely the astonishing discovery that he no longer wishes to detach himself from this being which he has himself built up, that it is beginning to interest him. If you try it you will see for yourself: you cannot get away from this artificial human being; it lives within you. And in a peculiar way: it not only lives within you but it transforms itself and radically. It changes so that at last it becomes something quite different from what it was originally. It becomes something of which we are forced to say “it really does exist within us.”

This is an experience which is possible to everyone. We admit that what has just been described—which is not the original self-created being of phantasy, but that which this has become—is a part of what is within us. Now this is just what has, so to speak, brought about the apparently causeless things during our lives. We find within ourselves the real cause of what is otherwise incomprehensible. That which I have described to you is, in other words, the way not only to peer into your own soul-life and find something, but it is the way out from the soul-life into the environment. For what we fail to bring off does not remain with us, but belongs to our environment. So we have taken something out of our environment which does not harmonize with the facts of our consciousness, but presents itself as if it were within us. Then we gain the feeling that we really have something to do with what seems so causeless in real life. A person acquires in this way a feeling of his connection with his destiny, with what is called Karma. Through this soul experiment a real way is opened to experience within himself, in a certain manner, his own Karma.

You may say: “Yes, but I do not understand exactly what you have said.” If you say that you do not fail to understand what you imagine, but you lack understanding for something which even a child can grasp, but about which you simply have not thought. It is impossible for anyone who has not carried out the experiment to understand these things. Only he who has done this can understand. These things are to be taken only as the description of an experiment that can be made and experienced by anyone. Each one comes to the realization that something lives within him which is connected with his Karma. If anyone knew this beforehand no rule would need be given him for the attainment of this knowledge.

It is quite in order that no one grasps this who has not yet made the experiment; it is not however a question of understanding in the ordinary sense, but an acceptance of information regarding something that our soul may undertake. If our soul follows such paths it accustoms itself not to live within itself only, in its own wishes and desires, but to relate itself to outer happenings, to consider them. Exactly the things which we ourselves have not desired, we have built into that which is here considered. And when we have come to face our Destiny so that we can calmly take it upon us, and think in regard to what we usually murmur and rebel against: “We accept it willingly, for we ourselves have decreed it,” then there arises a state of mind and heart in which, when we force our way down into the hidden depths of soul, we can distinguish with absolute certainty the true from the false. For then is shown with a wonderful clarity and assurance what is true and what false.

If you behold any sort of vision with the mental eye, and can as it were by a mere look, banish it, drive it away, simply by the use of all the inner forces with which you have become acquainted—then it is just a phantasm. But if you cannot get rid of it in this fashion, if you can banish at most that which reminds you of the outer world; if the really visionary quality, the spiritual thing remains like a solid fact—then it is true. But you cannot make this distinction until you have done what has been described. Therefore without the above-mentioned training there can be no certainty in the differentiation between the true and false upon the super-sensible plane. The essential thing in this soul experiment is that we always remain in full possession of our ordinary consciousness in regard to what we desire, and that by means of this experiment we accustom ourselves to look upon what we in our ordinary consciousness do not at all want, and is repugnant to us, as something willed into existence by us. One may in a certain sense have reached a definite degree of inner development; but unless, through such a soul experiment, we have learned to contrast all the wishes, desires, sympathy and antipathy which live in the soul with our relation to what we have not wished, then we shall make mistake after mistake.

The greatest mistake in the Theosophical Society was first made by H. P. Blavatsky; for although she fixed her spiritual attention upon the realm where Christ may be found, in the contents of her upper consciousness, in her wishes and desires, there was a constant antipathy, even a passion against everything Christian or Hebrew, and a preference for all other spiritual cultures on earth, and because she had never gone through what has been described today she conceived of the Christ in an entirely false way. That was quite natural. It passed over to her nearest students, and has been dragged along, although grotesquely coarsened, to the present day. These things extend to the highest spheres. One may see many things upon the occult plane, but the power of discrimination is something different from mere sight, mere perception. This must be sharply stressed.

Now the problem is this: When we sink down into our hidden soul-depths (and every clairvoyant must do this,) we first come into what is fundamentally ourselves. And we must learn to know ourselves by really making the transition, by having a world before us, of which Lucifer and Ahriman always promise to give us the kingdoms. This means that our own inner self appears before us, and the devil says: “This is the objective world.” That is the temptation that even Christ did not escape. The inner illusions of the inner world were presented, only He, through His inherent power, recognized from the very beginning that it is not a real world, but a world that is within. It is through this inner world alone, which we must separate into two parts in order to get rid of one—our own personal part—and have the other remain, that we pass through the hidden depths of our soul-life out into the objective super-sensible world. And just as our spiritual-soul kernel must make use of our physical body as a mirror for outer perception, for the facts of ordinary consciousness, so must the human being make use of his etheric body as a reflecting apparatus for the super-sensible facts which next confront him. The higher sense organs, if we may so describe them, open within the astral body, but what lives in them must be reflected by the etheric body, just as the spiritual and soul activity of which we are aware in ordinary life is reflected by the physical body. We must now learn to manage our ether body, and it is entirely natural since our etheric body is usually unknown to us, although it represents what vitalizes us, that we must become acquainted with it before we can learn to recognize that which enters us from the super-sensible objective world and may be reflected by this ether body.

You now see what we experience when we descend into the hidden depths of our soul life. It is primarily ourselves, and the projection of our wishes is very similar to what we usually call the life in Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] It differs from it only in that when anyone in ordinary life thus pushes forward into imprisonment within himself (which is what it may be called,) he has still his physical body to which he can return. But in Kamaloca the physical body is gone, even part of the etheric body—the part which most immediately reflects for us—but the universal life-ether surrounding us serves as an instrument of reflection, and mirrors everything that is within us. Thus in the Kamaloca period our own inner world is built up about us as an objective world, all our wishes, desires, all that we feel, and to which we are inwardly attuned.

It is important to understand that the primary characteristic of the life in Kamaloca is our imprisonment within ourselves, and this prison is the more securely fastened by the fact that we cannot return to any sort of physical life to which our whole inner activity has been related. Only when we live through this Kamaloca period in such a way as to realize gradually (we do come to this gradually,) that it all may be got rid of by experiencing our-self otherwise than through mere desires and so forth, only then is our Kamaloca prison opened.

How is this meant? In the following way: Let us suppose that someone dies with a definite wish; this wish belongs to that which projects itself outward and is built up around him in some kind of imagery. Now as long as this desire lives within him it is impossible, in regard to it, to open Kamaloca with any sort of key. Only when he realizes that this wish cannot be satisfied except by discarding it, when his attitude towards it becomes the opposite to what it has been, then gradually with the wish everything that imprisons us in Kamaloca will be torn from the soul. Only then do we come into the realm between death and rebirth which has been called the devachanic [Devachan = Heaven.], and which may be entered also through clairvoyance when we have recognized that which belongs to the self alone. In clairvoyance it is reached through a definite degree of development; in Kamaloca through the passage of time, simply because time so torments us through our own desires that at last they are overcome. By this means that which has been dangled before us as if it were the world and its splendor is destroyed.

The world of super-sensible realities is what is usually called Devachan. How does this world of super-sensible facts appear before us? Here upon this earthly globe we can speak of Devachan only because in clairvoyance, when the self has been really conquered, we enter at once into the world of super-sensible facts, which are objectively present, and these facts coincide with those of Devachan.

The most important characteristic of this devachanic world is that in it moral actualities are no longer separable from the physical, that moral and physical laws are one and the same. What does that mean? Well, is it not true that in the ordinary physical world the sun shines upon the just and the unjust? Whoever commits a crime may be put in prison, but the physical sun is not darkened. That is to say: in the physical world there is a realm of moral and physical laws, leading in two very different directions. It is not so in Devachan, not at all; instead of this, everything proceeding from morality, from intelligent wisdom, from the aesthetically beautiful, and so on, leads to growth (is creative,) and that which arises from immorality, intellectual falsity, and aesthetic ugliness leads to withering and destruction. And there the laws of nature are such that the sun does not shine upon the just and the unjust alike but, if we may speak figuratively, it darkens upon the unjust; so that the just, passing through Devachan, have there the spiritual sunshine, that is to say, the influence of the fertilizing forces that bring about their forward progress in life. The spiritual forces draw back from the dishonest or ugly human being. The following is possible there which is impossible here on earth. When two people—just and unjust—walk here side by side, the sun cannot shine upon one and not upon the other; but in the spiritual world the effect of the spiritual forces depends absolutely upon the quality of the individual concerned. That is to say: the laws of nature and the spiritual laws do not follow two separate roads, but one and the same. That is the fundamental, essential truth. In the devachanic world the natural, moral, and intellectual laws act together as one.

As a result the following occurs: If a human being has entered and lives through the devachanic world he has within him what is left over from his last life of justice and injustice, good and evil, aesthetic beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood. All this residue acts however in such a way that it takes immediate possession of the natural laws. We may compare the law there with the following in the physical world: If anyone in the physical world had stolen or lied and, seeking the sunlight, found that the sun did not shine upon him, could not find it anywhere, and thus through lack of sunshine developed a disease ... or let us rather assume as an example that someone in the physical world who was a liar had difficulty in breathing; that would be an exact parallel with what would be the case in the devachanic world. To the person who has burdened himself with this or that, something happens in his spiritual and soul nature so that the natural law at once and absolutely expresses the spiritual law. Hence, if the further development of this personality is brought about in this way, as he progresses gradually and is more fully permeated by these laws, such characteristics develop in him that he becomes an expression of the qualities which he brought over from his past life. Just let us suppose that someone has been two hundred years in Devachan, and has gone through it, having been in his last life a liar: the spirits of Truth withdraw from him. There dies in him that which in a truthful soul would be invigorated.

Or let us assume that someone with a pronounced quality of vanity which he has not given up goes through Devachan. This vanity in Devachan is an extraordinarily evil-smelling emanation, and certain spiritual beings avoid a personality who gives out the offensive evaporation of ambition or vanity. This is not a figurative statement. In Devachan vanity and ambition are extremely evil exhalations, and lead to the withdrawal of the beneficent influence of certain beings who retreat before this atmosphere. This could be compared to the placing in the cellar of a plant which thrives only in sunlight. A vain person cannot thrive. He will grow up with this characteristic. When he reincarnates he lacks the strength to build in the good influences. Instead of developing certain organs in a healthy way, he forms an unhealthy part in his organism. Thus not only our physical limitations, but our moral and intellectual ones as well show us the kind of human beings we become in life. Only when we emerge from the physical plane do natural and spiritual law go side by side. Between death and a new birth they are a single whole. And in our soul are implanted the natural forces which destroy if they are the result of the immoral deeds of past lives, but which fructify if they are the result of noble ones. This is true not only for our inner constitution, but also for that which falls upon us from without as our Karma.

In Devachan the essential fact is that no difference exists there between natural and spiritual law, and it is the same for the clairvoyant who really penetrates to the super-sensible worlds. These laws of the super-sensible worlds are radically different from those which rule upon the physical plane. It is simply impossible for the clairvoyant to differentiate in the manner of the materialistic mind when someone says: “That is only a law of objective nature.” Behind this objective natural law there exists always in reality a spiritual law. A clairvoyant cannot cross a scorched meadow, for example, or a flooded district, cannot perceive a volcanic eruption without thinking that behind the facts of nature are spiritual forces, hidden spiritual beings. For him a volcanic eruption is at the same time a moral deed, even though its morality may lie in an entirely different, undreamed-of realm. Those who always confuse the physical with the higher worlds will say: “Well, when innocent human beings are destroyed by a volcanic outbreak, how can one assume that it is a moral deed?” We do not need to worry about that. Such a judgment would be as cruelly philistine as the opposite idea: namely, to regard it as a punishment from God upon the people who are settled around the volcano. Both judgments are possible only to the narrow-minded standpoint of the physical world. Such is not the question, which may have to do with much more universal things. Those who live on the slope of a volcano, and whose property is destroyed by it, may be for this life entirely innocent. It will be made up to them later. This does not make us hardhearted and unwilling to help them (that again would be a narrow-minded interpretation of the matter). But in the case of volcanic eruptions the fact is that in the course of the earth evolution certain things happen through human deeds which retard human evolution, and just the good gods must work in a certain way for a balance which is sometimes achieved through such natural phenomena.

This application of the law is to be seen only in occult depths: that compensation is created for what is done by men themselves against the genuine development of humanity. Every event, whether a mere activity of nature or not, is at bottom something moral, and spiritual beings in the higher worlds are the bearers of the moral law behind the physical fact. If you simply conceive a world in which no separation of natural and spiritual laws can be considered, a world in which, with other words, justice rules as a natural law, you have then the devachanic world. Therefore one need not think that in this devachanic world through any sort of arbitrary decision an unworthy action has to be punished, because in that realm the immoral destroys itself as inevitably as fire consumes inflammable material, and morality is self-stimulated, and advances itself.

We thus see that the essential characteristic, the innermost nerve of existence, so to speak, is quite different for the different worlds. We gain no idea of the several worlds if we do not consider these peculiarities which differ so radically upon different levels. We may thus correctly characterize physical world, Kamaloca, and Devachan: in the physical world natural and spiritual law run side by side as two series of facts; in Kamaloca the human being is confined within himself, as if in a prison of his own being; the devachanic world is the complete opposite of the physical; there natural and spiritual law are one and the same. These are the three characteristics, and if you consider them carefully, striving sensitively to realize how very different from our own a world must be in which the moral, intellectual, even the law of beauty are at the same time natural law, then you will gain an acute impression of conditions in the devachanic world.

In our physical world when we meet an ugly or a beautiful face we have no right to treat the ugly person as if he must be psychically revolting, or the beautiful one as if he must necessarily be worthy of high esteem. In Devachan it is quite otherwise. There we meet no ugliness that is not deserved, and it will be impossible for anyone who, because of his preceding incarnation, is obliged in this one to wear an ugly face, but who strives throughout this life to be true and honorable, to meet us in Devachan with any sort of unpleasant appearance. He will have transformed his ugliness into beauty. But it is equally true that he who is untruthful, vain, or ambitious in this life will wander about in Devachan with some hideous form. And something else is also true: In ordinary physical life we do not see that an ugly face continually robs itself, nor that a beautiful one contributes something to itself, but in Devachan it is like that; ugliness is an element of progressive destruction, and we cannot perceive beauty without assuming that it is the result of an equally continuous furtherance and help.

We must feel quite otherwise towards the devachanic or mental world than towards the physical world. And this is necessary: to differentiate in these sensations, to see the essential which matters, in order that you may appropriate not only the description of these things, but that you may take away feelings, sensitivity towards that which is described in spiritual science. If you try to soar upwards to an appreciation of a world in which morality, beauty, and intellectual truth appear with the inevitability of natural law then you have the feeling of the devachanic world; and this is why we must, so to say, collect so much material and work so much, in order that the things which we work out for ourselves may at last be merged into one feeling.

It is impossible for anyone to come easily or lightly to a real knowledge of what must gradually be made clear and comprehensible to the world through spiritual science. There are many different movements that say, “Oh why must so many things be learned in spiritual science? Are we to become pupils again? Feeling is all that matters.” It does matter, but it must be the right feeling, which must first be developed! This is true of everything. It would be pleasanter, would it not, for the painter if he did not have to learn the technique of his art, if he did not have to bring out upon the canvas, at first slowly, the final result, if he needed only to exhale in order to have his finished work before him! In our world today it is a curious fact that the more the realm of the soul is in question, the harder it is for people to realize that nothing is accomplished by mere exhaling! In music it would not be admitted that one could become a composer without learning anything of composition; there it is quite obvious. This is so also with painting, though people admit it less easily, and in poetry they admit it even less, otherwise there would be in our own time fewer poets. For actually no time is as unpoetic as our own though there are so many poets. If it is not necessary to have studied poetry, but only to be able to write (which naturally has nothing to do with poetic art) and of course to spell correctly—we need only to be able to express our thoughts! And for philosophy still less is required. For today, that anyone may judge straight away anything concerning the conceptions of life and the world is regarded as a matter of course, since everyone has his own point of view. One finds again and again that no value is set by such people upon the carefully worked out personal possession of the means and methods of cognition and of research in the world, gained through every resource of inner work. Instead, it seems to them obvious that the standpoint of one who has labored long before venturing to give out even a little about world secrets has no greater value than that of the one who simply takes it upon himself to have a standpoint. Anyone can count nowadays as a man with a world conception.

This, on the contrary, is what really matters, upon which everything depends; that we labor with all our energy in order that what we work out for ourselves we may at last gather together and carry over into feelings, which through their coloring give the highest, the truest knowledge. Struggle through, by working towards a feeling, an impression of a world in which natural and spiritual law coincide. Then if you work seriously—no matter though people believe you to have learned only theoretically, although you have striven hard in working through this or that theory—you will realize that it makes an impression upon the devachanic world. If you have not simply imagined a feeling, but evolved it by years of careful work, then this feeling, these nuances of sensibility, have a strength which will bring you further than they could reach of themselves; for through earnest, eager study, they have become true. Then you are not far from the point where these nuances burst asunder, and there lies before you the reality of Devachan. For if the nuances of feeling are truly worked out they become a power of perception.

Therefore, if work along these lines is undertaken by student groups upon a basis of truth, honesty, and patient practice, outside of all sensation, their meeting places become what they should be: schools to lead men into spheres of clairvoyance. And only those who cannot wait for this, or who will not co-operate, can have an erroneous view of these matters.

We have spoken recently of many things concerning the existence of hidden soul depths, and it will be well in any case to continue to occupy ourselves with various details of this subject which it may be useful for an anthroposophist to know. Generally speaking, it must be said that a complete clarification of these things is possible only if it can be worked out on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge.

We have considered what may be called the human organization from the most diverse viewpoints. Therefore, when we wish to point out something in hidden soul depths, it will be easy for each one to relate it correctly to what was shown regarding the human structure as we know it from the more or less elementary presentations of the anthroposophical world-conception.

It has been repeated that everything included in our visualizations and percepts, our impulses of will, our feelings, in short, all that goes on in our souls under normal conditions between awaking in the morning and falling asleep at night, may be called the activities, peculiarities, and powers of the ordinary consciousness. Now we shall indicate by a diagram all that falls within this ordinary human consciousness, all that is known and felt and willed between waking and sleeping, within these two parallel lines (a–b).

In this section (a–b) belong, in addition to our visualizations, every sort of percept. Thus, if we put ourselves into correspondence with the outer world through our senses, and procure thereby in every possible sense-impression a picture of this world, remaining in connection, in touch with it, then that belongs also to our ordinary consciousness. But since all our feelings and impulses of will belong to it as well, one might say that in the area indicated by the parallel lines (a–b) everything belongs of which our normal soul activities give us information in everyday life.

The point is for us to know with certainty that to this so-called soul life the physical body is assigned as an instrument, including the senses and the nervous system. If we add two more to these parallel lines we may indicate the physical sense organs and the nervous system, which we may call the tools of this consciousness—the sense organs chiefly, but also to a certain extent the nervous system.

Below the threshold of this ordinary consciousness lies everything which we may describe as the hidden aspects of soul-life, or the subconscious. (See diagram, b–c.) We shall get a good idea of all that is, so to speak, embedded in this subconsciousness if we remember having heard that the human being, through spiritual training, attains to imagination, inspiration, and intuition; [These three terms as used by Rudolf Steiner denote three super-sensible faculties. (Tr.)] so we must substitute for the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will belonging to the surface consciousness, the imagination, inspiration, and intuition of the subconsciousness. We know, however, also that the subconscious activity is not aroused by spiritual training alone, but that it may exist as inheritance of an old, primitive atavistic state of the human mind. Under these conditions there arise what we define as visions, and visions of this naive consciousness would correspond to imaginations gained through training. Premonitions arise; and these might be primitive inspirations. We can show at once the difference between an inspiration and a premonition by a significant example.

We have already mentioned that in the course of the 20th century there will occur in human evolution what may be called a sort of spiritual return of Christ, and that there will be a number of persons who experience this working of Christ from the astral plane into our world in an etheric form. We may acquire knowledge of this event by authentic training, recognizing the trend of evolution, and also that this must come about in the 20th century. It may, however, happen, as it often does at the present time, that individuals here and there are gifted with a natural, primitive, clairvoyance which is, so to speak, a kind of obscure inspiration which we may call a premonition of the approach of Christ. Perhaps such people might not have accurate knowledge of the matter involved, but even such an important inspiration may arise as a premonition, though in the case of a primitive consciousness it may not retain its premonitory or visionary character. The vision constitutes some sort of picture of a spiritual event. Let us say, for example, that someone has lost a friend whose ego has passed through the gate of death. This friend now dwells in the spiritual world, and a kind of bond establishes itself between this person and the one still living in this world. It may be that the person in this world cannot rightly understand what the deceased desires and has a false idea of what is being experienced by the departed. The fact that such a condition exists presents itself in a vision which, as a picture, may be false though founded upon the fact that the dead is really trying to establish a bond with the living, and this gives weight to the presentiment so that the living person who experiences it knows certain things, either about the past or future, which are inaccessible to normal consciousness. If the human soul acquires, however, a definite perception, not a vision which may, under the circumstances, be false, but a factual perception—an occurrence, let us say, of the sense world, but in this case in a sphere invisible to the physical senses, or an incident in the super-sensible world—it is called in occultism deuteroscopy, or second sight. With all this I have described to you only what takes place although subconsciously, within the human soul, whether developed by correct training or appearing as a natural clairvoyance.

The phenomena enumerated when contrasting the subconscious with the ordinary consciousness, differ considerably from those confined to the conscious mind. The relation of this ordinary consciousness to the underlying causes of its activities has already been described in one aspect by this phrase: the impotence of ordinary consciousness. The eye sees a rose, but this eye, which is so constituted that in our consciousness the image of the rose arises has, like the consciousness itself, no power over the blooming, growth and fading of the rose in spite of its perception and the resultant image. The rose blooms and fades through the activity of the forces of nature and neither the eye nor the consciousness has any control beyond the sphere which is accessible to their perception.

This is not the case regarding subconscious happenings. We must hold fast to this fact, for it is extraordinarily important. When we perceive something through the use of our eyes in normal sight, pictures in color or anything else, we can alter nothing in the objective facts by mere perception. If nothing happens to harm our eyes they remain unchanged by the mere act of seeing; only by crossing the boundary between normal and blinding light do we injure our eyes. Thus it may be said that if we confine ourselves to the facts of the normal consciousness, we do not react upon ourselves. Our organism is so constituted that changes are not ordinarily induced in us by this consciousness.

It is quite otherwise with that which appears in the subconscious. Let us assume that we are forming an imagination, or that we have a vision which may be the response of a good being. This good being is not in the physical, but in the super-sensible world, and let us imagine this world where such beings exist and which we perceive, perchance, through an imagination or a vision, to be between these lines (b–c). In that world we have to seek all objects of subconscious perception. But if we identify anything in that other world as an evil or demonic being, either through an imaginary image or a vision, we are not, in regard to this being as powerless as we are with the eye in regard to the rose. If in a super-sensible imagination or vision of an evil being we develop a strong feeling that it must depart, it is bound to feel as if it were powerfully thrust from us. It is the same when we form an imagination or vision of a good being. If in this case we develop a sympathetic feeling, the being feels impelled to approach and to connect itself with us. All beings who in one way or another inhabit that world feel, when we form visions of them, our attracting or repelling forces. With our subconsciousness we are in a position resembling somewhat that of the eye if with it we were able not only to see a rose, but by means of simple sight could arouse a desire that the rose approach and could draw it toward us or, if the eye, seeing something disgusting, could not only form such a judgment but could remove this object by mere antipathy. The subconscious is in touch with a world in which the sympathy and antipathy which are present in the human soul can take effect. It is necessary for us to impress this upon our minds.

Sympathy and antipathy, and in general all subconscious impulses, act in the manner described not only upon their own world, but above all upon what is within ourselves; and not only upon a part of the etheric body, but upon certain forces of the physical body. We must consider here as enclosed between these lines (b–c) that living force within the human being which, pulsing in his blood, can be called the blood warming power and, also, the force residing in our healthy or unhealthy breathing power, conditioned more or less by our whole organism. (See diagram b–c.) To all this, upon which the subconscious works within us, there belongs in addition a large part of what is called the human etheric body. The subconscious or hidden soul powers work within us so as to affect our blood heat upon which depend the pulsation, the liveliness or sluggishness of our circulation. It may thus be comprehended that our subconsciousness is directly connected with the circulation of our blood. A slower or a more rapid circulation depends primarily upon the subconscious powers of the individual.

An influence upon the demonic or beneficent beings inhabiting the outer world can only be exerted if the human being has visions, imaginations, or some other sort of subconscious perception of a certain clarity. That is to say, if they really stand before him; only then can his sympathy or antipathy set in motion subconscious powers that act like magic in this outer world. This distinct standing-before-the-soul in the subconsciousness is not necessary for the effect upon our own inner organism as described above. (See diagram b–c). Whether the person in question knows or does not know which imaginations correspond to a certain sympathy, this sympathy nevertheless affects the circulation of his blood, his breathing system, and his etheric body.

Let us assume that during a certain period of his life someone has a tendency to have feelings of nausea. If he were subject to visions or had imaginative sight, he would recognize these visions and imaginations as perceptions of his own being; they would appear projected into space, but would, nevertheless, belong to his own inner world. They would represent the sort of inner forces that produced the feelings of nausea. But even if he could not practice this kind of self-knowledge and were simply nauseated, these inner forces would act upon him nevertheless. They would influence the warmth of his blood and his forces of breathing. It is actually the case that a human being possesses more or less healthy breathing and circulation, according to the character of his subconscious feelings. The activity of his etheric body and, indeed, all his functions, are dependent upon the world of feelings existing within him.

When, however, the facts of the subconscious mind are really experienced by the soul, it is shown not only that this connection exists, but that because of it a continuous effect is produced upon the general human organism. There are certain feelings, certain states of mind, that work down into the subconscious and, because they call forth definite conditions of blood, of the breathing power, and of the etheric body, affect the organism beneficially, or obstruct the entire life. Thus, as a result of what works down into the subconscious, something is always arising or subsiding. The human being either deprives himself of his life forces, or adds to them through what he sends over from his state of consciousness into the subconscious conditions. If he takes pleasure in a lie he has told, if he is not horrified at it—this being the normal feeling about lies—if instead he feels indulgence, or even satisfaction, then what he feels about it is sent down into his subconscious. This injures the circulation, breathing, and the forces of the etheric body. The result is that when this human being goes through the gate of death he will have become stunted, poorer in forces, something will have died in him which would have lived had he felt the normal horror and disgust at his lie. In the latter case, his disgust would have worked against the lie, transformed itself into the forces here indicated (see diagram), and he would have succeeded in sending something enlivening, creative, into his organism.

We see from the fact that forces are continually transferred from the conscious to the subconscious, that the human being contributes from this subconscious to his own invigoration or deterioration. True, he is not yet strong enough in his present state to spoil out of his soul, so to speak, any other parts of his organism except the circulation of his blood, his breathing system, and etheric body. He cannot injure the coarser and more solid portions, but is able to affect detrimentally one part only of his organism. What he has injured is most distinctly visible when what remains of the etheric body has been influenced in this way; for the etheric body is in constant connection with the warmth of the blood and the constitution of the breath. It is impaired by evil feelings. Through good, normal, and sincere feelings it gains, however, fertilizing, strengthening and maturing powers. We may say, therefore, that a human being, through his subconscious activities works directly, creating or depleting, upon the factual reality of his organism by descending from the level of his powerless surface-consciousness, into the region where something arises or perishes within his own soul, and thereby in his entire organism.

We have seen because the subconscious may be experienced more or less consciously by the soul and something may be known about it, that it achieves an influence in a sphere which we may describe by an expression used throughout the Middle Ages as the elemental world. A human being cannot enter directly into any kind of connection with this elemental world; he can do so only indirectly through those experiences within himself which are effects of the subconsciousness upon the organism. But when he has for a time learned to know himself so as to be able to say: if you feel this, and send down this or that emanation from your conduct into your subconsciousness, you destroy certain things or cripple them; if you have other experiences and send down a different sort of reaction you improve yourself,—if a human being for a time observes within himself this ebb and flow of destructive and beneficent forces, he will become ever riper in self-knowledge. This is the genuine form of self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge gained in this manner is as definite in its effect as would be a scorpion's sting on our toe every time we felt in the physical world the impulse to lie or were tolerant of lying. We may be sure that one observing such an immediate result would cease to lie. If the direct physical effect upon us should be a more or less serious mutilation it would resemble what actually happens, although unperceived, through what is sent down into the subconscious mind from these daily experiences. What is sent down because of our tolerant attitude toward a lie is such that it does bite off and take away from us something the loss of which injures us and which through our future karma we must regain. If we send down a right feeling into the subconscious mind—there is naturally an almost endless scale of feeling which may descend—we grow within ourselves, create new life forces in our organism. Such an observation of our own up-building or deterioration is an immediate result of true self-knowledge.

It has been recently reported that many do not understand how to distinguish a genuine vision or imagination [This term as used by Rudolf Steiner, denotes a super-sensible faculty (Tr.)] belonging to something objective from that which appears in space but is the creation of our own subjective nature. Well, it cannot be said: write down this or that and you will then be able to make the distinction. There are no such rules. One learns gradually through development; and the ability rightly to distinguish that which belongs to ourselves alone from that which, as outer vision, belongs to a genuine entity can be attained only when we have endured the continual gnawing of deadly subconscious activities. We are then equipped with a certain assurance. Then also the condition arises in which a human being, confronting a vision or imagination may ask himself: Can you penetrate it through the power of your spiritual sight? If the vision persists when this active force is turned upon it then it is an objective fact, but if this concentrated gaze extinguishes the vision it is proved to be only his own creation. Anyone who, in this respect, does not take precautions may have before him thousands of pictures from the Akashic Record; if he does not test them to see whether or not they can be extinguished by a resolutely active gaze, the akashic pictures which may give so much information, count only as images developed by his own inner nature. It could happen, for example, that such a person sees nothing beyond himself, externalizing himself in quite dramatic images which he believes to extend throughout the entire Atlantean world, throughout generations of human evolution—but which may be, in spite of such apparent objectivity, nothing but the projection of his own inner self.

When the human being has passed through the gate of death the obstructions no longer exist by which something within himself becomes an objective vision. In ordinary life of the present day what is subconsciously experienced, sent down by the individual human being into his subconscious mind, does not always become vision and imagination. It becomes imagination through correct training, and vision in the case of atavistic clairvoyance. When the human being has passed through the gate of death his collective inner self becomes at once an objective world. It is there confronting him, Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] being in essence nothing but a world built up around us out of that which is experienced within our own soul. This condition is reversed only in Devachan. [Devachan = Heaven]

Thus we can easily comprehend what has been said regarding the effect of sympathy or antipathy present in visions, imaginations, inspirations and premonitions: that these act in all cases upon the objective elemental world. Upon this point it has been stated that in the physically incarnate personality only that which he has developed into vision and imagination acts upon this elemental world. In the case of the dead the forces affect the elemental world which were present in the subconscious mind, and which are always taken along when a human being passes through the gate of death, so that everything experienced after death influences in reality the elemental world. As surely as waves are aroused in a stream by whipping it do the subconscious experiences transmit themselves after death to the elemental world; as certainly as waves that are whipped extend in flattening circles, or a current of air passes undeterred on its way, do these forces spread over the elemental world. Therefore this world is constantly filled with that which is aroused by the content of the subconscious mind which mortals take with them through the gate of death. The point concerning us here is that we gain the ability to bring about the conditions necessary for sight in the elemental world. One need not wonder at the clairvoyant when he recognizes quite correctly that occurrences in that world are activities of the dead. It is even possible, as you will see, to follow the effects of these after-death experiences into the physical world—of course under certain conditions. When the clairvoyant has gone through all that has been described, and acquired the ability to perceive the elemental world, he reaches then after a time a point where he may have strange experiences.

Let us suppose that a clairvoyant looks at a rose with his physical eyes, and receives a sense impression. Let us further suppose that he has trained himself so that the color red gives him a definite shade of feeling. This is necessary, for without it the process goes no further. Unless colors and tones produce definite nuances of feeling when clairvoyance is directed at an outside object, the sight progresses no further. Suppose that he gives the rose away. Then, if he is not clairvoyant, what he felt would have sunk into his subconscious mind, and would be working, either beneficially or detrimentally, upon his health, and so on. But if he is clairvoyant, he would perceive just how the image of the rose acts in his subconscious mind. That is to say, he would have a visionary picture, an imagination of the rose. He would perceive at the same time—as has been explained—how his feeling about the rose affected, either beneficially or detrimentally, his etheric or his physical body. He would observe the action of all this upon his own organism. When he has this image before himself he will be able by its means to exert an attractive force upon the being which we may call the group-soul of the rose and which underlies its existence. He will be looking into the elemental world, seeing the rose's group-soul in so far as it dwells there.

If the clairvoyant goes still further, has emerged from perception of the rose, has given it away, has followed his own inner procedure in concentrating upon the rose and its results, and has reached the point of seeing something of it in the elemental world—then there appears in place of the rose a wonderful shining image belonging to the elemental world. Then, if the procedure has been followed up to this point, something special happens. The clairvoyant can now disregard what is before him. He can then give the command to himself: Do not look with your inner sight at what seems to be a living etheric being going out into the world. Do not regard it! Then, strangely, the clairvoyant sees something which, passing through his eye, shows him how the forces act which form it, how they issue from the human etheric body and build up the eye. He sees the formative forces belonging to his own physical body. He sees his own physical eye as he ordinarily sees an external object. That is in fact something which may occur. A way may be followed from the outer object up to the point where, in absolute inner darkness—no other sense impressions being admitted—what the eye looks like is seen in a spiritual picture. The human being sees his own inner organ. He has entered the region (see diagram), which is really formative in the physical world: the creative physical world. It is first perceived by the clairvoyant in observing his own physical organization. Thus he follows the way back to himself. What sent such forces into our eye that we see it giving out rays of light which really express the essential nature of sight? Then we see the eye surrounded by a sort of yellow glow; we see it enclosed within us. This was brought fourth by the entire process that brought the human being finally up to this point.

The forces that may issue from a dead person follow the same course. The human being takes with him the contents of his subconscious mind into the world that he inhabits after he passes through the gate of death. Just as we enter our own physical eye, do the forces sent out by the dead from the elemental world reenter the physical world. The deceased has perhaps an especial longing for someone whom he has left behind. This longing, at the time lying in the subconscious, becomes at once a living vision and in this way affects the elemental world. What was only a vision in the physical world becomes a power in the elemental world. This power follows the way indicated through the longing for the one who is living and, if the conditions permit, it may create some disturbance in the physical world near the living, who may notice rapping sounds or something of the kind. These are heard just like any physical sounds. Occurrences of this kind, originating in this way, would be noticed more frequently than is usually the case were people more observant of the times favorable to such activities. The times of gradual going to sleep and of similar awaking are the most favorable, but no attention is paid to them; yet there are few, if any, who have never received during such moments of transition what were really manifestations of the super-sensible world, ranging all the way from disturbing noises to audible words.

All this has been pointed out today in order to show both the reality and the nature of the connection between human beings and the world. Impressions of an objective sense-world, received by the ordinary consciousness, are powerless and without any real relation—even to that world; but as soon as the human experience descends into the subconscious the relation with realities is established. The helplessness of the former consciousness passes over into a delicate magic, and when the human being has passed through the gate of death and is released from the physical body, his experiences are such that they are effective both in the elemental world and, under favorable circumstances, even upon the physical plane where they may be observed by the ordinary consciousness.

In describing what may take place, only the simplest example has been used, because it is best to begin with the simplest case. Of course we shall—since we have left ourselves time for it—work out also what we need to know in order to proceed to more complicated matters which may lead us into the more intimate relations between the world and humanity.

Considering on this occasion the lectures which I am having to give just now in Zürich,¹ I am freshly reminded that one can hardly come into touch with the spiritual life of that city in any broad sense at present without giving some attention to what is now called analytical psychology, or psychoanalysis. And various considerations connected with this realization have decided me to introduce what I have to say today with a short enumeration of certain points in analytical psychology, in psychoanalysis. We shall link it then with further remarks.

We have often noted how important it is for the researcher in the field of anthroposophical spiritual science, to connect his considerations with what is offered by the moving forces of our own age. It may be said that all sorts of people who feel drawn to psychoanalysis today are earnestly searching for the spiritual foundations of existence, for the inner realities of the soul of man. And it may be called a curious characteristic of our own time that so many of our contemporaries are becoming aware of quite definite, and most peculiar forces in the human soul. The psychoanalysts belong to those who, simply through the impulses of the age, are forced to hit upon certain phenomena of soul life.

It is especially important also not to remain entirely oblivious of this movement, because the phenomena of which it takes cognizance are really present, and because in our own time they intrude themselves for various reasons upon the attention of human beings. Today they must become aware of such phenomena.

On the other hand it is a fact that the people who concern themselves with these things today lack the means of knowledge required for the discussion and, above all, for the understanding of them. So that we may say: psychoanalysis is a phenomenon of our time, which compels men to take account of certain soul processes, and yet causes them to undertake their consideration by inadequate methods of knowledge. This is particularly important because this investigation, by inadequate methods of knowledge, of a matter that quite obviously exists and challenges our present human cognition leads to a variety of serious errors, inimical to social life, to the further development of knowledge, and to the influence of this development of knowledge upon social life.

It may be said that even less than half-truths are, under certain circumstances, more harmful than complete errors. And what the psychoanalysts bring to light today can be regarded only as an assortment of quarter-truths.

Let us consider a few excerpts from the research magazine of the psychoanalysts. What is called psychoanalysis today had its origin in a medical case observed by a Vienna interne, a Dr. Breuer, in the eighteen-eighties. Dr. Breuer, with whom I was acquainted, was a man of extraordinarily delicate spirituality besides what he was as a physician. He was interested to a high degree in all sorts of aesthetic, and general human problems. With his intimate manner of handling disease, it was natural that one case, which came under his observation in the eighties, was particularly interesting to him.

He had to treat a woman who seemed to be suffering from a severe form of hysteria. Her hysterical symptoms consisted of an occasional paralysis of one arm, dreamy conditions of various kinds, reduction of consciousness, a deep degree of sleepiness, and besides all this, forgetfulness of the usual language of her every day life. She had always been able to speak German; it was her native language, but under the influence of her hysteria could no longer do so; she could speak and understand only English.

Breuer noticed that when this woman was in her dreamy condition she could be persuaded, by a more intimate medical treatment, to speak of a certain scene, a very trying past experience. Now I will make clear to you from the description of the case given by the Breuer school, how the woman in her half-conscious condition, sometimes artificially induced, gave the impression that her hysteria was connected with a severe illness of her father, through which he had passed a long time before. Breuer could easily hypnotize a patient, and when he had placed her under hypnosis and encouraged her to speak of it, she told of an experience she had had during her father's illness. She had helped with the nursing, and always came back to this definite experience. I will quote from the report: [The following quotations are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.]

“On one occasion she was watching at night in great anxiety and tension, for the sick man had a high fever, and a surgeon was expected from Vienna to perform an operation. Her mother had left her for a time, and Anna (the patient) sat by the sickbed, her right arm across the back of the chair. She fell into a kind of waking dream, and saw, as if issuing from the wall, a black snake approaching, to bite her father. ...”

Men of the present day are always stricken by materialism, so we find in the report at this point the following suggestion, which is of no value whatever:

(“It is very probable that in the meadow behind the house there were a few snakes which had frightened the girl previously, and which now furnished material for the hallucination.”)

That is only an interpolated remark, to which you may attach importance, or not—it does not matter. The point is that the snake seemed to her to come out of the wall to bite her father.

“She wanted to fight off the creature, but was as if paralyzed; the right arm hanging over the back of the chair had gone to sleep and became anaesthetized and paralyzed and, as she looked at it, the fingers changed into little snakes tipped with skulls.”

All this was beside her father's sick bed.

“She probably tried to chase away the snake with the lamed right hand, and so associated the anaesthesia and lameness with the snake hallucination. When this had disappeared she wished, in her fright, to pray, but every language failed her. At last she remembered an English nursery rhyme, and could continue to think and pray in this language.”

The whole illness originated from this experience. From it there had remained the paralysis of one hand, reduction of consciousness in varying degrees, and inability to express herself in any language but English. Dr. Breuer then noticed that the condition was ameliorated whenever he had her tell this story, and he based his treatment upon this fact. By means of hypnosis he drew from her little by little all the details, and really succeeded in bringing about a marked improvement in her condition. The patient got rid of the matter, as it were, by uttering and communicating it to another.

Breuer and his collaborator Freud, in Vienna, who were both influenced, as was natural at this period, by the school of Charcot [Jean Martin Charcot, French M.D. (1825-1893).] in Paris, diagnosed this case as a psychic trauma, a psychic wound, what is called in England a “nervous shock.” The psychic shock was supposed to consist of this experience at her father's bedside, and to have had an effect upon the soul similar to that of a physical wound upon the body.

It must be noted that from the beginning Breuer conceived the whole affair as a soul illness, as a matter of the inner life. He was convinced from the beginning that no anatomical or physiological changes could have been shown, no causes, for example, such as changes in the nerves leading from the arm to the brain. He was convinced from the start that he was dealing with a fact within the soul.

They were inclined in these early days to regard these cases as induced by wounds of the soul, shocks, etc. Very soon, however, because of Dr. Freud's active interest, theories took on a different character. With Freud's further development of the subject Dr. Breuer was never fully in accord. Freud felt that the theory of soul wounds would not do, did not cover these cases, and thus far Breuer agreed with him. I will remark in parenthesis that Dr. Breuer was a very busy practicing physician, thoroughly grounded in science, an excellent pupil of Nothnagel [Hermann Nothnagel, M.D. (1841-1905).] and because of external circumstances alone never became a professor. We may well believe that if Breuer, instead of remaining one of the busiest physicians in Vienna, with little time for scientific research, had obtained a professorship and so been able to follow up this problem, it might have assumed a very different form!

But from then on Dr. Freud took especial interest in the matter. He said to himself: the theory of trauma does not explain these cases. We need to determine under what conditions such a soul wound develops. For it might be said with justice that many girls had sat beside a father's sickbed with equally deep feelings, but without producing the same results. The unscientific layman deals with such problems promptly by the extraordinarily profound explanation that one is predisposed to such symptoms while another is not. Although very “profound,” this is the most absurd solution that can be arrived at, is it not? For if you explain things that occur on the basis of predisposition, you can easily explain everything in the world. You need only say: the predisposition for a certain thing exists.

Of course serious thinkers did not concern themselves with such ideas, but sought the real conditions. And Freud believed that he had discovered them in cases like the following. You will find innumerable similar cases in the literature of the psychoanalysts today, and it may be admitted that an immense amount of material has been collected in order to decide this or that point within this field. I will describe this one case, making it as comprehensible as possible. Its absolute historical accuracy is not important to us.

There was a woman with other guests at an evening party, a gathering of friends to bid good-bye to the mistress of the house, who had become nervous and was about to leave for a health resort abroad. She was to leave on that evening, and after the party had broken up, and the hostess departed, the woman whose case we are describing was going with other supper guests along the street when a cab came around the corner behind them (not an automobile—a cab with horses), driven at a great pace. In the smaller cities people returning home at night often walk in the middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk. (I do not know if you have noticed this). As the cab rushed towards them the supper guests scattered to right and left on to the sidewalks, with the exception of this one woman whom we are considering. She ran along the street in front of the horses, and all the driver's cursing and swearing and the cracking of his whip could not deflect her. She ran until she came to a bridge where she tried to throw herself into the water in order to avoid being run over. She was rescued by passersby, and returned to her party, being thus preserved from a serious accident.

This performance was of course connected with the woman's general condition. It is due, undoubtedly, to hysteria if a person runs along the middle of the street in front of horses, and the cause of such an action had to be discovered. Freud, in this and similar cases, examined the previous life back to childhood. If, even at an early age, something happened that was not assimilated by the soul, it could create a tendency which might be released later by any sort of shock.

And in fact such an experience was found in the childhood of the woman in question. She was taken driving as a child, and the horses became frightened and ran away. The coachman could not control them, and when they reached the river bank he sprang off, ordering the child to jump too, which it did, just before the horses plunged into the river. Thus the shocking incident was there, and a certain association of horse with horse. At the moment when she realized her danger from the horses she lost control of herself, and ran frantically in front of them instead of turning aside—all this as an after-effect of the childhood experience. You see that the psychoanalysts have a scientific method, according to present-day scientific ideas. But are there not many who have some such experience in childhood without such a reaction, even with the association of horse with horse? To this single circumstance something must be added to produce a “predisposition” to run in front of horses, instead of avoiding them.

Freud continued his search, and actually found an interesting connection in this case. The woman was engaged to be married, but was in love with two men at the same time. One was the man to whom she was engaged, and she was sure that she loved him best; but she was not quite clear about that, only halfway so; she loved the other also, this other being the husband of her best friend, whose farewell supper had taken place that evening. The hostess, who was somewhat nervous, took her departure, and this woman left with the other guests, ran in front of the horses, was rescued, and brought back quite naturally into the house she had just left. Further inquiry elicited the fact that in the past there had existed a significant association between the lady and this other man, the husband of her best friend. The love affair had already taken on “certain dimensions,” let us say, which accounted for the nervousness of her friend, as you may easily imagine. The physician brought her to this point in the story, but had difficulty in persuading her to continue. She admitted at last that when she came to herself in her friend's house, and was again normal, the husband declared his love to her. Quite a “remarkable case,” as you see!

Dr. Freud went after similar cases, and his researches convinced him that the hysterical symptoms, which had been attributed to a psychic “trauma” or wound, were due instead to love, conscious or unconscious. His examination of life experiences showed that circumstances might greatly differ, indeed in the most characteristic cases, that these love stories might never have risen into the consciousness of the patient at any time.

So Freud completed what he called his neurosis theory or sexual theory. He considered that sexuality entered into all such cases. But such things are extraordinarily deceptive. To begin with, there is everywhere at the present time an inclination to call sex to your aid, for the solution of any human problem. Therefore we need not wonder that a doctor who found it to be a factor in a certain number of cases of hysteria set up such a theory.

But on the other hand, since analytical psychology is carrying on a research with inadequate tools, this is the point at which the greatest danger begins. The matter is dangerous first, because this longing for knowledge is so extremely tempting, tempting because of present circumstances, and because it may always be proved that the sex connection is more or less present. Yet the psychoanalyst Jung, who wrote Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse (see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.), Professor Jung of Zürich does not share the opinion that Freud's sexual “neurosis theory” covers these cases. He has instead another theory.

Jung noted that Freud has his opponents. Among them is a certain Adler. This Adler takes a quite different viewpoint. Just as Freud tested large numbers of cases, and settled upon sex as the original cause (you can read it all in Jung's book), so Adler approached the problem from another side, and decided that this side is more important than the one that Freud has placed in the foreground.

Adler—I will only generalize—found that there was another urge that played quite as important a role in the human being as the sexual impulse emphasized by Freud. This was the desire for power, power over one's environment, the desire for power in general. The “will to power” is even regarded by Nietzsche as a philosophical principle, and as many cases may be found to support the power-impulse theory as Freud found for his sexual theory.

One need only begin “analyzing” hysterical women to find that such cases are not at all rare. Assume for example that a woman is hysterical and has spasms—heart spasms are a favorite in such cases—as well as all sorts of other conditions. The home is stirred up, the whole environment, everything possible is done, doctors are summoned, the patient greatly pitied. In short, she exercises a tyrannical power over her environment. A reasonable person knows that in such a case there is really nothing the matter, even though such patients are aware of their condition and suffered from it. They are in reality perfectly healthy—but ill when they wish to be. You may diagnose them as well and ill at the same time. They do of course fall down when they faint in a heart spasm, but they fall as a rule on the rug, not on the bare floor! These things may be observed.

Now this subconscious lust for power leads very easily to hysterical conditions. Adler investigated the cases at his disposal from this particular standpoint, and found everywhere when hysterical symptoms appeared that somehow the lust for power had been aroused and driven into unhealthy extremes. Jung said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot say that Freud is wrong; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler is wrong; what he observed is also there. So it is probably sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”

That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special theory. This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the action of our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there are two types of people. In one type feeling is more developed, in the other thinking.

Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the fact that men are divided into thinking men and feeling men is sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it must not regard anything as a layman would, and simply say: in our environment there are two types of people, feeling people and intellectuals—it must add something to that. Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into things sends out his own force into objectivity; the other draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers. The first is called the extroverted type, the other the introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the second the intellectual one. This is a learned division, is it not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point—that is not to be denied!

Then Jung goes on to say; In the case of the extraverted type (that of the man who lives preferably in his feelings), there exist very frequently in the subconscious mind intellectual concepts, and he finds himself in a collision between what is in his consciousness and the intellectual concepts that float about subconsciously within him. And from this collision all sorts of conditions may arise, conditions mainly characteristic of the feeling type.

In the case of those who occupy themselves more with the mind, the men of reason, the feelings remain down below, swarm in the subconscious, and come into collision with the conscious life. The conscious life cannot understand what is surging up. It is the force of the subconscious feelings, and because man is never complete, but belongs to one of these two types, circumstances may arise that cause the subconscious mind to revolt against the conscious, and may frequently lead to hysterical conditions.

Now we must say that Jung's theory is simply a paraphrase of the trivial idea of the feeling and the reasoning man, and adds nothing to the facts. But from all this you needs must realize that men of the present are at least beginning to notice all sorts of psychic peculiarities, and so concern themselves that they ask what goes on within a man who shows such symptoms. And they are at least so far along that they say to themselves: These are not due to physiological or anatomical changes. They have already outgrown bare materialism, in that they speak of psychic phenomena. So this is certainly one way in which people try to emerge from materialism, and to reach some knowledge of the soul.

It is, however, very peculiar, when you look at the subject more closely, to see into what strange paths people are led by the general inadequacy of their means of cognition. But I must emphatically point out that men do not realize into what they are being driven, and neither do their supporters, readers, and contemporaries. Thus, rightly regarded, the matter has actually a very dangerous side, because so much is not taken into consideration. In the subconscious mind itself there is a commotion, it is the theories which agitate in the subconscious. It is really strange. People set up a theory in regard to the subconscious, but their own subconsciousness is agitated by it. Jung pursues the matter as a physician, and it is important that psychological questions should be handled from that standpoint, therapeutically, and that many should be striving to carry over the matter into pedagogy. We are no longer confronted by a limited theory, but by the effort to make it into a cultural fact.

It is interesting to see how someone like Jung, who handles this matter as a physician, and has observed, treated, and apparently even cured all sorts of cases, is driven further and further. He says to himself: when such abnormal psychological symptoms are found, a search must be made in order to discover any incidents of childhood which may have made such an impression on the human soul life as to produce after-effects. That is something especially sought for in this field: after-effects of something that happened in childhood. I have cited an example which plays quite a role in the literature of psychoanalysis: the association of horse and horse.

Later, however, Jung came upon the fact that in many of the cases of genuine illness it cannot be proved, even if you go back to his earliest childhood, that the patient as an individual is suffering from any such after-effects. If you take into consideration everything with which he has come in contact, you find the conflict within the individual, but no explanation of it. So Jung was led to distinguish two subconsciousnesses: first the individual subconsciousness, concealed within the human being. If in her childhood the young woman jumped out of a carriage and received a shock, the incident has long since vanished from her consciousness, but works subconsciously. If you consider this subconscious element (made up of innumerable details), you get the personal or individual subconsciousness. This is the first of Jung's differentiations.

But the second is the superpersonal subconsciousness. He says: There are things affecting the soul life which are neither in the personality nor in the matter of the outside world, and which must be assumed therefore as present in a soul world.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to bring such soul contents into consciousness. That is supposed to be the healing method: to bring everything into consciousness. Thus the physician must undertake to extract from the patient, not only what he has experienced individually from his birth on, but also something that was not in the outside world and is of a soul nature. This has driven the psychoanalysts to say that a man experiences, not only what he goes through after his physical birth, but also all sorts of things that preceded his birth—and that all this creates disorder within him. A man who is born today experiences thus subconsciously the Oedipus Saga. He not only learns it in school; he experiences it. He experiences the Greek gods, the whole past of mankind. The evil of this consists in the fact that he experiences it subconsciously. The psychoanalyst must therefore say—and he does go so far—that the Greek child also experienced this but, since he was told about it, he experienced it consciously. Man experiences it today, but it only stirs within him—in the thoughts of the extraverted man, in the subconscious feelings of the introverted type. It growls like demons.

Now consider the necessity that confronts the psychoanalyst if he is true to his theory. He would have to take these things seriously and say simply that when a man grows up and may be made ill by his relation to that which stirs within him—a relation of which he knows nothing—that this connection must become conscious, and it must be explained to him that there is a spiritual world inhabited by different gods. For the psychoanalyst goes so far as to say that the human soul has a connection with the gods, but it is a cause of illness in that the soul knows nothing of it.

The psychoanalyst seeks all sorts of expedients, sometimes quite grotesque. Let us assume that a patient comes and displays this or that hysterical symptom, because he is afraid of a demon—let us say—a fire demon. Men of earlier periods believed in fire demons, had visions of them, knew about them. Present-day people still have connections with them (the psychoanalyst admits that), but these connections are not conscious; no one explains that there are fire demons, so they become a cause of illness.

Jung however goes so far as to assert that the gods, to whom man is unconsciously related, become angry and revenge themselves, this revenge showing itself as hysteria. Very well, it amounts then to this: such a present-day man who is mistreated by a demon in his subconscious mind, does not know that there are demons, and cannot achieve any conscious relation with them because—that is superstition! What does the poor modern man do then, if he becomes ill from this cause? He projects it outwardly, that is to say he looks up some friend whom he had liked quite well, and says: This is the one who is persecuting and abusing me! He feels this to be true, which means that he has a demon which torments him, and so projects it into another man.

Often psychoanalysts, in treating such a case, deflect this projection upon themselves. Thus it often happens that patients, in a good or evil sense, make the doctor into a god or a devil.

So you see the physician of the present day is forced to say to himself: Men are tormented by spirits, and because they are taught nothing about them, cannot take possession of them in consciousness, they become therefore tormenting spirits among themselves, project their demons outwardly, persuade one another of all sorts of demoniacal nonsense, etc. And how disastrous this is assumed to be by the psychoanalysts is shown by the following case which Jung describes. He says: “Certain of my colleagues claim that the soul energies that spring from such torment, must be deflected into another channel.” Let us turn back then to one of the elementary cases of psychoanalysis. A patient comes, whose illness was caused, according to her psychoanalytical confession, by her having been in love, many years before, with a man whom she did not get. This had remained with her. Of course she might be annoyed by a demon, but in most cases observed by the doctors it turns out that something has happened in the individual subconsciousness, which they classify separately from the super-personal subconscious. The doctors try to divert this immature fantasy or to transform it. If a love-thirsty soul can be persuaded to make use of her accumulated affections in humanitarian services, perhaps as head of a charitable institution, it may turn out well. But Jung himself says: “It is not always possible thus to divert this energy. Energies so implanted in the soul have often a certain definite potential which cannot be directed.” Very well, I have no objection to this expression, but wish only to point out that it is a translation of what the layman often discusses, and the way in which he often expresses himself. But Jung describes a case which is interesting, and a good example of the fact that these potentials cannot always be directed.

An American, a typical man of today, a self-made man, the efficient head of a business that he had built up, having devoted himself to his work and achieved a great success, thought then: I shall soon be forty-five, and have done my bit! Now I will give myself a rest. So he decided to retire, bought himself an estate with autos and tennis courts, and everything else that belonged to it, intending to live in the country, and simply to draw his dividends from the business. But when he had been for a time on his estate he ceased to play tennis or to drive his car, or to go to the theater. He took no pleasure in the gardens that were laid out, but sat in his room alone, and brooded. It hurt him there, and there, everything hurt him. Actually his head hurt, then his chest, and then his legs. He could not endure himself, ceased from laughter, was tired, strung up, had continual headache—it was horrible. There was no illness that a doctor could diagnose! It is often that way with men of the present, is it not? They are perfectly healthy, and yet ill. The doctor said: "This trouble is psychic. You have adapted yourself to business conditions, and your energies will not readily take another course. Go back to business. That is the only suggestion that I can make.” The man in question grasped this, but found that he was no longer any good at business! He was just as ill there as at home.

From this Jung rightly concludes that you cannot easily deflect energy from one potential to another, nor even turn it back again when you have failed. This man came to him for treatment. (You know many people come to Switzerland bringing such illnesses and non-illnesses!) But he could not help this American. The trouble had taken too strong a hold; it should have been handled earlier.

You see from this that the therapy of deflection has also its difficulties, and Jung himself offers this example. Important facts are met everywhere which—I now may say—will be successfully dealt with only by spiritual science or Anthroposophy, in accordance with exact knowledge. But there they are, and people notice them. The questions are there. It will be discovered that the human being is complicated, and not the simple creature presented to us by the science of the 19th century. The psychoanalyst is confronted by a remarkable fact which is quite inexplicable by the science of today. In Anthroposophy, together with the information given in my lectures, you will easily find an explanation, but I can come back to the point in case you do not find it. It may happen, for example, that someone becomes hysterically blind, that is, his blindness is an hysterical symptom. This is possible. There are hysterically blind people, who could see, yet do not—who are psychically blind. Now such people are sometimes partially cured—partially; they begin to see again, but do not see everything. Sometimes such an hysterically blind man recovers sufficient sight to see people, all but their heads! Such a half-cured person goes along the streets, and sees everyone without a head. That really occurs, and there are even stranger symptoms.

All this may be dealt with by spiritual science—anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—and in a lecture that I gave here last year you may find an explanation of the inability to see the heads of people. [Lecture given at Dörnach, August 5, 1916.] But the present psychoanalyst is faced by all these phenomena. And so much confronts him that he says to himself: It may be quite disastrous for a man to be connected with the superpersonal unconscious; but for God's sake (the psychoanalyst does not say ‘for God's sake,’ but perhaps ‘for science's sake’) do not let us take the spiritual world seriously! It does not enter their minds to consider the spiritual world seriously. Thus something very peculiar happens. Very few notice what strange phenomena appear under the influence of these things. I will call to your attention something in Jung's book Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse, [see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.] recently published, which will show you where the psychoanalyst lands today. I shall have to read you a passage.

“According to this example” (these are examples showing that a man has within him, not only the contents of his present personal life, but far-back connections with all sorts of demonic, divine, or spiritual forces, etc.)—“According to this example of the genesis of new ideas from the store of the primeval pictures”—(here he does not call them ‘gods’ but ‘primeval pictures’)—“we will take up the further description of the transference processes. We saw that the libido, in those apparently preposterous and curious fantasies, had seized upon its new object, namely the contents of the absolute unconscious.” (The absolute unconscious is the superpersonal unconscious, not the personal.) “As I have already said, the uncomprehended projection of the primeval pictures upon the physician involves a danger for the further treatment that must not be under-estimated.” (The patient transfers his demons to the doctor. That is one danger.) “The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of all that mankind has thought and felt, but also every infamous and devilish deed of which men have been capable.”

Just think! Jung has come so far as to perceive that a man has subconsciously within him all the most fiendish crimes, as well as the most beautiful of all that mankind has been able to think and feel. These people cannot be persuaded to speak of Lucifer and Ahriman, [Compare Rudolf Steiner, The Luciferic and Ahrimanic Influences in their Relation to Man, 1918, reprinted in Anthroposophie, Vol. 17, Book 2, p. 159.] but they agree upon the preceding statement, which I shall read to you once more:

“The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of all that mankind has thought and felt, but also every infamous and devilish deed of which men have been capable. If the patient cannot distinguish the personality of the physician from these projections, then every possibility of mutual understanding is lost, and the human relationship becomes hopeless. If, however, the patient avoids this Charybdis he falls into the Scylla of the introjection of these pictures, that is to say that he attributes their qualities not to the physician but to himself.” (Then he himself is the devil.) “This danger is equally serious. In projection he staggers between an extravagant and morbid adulation and a hateful contempt for his physician. In introjection he falls into a ridiculous self-deification, or a moral self-laceration. The mistake that he makes each time is in attributing to himself the contents of the absolute unconscious. So he makes himself into a god or a devil. Here lies the psychological reason why men have always needed demons, and were never able to live without gods—except a few particularly clever Western specimens of yesterday and the day before, supermen whose god being dead, have made gods of themselves, rationalistic pocket size gods with thick skulls and cold hearts.”

Thus you see, the psychoanalyst is driven to say: The human soul is so made that it needs gods, that gods are necessary to it, for it becomes ill without them. Therefore it has always had them. Men need gods. The psychoanalyst ridicules men, saying that when they lack other gods they make gods of themselves, but “rationalistic pocket size gods with thick skulls and cold hearts. The idea of God” (he says further), “is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational nature. ...”

To describe the necessity of the God-concept in these terms is as far as one can go by the methods of natural science! Man must have a God; he needs him. The psychoanalyst knows that. But let us read to the end of the sentence:

“The idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing to do with the question of the actual existence of God.”

When you read the complete sentence you run upon the great dilemma of the present day. The psychoanalyst proves to you that man becomes ill and useless without his God, but says that this need has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God. And he continues:

“For this latter question” (namely, of the existence of God,) “belongs to the most stupid questions that can be framed. Man knows well enough that he cannot conceive a God, much less imagine that he really exists, or that there can be any occurrence not conditioned by natural causes.”

Now I beg of you, here you find—here you are standing at the point where you may catch at things. The things are there, knocking upon the doors of knowledge. Seekers are also there. They admit an absolute necessity, but when that necessity is stated as a serious question they consider it one of the stupidest that can be suggested.

You see, you have there one of the points in the cultural life of today from which you may note exactly what is always avoided. I can assure you that, in their examination and knowledge of the soul, these psychoanalysts are far ahead of what is offered in current psychiatry by the universities. They are not only far beyond ordinary university psychiatry and psychology, but in a certain sense they are right to look down upon this dreadful so-called science. But one may catch them in any such passage, showing as it does what mankind is actually facing in the attitude of contemporary science.

Many do not recognize this. They do not realize the force of belief in authority. There has never been such faith in authority, nor has it ever reigned so absolutely as in the subconscious mind today. One asks again and again: Just what do you do as physicians when you handle hysterical cases? You seek something in the subconscious mind that is not solved within consciousness. Yes, but you find repeatedly just such a subconscious content in the case of the theorists. If you lift it into full consciousness it turns out to be exactly what has been murmuring in the subconsciousness of the modern doctors and their patients. And all our literature is so saturated with it that you are in daily and hourly danger of imbibing it. And since it is only through spiritual science that men may become aware of these things, many take them up unknowingly, draw them into their subconsciousness, where they remain.

This psychoanalysis has at least pointed out that the reality of the soul is to be accepted as such. They do that. But the devil is everywhere at their heels; I mean that they are neither able nor willing to approach spiritual reality. Therefore you find in all sorts of places the most incredible statements. But present humanity has not the degree of attention necessary to perceive them. We should naturally expect any reader of Jung's book to fall off his chair under the table at certain sentences, but men of the present do not do that; so only think how much of it must lie in the subconsciousness of modern humanity. Yet for this very reason, because these psychoanalysts see how much there is in the subconscious—and they do see it—they look upon many things differently from other people. In his Preface Jung says something, for example, part of which is not bad.

“The psychological processes which accompany the present war, above all the incredible depravity of public opinion, the mutual calumnies, the undreamed of fury of destruction, the flood of lies, and men's inability to halt the bloody demon, are all adapted to set before the eyes of thinking humanity the problem of the restlessly slumbering, chaotic realm of the subconscious. This war has shown pitilessly to the cultured man that he is still a barbarian, and at the same time what an iron rod of correction awaits him should it again occur to him to hold his neighbor responsible for his own bad character. The psychology of the single individual corresponds to the psychology of the nations.”

And now comes a sentence which makes you wonder what to do with it.

“What the nations do is done by each individual, and so long as the individual does it the nation will do it too. Only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a change in the psychology of the nation.”

These sentences, placed side by side, show how destructively this thinking works. I ask you if it is sensible to say: “What the nations do is done by each individual?” It would be equally reasonable to ask: Could an individual do it without nations doing it too? It is nonsense, is it not, to say things like that. The unfortunate thing is that even prominent thinkers are impressed by it. And this sort of thinking is not only to become therapy, but take the lead in pedagogy. This again is founded upon the justifiable longing to introduce into pedagogy a new soul and spiritual element. Are conclusions to be accepted which were reached by entirely inadequate methods of cognition? These are nowadays the important questions.

We shall return to the matter from the standpoint of anthroposophical orientation, and throw light upon it from a broader horizon. Then we shall see that one must set about it in a much bigger way, in order to succeed with these things at all. But they must be handled concretely. The problems which as yet have been investigated only by the old, inadequate methods, must be placed in the light of anthroposophical knowledge.

Take, for example, the problem of Nietzsche. Today I will only suggest it; tomorrow we shall consider such problems more thoroughly. We know already from former lectures: [Lectures given at Dörnach, October 14, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28; November 2, 3, 4, 1917.] from 1841 to 1879 battle of spirits above; from 1879 on, the fallen spirits in the human realm. In future such and similar things must of necessity play a role whenever a human life is studied. For Nietzsche was born in 1844. For three years before he descended to earth his soul was in the spiritual realm in the midst of the spirit battle. During his boyhood Schopenhauer was still living, but died in 1860, and only after his death did Nietzsche devote himself to the study of Schopenhauer's writings. The soul of Schopenhauer cooperated from above in the spiritual world. That was the real relationship. Nietzsche was reading Schopenhauer, and while he was absorbing his writings Schopenhauer was working upon his thoughts.

But how was Schopenhauer situated in the spiritual realm? From 1860 through the years when Nietzsche was reading his books, Schopenhauer was in the midst of the spiritual battle that was still being fought out on that plane. Therefore Schopenhauer's inspiration of Nietzsche was colored by what he himself gathered from the battle of spirits in which he was involved. In 1879 these spirits were cast down from heaven upon the earth. Up to 1879 Nietzsche's spiritual development had followed very curious paths. They will be explained in the future as due to the influence of Schopenhauer and of Wagner. In my book Friedrich Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, you may find many supporting details. Wagner had up to that time no particular influence except that he was active on earth. For Wagner was born in 1813; the battle of spirits only began in 1841. But Wagner died in 1883, and Nietzsche's spiritual development took its peculiar direction when Wagner's influence began. Wagner entered the spiritual world in 1883, when the battle of spirits was over, and the defeated spirits had been cast to earth. Nietzsche was in the midst of things when the spirits began to roam around here on earth. Wagner's post mortem influence upon Nietzsche had an entirely different object from that of Schopenhauer.

Here begin the super-personal but definite influences, not those abstract demonic ones, of which the psychoanalyst speaks. Humanity must resolve to enter this concrete spiritual world, in order to comprehend things which are obvious if only the facts are tested. In the future Nietzsche's biography will state that he was stimulated by that Richard Wagner who was born in 1813, and took part up to 1879 everything that led to the brilliant being whom I described in my book; that he had the influence of Schopenhauer from his sixteenth year, but that Schopenhauer was involved in the spiritual battle that was fought upon the super-physical plane before 1879; that he was exposed to Wagner's influence after Wagner had died and entered the spiritual world, while Nietzsche was still here below, where the spirits of darkness were ruling.

Jung considers this a fact: that Nietzsche found a demon, and projected it without upon Wagner. Oh well—projections, potentials, introverted or extraverted human types—all words for abstractions, but nothing about realities! These things are truly important. This is not agitation for an anthroposophical world-conception for which we are prejudiced. On the contrary, everything outside of anthroposophy shows how necessary this conception is for present-day humanity!

• 1. Anthroposophy and the Science of the Soul (Nov. 5), Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science (Nov. 7), Anthroposophy and Natural Science (Nov. 12), Anthroposophy and Social Science (Nov. 14).

I have designated what is called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis as an effort to gain knowledge in the soul realm by inadequate means of cognition. Perhaps nothing is so well adapted to show how, at the present time, everything urges the attainment of the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, and how on the other side, subconscious prejudices lead men to oppose a spiritually scientific consideration of the facts. Yesterday I showed you by definite examples what grotesque leaps modern erudition is obliged to take when it ventures upon soul problems, and how to detect these leaps in the mental processes of modern scholars. It was pointed out that one of the better psychoanalysts—Jung—divided patients into two classes: the thinking type, and the feeling type. From this starting point he assumed that in cases of the thinking type, subconscious feelings force their way up into consciousness and produce soul conflicts—or in the opposite type, that thoughts in the subconscious mind arise and conflict with the life of feeling.

Now it might be suggested that these things will be fought out in scientific discussion, and that we might wait until people make up their minds to overcome the subconscious prejudice against anthroposophical spiritual science. But passive waiting becomes impossible in that such things do not confine themselves to the theoretical field, but encroach upon life practice and cultural development. And psychoanalysis is not content to occupy itself with therapy alone, which might be less dubious since there seems to be little difference—I said seems—between it and other therapeutical methods; but it is trying to extend itself to pedagogy, and to become the foundation of a teaching system. This forces us to point out the dangers residing in quarter-truths in a more serious manner than would be called for by mere theoretical discussion.

Much that relates to this matter can be decided only with the passage of time, but today we shall have to enlarge the scope of our examination in order to throw light upon one aspect or another. First of all I wish to call to your attention that the facts which lie before the psychoanalyst really point to an important spiritual sphere which present-day man does not wish to enter in an accurate and correct manner, but would prefer to leave as a sort of nebulous, subconscious region. For our present sickly, materialistically infected approach, even in this domain, likes nothing better than a vague, mystical drifting among all sorts of incomplete or unexecuted concepts. We find the most grotesque, the most repulsive mysticism right in the midst of materialism, if you take mysticism to mean a desire to swim about in all sorts of nebulous thinking, without working out your world-conception into clear, sharply outlined concepts. The domain into which recognized facts are pushing the psychoanalysts is the field of extra-conscious intelligence and reasoning activity. How often I have dealt with these matters—without going into details, but merely mentioning them, since they are taken for granted by students of spiritual science. How often I have reminded you that reasoning, intellectual activity, cleverness are not confined to the human consciousness, but are everywhere, that we are surrounded by effective mental activity as we are surrounded by air, interwoven with it, and the other beings as well.

The facts before the psychoanalyst might easily refer to this. I quoted to you yesterday the case described by Jung in his book, Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prosesse. It had to do with a woman who, having left an evening party with other guests, was frightened by horses, ran in front of them along the street to the river where she was rescued by passers-by, brought back to the house that she had left, where she had a love scene with her host. From the standpoint of Freud or Adler the case is easily explained on the basis of the love-drive or the power-drive, but this diagnosis does not reach the vital point. Its foundation is reached only by realizing that consciousness does not exhaust the cleverness, calculation, the artfulness of what penetrates man as intelligence, and by realizing that the laws of life are not limited by the laws of consciousness.

Consider this case. We can at least raise the question: What did the woman really want, after she had been one of the party, and had seen her friend depart for the health resort? She wanted the opportunity for what actually happened, she wanted a legitimate excuse to be alone with the master of the house. Of course this had nothing to do with what was in her consciousness, what she realized and admitted. It would not have been “proper,” as we say. Something had to be brought about that need not be avowed, and we shall reach the real explanation by allowing for her subconscious, designing intelligence, of which she was herself unaware. Throughout the entire evening she had wanted to bring about a conversation with her host. If one is less clever a poor choice is made of means, if more clever a better choice. In this case it may be said that in the woman's ordinary consciousness, which admitted scruples as to what was proper or improper, allowed or not allowed, the right means could not have been chosen for the end in view. But in that which was stored below the layer of the ordinary consciousness the thought was incessantly active: I must manage a meeting with the man. I must make use of the next opportunity that presents itself in order to return to the house.

We may be sure that if the opportunity with the horses had not offered itself, supported by association with the earlier accident, she would have found some other excuse. She needed only to faint in the street, and would have been brought back to the house at once, or she would have found some other expedient. The subconsciousness looked beyond all the scruples of the ordinary consciousness, taking the attitude that “the end justifies the means,” regardless of whether they would or would not harmonize with ideas of propriety and impropriety.

In such a case we are reminded of what Nietzsche, who surmised many of these things, called the great reason in contrast with the small reason, the all-inclusive reason that does not come into consciousness, that acts below the threshold of consciousness, leading men to do many things which they do not consciously confess to themselves. Through his ordinary outer consciousness the human being is in connection first with the world of the senses, but also with the whole physical world, and with all that lives within it. To the physical world belong all the concepts of propriety, of bourgeois morality, and so forth, with which man is equipped.

In his subconsciousness man is connected with an entirely different world, of which Jung says: the soul has need of it because it is related to it, but he also says that it is foolish to inquire about its real existence. Well, it is this way: as soon as the threshold of consciousness is crossed, man and his soul are no longer in merely material surroundings or relations, but in a realm where thoughts rule, thoughts which may be very artful.

Now Jung's view is quite correct when he says that modern man, the so-called man of culture, needs particularly to be mindful of these things. For present culture has this peculiarity, that it forces down numerous impulses into the subconsciousness, which then assert themselves in such a way that irrational acts—as they are called—and irrational general conduct result. When the “power-urge” or the “love urge” are mentioned, it is because in the moment that man and his soul enter the subconscious regions they come nearer to the realm where these instincts rule; not that they are in themselves causes, but that man with his subconscious intelligence plunges into regions where these impulses are effective.

That woman would not have gone to so much exertion for anything that interested her less than her love affair. It required an especial preoccupation for her subconscious cunning to be aroused. And that the love impulse so often plays an important role is due simply to the fact that the love interest is so very common. If the psychoanalysts would only turn more of their attention in other directions, cease to concentrate upon psychoanalytic sanatoriums, where the majority of the inmates seem to me to be women—(the same reproach is cast upon anthroposophical institutions but, I think, with less justice),—if they were more experienced in other fields, which is of course sometimes the case, if there were a greater variety of cases in the sanatoriums, a more extensive knowledge might be obtained.

Let us assume that a sanatorium was equipped for giving psychiatric treatment especially to people who had become nervous or hysterical from playing the stock market. Then the existence of other things in the subconscious mind could be established with as much reason as the love-urge, introduced by Freud. Then it would be seen with what detailed cunning, and artful subconscious processes, the man acts who plays the stock market. Then, through the usual methods of elimination, sexual love would be seen to play a very small part, yet the subtleties of subconscious acuteness, of subconscious slyness, could be studied at their height. Even the lust for power could not always be designated as being the primary impulse, but altogether different instincts would be found ruling those regions, in which man submerges himself with his soul. And if in addition a sanatorium could be equipped for learned men who had become hysterical—forgive me!—it would be found that their subconscious actions seldom lead back to the love-motive. For those with any thorough knowledge of facts in this field realize that, under present conditions, scholars are seldom driven to their chosen science by “love,” but by quite different forces which would show themselves if brought to the surface by psychoanalysis. The all-inclusive fact is that the soul is led from the conscious down into the subconscious regions where man's unconquered instincts rule. He can master these only by becoming aware of them, and spiritual research alone can lift them into consciousness.

Another inconvenient truth! For of course it forces the admission, to a point far beyond what the psychoanalyst is prepared to admit, that man in his subconscious mind may be a very sly creature, far more sly than in his full consciousness. Even in this field, and with ordinary science, we may have strange experiences. There is a chapter on this subject in my book Riddles of the Soul In it I deal with the strictures upon Anthroposophy, found in a book entitled Vom Jenseits der Seele,¹ and written by that academic individual Dessoir. This second chapter of my book Riddles of the Soul will be a nice contribution to thinking people who would like to form an opinion of present scholarly ethics. You will see when you read this chapter what kind of opposition must be encountered. I will mention, of all the points therein indicated, one or two only which are not unconnected with our present theme.

This man makes all sorts of objections to this and that, founded upon passages taken from my books. In a very neat connection he tells how I distinguish consecutive periods of culture: the Indian, the old Persian, the Chaldean-Egyptian, the Graeco-Latin, and now we live in the sixth, he says, “according to Steiner.”

This forces us to refute these misstatements in a schoolmasterly manner, for it shows us the only way to get at such an individual. How does Max Dessoir come to assert, in the midst of all his other nonsense, that I said we are living in the sixth postatlantean culture period? It may be easily explained if you have any practice in the technique of philological methods. I was connected for six years and a half with the Goethe Archives in Weimar, learned there a little about the usual procedure, and could easily show, according to philological methods, how Dessoir came to attribute to me this statement regarding the sixth culture period. He had been reading my book Occult Science, an Outline, in which there is a sentence leading to a description of our present fifth postatlantean culture period. In it I say that there are long preparations and, in one section, that events taking place in the 14th and 15th centuries were prepared in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. About five lines further on I say that the sixth century was a preparation for the fifth culture period. Dessoir, reading superficially, turned back hastily as scholars do, to the place that he had noted in the margin, and confused what was said about the culture period with what had been stated further back about the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Thus he says “sixth culture period” instead of fifth because his eye had moved backward a few lines.

You see with what a grand superficiality such a person works. Here we have an example of how such “scholarship” may be philologically shown up. In this literary creation such mistakes run through the entire chapter. And while Dessoir affirms that he has studied a whole row of my books, I could prove, again philologically, which ones of mine compose this “whole row.” He had read—and but slightly understood—The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for he devotes a sentence to it that is utter nonsense. And he read Occult Science, but in such a way as to bring out the kind of stuff that I have described. He read in addition the small work The Spiritual Guidance of Man, and the little pamphlets on Reincarnation and Karma, and Blood is Quite a Special Fluid. These are all that he read, as may be shown by his comments. He read nothing else. These are our present ethics of scholarship. It is important once in a way to expose, in such a connection, the erudition of the present day. Out of the long list of my books he chooses a very small number, and founds upon them, with quite perverted thinking, his whole statement. Many of our scientists today do exactly the same thing. When they write about animals, for example, they usually have for a foundation about as much material as Professor Dessoir extracted from my books.

Quite a pretty chapter could be written from observations of Dessoir's subconscious mind. He himself, however, in a special passage in his book, permits us to take account of his subconsciousness. He relates rather grotesquely that when he is lecturing it often happens that his thoughts go on without his full conscious direction, and that only by the reaction of his audience does he recognize that his thoughts have taken a line independent of his attention. He tells that quite naively. But only think! From this fact he embarks upon extended consideration of the many peculiarities of human consciousness. I have pointed out somewhat “gently” that Dessoir thus strangely reveals himself. I said at first: It cannot be possible that he means himself. In this case he must simply be identifying himself with certain clumsy lecturers, and speaking in the first person. It would be imputing to him a good deal to suppose that he is describing himself. But he really does exactly that. Well, in the discussion of such matters many odd things must be noted.

He disposed of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by one remark, with the addition of a sentence that is Dessoirish, but did not originate with me. The whole matter is crazy. He says at the same time “Steiner's first book, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” This forces me to point out that this book forms the close of a ten year period of authorship, and to offer this incident as an example of academic ignorance, and ethics. I know of course that although I have shown how incorrect his statements are, people will say again and again: “Well, Dessoir has refuted Steiner.”—I know it very well. I know that it is speaking against walls to try to break through what men imagine they have long since got rid of—belief in authority!

But this chapter alone will prove the difficulties against which spiritual science must struggle because it insists upon clear, sharply outlined concepts, and concrete spiritual experiences. There is no question of logic with such an individual as Dessoir, and a lack of logic characterizes in the broadest sense our present so-called scientific literature.

These are the reasons why official learning, and official spiritual trends, even if they work themselves away from such inferiority as the university psychiatry or psychology, are not in a position to make good because they lack the smallest equipment for a genuine observation of life. So long as it is not realized how far from genuine research and from a sense for reality that really is which poses as scientific literature—I do not say, as science, but as scientific literature—and often forms the content of university and especially of popular lectures—so long as this authoritative belief is not broken through, there can be no cure. These things must be said, and are compatible with the deepest respect for real scientific thinking, and for the great achievements of natural science. That these things are applied to life in such contradictory fashion must however be recognized.

After this digression let us return to our subject. Dessoir takes the opportunity to combine objective untruth with calumny in his remark regarding the little pamphlet Spiritual Guidance of Man. He feels it to be especially irritating that I have indicated important subconscious action of spiritual impulses by showing that a child while building its brain manifests greater wisdom than it is conscious of later. A healthy science ought to take its starting point from such normal effects of the subconscious, yet it needs something in addition. If you take up the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find mention of the Secret of the Threshold. In the explanation of this “secret” it is stated that in crossing the threshold into the spiritual world a kind of separation takes place, a sort of differentiation of the three fundamental powers of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. Remember in the part dealing with the Guardian of the Threshold, the explanation that these three forces, which act together in ordinary consciousness in such a way that they can hardly be separated, become independent of each other. If I sketch them, this narrow middle section (see drawing) is the boundary between the ordinary consciousness and that region in which the soul lives in the spiritual world. Thinking, feeling, and willing must be so drawn as to show this as the range of will (red), but bordering upon the realm of feeling (green), and this in turn borders upon the realm of thinking (yellow). But if I were to indicate their direction after crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, I should have to show how thinking (yellow) becomes independent upon the one hand; feeling (green, right) separates itself from thinking, will becomes independent too (red, right), as I sketch it here diagrammatically, so that thinking, feeling, and willing spread out from one another like a fan.

You will find this described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. That these three activities, which before passing the threshold border upon each other but work separately, interact in the right way and do not come into confusion is due to the fact that the threshold has, so to speak, a certain breadth in which our

ego itself lives. If our ego acts normally, has perfect soul health, then the interaction of thinking, feeling, and willing is so regulated that they do not collide with one another, but mutually influence each other. It is the essential secret of our ego that it holds thinking, feeling, and willing beside each other, so that they can affect each other in the right way, but do not mix in any accidental fashion. Once across the threshold into the spiritual world there is no danger of this since the three faculties then separate.

Certain philosophers (such as Wundt, for example), insist that the soul must not be described as threefold because it is a unity. Wundt, too, confuses everything. The facts are that in the spiritual world thinking, feeling, and willing originate in a threefold manner, yet in the soul on earth they act as a unity. That must be taken into consideration, and if it be claimed, as recently reported, that Anthroposophy recognizes three souls though there exists but one, and that Anthroposophy has therefore no reasonable argument—then the answer must be that the unity of man is not impaired by the fact that he has two hands.

But now we are considering the relation of the ego to the soul-forces that work within it, and their action beyond the threshold of consciousness in the spiritual world. (Drawing, middle and right). An opposite condition may be brought about if the ego has been weakened in any way. Then the threshold is crossed, as it were, in the opposite direction (See drawing, left). Then thinking swerves aside (yellow, left), mingles with feeling (green, left), and willing (red, left), and confusion results. This happens if thinking is exposed in any way to the danger of not being properly confined, so that it asserts itself unwarrantably in the consciousness. Then, because the ego is not working as it should, thinking slides into the sphere of feeling or of will. Instead of working side by side, thinking mixes itself with feeling, or will, the ego being for some reason unable to exert its normal power.

This is what has happened in the cases described by the psychoanalysts as hysterical or nervous. Thinking, feeling, and willing have swung to the opposite side, away from the healthy direction that would lead them into the spiritual world. If you have any gift for testing and proving you may easily see how it comes about. Take the case of the girl sitting by the sickbed. Her strong ego-consciousness was reduced by loss of sleep and anxiety. The slightest thing might cause thinking to leave its track alongside of feeling and to run over into it. Then thought would be at once submerged in the waves of feeling, which are far stronger than the waves of thought, and the result in such a case is that the whole organism is seized by the tumult of feeling. This happens in the instant that thinking ceases to be strong enough to hold itself apart from feeling.

It is seriously demanded of the human being that he learn more and more to hold his thinking apart from the waves of feeling and will. If thinking takes hold subconsciously of the waves of feeling something abnormal results. (See drawing: at the right is the superconscious, in the middle the conscious, at the left the subconscious). This is extremely important.

Now you may readily imagine that in this modern life, when people are brought into contact with so much that they do not properly understand and cannot appraise, thoughts continually run over into feelings. But it must be remembered that thinking alone is oriented upon the physical plane; feeling is no longer confined to the physical plane, but stands in connection, by its very nature, with the spiritual plane as well. Feeling has really a connection with all the spiritual beings who must be spoken of as real. So that if a man with inadequate concepts sinks into his feeling-life, he comes into collision with the gods—if you wish to express it thus—but also with evil gods. And all these collisions occur because a man is submerged with no reliable means of knowledge. He must so submerge if he spends more time in the sphere of feeling than in the ordinary sphere of reason. In the sphere of feeling man cannot emancipate himself from his connection with the spiritual world. Even if, in this materialistic age, he does free himself in the realm of the intellect, he always enters the region of feeling with inadequate concepts, and so he must become ill.

What then is the real remedy, and how are men to be restored to health? They must be guided to concepts that reach out to include the world of feelings; that is to say that modern man must again be told of the spiritual world, and in the most comprehensive terms. Not the individually adapted therapeutic instructions of the psychoanalysts are meant, but the spiritual science which is applicable to all humanity. If the concepts of spiritual science are really accepted—for not everyone takes them in who only listens to lectures, or reads about them—but if they are really absorbed there will be no further possibility of the chaotic intermingling, in the subconscious, of the three spheres of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing, which is the basis of all the hysteria and nervousness noted by the psychoanalysts.

For this, however, a man needs the courage to approach a direct experience of the operation of spiritual worlds, the courage to recognize that we are living now in a crisis that is connected with another (the established date being 1879), another crisis with painful consequences from which we are still suffering. I told you yesterday that many things must be considered from standpoints other than the materialistic ones of our own time, and I chose Nietzsche as an illustration.

Nietzsche was born in 1844. In 1841 the battle began in the spiritual world, of which I have already spoken, and Nietzsche was for three years in the midst of it, absorbing from it all possible impulses, and bringing them down with him to earth. Richard Wagner, born in 1813, took at first no part in it. Read Nietzsche's early writings, and notice the combative tone, almost every sentence showing the after-effects of what he experienced spiritually from 1841 to 1844. It gave a definite coloring to all the writings of Nietzsche's first period.

It is further of importance—as I have also explained—that he was a lad of sixteen when Schopenhauer died, and started at that time to read his works. A real relation ensued between the soul of Schopenhauer in the spiritual world and that of Nietzsche on earth. Nietzsche read every phrase of Schopenhauer so receptively that he was penetrated by every corresponding impulse of their author. What was Schopenhauer's object? He had ascended into the spiritual world in 1860 when the battle was still raging, and wanted nothing so much as to have the power of his thoughts continued through his works. Nietzsche did carry forward Schopenhauer's thoughts, but in a peculiar way. Schopenhauer saw when he went through the gate of death that he had written his books in an epoch threatened by the oncoming spirits of darkness, and with the struggle before him of these spirits against the spirits of light, he longed to have the effects of his work continued, and formed in Nietzsche's soul the impulse to continue his thoughts. What Nietzsche received from the spiritual world at this period contrasted strikingly with what was happening upon the physical plane in his personal relations with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's soul life was composed in this way, and his career as a writer.

The year 1879 arrived. The battle that had been going on in the spiritual realms began to be transferred to earth after the fall of the spirits of darkness. Nietzsche was exposed by his whole Karma (in which I include his relations with the spiritual world), to the danger of being driven by the spirits of darkness into evil paths. He had been inspired by the transcendent egoism of Schopenhauer to try to carry on his work. I do not mean to say that egoism is always bad. But when Wagner rose into the spiritual world in 1883 the spirits of darkness were below, so he came into an entirely different atmosphere, and he became Nietzsche's unselfish spiritual guide. He let him enter what was for him the proper channel, and allowed him to become mentally deranged at exactly the right moment, so that he never came consciously into dangerous regions. That sounds paradoxical, but it was really the unselfish way in which Wagner's soul affected Nietzsche from the purer realms above, rather than the manner in which Schopenhauer's soul acted, he being still in the midst of the battle, up in the spiritual world, between the spirits of darkness and the spirits of light. What Wagner wanted to do for Nietzsche was to protect him, so far as his Karma permitted, from the spirits of darkness, already descended upon earth.

And Nietzsche was protected to a great extent. If his last writings are read in the right spirit, eliminating the things that have sprung from strong oppositions, great thoughts will be discovered. I tried in my book Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, to show the mighty thought impulses, detached from all his resisting impulses.

Yes, “the world is deep.” There is really some truth in Nietzsche's own saying: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day divines.” So we must never try to criticize the wide regions of the spiritual life by means of our ordinary consciousness. The wise guidance of the worlds can be understood only if we can enter into that guidance, free from egoistic thoughts, even if we can fit the development of tragic happenings into the scheme of wisdom. If you wish to look into the heart of things you will come upon many uncomfortable places.

In future whoever wishes to evaluate a life like Nietzsche's will make no progress if he describes only what happened in Nietzsche's environment on earth. Our view of life will have to extend to the spiritual world, and we shall be pushed to this necessity by the kind of phenomena that the psychoanalyst today tries to master by such inadequate means of knowledge, but never will control. Therefore human society might be driven into regions of great difficulty if it yields to psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of pedagogy.

Why should this be? Consider the fact that thinking slips down into the sphere of feeling. Now as soon as a man lives with his soul in the sphere of feeling, he is no longer in the life that is bounded by birth and death or by conception and death, but lives in the whole world, the extended world. This represents the usual life span (See drawing, a); within the realm of feeling he lives also in the period from his last death to his birth into this present life (See drawing, b); and with his will he lives even in his previous incarnation (Drawing, c).

Think of the relation to pupil or patient of an instructor who wishes to proceed by the method of psychoanalysis. When he tries to deal with soul contents which have slipped down into the realm of feeling he lays hold, not only upon the man's individual life, but upon the all-inclusive life which extends far beyond the individual. For this all-encompassing life, however, there are between men no connections that may be handled by means of mere ideas. Such connections lead instead to genuine life-relationships. This is very important. Imagine the existence of such a connection between a psychoanalytic instructor and pupil. What takes place could not be confined to the realm of ideas which are conveyed to the pupil, but real karmic connections would have to be established because one is really encroaching upon life itself. It would be tearing the individual in question out of his karma, changing the course of his karma. It will not do to handle that which extends beyond the individual in a purely individual manner. It must be treated instead in a universally human way. We are all brought together in a definite epoch, so there must be a mutual element which acts as soon as we go beyond the individual. That is to say: a patient cannot be treated by psychoanalysis, either therapeutically or educationally, as between individuals. Something universal

must enter, must enter even the general culture of the period, something which directs the soul to that which would otherwise remain subconscious; and that which draws the subconsciousness upward must become the milieu—not a transaction between individuals.

Here, you see, lies the great mistake that is being made. It has a terrific range and is of immense importance. Instead of trying to lead them to the attainable knowledge of the spiritual world which is demanded by the times, the psychoanalysts shut all the souls who show any morbid symptoms into sanatoriums, and treat each one in the individual manner. It can lead only to the forming of confused karmic connections—what takes place does not bring to light the subconscious soul content, but simply forms a karmic tie between doctor and patient because it encroaches upon the individual.

You understand: we are dealing here with real, concrete life, with which it does not do to play, which can only be mastered if nothing is striven for in this field except what is humanly universal. These things must be learned by direct relations of human beings with the spiritual world. Therefore it would be useful if people were to stop talking abstractly as Jung does, saying that a man experiences subconsciously everything that mankind has been through, even all sorts of demons. He makes them into abstract demons, not realities, by saying that it is stupid to discuss their possible existence. He makes them into abstract demons, mere thought demons that could never make a man ill. They can exist only in consciousness, and can never be subconscious. That is the point: that people who give themselves up to such theories are themselves working with so many unconscious ideas that they can never happen upon the right thing. They come instead to regard certain concepts as absolute, infallible; and I must ever repeat that when ideas begin to become absolute, men get into a blind alley, or reach a pit into which they fall with their thinking.

A man like Dr. Freud is obliged to stretch the sexual domain over the entire human being in order to make it account for every soul phenomenon. I have said to various people with psychoanalytic tendencies, whom I have met: A theory, a world-concept must be able to hold its own when you turn it upon itself, otherwise it crumbles into nothingness. The simple fallacy, if you extend it far enough, is an example. A Cretan says: All Cretans are liars. If it is said by a Cretan, and it is true, then it would be a lie, which causes the saying to annul itself. It will not do for a Cretan to say “All Cretans are liars,” expecting the sentence to pass unchallenged. That is only a sample of absolutizing. But a theory should not crumble when turned upon itself. Just as the statement that all Cretans are liars would be a lie if made by a Cretan, so does the theory of universal sexuality crumble if you test it out by applying it to the subject itself. And it is the same with other things. You can understand such a principle for a long time without applying it vigorously, in accordance with reality. But it will be one of the particular achievements of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that it cannot be turned in this manner against itself.

• 1. Beyond the Limits of the Soul. (This book has not been translated into English. Ed.)

Today I shall have something to add to what was stated yesterday. I am reminding you of something which most of you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death the physical body remains behind within the earth-forces, the etheric body dissolves within the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his continuing life, his existence, throughout the realms which lie between death and a new birth. I said that we can follow up the formative forces within the human being himself which project from one life into the other.

We know that man is in essence a threefold being, with three independent members; I mean, in regard to the formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the system of the nerves and senses, which naturally is spread over the whole body, but is located primarily in the head; we have the rhythmic system, including the rhythm of the breath, circulation, and other rhythms; then we have the metabolic and limb organization, which we consider as one because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with his metabolism.

You know that each human being has a differently, an individually shaped head. If we consider the forces which shape the human head—of course you must not think of the physical substances, but of the formative forces, of that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its entire character, its phrenological expression—if we consider these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic and limb system belonging to the previous incarnation which have now become form. Thus we have in the head the transformation of the earlier metabolic organism, and if we consider what we possess as a metabolic and limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping the head for our next incarnation. Therefore, if we understand the building of the human form we can, as it were, look back, through a corresponding development of the idea of metamorphosis, from the human head of today to the metabolic system of the previous incarnation; and we can look from the present metabolic system forward to the head formation of the next incarnation. [See: Guenther Wachsmuth, Reincarnation as a Phenomenon of Metamorphosis, Anthroposophie Press, New York, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London.]

This conception, which in our spiritual science and in the spiritual science of all ages plays a certain role, these truths concerning repeated earth lives remain by no means without substantiation, for whoever understands the human organism can read them directly from it. But the present trend of natural science is as far removed as possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation which would be necessary in this case. Of course one cannot escape, through the study of anatomy and physiology alone, the foolish conclusion that the liver and lungs may be investigated by the same method. One lays the liver beside the lungs upon the dissecting table and regards them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. In such a way one can obtain no knowledge of these things, and two organic systems which are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be studied by an external comparison of their cellular configuration, as they must be according to present ideas.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent details, methods must be employed through which a conception of these things may be gained. If the methods which I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment are sufficiently developed, then the human power of cognition is greatly strengthened. I am repeating here certain statements that I have already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum building: Our ordinary cognition is strengthened, through which we look out with our senses at our environment, and through which we also examine our inner life, where we meet primarily our thinking, feeling, and willing. And if we broaden our knowledge to the degree possible through these exercises which have been often described, then our view of the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a first result we realize the absolute folly of speaking of atoms in the manner of present world-conceptions. What is behind sense perception, behind its qualities, behind yellow and red, behind C sharp, g, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual essentiality. The outer world becomes ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition, so that we really cease to take seriously all those constructions derived from chemical or other ideas. All atomism is thoroughly driven from our minds when we broaden our knowledge of the outer world. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.

If, on the other hand, through such an enlarged vision we look more deeply into our inner life there arises—not that confused mysticism which forms a justifiable transition, pointed out and explained yesterday—but there arises instead, when inner cognition is developed, a psychic knowledge of the organs. We learn really to recognize our inner organization. While our outer perception is more and more spiritualized, our inner perception is, first of all, more and more materialized. Working in this inner direction, not the nebulous mystic but the real spiritual researcher will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism. We attain to the spiritual world in no other manner than by this detour through the observation of our own inner materiality. Unless we learn to know lungs, liver, and so forth, we do not gain on this detour through our inner being any kind of spiritual enthusiasm which, freed of the confusion of mysticism, works towards a concrete knowledge of the inner organs.

At all events, we gain a more exact knowledge of the configuration of the soul. To begin with, we learn to give up the preconceived idea that our psychic constitution is merely an adjunct of the sensory and nervous system. Only the world of representations is correlated to the nervous system, the world of feeling not at all. The world of feeling is connected directly with the rhythmic organization; and the world of will is adjusted to the metabolic and limb system. If I will something, a corresponding activity is induced in my metabolic and limb system, the nervous system being there only in order that concepts may be formed in regard to what takes place in the will. There are no nerves of will, as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and nerves of will is absurd. The nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will exist for no other purpose than the inner observation of the processes of will. They too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly we come at last to consider the human organism in its entirety. Take the lung organism, the liver organism, and so forth. Looking at them within, you reach a point when you survey, as it were, the surface of the several organs, naturally by means of spiritual sight. What exactly is this surface of the organs? It is nothing less than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. Our perceptions, and also what we elaborate in thought are reflected upon the surface of all our inner organs; and this reflection makes known our recollections, our memory during life. Thus, after we have perceived and digested something in thought, it is mirrored upon the surface of our heart, liver, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our memories. And with a not very extensive training you may notice how certain thoughts shine back in memory from the whole organism. Very different organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering, let us say, very abstract conceptions, then the lung surface participates strongly. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts which have a nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is concerned. Thus we can describe very well, and in detail, how the various organs take part in this reflection which makes its appearance as recollection, as the power of memory.

When we concentrate upon the whole soul nature we must not say: In the nervous system alone we have the organic correlate of the soul life, for the entire human organism is the correlated organization for the life of the soul.

In this connection much knowledge, once present as instinct, has simply been lost sight of. It still exists in certain words, but people no longer realize how wisdom is preserved in words. For example, if anyone in the time of the ancient Greeks had a tendency to depression when forming his recollections, they called it hypochondria, meaning a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen where, as a result of this rigidity, reflection was brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of depression. The entire organism is involved in these things. That is something which must be kept in our minds.

When speaking of the power of memory, I drew attention to the surface of the organs. In a certain sense everything experienced strikes the surfaces, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. But something enters the organism at the same time. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular. They have an inner secretion, which during life is changed into force. But not everything is thus transformed into organic metabolism, etc. Certain organs take up instead something which becomes latent within them, and constitutes an inner force; for example, all thoughts connected mainly with our perception of the outer world through which we form images of outer objects. The forces developed in these thoughts are, in a certain manner, stored up within the lungs.

You know that the inside of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, the movement of the limbs, and these forces are so transmuted that during the life between birth and death our lungs are somewhat of a reservoir of forces which are continually influenced by the metabolic-and-limb system. We find that at the time of death such forces have been stored up. The physical matter naturally falls away, but these forces are not wasted. They accompany us through death, and throughout the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a new incarnation these forces which were in the lungs form our head outwardly, stamp upon it its physiognomy. That which the phrenologist, the craniologist study in the outer form of the skull would be found forecast within the lungs during the previous incarnation.

You see how definitely, from life to life, the transmutation of forces may be followed up. When this is done reincarnation will no longer be an abstract truth alone, but will be studied concretely, as one can study physical things. And spiritual science becomes valuable only when in this way we penetrate into concrete facts. If we speak only in generalities of repeated earth lives, and so forth, then these are mere words. They have meaning only if we can enter upon the single concrete facts.

If that which has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way it is squeezed out, as I said yesterday, much in the same way as a sponge is squeezed out, and then, from that which should form the head only in the next incarnation, there arise mainly abnormal phenomena which are usually called coercive thoughts, or described by some other term as illusions. It is an interesting chapter of a higher physiology to study in lung cases the strange notions which arise in the patient in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just explained to you, with the abnormal pressing out of thoughts.

You will see undoubtedly that the thoughts which are pressed out under these conditions are coercive because they already contain the formative forces. The thoughts which we ought normally to have in consciousness should be pictures only, they must not contain a formative force, and should not coerce us. Throughout the long period between death and rebirth these thoughts do coerce us; then they are causative, formative. During earth life they must not overwhelm us; they should use their power only during the transition from one life to another. This is the point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the manner I have just explained in regard to the lungs, you will discover that there are concentrated in the same way within the liver all the forces which in the next incarnation determine the inner disposition of the brain. Again by a detour through the metabolic organism of the present life, the forces of the liver pass over, this time not into the shape of the head, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present one, in order that thus, upon the detour through the metabolism there may arise within the liver definite powers. But if these are ejected during the present incarnation they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You see now concretely what I pointed out yesterday more theoretically: that these things arise, having been squeezed out of the organs, then force their way into consciousness. Out of the general hallucinatory life, which should extend from the end of one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and, in this way, make their abnormal appearance.

If you study in the same manner all that is connected with the kidneys and excretory system you will discover that they concentrate within themselves the forces which, in the following incarnation, influence the head organization preferably in the field of affective emotions. The kidneys, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by a detour through the head organization.

If these forces are squeezed out during the present incarnation they display all the nervous symptoms connected with over-excitement of the human being, inner excitement specifically, hypochondriacal symptoms, depression, in short all the conditions connected particularly with this aspect of the metabolism.

In reality everything remembered with a strong ingredient of feeling or passion is also connected with what is reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections we find them to be more often memory ideas, the memories proper. If we turn to the kidney system we see what sort of lasting habits we have in this incarnation; and within the kidney system are being prepared already the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which, by a detour through the head organization, are intended for our next incarnation.

Let us study the heart with the same idea. For spiritual-scientific research, the heart is an extraordinarily interesting organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart rather lightly. It looks upon the heart as a pump which pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd can be believed, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood. The blood is set in motion by the full agility of the astral body and ego, and the heart's movement is only the reflex of these activities. The movement of the blood is autonomous, and the heart only brings to expression the movement caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that manifests the movement of the blood, the heart itself having no activity in relation to this blood movement. The present natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to Stockholm I explained this to a scientist, a medical man, and he was furious about the idea that the heart should not be regarded as a pump, that the blood comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply inserted in the general blood movement, participates with its beat, and so on.

Well, something is reflected from the surface of the heart which is not a matter of memory or of habit. The life processes become spiritualized when they reach the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. That is to be taken simply, entirely as the physical aspect. The pangs of conscience which radiate into our consciousness are that ingredient in our experiences which is reflected from the heart. Spiritual cognition of the heart teaches us this.

But if we look into its interior we see gathered there forces which again stem from the entire metabolic and limb organism, and because everything connected with the heart forces is spiritualized that is also spiritualized within it which has to do with our outer life and deeds. And however strange and paradoxical it may sound to anyone clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that what is thus prepared within the heart are the karmic propensities, the tendencies of our karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the limb and metabolic system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.

You see, if we learn to know this organization we learn to differentiate and recognize its connection with the complete life extending beyond birth and death. We look then into the whole structure of the human being. We cannot speak of the head in relation to metamorphoses, for the head is simply cast off, its forces having completed their activity in the present incarnation. That which, however, exists in these four main systems, in lung, kidney, liver, and heart, after making a detour through the metabolic and limb system, passes over forming our head with all its predispositions and tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of our body the forces which will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means a mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a retort which modern physiology describes. You need only to take a step in walking and a certain metabolic effect is produced. The metabolism then taking place is not simply the chemical process which may be examined by means of physiology and chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a nuance of morality. And this moral nuance is in fact stored up in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the human being in his entirety means to find in him the forces which reach over beyond earth life. Our head itself is a sphere, and this form is modified only because the rest of the organism is attached to it. Our head is formed out of the cosmos. When we go through death we must, with the spiritual and soul organization which remains to us, adapt ourselves to the whole cosmos. The whole cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle of the period between two incarnations—I have called it in one of my Mystery Dramas the Midnight of Existence—up to this time, if I may so express myself, we continue to spread out into our environment and what thus goes out from us into the surrounding world gives the astral and etheric configuration for the next incarnation.

All this, coming in essence from the cosmos, is determined by the mother. Through the father and impregnation comes that which is formed in the physical body and in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Being, passes over into an entirely different world. It goes over into the world from which it can then follow the path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely important process. The period up to the Midnight Hour and the period from the Midnight Hour on—both between death and rebirth—are really very different from each other. In my Vienna lecture cycle in 1914 I pictured these experiences in their inner aspect.¹ If we look at them more from the outside, we must say: The ego is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares within the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly through the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence on up to the next birth, the ego passes over into what the old Mysteries called the netherworld; and on the detour through this netherworld it passes through impregnation. There the two poles of humanity meet as it were, through mother and father, from the upper world and from the netherworld.

What I am now saying was an intrinsic portion of the Egyptian Mysteries which came out of the old instinctive knowledge, at least so far as is known to me. The Egyptian Mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they then called the upper and the lower gods, the upper and the underworld of gods; and it may be said that in the act of impregnation a polar equilibrium of the upper and the underworld of gods is brought about. The ego between death and rebirth goes first through the upper and then through the lower world. In olden times there was not the strange nuance which many connect today with upper and netherworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper as the good and the netherworld as the bad. This nuance was not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities which had to participate in the general world creation. Humanity in the direct experience of the upper world, viewed it more as the world of light, the netherworld more as the world of gravity. Gravity and light were the two polarities when expressed exoterically, and thus you see that such things may be described concretely.

In regard to the other organs I have told you that the overflowing of organic forces may become hallucinatory life, especially that which is squeezed from the liver system. But if the heart squeezes out its contents it is really the collected forces, ejected and brought into consciousness, which call forth in the next incarnation that strange urge to live out one's karma. If we observe how karma works, it may be said that a figurative description from the human side might represent it as a kind of hunger and its assuagement.

That must be understood as follows: Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking case: A woman meets a man and begins to love him. As that is usually regarded, it is somewhat as though you were to cut out a small piece from the Sistine Madonna, for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy and gaze at it. You have a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that. You must trace it backwards. Before the woman met the man she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons why the woman went from one place to another. There is sense in it and, although it is naturally hidden in the subconscious, there is a connection throughout, and we can, by going back into childhood, follow the way. The woman in question—and this is directed at no one in particular—follows the path from the beginning which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being at birth hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is the result of such an indescript spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to it, as it were, by the whole self. The human being has forces within him which lead to later events, in spite of the freedom which nevertheless exists, but acts in a different field. Well, the forces which manifest in this way as hunger, leading to karmic satisfaction, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out prematurely and enter the consciousness during the present incarnation, they may create pictures which produce a stimulus, and then frenzy results.

Frenzy is nothing but the outburst in this incarnation of a karmic force intended for the subsequent incarnation. Think how differently we must accustom ourselves to look upon world events, having understood these connections. People put questions such as: Why did God create frenzy? Frenzy has plenty of good reasons for existence, but everything working in this world may appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, due in this case to Luciferic forces—everything premature in the world is brought about by Luciferic forces—this precipitate appearance of karmic forces intended for a later incarnation produces frenzy.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in later incarnations may really be studied in the abnormalities of the present life. You may easily imagine what an important difference exists between what remains in our heart throughout our entire incarnation, and the condition it will be in after it has gone through the long development between death and rebirth, to appear then in a new life in the outer behavior of a human being.

However, if you look into your own hearts you can see pretty clearly, though of course only in latency, not in a finished picture, what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general statement: what will take effect karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the receptacle in which the karma of subsequent incarnations is stored. These are the things which must be concretely regarded if we wish to practice genuine spiritual science.

You may imagine what enormous importance these things will attain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does present medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not recognize the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs! And it does not know that. It does not even discover a correct connection between excitement hallucinations and the kidney system, nor of the quiet hallucinations, those which simply appear and are present as I have just explained, and are, so to say, liver hallucinations. Hallucinations which appear as though crawling on a human being so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are the excitement hallucinations which have to do with the emotions and temperament. From such symptoms a much more exact diagnosis can be made than by the means in ordinary use today. And diagnoses based upon purely external evidence are very uncertain in comparison with what they would be were these things studied with the above-mentioned symptoms in mind.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as an inner organ or organic system, contain the compressed coercive thoughts with all that we receive and concentrate in that organ through perception of outer objects. The liver has an entirely different relation to the outer world. Because the lungs preserve the thought material they are quite differently shaped. They are more closely connected with the earth element. The liver, which conceals in particular the quietly appearing hallucinations, is connected with the element of water; and the kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, belongs to the element of air. One thinks naturally that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not with it alone. On the other hand, the kidney system—as an organ -—belongs to the element of air, and the heart system to that of warmth, being entirely formed out of that element. Hence, this element which is the spiritual one is also the one which takes up the predisposition of our karma into the delicate warmth structures of the warmth organism.

Since the human being as a whole stands in a relation with the outer world, you can readily realize that the lungs have a particular relation to the outer world in connection with the earth element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for diseases which originate in the lungs. (This is of course to be considered in its broadest implications.) If you take what circulates in the plant, its circulation of juices, you will have the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver. Thus a study of the reciprocal relation of the organs with the outer world offers in fact the foundation for a rational therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empiric notes. One can reach a really rational therapy only by studying in this way the reciprocal relations between the domain of the human organs and the outer world. Of course the voluptuous longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no farther than the well-known “little divine flame” of Meister Eckhardt, and so on; if only the outpouring of inner delight is the aim, and the beholding of beautiful images without penetrating this element to the definite configuration of the inner organs, then important therapeutic knowledge cannot be acquired. For this knowledge is gained upon the path of genuine mysticism which advances to the concrete reality of the inner human organism.

We learn, by the detour through this inner knowledge, to discern the passage through the incarnations. In just the same way, when we regard the outer world, in penetrating this carpet of the sense impressions, we attain to the spiritual. We rise into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not reach through the detour of inner mysticism. The hierarchies are found through a more profound contemplation of the outer world. Upon this path there follow results which may be first expressed by analogies; yet they are not mere analogies, for there exist deeper connections and relations.

We breathe, do we not? And I recently reckoned for you the number of inhalations during twenty-four hours. If we count eighteen breaths to the minute we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25920 inhalations in a day and night.

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night. When you awake in the morning you draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and ego. This is also breathing. In the morning you inhale the astral body and ego, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath in 24 hours, in one day. That is 365 such breaths in a year. And take the average age of a human being, 72 years, and you have approximately the same result. If I had not started with 72, but somewhat lower, I should have reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of a human being, and count each single day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and exhalations of the astral body and ego as you have in and out breathings in 24 hours. You make in the course of your life as many in and out breathings of the astral body and ego as you make daily in your in and out breathing of air. These rhythms correspond absolutely, and show us how man is fitted into the cosmos. The life of one day from sunrise to sunset, as a single circuit, corresponds with an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see the human being becomes a part of the whole world organism; and I should like to close these considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think about it rather thoroughly, and to make it a subject of meditation. Science today postulates a cosmic process, and within this cosmic process the earth once arose. In the end the earth, when the entropy is fulfilled, will be consumed in cosmic heat. If today we form for ourselves a concept such as the Copernican, or any modification of it, then we take into consideration only the forces which formed the earth out of the primeval nebula, and human life really becomes a sort of fifth wheel on the wagon; for the geologist and the astronomer do not consider mankind. It does not occur to them to seek in any sense within mankind itself the cause of a future world organism. The human being is everywhere present in this cosmic process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon. The world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do with it. Consider it in this way: the world process comes to an end, ceases, is dispersed in space. It stops, and the causes of what ensues are always within the human being himself, inside his skin; there they find their continuation.

The inception of what is now the world lies far back within man of primeval ages. It is thus in reality. The books of ancient wisdom tell us this in their own language, and the saying of Christ-Jesus points to these things: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. All that constitutes the material world is dissolved, but that which issues from the spirit and soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives on into the future. The causes of the future exist within us, and need not be investigated by geologists. We should seek them among the inner forces of our organism which pass over into our next earth-life first, but then continue into other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look within man. Everything external perishes utterly.

The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called: the law of the conservation of energy. This law carries forward the forces of man's environment; but all these will dissolve and disappear. Only that which arises within humanity itself can create the future. The law of the conservation of energy is the most false imaginable. In reality its result is simply to make mankind a fifth wheel in the creative process of the cosmos. Not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy is correct, but that other saying: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. These two are in diametrical contrast; and it is simply thoughtlessness when today certain members of this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in the Bible and, at the same time, adherents of the theories of modern physics. This is sheer dishonesty which claims today to be something culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture—which it actually opposes—if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into ascending powers.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, Easter 1914, six lectures.

If I have the temerity to speak about this social question in three brief lectures you will, I am sure, understand that the time at my disposal will only allow me to give the vaguest outline, an outline that will have to take shape in what you, my respected audience, will make of what I have to say. Please regard the content of these lectures as the merest hints which may serve you as suggestions.

What can we make of the social question nowadays? If we look squarely at human life as it is today we certainly do not find a clear picture with any obvious solutions. What we see is a huge number of differentiated conditions of life spread across the face of the earth, conditions that have created great gulfs and abysses within humanity between internal human experiences and the external life of commerce and industry. The tremendous variety of differentiations becomes all too obvious when you look at the difference between life prior to the terrible World War and life now. If you look at any larger region of the earth you will find that the differentiations in social life prior to and following the War are entirely different from those that pertained even only 50 years ago in the same region.

Today—thank goodness, we should add—we tend to look on these conditions of life with our heart, we feel their tragedy. But our intellect, well trained though it has become over the course of recent centuries, cannot keep up. This is the strange thing about all social matters now, that real questions, questions of life itself, are so very pressing and yet human understanding cannot keep pace with them.

It is hard to find ideas that can truthfully be called genuinely fruitful. The thoughts people have tend to fail when they are applied to social life.

The direction social development has taken makes it necessary to link the question of social life with another question in which only factual knowledge can be decisive, only a direct, concrete understanding.

It is easy, ladies and gentlemen, to think about a paradise on earth in which human beings can live a good life and be contented; such a thing appears to be a matter of course. However, to state how an existence worthy of the human being is supposed to arise out of today’s economic life, out of the concrete facts that nature and human labour and our inventive spirit present us with requires a profounder knowledge of the matter than any branch of science can provide. Compared with the complicated facts of social, economic life, what we see under the microscope or in the sky through the telescope is exceedingly simple.

As a matter of fact, everyone has something to say about the social question although hardly anyone has the patience or tenacity, or even the opportunity, to acquire an expert knowledge of the actual facts. As far as the social question is concerned, we have just come through a period with regard to which we should thank God that it is behind us. This was the period of Utopia, the period when people imagined the kind of paradise on earth in which human beings should live in the future like characters in some kind of novel. Whether these Utopias have been written about or whether someone has tried to establish them in reality, as Owen®' did in Scotland or Oppenheimer has been doing in Germany, is irrelevant. As far as present-day social life is concerned, it is irrelevant whether a Utopia is described in a book—in which case it becomes obvious that it cannot be realized—or whether someone founds a little settlement like an economic parasite which can only exist because the rest of the world is there around it, which can only exist so long as it can maintain itself as a parasite on the commercial world and then perishes.

The important thing to be considered with regard to the social question is the need to develop an awareness of the social waves pulsating beneath the surface of humanity, an awareness of what existed in the past, what is there now in the present and what wants to work on into the future—for what is preparing to work on into the future already exists everywhere to a great extent in the subconscious part of human beings. It will therefore be necessary in these lectures to point very firmly to what is there in the human unconscious. Above all, though, we must gain a broad conception of social life as it has developed historically.

Ladies and gentlemen, what once existed long ago is still with us now in the form of tradition, a remnant, but we can only understand what is here amongst us if we understand what existed long ago. Similarly, future tendencies are already mingling with what is here now in the present, and we must understand those seeds of the future that are already planted in our present time. We must not regard the past solely as something that happened centuries ago; we must see it as something still widespread amongst us, something effective that we can only comprehend as a past in the present or a present from the past if we learn to assess its significance correctly. We can only gain some insight if we trace the external symptoms back to their deeper foundations.

Please do not misunderstand me, ladies and gentlemen. In describing things like this one sometimes has to emphasize them rather forcefully, so that one appears to criticize when one merely intends to characterize. I do not mean it as a criticism when I say that the past is still a part of the present. In fact I can admire this past and find it extremely attractive as it makes a place for itself in the present, but if I want to think socially I must recognize that it is the past and that as such it must find its proper place in the present. This is how I have to gain a feeling for social life as it really is.

Let me give you an example, and please forgive me for quoting something from the immediate present, for I mention this somewhat strange symptom without intending any slight whatsoever. Yesterday we met your respected chairman on the street wearing his cap and gown. He looked remarkably handsome and I admired him very much. Nevertheless, what I beheld before my eyes was not only entirely medieval but I even thought someone from the ancient oriental theocracies was approaching us in the midst of the present day.

Underneath the gown there was, of course, an entirely modern soul, an anthroposophist actually, who possibly even saw himself as embodying something of the future into the bargain. Yet the symptom, the actual face of what I saw was history, history in the present time.

If we want to understand social life, if we want to understand the economic interrelationships that have their effect on our breakfast table every morning and determine how much we have to take out of our purse in order to make it possible for our breakfast to be there, then we need to have an overall view of humanity’s social evolution. Yet this social evolution of humanity, especially with regard to the social question, is today almost exclusively approached from the materialistic point of view.

What we must do first is look back to those quite different conditions that once obtained in human history and prehistory We must look back to those social communities that were the social theocracies of the Orient, although to this day they still exercise a strong influence in the West.

These were very different social communities. They were communities in which social relationships were structured through the Inspiration received by priests who remained aloof from ordinary conditions in the world. From the spiritual impulses that came upon them people derived the impulses for the external world. If you look at ancient Greece or Rome you see a social structure involving an immense army of slaves with above them a self-satisfied, wealthy upper class—relatively speaking. It is impossible to understand this social structure without taking account of its theocratic origins in which people believed in it as something given by God, or by the gods; they believed this not only with their heads but also with their hearts and with their whole being. So the slaves felt they were occupying their rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Human social life in ancient times is only comprehensible if you take into account the way in which external, physical structures were filled with commandments received through Inspiration.

These commandments, received from beyond the world by priests who remained aloof from the world, determined not only what human beings needed for the salvation of their souls, not only what they thought and felt about birth and death, but also how they should relate to one another. From the distant Orient we hear resounding not only the words ‘Love God above all things’, but also ‘and thy neighbour as thyself. Today we take a phrase such as ‘thy neighbour as thyself very abstractly. It was not so abstract when it rang out to the crowds from the inspired priest. It was something that worked from individual to individual, something that later came to be replaced by all those concrete conditions we now summarize by the name of law and morality. These conditions of law and morality that only came to be a part of human evolution later were originally contained in the divine commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ through the very way in which they were brought into the world by the inspired priests of theocracy.

In the same way the duties of the economic life, what human beings were supposed to do with their cattle, with their land and soil, these things were also determined by divine Inspirations. You can find echoes of this in the Mosaic laws. With regard to their culture and spiritual life, with regard to their life of law and morality, and with regard to their economic life, human beings felt themselves placed into the earthly world by divine powers. Theocracy was a unified structure in which the various members worked together because they were all filled with a single impulse. The three members: the life of culture and spirit, the life of law—what we today call the life of the state—and the economic life, these were combined in a unified organism filled with impulses that were not to be found on the earth.

As human life evolved further these three impulses, spiritual/cultural life, state/legal/moral life, and economic life pulled apart from one another and became differentiated. The single stream flowing in the form of unified human life in the theocracies gradually divided into two, as I shall show next, and then into three. It is with these three streams that we are confronted today.

Ladies and gentlemen, theocracy in olden times rested on the Inspiration received by the Mystery priests which flowed into the social life, including the legal-moral life and also the economic life. Rules of conduct in the form of commandments could be derived from those Inspirations so long as economic life was based mainly on the soil, agriculture, animal husbandry and so on. Based on their special relationship with the land, human beings bore in their hearts something that went out to meet what came towards them from theocracy.

Once trade and commerce began to play a greater role in human evolution this changed. We can only understand the oldest theocracies if we know that essentially all economic life rests on the human being’s sense of belonging to the land and the soil, and that trade and commerce are merely superimposed on top of this. They existed, of course, but in the way they developed they followed on from what related to the soil, to agriculture. Looking at human evolution we can see how trade and commerce emancipated themselves from agriculture, initially in ancient Greece and much more so in the days of the old Roman Empire. Roman life as a whole received its characteristic configuration from the way the activities of trade and commerce became an independent element in the social structure.

The significance of this emancipation for people in the Roman Empire deeply touched the hearts of the Gracchi, Tiberius Sempronius and Gaius Sempronius, and the words they found with which to express what was in their hearts led to the great social struggles of Roman times. In fact the first social movement leading to strikes had taken place in ancient Rome when the plebeians streamed out to the ‘sacred mountain’ to demand their rights. That was when the urge arose to push for new social forms for the future.

Then for the first time it was noticed that something independent had arisen, something that had up to then been an integral part of the whole social structure, and this was the human being’s labour, which brings into being a specific relationship between one individual and another. When an individual is told by the commandments that he is more lowly than another, he does not ask how he ought to arrange his work since this arises naturally from the relationship between the two. But when labour manifests as something that has emancipated itself and become independent the question arises: How do I relate to my fellow human beings in a way that enables my labour to be integrated within the social structure in the right way? Trade, commerce and labour are the three economic factors that stimulate human beings to bring to birth their legal rights and also an independent morality, a morality that has been separated off from religion. So human beings felt the need to let two streams flow from the single stream of theocracy. Theocracy was allowed to continue, and a second stream, the stream of the military life and specifically of the law, then flowed along beside it.

So as eastern culture spread towards Europe we see how under the influence of trade, commerce and labour the ancient theocratic ideas moved over into legalistic thinking. We see how in place of old situations that were not legalistic at all legalistic conditions developed to regulate questions of ownership and other matters that express the relationship between one individual and another. (You must try to understand what this means in relation to ancient Mosaic legislation.)

The seeds for this were sown at the time of the Gracchi, and these germinated later in Diocletian’s day. You can see how the second stream gradually established itself alongside the first and how this expressed itself in human life as a whole.

In the ancient theocracies over in the East the spiritual knowledge human beings were to have about the supersensible worlds was self-evident theosophy. Theo-Sophia is the concrete wisdom that was received through Inspiration.

Then, when the stream moved on towards Europe, jurisprudence came to join it. Jurisprudence cannot be a ‘sophia’ for it is not something that is received through Inspiration; it is something that human beings have to work out for themselves through the way one individual relates to another. The capacity to form judgements is what counts. So ‘sophia’ was replaced by logic, and the jurisprudence that was then poured into the whole social structure became predominantly logical. Logic and dialectic triumphed not so much in science as in the life of the law, and the whole of human life became squeezed into this second stream, this logic. The concept of ownership, the concept of personal rights, all such concepts were realized as logical categories.

This second stream was so powerful that it began to colour the first, thus turning ‘theo-sophia’ into ‘theo-logia’. The first stream came to be influenced by the second. So then, side by side with a well-tried ‘theo-sophia>—who, a little less lively and somewhat skinnier than she had been in her youth, had turned into a ‘theo-logia’—there came into being a ‘jurisprudentia’ as well. This jurisprudence encompassed everything that emerged in various disguises right up to the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth century, and it is still at work in the whole of economic life.

It was at work in Adam Smith, even though his concern was the economic life. Read Adam Smith while retaining your sense of how legalistic thinking continues to rumble on. The economic life was beginning to arise, but it was into the old concepts of jurisprudence——obviously these concepts Were old by then—that he tried to squeeze the economic life and its complications arising out of the way scientific thinking had taken hold of technology and so on.

So for a while in the civilized world two streams developed. There was ‘theo-logia’, which on the one hand flowed into science; it is easily proved how the later sciences developed out of ‘theo-logia’. But meanwhile human beings had learnt to think dialectically and logically, and this, t00, they poured into science. This is how modern times have come into being. Social and economic conditions are developing an overwhelming complexity. People are still accustomed to thinking theologically and legalistically, and this they are now applying to science on top of everything else. The scientists have failed to notice this. When they put their eye to a microscope Or study the starry heavens through a telescope, or when they dissect a lower animal in order to study its organism, it does not occur to them that they are applying a historical phase of human thinking rather than anything absolute. In recent times this scientific thinking has most certainly been taking over human civilization. One is expected to think scientifically about everything, and this has become a habit not only amongst the well-educated, for it is rife in the whole of humanity down to the simplest people.

I hope you will not misunderstand me when I make the following observation. When we discuss things in the way 1 have been doing over the past few days with regard to education one must include spiritual aspects that can illumine the scientific aspect. But people educated in science react by presuming that there can be no truth in things that are not written down in a book on physiology or pronounced from the rostrum in the physiology department. They do not assume that things that cannot be pronounced in this way, things that I have said with regard to scientific matters, have in fact all been checked and that full account has been taken of what the physiology books and the professor on the rostrum tell us. But people today cannot discern how one thing develops from another. As a result today’s science which is so brilliant and which is fully recognized by anthroposophy becomes a hindrance not because of what it says but as a result of the way people see it. In fact you can use the latest developments in human evolution to demonstrate clearly the way in which it has become a hindrance.

Karl Marx is well known to you by name. In recent times he has spoken about social life in a way that has impressed millions and millions of people. How did he speak? He spoke in a way that a representative of the scientific age is bound to speak on social matters.

Let us imagine how this representative of the age is bound to speak. The scientist has thoughts in his head, but he is not too concerned with them. He only begins to take them into account when they have been verified by what he sees under the microscope or by some other experiment or observation. What he observes must be kept entirely separate from himself, it must not be linked with himself in any way but must come from outside. So someone who thinks scientifically is bound to see an abyss between his own thinking and whatever comes to him from outside.

Karl Marx learnt this way of thinking that one wants to keep separate from the outside world not quite from the newest science but in a somewhat older form, namely, Hegelian dialectics. In fact this is only a slightly different colouring of scientific thinking. While he was learning this scientific way of thinking he was living within his own surroundings. But as a representative of the scientific age he could make nothing of it. As a German he was at home within the German way of thinking logically and dialectically. But he was unable to make anything of his thoughts, just as the scientist cannot make anything of his thoughts but has to wait and see what the microscope or telescope will show him, namely, something from outside. Karl Marx was incapable of doing anything with his thoughts, and as he was unable to escape from inside his own skin he escaped from Germany instead and came to England. Here he found himself confronted with external social conditions just as the scientist is confronted by the microscope or telescope. Now he had a world outside of himself. This enabled him to speak and establish a social theory in a scientific way, just as the scientist establishes his theory—and since people are totally immersed in this way of thinking he became immensely popular.

When one talks about human beings in terms of external nature—as Karl Marx did—then human beings, including the social conditions in which they live, are made to look as though they were in fact nature. I can say what I have to say about Jupiter, about the violet, about the earthworm equally well in Iceland, in New Zealand, in England, in Russia or anywhere else. There is no need for me to speak in concrete terms, for everything must be kept general.

So if you establish a social theory along scientific lines it seems that this is something that has validity all over the world and can be applied anywhere. In fact the main characteristic of the legalistic political way of thinking—of which Marxism is merely the culmination—is that it wants to take general abstractions and apply them anywhere. You will find this even where there is as yet no sign of socialist thought, but only a legalistic, logical way of thinking, as in Kant with his categorical imperative which is also perhaps known to you as something from beyond your shores.

Ladies and gentlemen, this categorical imperative states: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be valid for all people.?! Such a thing has no application in real life, for you cannot say to someone: Get the tailor to make you a jacket that will fit anyone. This is the logical model on which old-fashioned legalistic, political thinking is founded, and it has reached its culmination in Marxist social thought.

So you see how what Marx observed scientifically by applying his German thinking to the English economic situation was initially realized. This he then transported back to Central Europe where it lived in people’s will impulses. Subsequently it was also carried further eastwards where the ground had even been prepared for this application of something totally abstract to real human situations. In the east Peter the Great had even prepared the ground for Marx. Peter had already inserted western thinking into Russian life. Even though Russia bore many oriental traits in its soul while its people were still steeped in theocracy he brought in legalistic, political thinking and side by side with Moscow set up St Petersburg further to the west.

People overlooked the fact that here were two worlds, that St Petersburg was Europe and Moscow was Russia where pure oriental theocracy still had a profound role to play. So when Soloviev created a philosophy it was theosophical rather than dialectic and scientific like that of Herbert Spencer. Soloviev belonged to Moscow, not St Petersburg. Not that things in Russia can be divided neatly in accordance with geography. However much he remains attached to Moscow, however far eastwards he might travel, Dostoevski belongs to St Petersburg.?® Experiences in Russia take account of the interplay between St Petersburg and Moscow. Theocratically speaking, Moscow is Asia, even today, while St Petersburg is Europe.

St Petersburg had been prepared in a legalistic, political way for what Leninism perpetrated in Russia when something that was the final outcome of the Western European soul was impressed upon the Russian soul, to which it was completely foreign. It was so abstract, so foreign that what Lenin>® did in Russia might just as well have been done on the moon. He could have chosen anywhere else, but he happened to want to rule Russia.

So conditions have arisen that we entirely fail to understand in a concrete way if we only look at the social situation. We must make an effort to understand them in a concrete way, ladies and gentlemen. We must understand that in human evolution the spiritual, cultural life came before legalistic, political life which established itself as a second stream beside the first one. We must understand that the time has perhaps now arrived for something new to happen, something that goes beyond the way the legalistic life has coloured ‘theosophia’ and transformed it into ‘theo-logia’. Perhaps it is time for spiritual, cultural life to reawaken in a new form.

The fact is that in human evolution many aspects of the spiritual, cultural life have retained the forms they had in olden times. Not only cap and gown but also thought forms have remained. These thought forms no longer fit in with a world in which trade, commerce and labour have emancipated themselves in a way that has left the spiritual, cultural life behind as a separate aspect alongside the rest of life. This is more the case the further west one travels.

It is least of all the case in the Russia of Moscow. In Central Europe all the struggles, including the social ones, concern the fact that people cannot find a proper way of relating the dialectical, legalistic, political element with the theocratic element. They cannot work out whether cap and gown should be retained when the judge takes his seat or whether they should be discarded. Lawyers are already rather embarrassed by having to wear gowns, while judges still find they enhance their dignity. People cannot decide. There is a fierce struggle going on about this in Central Europe. In Western Europe the theocratic element has become strongly preserved in thought forms.

Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the fact that the second stream has established itself in human evolution. On the one hand there are those who—symptomatically speaking—have retained the ancient ways including cap and gown. But now people want to see them take these off in order to find out what they are wearing underneath. Whether it be a king’s mantle or a soldier’s cloak it will have to be something that does justice to a legalistic situation, a political situation. When we meet such people in the street we want to remove their cap and gown in order to see them as complete individuals; underneath we want to find a kind of soldier’s cloak or some garment that would be appropriate for a solicitor’s office. Then we should see before us both the streams living side by side within the person.

I must confess—in jest, of course, although I mean it quite seriously—that when I meet someone in the street wearing a cap and gown I cannot help asking myself whether such a person would know whether the next letter he writes should bear the date of 768 BC or—if perhaps the gown conceals a legal scholar—ap 1265. It is difficult to decide on a date, since the distant past and the medium past appear side by side in two streams. The last to occur to me would be today’s date, for there is no question of taking the present time into consideration just yet. The two different pasts relate to one another as does Moscow to St Petersburg.

We are faced with the question of how the aspects that proceed side by side today can be brought into a meaningful organizational structure. We shall see how the twofoldness about which I have been speaking leads on to a threefolding in modern times, a threefolding in which the three elements also proceed side by side.

When I speak of threefolding, ladies and gentlemen, I do not mean that there is at present a beautiful unity in social life which we are to cut into three pieces so that three elements can evolve side by side. I mean that a threefoldness already exists, just as it does in the human being who has a system of head and nerves, a thythmic system, and a system of metabolism. The three must function properly together, however, and to each must be assigned what belongs to it. If the digestive system works too little, leaving too much for the head to do, the result is all kinds of migraine-like disorders.

If the spiritual, cultural element—which is the head in the social organism—does not function well, leaving too much to the economic element, then all kinds of social ills will ensue.

To observe social life in depth we have to see such things in the context of human evolution, for this is the best way of avoiding superficiality. We must succeed in putting cap and gown into a context that enables us to conceive of two different historical dates as being one inside the other. This then becomes the present time. Otherwise the past remains the past with its two streams flowing side by side and continuing to be the fundamental cause of the social ills present in the world today, even though people do not wish to see it like this. There will be some more to say in the third part of my lecture.

Ladies and gentlemen, as it has grown rather late I will be brief in what I still have to tell you today. This will bring us up to the present time and I shall save the greater part for the next lecture.

From the beginning of the fifteenth to sixteenth century, but most clearly from the nineteenth century onwards, the two streams I have been describing came to be accompanied more and more by a third one. This has become increasingly apparent the further civilization and culture have moved westwards. To what was originally theocratic and adapted to the land and the soil, to agriculture, there was added in the middle regions the legalistic element adapted to trade, commerce and labour. And now in the West a further element has come to join these, the element that later came to be termed industry, everything industrial including all the technical things this involves.

Consider what the introduction of the actual industrial element into human evolution has meant. It would be an easy calculation to adapt what I am about to say to present-day conditions, but I shall refer to an earlier point in time, roughly the 1880s. At that time it was said that the population of the world amounted to 1,500 million human beings. But this was not a correct calculation of the earth’s population. It would have been correct for the most ancient antiquity when virtually every individual laboured manually in some way, or with something closely connected to human life such as guiding the plough or leading the horse and so on. But by the nineteenth century another entirely new population had entered the world, namely, the machines that relieved human beings of a part of their labour. Even for the 1880s if you calculate the amount of labour from which human beings had been relieved by machines you arrive at a world population of 2,000 million, about a quarter more. Today—and this was much more so before the War—if we count the number of human beings on the earth purely physically, we arrive at a completely erroneous total. To accord with the amount of work done we have to add another 500 million human beings.

This has indeed added an entirely new element to the ancient theocratic and legalistic streams, an entirely new stream, in fact, for instead of bringing human beings closer to their environment it has thrown them back upon themselves. In the Middle Ages one part of the human being was, let’s say, the key he had just crafted, or even the entire lock. What a human being did passed over into his work. But when a person is operating a machine he does not much care what kind of a relationship he has with that machine—relatively speaking, of course. So he is turned more and more in upon himself. He experiences his humanity. The human being now enters evolution as an entirely new being, for he is detaching himself from what he does externally.

This is the democratic element that has been arising in the West over the last few centuries, but so far it is only a requirement, a postulate, and not something that has been fully realized. These conditions are overwhelming people, for they are only capable of thinking in a theocratic or a legalistic manner. Yet life is becoming more and more industrialized and commercialized and confronting human beings with overwhelming demands. They have not penetrated this with their thoughts. Even someone like Marx thought only legalistically, and the manner in which millions and millions of people have come to understand him is merely legalistic.

In this way, then, a third stream, about which we shall speak tomorrow, has come to join the other two. The proletarian human being is born, and what rumbles in the inner being of this proletarian comes to life in a particular conception of capitalism, of labour. Life itself is forcing human beings to come to grips with these problems and only now can we really say that human evolution has reached the present time.

There stands the man in his cap and gown, handsome and lordly, radiating towards us from the far past. And there stands the man with his soldier’s cloak and sword as an embodiment of the legalistic element—for the soldierly aspect is only another side of the legalistic—belonging to the more recent past but not yet to the present. We might even take the man in cap and gown for a good lawyer as well, since this is the image he has been presenting to humanity for centuries, and the uncomfortable fit is therefore not yet too noticeable for us. But if he were to plant himself into economic life—well, unless he is able to enter this fully despite his cap and gown, then I fear his only achievement will be to lose his money. People have in general not yet succeeded in entering upon what this third stream means in life, and neither has humanity as a whole. That is why the social question confronts us as a question for all humanity. The human being finds himself placed beside the machine. We must grasp the social question not as an economic problem, but as one concerning humanity as a whole, and we must understand that it is within the human sphere that we have to solve it.

As yet we lack the necessary thought impulses such as existed for the theocratic and the legalistic streams. We do not yet have such thought impulses for the economic stream. Today’s struggles are all about finding thought impulses for the economic stream such as existed for the theocratic and the legalistic stream. This is the main content of the social question today, and large-scale beneficial solutions are proving even more difficult to come by than are small-scale ones. States that have suddenly been confronted with having to take on an industrial economic life tried to encompass it within the old legalistic forms. Having failed to do this they have now found a kind of safety-valve that is enabling them to avoid allowing the economic life to develop in a real way alongside the life of the state. This safety-valve is colonization. Having failed to find vigorous social ideas within, they sought evasive action in founding colonies.

This worked for England but not for Germany. Germany undoubtedly failed to encompass its industrialization because it was unsuccessful in founding colonies. The great question facing humanity today is: How is the human being to cope with industrialization in the way he once coped with theocratic life and then with legalistic life?

People today think that a purely materialistic solution can be found for this great problem. Everyone wants to solve it on the basis of economic life. I intend to show the modest beginnings of a spiritual way in which it can be solved. This is what I shall speak about in the next two lectures.

On Founding an Association for Further Work along the Lines of these Lectures

Ladies and gentlemen, from the way I have been presenting these lectures you will have gathered how much importance I attach to the sum-total of impulses amongst which a particular education method is only, you might say, a partial expression—a partial expression of what, in my opinion, ought to come about at the present moment in human evolution through a deeper understanding of life, an understanding of life founded on reality. Having noted the fundamental tone I believe I have managed to sustain during these lectures, you will believe me when I thank you most warmly—not so much in my own name as in the name of this matter as a whole for which, as you know, I would like to pledge my whole existence—when I thank you most warmly for your decision to take the matter in hand for this part of the world.

We can only hope that in the association you intend to create as the result of intentions that have ripened here there will be a number of persons who will have the strength to carry what you hope will arise out of the meetings we have had today.

For matters of this kind, ladies and gentlemen, it is important that there should be persons capable of carrying the impulse. The anthroposophical movement, as we call it, can only make progress in the world if it is carried by individual human beings. Of course there have to be associations or societies, but the most important thing is that personalities emerge from such societies who with their own individual strength can carry whatever it is that comes to be regarded as important.

If we consider the very important position in which the population of this country, in particular, finds itself in the present historical situation, and if we take seriously the responsibility arising out of this position, we have to say that something exceptionally important could arise out of the decision you have taken today. The number of those who say that the world needs a push towards the spirit is small as yet. On the degree to which this small number becomes an ever-growing crowd will depend whether world evolution can make any progress at all through new impulses.

As I said in the lecture this morning, the old impulses have more or less come to a standstill. We still use the old words; numbers and strong parties talk in old-fashioned terms. Let us endeavour to talk in new-fashioned terms, and let us strive to take these things into the real world. But do not let us become over-enthusiastic about our intention of bringing spiritual values into evolution. Let us not get over-excited! ‘Bringing spiritual values into reality’ can become a slogan just like any other.

The most important thing is that with our whole heart, in the fullness of our being, we can stand for what can be guided, thought and willed from real life, through real life and for real life. It is this that is essential.

Perhaps your association will initially bring to fruition things that can and, I believe, must be directed towards education. Whatever the case may be, something extraordinarily positive, something connected with the evolution of humanity in our present age, will come from your decisions.

I wanted to say these few words of warmest gratitude to you for attaching your hearts to what has been expressed in these lectures in the form of ideas, something with serious intent that needs to be elicited from human evolution by human beings with true feelings in order to become an impulse for evolution on into the future.