The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the gathering held here just after the Christmas Course we turned our attention to things that can deepen medicine in an esoteric sense. And we tried—to the extent to which this is possible in such brief meetings—to penetrate into the esotericism of medicine, in the way that is suitable for younger medical aspirants today. In formulae for further contemplation and elaboration, we received things that can quicken the sense for medicine and emphasis was laid upon the necessity of having this sense for medicine.

I picture to myself that you have worked upon these things for a time, my dear friends. Naturally, my idea of this work is not that people sit down and ponder about such things theoretically, but that from time to time, when the inner need is felt, they let these things work upon and develop the soul. It was inevitable, from the very way in which these things came before us, that one perfectly definite fact should emerge—a fact which I believe to be of importance for our gathering now. Because of the very concentrated form in which the esoteric things were given at the first gathering, one or another, to a greater or lesser degree, must have realized that it was necessary to face certain inner difficulties. The purpose of esoteric teachings is not always to make life as easy as possible for us. In a certain respect the opposite is certainly the case. They are also there in order to make life more difficult, to make us realize the difficulties of understanding the world, of really getting to know the world and human beings. So that when we become alive to these difficulties, we take the opposite path of development from that which is so often taken in our civilization today. We take the opposite to a superficial path of development. It is only by becoming alive to the difficulties existing as between the outside world and the human being that a person can be deepened in soul. I think, therefore, the best way now will be if, bearing these inner difficulties in mind, you will bring them forward in the form of questions and we will then make matters that can really promote the development of our subject into the theme of our discussions. I would ask you, to begin with, to tell me what inner and outer difficulties have arisen in your own circle. Difficulties will have arisen both for the practitioner and for the student. There are a number among you who are now approaching the end of their studies; they will have found quite specific difficulties and we will try to find their solution. All of you have received the first circular letter and you will have realized that in connection with definite questions there is a very great deal to say. I would like to ask if any question, definite or indefinite, has arisen, for such questions will surely lead us further. In this way we shall get away more from theoretical study and reach matters which lie in the realm of actual experience.

Question: A participant asked about the course of the year, the Calendar of the Soul, definite constellations of the stars and whether one must be consciously aware of these.

That is not essential. You mean observation of the constellations as they are at a particular time. It is, of course, a help if one is able to look at the visible constellations. But if I have understood you aright you mean: How are things, really, if we allow the formulae we have been given to work upon the soul? These things work through their own inherent mantric power; orientation in the outer world according to the stars can, of course, be a help but you must remember the following. Take the most striking example of a human-cosmic relationship that can still be observed today, namely the menses. It is obvious that they are determined cosmically yet they are not so determined in the present epoch. They were cosmically determined in a much earlier phase of cosmic evolution in which our earth was also involved. Then, in the course of time, they became independent, were emancipated from the external cosmos, so that nowadays there is no direct dependence. Therefore, one cannot say nowadays that the phases of the moon are coincident with menstruation. This cannot be said. But it is certainly true to say that there was once a time when the one coincided with the other; then they separated. The moon phases exist on their own. Menstruation takes its own independent course. Here is one example of separation. The other that I will mention is not governed by the phases of the moon but by the daily phases of the moon. Ebb and flow were once coincident with certain influences of the moon. Again there was separation. The moon is on its own, ebb and flow on their own.

These things also hold good in the working of mantric power. Mantric power is certainly of such a nature that what happens in the human being as a result of it was at one time coincident with cosmic processes, but separation has now taken place, so that a proper orientation is necessary. If we want this help from the outside world we must say to ourselves first of all: What is to happen in the inner being is inscribed in the cosmos. But in contemplating this we must make ourselves inwardly independent and be able to experience inwardly and quite on our own, emancipated from the cosmic happenings. Therefore it is not unconditionally necessary to reckon with the constellations of the stars in the working of a mantram. Equally it cannot be a question of the menses being regulated according to the external phases of the moon, because the menses have become a process of the world of nature. Today it is the case that the whole of our inner life that is to be influenced by mantrams must take place in emancipation from the outer cosmos.

In connection with other subjects I have often had to speak of this as the difference between Eastern and Western esotericism. The whole standpoint of the oriental is this: the human being has come forth from the cosmos, he must return there, he must be united with the cosmos again. Think of the posture of the Buddha. It is a return to earlier conditions. This is shown by the Buddha's whole posture, the crossing of the legs one over the other, the elimination of the limb structures. The position of the arms, too, is such that the whole relationship to the earth is paralyzed. We see how the human being again members himself into the cosmos. He goes back again. So it is, in reality, with the whole of Eastern esotericism. It is a going backwards. Our Western esotericism can only be a going forward, an ever-increasing emancipation. For this reason it is not so inwardly comfortable and when applied in certain domains particularly it does not make for inner ease.

Of course, if you have some specific, pathological condition before you, and when you look at the constellations you find, for example, that the condition definitely set in when Saturn was in opposition to the moon, this naturally has a certain significance. For if you now come as a healer with Saturn and moon, that is to say, in earthly terms, with lead and silver, saying: I will apply the lead cosmically and the silver in the earthly form, trying to pulverize it, to dissolve it; I will change it into the earthly form, thereby producing the same constellation that is expressed in the heavens in the opposition to the moon, then you can heal in the sense of the cosmic forces. But at the same time you bring the human being into a condition which throws him back into earlier stages of evolution. Whereas if you take your start directly from the given earthly state—the connection of the human being with lead, with silver—then you are working in something that is in a process of emancipating itself within the human being and you are looking not into the past but into the future. In this case you will certainly be doing something similar, but you get at it from within, by getting to know the nature of the lead and the silver, realizing that the lead works as substance, the silver through what it actually becomes when it is broken into pieces, dissolved, resolved into atoms. But you are comparing it with the human nature that is already emancipated, not with the cosmos. This is the way in which one must proceed. Therefore it may certainly be a help to think about the actual constellations of the stars. But to begin with, we shall have to use all our power to lend ourselves to the inner activation of soul by the mantric formulae we have been given, and seek for everything more from within.

Question: What must I do out of the ego when I am meditating?

From out of the ego? Meditation consists, does it not, in the following. As a modern person you feel that you must understand every sentence. This is emphatically an activity of the ego in the present incarnation. Everything you do intellectually is an activity of the ego. In the present incarnation the intellect predominates and everything else is overshadowed by the ego, works upwards at the most like a dream, and is unconscious. In contrast with this, meditation means elimination of this intellectual striving and, to begin with, taking the content of the meditation just as it is given—purely according to the sounds of the words. When you approach the content of the meditation intellectually you bring your ego into movement before you absorb the meditation, for you think about the content; it is outside you. If you let the meditation be present in your consciousness just exactly as it is given, not cogitating over it at all but simply letting it be in your consciousness, then your ego is working in you not from the present incarnation but from the past. You hold the intellect still, simply transporting yourself into the word-content which you hear inwardly, not outwardly; you transport yourself into this word-content and as you do so your inner being works within the content of the meditation—the inner being which is not that of the present incarnation. But thereby the content of meditation becomes—not something for you to understand merely—but something that works within you in reality; so that finally you become aware of: Now I have experienced something I was unaware of earlier.

Take a simple meditation which I have often given: “Wisdom lives in the Light.” If we think about this we can extract many very clever things but equally frightfully stupid things from it. “Wisdom lives in the Light” is there in order to be heard inwardly. When you hear this inwardly that within you which listens does not come from your present incarnation but what you have brought with you from former earthly lives. It is this that thinks and experiences, and after some time there lights up within you something you did not know before, that you cannot think out with your own intellect. Inwardly you are much further than your intellect. Your intellect contains only a tiny extract of what is really there.

After all, you must take what is given in Anthroposophy absolutely concretely and objectively. Just think about the following: With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is

concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is a product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years—if we express it in figures—comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a body, too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here.

Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He would call forth quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his pre-earthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human being has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly man.

You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical man who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity.

There, you see, you have two, actually distinguishable entities of forces in the human being. How can you understand these force entities? Take, with the outlook and feeling of the physician, the book Occult Science and read where the earth's evolution is spoken of. At first there is a Saturn evolution, then a Sun evolution. If you follow the description of the Earth evolution you will find that until the separation of the sun, sun, moon and earth were one, combined together in one. Afterwards there is a separation of earth and sun, earth and moon. Up to the middle of this evolution, therefore, the human being lives in the cosmos. He lives in sun and moon just as he lives in the earth. After the separation of the sun he lives outside the sun; after the separation of the moon, outside the moon. Until the separation of the sun, therefore, the cosmic forces were working upon man's nature; those forces, too, which are today outside the earth in the moon and in the sun were working in the human being because he belonged to the world in which the sun and moon were still present. There followed for the human being an evolution during which sun and moon were outside.

There was a phase of evolution which contained within it all that today is both earthly and of the nature of sun and moon; later on, the extra-earthly emancipated itself from the earthly. The earthly went on along its own path, it dried up, hardened, became physical—and you find this today in the stream of heredity; it has densified within the stream of heredity. What the human being has received since the separation of the moon and sun lies in the forces working in from the cosmos. That is the point. So that in the model that is received in order that the second man may be elaborated, you have a model that really represents a primeval, artistic principle given by father and mother, originating when sun and moon were still united with the earth. It was then that the forces which really give the human being his earthly configuration were developed. For you will readily understand that the configuration of the human being is an earthly one. Try to think of the being of man entirely removed from the earth. What could be done with it? You would be extremely unhappy if after death you were to make use of anything like legs. Legs have purpose only when the earth's forces of attraction pass through them, when the legs are within the sphere of the earth's forces of attraction. Legs—and arms and hands, too—have meaning and purpose only on the earth. So that a whole section of the human organism, in the way it is developed, has purpose only when we are earthly man. What we are as Earthly man has no meaning so far as the cosmos is concerned. Therefore when we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second man in accordance with this model.

In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second man has tussles with the first. But within the second man there is the super-earthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner man, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willy nilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner man is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. Moreover, it is only possible to understand truly what comes later if these things can be properly reckoned with.

It is, of course, very easy for the materialists to say that all this is stupid, because children still retain a likeness to their parents after the change of teeth and not only up till that time. Such talk is nonsense. The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second man with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model. We have therefore simply to see these things in their right connection.

The following, too, must be remembered. Everything that has to be taken in must, in the first place, be taken in by the child and elaborated inwardly in such a way that the ego and astral body enter into intimate contact with the foodstuffs. Later on this need not be the case any longer. The human being is never afterwards in the position of being so strongly compelled to work out, according to a model, something that is independent as is the case during the first seven years of life. During those years he must work up in his ego and astral body everything he takes in; he must work it up in such a way that it can be molded in accordance with the model. This process must be helped; and the world has arranged for it, inasmuch as milk is able to bear a very great resemblance indeed to an etheric structure. Milk is a substance which really still has an etheric body and because this substance, when it is taken by the child, still works up into the etheric, the astral body is able at once to take hold of the milk and then there can arise the close inner contact between what is thus taken in and the astral body and ego organization. For this reason there is an inward, intimate connection in the child between the external foodstuffs and the inner organization of spirit and soul.

In the whole way in which the child drinks milk you can actually see how his astral body and his ego are taking hold of the milk you can see it with your very eyes. And now, as a physician, you must realize the remarkable process of working up what is going on. On the one side, meditate in mantrams, letting the mantram work upon you, freeing your forces of soul on the one hand; and on the other hand, meditate simply upon the child. Picture to yourself how the being of spirit and soul comes down and makes its way to the physical foodstuff, ignoring the model to begin with, and then picture what is going on between the being of spirit and soul and the foodstuff—a process that is now directed in accordance with the forms contained in the model. If you form a true picture of an excessively strong working of the spirit and soul, the picture crystallizes into that of scarlet fever. A picture of a too feeble working of the spirit and soul which wavers in the face of the model and becomes the picture of measles.If you picture these things in meditation you carry over ordinary meditation into medical meditation. It is dreadful that people today want to grasp everything with the intellect. In medicine really nothing can be grasped with the intellect. With the intellect one could at the very most grasp the diseases of the minerals—and there it is not a question of curing. Everything medical must be grasped by direct perception and the faculty for this has to be developed.

You cannot notice this process in a grown-up person. The digestive tract takes over the foodstuffs—it is a process transacted inwardly; whereas in the child, astral body and ego take over the foodstuffs. Unfinished forms of human nature have there to be directed and fashioned in accordance with the model. When you meditate upon the child, you see a mighty metamorphosis going on. You see the spirit and soul lighting up, as it were, and the in-taken foodstuffs cast into darkness and shadows; you see there how the second man is formed out of light and darkness, in colors, as it were. You see how the pre-earthly in man is a brightness and how the external foodstuffs are a darkening. In the child a brightness comes upon the darkness, a brightness that comes from the pre-earthly. The milk goes in as darkness. The brightness and the darkness together give rise to manifold colors. What is white in the physical is black in the spiritual; always the opposite.

These things make it possible for the ego to be active in quite another way than is usual in life. What a feeble effort it is that we make in the act of ordinary, intellectual thinking. Intellectual activity is man's greatest weakness. He simply carries one concept to another. But if you observe the child in the way now described you will meditate in such a manner that your ego organization is thoroughly involved in the effort.

These things, in their further course, must also be heeded in our pedagogy. In a school like the Waldorf School we have children between the ages of seven and fourteen. At this age things have changed. The second man has been developed. The child before us has been molded out of pre-earthly existence according to the model that has been cast off; forces of heredity, naturally, have remained in the child. They have been brought into the model, into the imitation of the model. The child is now much too unearthly. For now the forces that come from beyond the earth have worked on the child with special strength and the swing of the pendulum has gone to the opposite side. Formerly, this was externally visible in the human being; he was entirely the product of heredity. Now that which is to be seen externally has arisen entirely from within. It is the external world that has now to be mastered. What has hitherto worked without consideration for the earthly world, with consideration only for the human model, must direct itself to the outer world. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, astral body and ego organization must work in such a way that this super-earthly being is again adjusted to the external conditions of earth existence. This process has its culmination at puberty. At that age the human being is placed wholly within earthly conditions; he enters into his relationships with earthly conditions; the earthly is membered into his being. Therefore the element of greatest importance in the generation of the second man between the seventh and fourteenth years is what the human being brings with him from pre-earthly existence. For this reason his own specific karma only begins to work after puberty. Then the earthly works in. A culmination is reached at puberty and the third man now begins to develop.

The second man—so far as the substance is concerned—is thrown off and the third man is developed. The process does not reach so far as actual form, it only gets as far as life. If it were to get to form, we should get third teeth, because the human being is now governed by external conditions. Within these outer conditions it is the case that the human being again takes in what is extra-human. When he was being governed by the model he was directed entirely in accordance with the human. So long as he was governed by the model he was governed by something passed on by heredity. But in this there lies, in reality, something that is dried up. Since the separation of the sun it has really broken off from the root of his being and is dried up, withered. Therefore the forces of heredity contain the most pathological forces and when he is governed by the model the human being really absorbs innumerable causes of illness. He absorbs few such causes during the period after the change of teeth because then he is governed by the external world; climate, everything contained in the outer air, etc., are less harmful. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the human being is healthy; then again there begins a period when he is again susceptible.

All these conditions must be observed in such a way that you have the picture of man in your mind. If you have this picture of man in mind, then you also meditate rightly. Then you will be able to combine what you learn with what you meditate upon and what you have learned does not remain theory but becomes practice, because you uncover the power that enables you to perceive these things. This is what is so urgently needed today. It is impossible to achieve anything in medicine so long as we persist in thinking that evolution goes forward in a straight line. The human being is in reality constituted from separate streams of development which take their course in periods of seven years; what comes later is linked to what is earlier; it is not a one-sided continuation but different conditions are always intervening. Continuous evolution in this sense, where the earlier alone is the cause of the later, is only to be found in the mineral kingdom, less in the plant kingdom and least of all in the human kingdom.

Let us try to picture the plants. How do people proceed today when they picture the plants? There is the soil of the earth. The seed is pictured as being laid into the soil and then the plant grows out of this. People are naive enough to think as follows: Hydrogen is a very simple molecule, consisting of two atoms. All kinds of things are imagined to form combinations. Alcohol is certainly a very complicated molecule. Carbon is there combined with hydrogen and oxygen and then one has something more complex. And now there come still more complicated substances with more and more complicated molecules. There was a period during the eighties and nineties of the last century when the titles of these were very complicated, consisting of more than three lines in length. Yes, the molecule has become terribly complicated! And now still more so. Then it becomes a seed, and a seed is a most highly complicated combination. Then the plant grows out of the seed. But all this is nonsense. The basis of the seed formation is, in reality, that earthly matter tears itself away from the principle of structure and passes over into chaos, becomes chaotic, contains no more forces of matter in itself. Then, when no earthly structure is present, what is working out of the cosmos can assert itself. The cosmic declares its readiness to mirror the cosmic structure in the minute. In the seed formation the “nothingness” asserts itself over against the earthly and the cosmos works into the nothingness.

Frau Dr. Kolisko could tell you an interesting fact which entirely confirms this. During investigations into the function of the spleen we took small rabbits and excised the spleen. In spite of this the rabbits were quite well. They did not die of the operation, but a long time afterwards, from colds. It was quite possible to see how the rabbits live on without the spleen. When one of the rabbits died, we were able to see what had happened and in the place of the spleen there had appeared tissue which had assumed a decidedly spherical form. What had really happened? We had excised the physical spleen and by doing this had artificially driven earthly substance into chaos, made it accessible to the cosmic forces, and something resembling a seed formation had come into being. There had arisen, in an extremely primitive form, something that resembled the structure of a seed—an image of the cosmos. This quite harmless vivisection, therefore, confirmed a matter of great significance, for this is what appears to spiritual-scientific observation.

Take a quartz crystal. It is an earthly thing. Why? Why is the quartz crystal an earthly thing, retaining its form really in a very pedantic, rigid way? The quartz gets its form from an inner force and if you break it apart with a hammer the single parts always retain the tendency to be six-sided prisms, self-contained, six-sided pyramids. This tendency is present. You can as little rid the quartz of this tendency as you can get pedantry out of a man who is pedantic by nature. You may atomize a pedantic person, but he will still remain pedantic. The quartz does not allow itself to come to the point where the cosmos can do anything with its forces. Therefore the quartz has no life. If the quartz could be pulverized to such a degree that in the single fragments it no longer had the tendency to be governed, in the single fragment, by its own forces, something living and cosmic would grow out of the quartz. This is what happens in the formation of a seed. In the seed, matter is driven out to such a degree that the cosmos can intervene with its etheric forces. The world must be seen as a perpetual entering into chaos and again an emergence from chaos. What is contained in quartz also came at one time from the cosmos, but it remained at a standstill, has become Ahrimanic. It no longer exposes itself to the cosmic forces. As soon as anything enters into the realm of the living it must always pass through chaos.

This again is something which will help you to meditate in the sense of medicine. And you can also picture the developed plant—how it grows from leaf to leaf, and so on. You come to the formation of the seed in the fruit. Whereas you otherwise picture the seed plant as brightness it now becomes dark, quite dark. Then again comes the light, when the forces from outside take hold. In this way, too, you can make an imaginative picture from the being of the plant. When you are aware of an object which you call “plant”—then it is an imaginative meditation. You should not remain in the sphere of the intellectual but in the sphere of the concrete, inner picture. The intellectual element is merely there for the purpose of presenting what is known, in the form of thoughts.

Suppose you write down the word Menschenkind. This word is taken from something that has been perceived. Very well. The word Menschenkind reminds you of a Menschenkind (a human child). But suppose you take the word and say: I like the i, so I will put that first, I like the n, so I will put that next, then the sch and so on. You can put the word together in a different way but nothing that you can make anything of will come out of it. This is what people are doing with concepts all the time. The concept is only the spiritual term for the perception. People separate and combine concepts and think in acts of thinking. They do this, too, when they are observing the external world. They cover up observation with thinking and so they live today outside reality. This is possible as long as one is working with the science that stands outside reality, with geometry and arithmetic. But if we want to go in for medicine we cannot stand outside reality. If we do, then we also stand outside reality in medical practice itself.

Today I should like you really to speak out what is in your minds so that the discussion can center around it.

Question: A question in the hearts of all of us is how to succeed with the meditations that we have been given. At what times ought we to do them, ought they to be done in rhythmic sequence, how ought they to be done, ought those given at Christmas to be done at the same time as the others? We think that at any rate most of us feel rather oppressed with all the substance that is contained in the meditations and we do not yet know how to live with them properly.

In these things one really ought not to give such strict indications for this would be to encroach too much upon the freedom of the individual. If things are looked at in the right way it is not likely that there will be any feeling of oppression. When the meditations were given here at Christmas it was also indicated in which direction they move the soul. It was said—and the same applies to the meditations that are now being given in the First Class—that with these meditations it is rather different than when someone comes and wishes to have a personal meditation. In the case of a personal meditation one must naturally indicate whether the meditation should be done in the morning or the evening, how the person must act in the sense of this meditation, and so on. These meditations are intended to be part of the esoteric life of the individual according to his capacities and his karma. They then lead of themselves to the individual not remaining in isolation but unfolding within himself the impulse to recognize those who have similar aspirations. Such meditation must be regarded as a personal meditation.

So far as the other kind of meditations are concerned it would be good if they were done at a definite time or in special circumstances, or when accompanied by definite circumstances. In giving all meditations like those of the esoteric instruction given at Christmas, one has in mind the goal that is striven for. And then it is a matter of using the circumstances of one's life, the special situations of one's life, to make such meditations. Such meditations are done when one finds the necessary spare time for them—the more often the better. They will always have their effect. Precisely with such meditations the striving should be for personal development. One should try to find the link from the results that happen in the spiritual life, and one will, moreover, find it. In reality, the feeling of oppression would come if definite rules were laid down in regard to individuals or a group doing them at the same time as you say. Moreover this would lead to the meditation losing something that it really ought to have. Every meditation, you see, is impaired if one starts from the feeling that it is one's duty to do it. You must bear this well in mind. Every meditation is impaired by the feeling of being obliged to do it. Therefore in the case of the personal meditations it is absolutely necessary for this personal meditation gradually to become something that the human being feels in his soul to be like a thirst for meditation. Those who really thirst for their meditation just as a man eats when he is hungry, do their morning and evening meditations in the best way. When meditation becomes something without which a person cannot exist, when he feels that it is part and parcel of the whole life of his soul, then he has the right attitude to meditation.

With the other meditations, what matters is the inner desire, the inner will to become a physician and to say to oneself: “This is my path and I will meditate as often as I possibly can. I realize that when I do the one or the other meditation, it has this or that aim.” Out of the free, inner will of man, therefore, there must arise the urge to such meditation, to the carrying out of such a meditation. It is really inconceivable how anyone can feel a sense of oppression. For why should anything for which one thirsts inwardly, also give rise to a sense of oppression? If it oppresses, it has already been made into a matter of duty and that is just what meditation should never be. It should never be a matter of duty. Precisely when it is a question of becoming a physician, the following ought to be taken in the very deepest sense: The conception of becoming a physician ought not to be as it is today, namely, entering a profession. One ought really to become a physician because of an inner calling, an inner devotion to healing. This general urge to be able to heal is the true accompaniment, and one is then led towards the goal. Perhaps in few professions is it so harmful as it is in the profession of the physician to think of this profession as an external duty. Love for humanity must be implicit in the physician's profession. A physician should find his bearings quite naturally in his work.

Now, although in modern medicine, in modern medical studies, it is not very favorable for real healing when people become physicians just because they must become something or other and because the medical profession seems for some reason to be desirable, it is still worse when someone thinks he can become a physician artificially, through meditation, without feeling this thirst of which I have spoken. If the aim is a true one, ancient esoteric methods of development demand infinitely more than an external decision; and they do much more harm than external circumstances of life if they do not spring from the right attitude of soul. But you must also have a right conception of what I have here called the “attitude of soul.” What we call karma is not, as a rule, taken very seriously in life. An inner vocation arises, of course, because karma has put a person in a certain place. We must realize that to follow something out of a sense of duty is injurious, but to follow karma is something that accords entirely with the direction of human evolution. The karma of all of you has brought you to work in medicine, and now if only you will look deeply enough within yourselves you will find that you really do feel the thirst of which I have spoken. And you will find, too, the moments and hours when you want to do such meditations.

Now just when one takes up such a serious profession in all earnestness, the following (which has happened frequently since the Christmas Foundation Meeting) really should not be. It is not connected directly with medical work, but it is connected very strongly with the “human universal” inasmuch as it exists within the general Anthroposophical movement, and so it is also of importance to you. I shall speak about it in another place, but because it holds good very specially for you, I will say it here too. It was said at the Christmas Foundation that a new character must come into the Anthroposophical movement, that inner work must be done. Now many people drew a strange conclusion from this. There are people within the Anthroposophical movement who have definite positions and offices. Such people have written: Yes, I understand perfectly that a new character is to come into the Anthroposophical movement. I place myself entirely at the disposal of this, I do not want to remain in my old position. But this can never lead to anything. It can only lead to something when the person concerned knows that at the place at which he stands he must find his development, find it in reality, also in connection with the faculties which he uses and applies. This, naturally, is the case with you who have begun to work in the medical profession. You must regard it as karma and you must realize that your work in the future will be tremendous. You must realize, secondly, that the thirst of which I have spoken, the thirst to approach the true preparation for medicine by way of meditation, is also to be found in the soul.

This is what I wanted to say about the practice of meditation. Each meditation should enlighten and support the other. It may well be that some one meditation has worked strongly, and now you must do a different one in order to strengthen the effects still more. You do one meditation once, twice; you do another twelve times. This is something that comes when you really take to heart what is given as a meditation, when you experience it inwardly, and also when you take to heart what has been said about the goal of meditation. We must use this opportunity for developing much that was touched upon at Christmas.

Question: My conception was not that it was a question of meditating at definite times, but in spite of that I was aware of a sense of oppression because I considered it a duty to do this meditation and often I was not really fresh enough to feel it as a need. Perhaps this is due to the fact, in my case at least, that up to now I have not had the attitude that one ought to have as a physician, that I have not had the real will to heal. I think it has been the same with one or two of us. Many of us have not become physicians in order to heal, but we have become physicians because of the great interest that we had in getting to know the nature of man, his conditions of disease and his normal conditions. We approached medicine entirely from the side of knowledge. Up till Christmas the will to heal was something entirely foreign to me; and so, to begin with, my work made me very unhappy because I had a great deal to do and at the beginning was too tired for meditation. But this work brought me more together with patients so that now I have an inkling of what it means to have the will to heal, and I think that now I shall be better able to meditate because this springs from a real need. Meditation can then really be seen as a path to the goal. Precisely this devotion to human destiny, this sympathy that one feels as a physician for everyone—this, and the will to heal which was not indicated through one's studies which lead to medicine more from the side of knowledge—is surely something that, until recently, has caused difficulties to many of us.

You must remember the following. When, in the sphere of medicine you divide these two things, the side of knowledge and the will to heal, it is a contradiction of the reality. It is very important to realize what is at stake here. Knowledge of the nature of man is necessary in many different fields of human activity. In pedagogy, for example, the essential starting point is a knowledge of the nature of the human being. In other domains, too, there must be knowledge of the nature of man if we have an eye to realities. Knowledge of the nature of man is essential for everyone who wants to get beyond superficialities. It is necessary for everyone. The fact that knowledge of the real nature of man is not sought for in many fields of activity is a consequence of the errors into which modern civilization has lapsed. In a certain sense this knowledge is sought for—although it cannot be found there because it can only be found today by way of Anthroposophy. It is sought for by theologians (I mean by the ordinary theologians). All kinds of people are looking and seeking for knowledge of the being of man. The only ones who are not seeking for it are the lawyers, because jurisprudence today is something which simply cannot be said to take hold of the realities of the world. The essential thing is that knowledge of the human being has to be somewhat specialized in the various domains of life. The physician needs a rather different kind of knowledge from the educator—a rather different kind only. It is necessary for educators to know as much as possible about education. There ought certainly to be connecting threads; there should be a hither and thither between the one and the other field of activity, based upon knowledge of the human being.

So far as concrete details of knowledge of the human being are concerned, the following must be remembered. You spoke about knowing the conditions of disease in a human being. This is a preconception—the outcome of materialism. In itself it is a materialistic preconception. Taken in the concrete, what does it mean to know the conditions of disease in the human being? How can I know anything about a disease that is localized, let us say, in the liver, in the spleen, in the lungs, in the heart? How do I get knowledge of it? When I know what kind of healing process might be capable of overcoming the process of disease. In reality the process of disease is the question and one remains at a standstill at this point if one's only aim is to get knowledge of the process of disease. The answer is the healing process. We know nothing at all about a process of disease when we do not know how it can be healed. Understanding consists in the knowledge of how the morbid process can be eliminated. Without the will to heal there can be no medical study in the true sense. To know conditions of disease means nothing. Without passing on from the pathology to the therapy one would simply be concerned with the pathological aspect, imagining that one was thus getting knowledge of the human being. One would simply be describing a diseased organ. But a description of this kind is quite inadequate; is not of the least value. So far as mere description and abstract knowledge are concerned there is no essential difference between a healthy or a diseased liver. In the sense of natural science there is no distinction to be made between a healthy and a diseased liver. The most that can be said is that a healthy liver is more frequent than a diseased one. But this is an external condition. If you want to get knowledge of a diseased liver, you must go into what is able to heal the diseased liver.

Upon what does healing depend? It depends upon knowing which substances, which forces must be applied to the human being in order that the process of disease may pass over into the healthy process. Such knowledge is transmitted, for instance, by the fact that one knows: Equisetum, within the human organism, takes over the activity of the kidneys. When, therefore, the activity of the kidneys is not sufficiently cared for by the astral body, I shall see that they are cared for by equisetum. I give support to the astral body by means of equisetum arvense. Here for the first time is the answer to what is really happening. The same process in the external world which leads to equisetum also takes its course in the human kidneys. The equisetum process must be studied in connection with the kidneys. This leads us to the domain of healing.

Thus it can never be a matter of pathology in a merely abstract sense or of a description of conditions of disease—all this amounts to nothing in reality. Our picture of a condition of disease should be that such and such a remedy works in such and such a way. The feeling that we have about knowledge in all domains of life should lead on to reality, not to formalism. It was always so when knowledge was everywhere connected with the Mysteries. In the Mysteries, knowledge was inevitably withheld from those who merely desired it in the formal sense and imparted only to those who had the will to lead over this knowledge into reality. Is that an answer to your question?

Question: I may have expressed myself rather radically when I spoke only about health and disease. In point of fact, I do consider the way in which the human being should be healed also to be a part of knowledge. I meant something rather different, namely, that one may know how a person can be healed but may not have the will to heal him. Up to now I have not, inwardly, had the impulse only to understand the human being in order to heal. I had not the impulse to let the whole of my work and studies and knowledge be filled entirely with the realization: I must be capable of healing the human being.

That is hypertrophy of knowledge.

Question: This is a fact with me and I wanted to speak about it because it is so. Perhaps it sounds very strange.

What I am going to say may sound very trivial and simple. It is as well that this kind of attitude cannot make clocks, for if it could, you would have clocks put together quite correctly according to the clock maker's art, but they would not want to go. By letting his will hypertrophy towards the one side or the other, a person can develop this or that, but the result will be of such a nature that it is not in line with the healthy evolution of human nature. Knowledge of healing should simply not exist without the will to heal. Today you ought to be speaking of something quite different. You should really be saying: “Yes, I have studied medicine for a short time and now I have an ungovernable will to heal. I must restrain myself so that this will which comes from knowledge does not break loose in such a way that I want to heal all the healthy people!” This is really not a joke. The voice should be a voice of restraint. It should simply not be possible to say: “I have striven for the knowledge of healing but not the will to heal!” For a knowledge that is real cannot separate itself from the will—that is quite impossible.

Question: I think that what was expressed in the previous question is a condition brought about by the kind of studies that are pursued at the universities. It seems to me to be a final result of such studies. The aim of all medical science is really knowledge, without leading over to the therapeutic aspect. In the lecture halls and the clinical courses one hears a little about diagnosis and when the professor does not know what to do until the new patient is brought in, he throws in a few words about the therapy. In a course on gynecology once, the lecturer spoke about the work of the physician in his practice. “Has it not struck you,” he said, “that in reality so little is said about therapy? You will realize this for the first time when you begin to practice. That is what happened to me. I had a head full of knowledge and then I realized the other.” Then he said that five minutes were given to the therapy and forty minutes to the diagnosis. Nobody realized that during all their studies they had heard nothing about therapy. This leads me to a question, because this fundamental attitude of modern science causes me many difficulties and conflicts. As a physician I was looking for something different in scientific medicine. This entirely superficial attitude which leads to all kinds of things, especially in diagnosis, often gives rise to results that are really repellent. Let me give an example. A patient came to me and asked, could I not help her? She suffered from recurrent inflammation of the frontal sinuses and she had been many times to a specialist. Among other things perforation had been done by way of the nose. She said she could not bear it any longer, she felt that the whole interpretation of her condition was too physical, and she asked if I could not help her in some other way. This attitude that the patient had realized is universal. It simply gropes on the surface and leads nowhere. It can only remain on the surface and it cannot lead to the real state of the case. And so I have often asked myself: Is it really good or indeed is it necessary to go so deeply into these methods which are considered a sine qua non in medical studies—methods which simply reach the point of monstrosity in gynecological research and simply have no relation to the final outcome? Is it necessary to go through all these things? I have the feeling that any instinct for healing which may exist is suppressed entirely by going through these things. I would like to mention something told to me by a former colleague. He was speaking of a peasant doctor in the Bavarian Alps who used to perform all kinds of orthopedic cures with such skill that he became famous. An orthopedic specialist in Munich got to hear of what this man was doing, went to see him and told him that he should come to him in his clinic. This man saw all the apparatus in the clinic and the specialist told him to show him how he worked. The peasant doctor looked at it all and from then onwards he could no longer cure people. Ought we to go through all the methods of scientific medical training or ought we to avoid them as far as is at all possible?

When you approach the question in this way, it becomes extremely important. You are right in thinking that I did not want to speak about personal characteristics of the prior questioner but to describe the attitude that inevitably arises from the modern methods of study. The true kind of medical studies would never lead anyone to desire knowledge of conditions of disease or processes of healing without at the same time having the will to heal. Such a thing would never arise out of true medical studies. It arises because of the way medical studies are arranged today. It must be admitted on the one side that by far the greatest part of what the medical student has to learn today in his various courses has nothing fundamentally to do with healing as such as therefore burdens the mind with all kinds of impossible things. In modern medical training it is more or less the same as it would be to make a sculptor, let us say, learn first of all about the scientific properties of marble and wood with which, in reality, he is not concerned. A great deal of what is contained in the medical textbooks today or is done in clinics has little to do with medicine in the real sense.

The moment you pass on from the physical description—this was what the lady of whom you spoke felt to be too physical—the moment you pass on to the etheric body, most of the things in the medical textbooks lose their significance because the moment you come to the etheric body the organs present quite a different aspect. When you pass from the physical to the etheric body, intellectual knowledge alone will get you nowhere. You will learn much more if you learn how to sculpture, if you learn the hand grip, the feeling for space that is needed by the sculptor.

So far as knowledge of the astral body is concerned, you learn far more when you can apply the laws of music. From music you learn an enormous amount about the forming of the human organism, how this process of formation develops out of the astral body. Inasmuch as the human being is organized for movement, for activity, he is built up, in reality, like a musical scale. Here (back of the shoulders) begins the tonic; then it passes over into the second, then into the third in the lower arms, where there are two bones because there are two thirds. This brings you to truths quite different from those which are considered nowadays to pertain to a real knowledge of the human being and quite a different course of teaching would really be necessary for one who is approaching medicine in the true sense.

The modern form of teaching has arisen from the fact that therapy has become nihilistic. Not only in the Viennese school of medicine has this been the case, but everywhere it is the same. Among the professors and lecturers who represent the various scientific faculties there have, at least, been serious minds who, in spite of all their shortsightedness, were, at any rate, scientific. At all events a certain earnestness was present. But when one comes to those who lecture about remedies, the earnestness ceases. The lecturer himself has no fundamental belief in what he is lecturing about. The earnestness stops at the point where the therapy begins.

From where, then, is the will to heal to proceed? It must proceed from a course of medical studies such as I outlined in connection with the course given at Christmas, where I spoke of what the sequence of studies should be. That, of course, is very different from the things that go on today and do not lead to a real art of medicine. In most cases, the practitioner has to learn things by dint of great effort when he has left his medical school. This is often not an altogether easy matter because the things he has learned are not only useless but actually harmful to him. He cannot see the real process of disease because all sorts of things are memorized in his head and he cannot see the process of disease in its reality. That is the one side.

But now, you are a group of young physicians. In the spiritual sense you have to be something more. The best way to attain that would be to say: Leave all medical studies alone, there is no true medical faculty today where you can study medicine in the real sense—come here and learn the essentials. In the radical sense, that is what one would say. But where would you be then? The world would reject you, would not recognize you as physicians. The only course open to the young physician is to go through the whole thing and then be healed by what he can learn of medicine here. With all the repugnance that you may feel, you must take the orthodox and regular course of study. There is no other alternative; it is absolutely necessary. That is the other side of the picture.

People like magnetic healers and amateurs who dabble in medicine abuse the university schools, but that is no use at all. Those who know how things are and who are led by experience to real understanding—they will be the true pioneers of reasonable medical study. This should be your endeavor: to awaken public opinion about the state of affairs. You realize, of course, that it is not you alone who speak as you have done. There are many physicians who speak in the same way, but they need what can be given here. And why? When one is an intelligent person today and becomes a physician, having passed through the university, one can, of course, criticize orthodox medicine. One has passed through the whole thing and knows what one lacks. But this knowledge can become effective only when one has got something to put in its place. Only then can it be effective. This, of course, is the other side. And so you must not take what I am saying here in the sense that I have any desire to hold back young physicians from completing their study. Bad as it may be, it is still necessary today to eat the bitter apple. When it is possible to speak on the platform of things which ought not to be—then and only then will there be a gradual improvement.

In this connection, you see, there is still a great deal to be done. I think I have already told the story of how I was once invited to speak about some medical subject to a group of physicians in Zurich. A professor of gynecology was also there. I saw that he had come with the attitude: “Well, we will listen to this lunatic so that at least we can abuse him, being justified by the fact that we did actually hear what he had to say” He came quite honestly in order to be amused by listening to a lunatic. His manner grew stranger and stranger and he listened in a most peculiar way. It was very unpleasant for him to find that he was not listening to a lunatic, that it could not all be put down as pure nonsense. I myself found it most amusing. I said to him: “This has made a strange impression on you, professor.” He replied: “Yes, one simply cannot speak about it. It is decidedly a different point of view.” It is, after all, a sign of progress when one gets to the point where people say: “It is a different point of view.”

What is it that has arisen by the side of scientific medicine which, after all, still towers above anything that has been achieved by the medicine of amateurs? I know that laymen have made progress. But it amounts to nothing. The valve in a steam engine was invented by a small boy one day when he was bored. One could not say of him that he was really capable of constructing engines because he invented the valve. Those who abuse scientific medicine today are really not justified in abusing it for they are talking about something of which they have no knowledge. What we have to achieve is not to mix up anthroposophical conceptions in medicine with what is already in existence. If in doing so we succeed in showing that we are sincere and serious, then great progress will have been achieved.

As you are young, I would like especially to lay this on your hearts. Let the aim of all the esotericism you receive be to make you capable of working also in the world, so that the real will to heal may unfold. Your aim cannot be to shut yourselves off, each one in the chamber of his heart. You must work to the end that medicine shall make real progress, just as the aim of educators is to enable education to make progress.

It is not possible for me to speak in detail of how most things that go on today in medical studies are really not essential for the understanding of the healthy and the sick human being. But if you study what I have given in the various lecture courses and cycles, you will find it. Suppose when a baby is born we were to ask ourselves how it should be fed, imagining that it is not possible to feed a baby properly before one has given him some idea about the nature of the foodstuffs: so it is with many things today. What I mean to convey is that one should have the intuition to understand a process spiritually, not physically. In diagnosis it is often more necessary to go back to the early causes which may lie at a definite time, very far back in the case of some patients. Methods are taught today for recognizing the condition of the diseased or the healthy organism at the actual time when the patient comes. But what is lacking is the kind of thinking which enables one to say to the patient: Fifty years ago this or that happened to you and that is the primary cause of your illness. As a rule, physicians depend upon what the patient himself says, and that is unreliable. The first cause is the external cause—it comes from outside. A physician in Christiania once brought a man of sixty to me. He had all kinds of eczema which it was easy to diagnose. But nothing that was applied was any help. The physician brought him to me, and the state of things was quite clear—I mention one example from hundreds—if one is to help in such a case, one must know the real starting point. In this case it was not very difficult. I very soon discovered that thirty or thirty-five years previously the man must have suffered from severe poisoning. This was still working in him. I told him to try and remember what had happened to him thirty-five years before. He told me that nobody had yet asked him such a thing. He said that he was in school and beside his classroom there had been a chemical laboratory where he had seen a glass containing liquid. He was thirsty and he drank the liquid. It was hydrochloric acid and he was severely poisoned.

It is very important to know such things. They lead one beyond the condition of the moment. Thus it is often important, for example, with certain conditions of hysteria, to know whether the person concerned has undergone the shock of having been nearly drowned. These things must be gone into. We go into them quite naturally when we have real sympathy for the human being whom we want to heal, and all medicine must take its start from sympathy with the human being. If this sympathy is lacking, the most significant things will be forgotten. That is what must be remembered in this direction.

Do all of you intend to come tomorrow? If so, we will say more about these things. I wanted now—without giving any explanation, for that I will do tomorrow—to give you certain lines which may become a central meditation. If you think about these lines again and again they will help you to realize what is built into the human being out of the cosmos, out of the earth's periphery, and by earthly forces. If you ask yourselves in connection with the formation of the eye: How is the eye formed from the cosmos?—if you ask yourselves how a lung is formed out of the forces of the earth's periphery, out of the planetary forces moving in the elements of air and water—if you ask how metabolism in the human being arises in connection with the earthly—then, if you will meditate on these questions in the light of the following lines, you will learn to look into the real nature of the human being.

I should like first to say a few words about the verse I wrote on the blackboard yesterday at the end of the lecture. It begins:

If we want really to understand the being of man for the purposes of treatment, we must be absolutely clear about the fact that we cannot take into consideration only what binds the human being to the earth, for that is of importance only in the very first years of childhood, up to the time of the change of teeth, and then no longer. After the change of teeth we have to consider those forces which really organize the human being away from the earth. For this purpose he has his etheric body and the etheric body is essentially different from the physical body. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is not. The physical body strives towards the earth, the etheric body away from the earth in all directions, in all directions of cosmic space. You include the universe when you study the physical body and the etheric body of man. The physical body is inwardly connected with the earth, the etheric body with everything that lies in the perceptible universe around the earth. So that you can think of all the forces which work upon the physical body as being forces which draw the human being to the earth, and all those forces which work upon the etheric body as forces which draw the human being away from the earth.

These forces exist and work in the human being. Therefore one cannot really say that the human being takes in some substance which was first outside and is then within him. It is not so. These centrifugal forces are working within the human being and because of this the substance immediately falls within the realm of the whole universe, of the whole visible universe.

Then, in regard to the astral body of man, you must picture to yourselves that it really comes from the realm of the spaceless; it merely assumes the form of spatial activity.

And when you come to the ego, you really can make no picture at all. The ego works neither from above nor from below; it works in such a way that one simply cannot make a diagram of it. The ego works only through the flow of time, through the continuity of time. What proceeds from the ego organization of man cannot be put into a picture. It is a reality at every point; it neither streams in nor streams out, it works in the purely qualitative sense.

When we look out into the worlds of the ether it is as if, with our etheric body, we were always losing ourselves in these worlds, but all the time the astral is streaming in towards us—the astral that is also not spatial but works as if it came towards us from the periphery of the universe. And now suppose that we have to do with vegetable protein in food. In the first place, vegetable protein has heaviness; in the second place, as protein, it strives towards the cosmos. When you introduce vegetable protein into the human organism the other two kinds of forces immediately begin to work on it—the forces which work in from all directions and those forces which as the forces of the astral work in from beyond space, as it were, upon this protein. And now suppose everything that might work in this way upon the human being were only capable of making him into a round, spherical body. You find the form which the working of these forces produce—the forces streaming outwards from and into the earth—you find this form in the bird's egg. These forces take shape in the egg. Why is it that not merely an egg-like form but a form with definite configuration is produced from an egg? If only those forces were at work of which I have just told you, all that could happen would be a completion of the egg shape. The bird would be complete when the egg is complete. But a bird has a very definite shape and has it because, in the first place, the moon circles round the earth. What I am saying about the bird also applies to the human being. If it were a case of the moon alone circling around the earth, no bird would arise, but what would happen would be this—that the egg shell would get soft and fall away and a spherical being would emerge, a spherical being consisting essentially of protein. Now the moon does not only circle around the earth, but there are all kinds of different constellations in space. The moon is always passing these constellations, and as it passes them it modifies the forces which proceed from them. Picture to yourselves that the moon is passing the Pleiades. The egg is then exposed to the forces which are the result of the in-streaming of the Pleiades and this in-streaming is modified by the moon. From the Pleiades there streams a force which is modified by the moon which is standing in front of them and exercising its influence, and as a result of this there arises the head of the bird. Therefore we can say that the bird's head is formed from the cosmos by cooperation between the planet moon and the fixed stars which are arranged in a special way in the Pleiades. The moon passes on and, let us say, it now stands in front of the constellation of Libra whose forces are again modified by the position of the moon. Here we have a different set of forces and besides this, the moon which was full moon when it stood in front of the Pleiades, has now, in front of Libra, become New Moon. The moon in connection with the constellation of Libra works differently from when it is working from a position in front of the Pleiades and the effect upon the egg is the formation of the bird's tail. The rest lies in between. So, if you want to study the form of the bird you must study how the moon passes by the cosmic constellations.

What is a person who has knowledge of earthly conditions able to say about the form of man, or, for that matter, of any living being? He can only say: Yes, of course, the Eagle has a definite form, the vulture has a definite form, the kangaroo has a definite form, and so on. Why have they these particular forms? If you remain at a standstill within the earthly world, as science does, there is only one answer: The animal has inherited its form from its ancestors. Thought can find no other answer. This answer is just like the logic of the saying: Penury comes from poverty. But this is no explanation at all. You must go further back. Those ancestors received it from their ancestors, and so you go on, in a vicious circle. We must study the cosmic forces and constellations of the stars if we are to have any understanding of the form of a living being.

But this is not all that I have to say. If only these things happened, very beautifully developed beings would be produced but they would all of them be like jellyfish, as the human being actually was in far past epochs of the earth. In the Atlantean epoch the human being was a kind of jellyfish. This was because the only substance he could absorb was in a plastic, fluid state, and out of this he was able to build up his physical body. The reason he was able to incorporate into himself potassium, sodium, and the other substances is because the other planets of our system, as well as the moon, pass through Libra, Aries, Taurus and so on, and they member into us those things that enable us to have the true form of man. In the formation of the human head, the influence of the moon is also united with the forces that go out from Mercury and Venus and the constellations into which they enter with the other planets. If these other constellations were not combined with the moon constellations, we should all be born as hydrocephalics. Organic metal is incorporated into us because the constellations of Mercury and Venus are working in conjunction with the moon constellation. We should get a terrible form of rickets, not only bow legs but legs that would be elastic, and our arms would be jelly-like structures if the planets that are more oriented to Saturn were not to combine with the moon constellation and if Saturn himself were not to work together with Jupiter and Mars. It is the sun which brings about the rhythmical balances between these two categories of planets.
The first two lines of the verse, therefore, should help you to understand how the human being is actually formed out of the cosmos. We shall not really progress until astronomy—but in the sense I have just indicated—is introduced into our medical science. Most of what is said about these things does not signify much. There is a muddle because things that happen in the human being are ascribed either to external, earthly circumstances, or to heredity. But when one comes down to details, the result is nil, because it is forgotten that the origin of the human form must be understood by a knowledge of the starry heavens in their qualitative aspect, in their inner aspect. The most important planet in the process of the formation of the human being is the moon. The moon must cooperate everywhere; the other planets modify the influence of the moon. The moon is the most important.

The verse continues:

Behold all that moves thee in Air
And thou wilt experience man's ensoulment.

Schau, was luftig dich bewegt,
Du erlebest Menschenbeseelung.

Now everything that works in the human etheric body, forms and shapes the human being. But the human being would be an automaton imbued with life, even if his form were as it is today, if only those forces which I have described to you were to work upon him. But the surroundings work upon him, all that lives and weave in the element of air around us. The ether and also the astrality of the cosmos weaves in the air. And just as externally our spatial form is developed under the influence of the moon in connection with the heavens, so we are inwardly ensouled because the sun is working together with the heavens. When the sun is standing in Leo, for example, it influences the cosmic forces (note well that we are not here speaking of the sun's own forces). It is then working, in the air, upon what affects us through our breathing and blood circulation, and is continually changing. The air changes as the sun passes on its course. Thereby the form becomes ensouled, so that we can really say: The constellations of the sun in the cosmos work in the airy element in the surroundings of the earth and this enables us to be beings of soul.

The verse continues:

Behold what is changed in the Earthly
And thou wilt discern the spiritualizing of man.

Schau, was irdisch sich wandelt:
Du erfassest Menschendurchgeistung.

By this metamorphosis is meant the gradual passing of the human physical body into the corpse. By the side of these words we write the sign of Saturn. Why? Now the Saturn forces work not only in the place where Saturn stands in the heavens. So far as space is concerned, Saturn is far away from the earth and the direct influences of this planet upon the human being from outside do not amount to very much. But Saturn has forces which are sucked, with tremendous strength, into the earth. The Saturn forces are sucked with tremendous strength into the earth and when we look beyond the earth, we really do not find these forces to any extent. But when we look at the earth herself, at what is on the surface and towards the interior of the earth, it is a different matter altogether. Suppose you see a snail crawling over the ground. The snail passes on but it leaves its slime behind it. The slime remains and you can follow the whole path taken by the snail. So it is with Saturn. He passes on, but wherever he has shone upon the earth he leaves his traces behind him—very, very definite traces If in much earlier epochs of earth evolution these traces had not remained as forces in the earth, we should have no lead. Lead originates from the primal substance, from the Saturn forces that are working in the earth, that were sucked in by the earth. In ancient times, when conditions were different, the lead forces came into being in the earth. These Saturn forces still have their afterworkings in the human being and it is an influence quite different from that of sun and moon.

We should not be beings of spirit, but beings of body and soul only, if these Saturn forces were not present. You can take this as a focus for thought, my dear friends. Nothing is without reason and purpose in the universe. Just ask yourselves: During what period of time has Saturn had opportunity to impregnate his forces into the earth from all directions? He has done this in the course of thirty years—the thirty years during which he circles around the sun and earth. This period is the time which the human being takes from his birth to the point where a certain phase of his life is concluded. When the human being has lived on the earth for thirty years, he reaches a certain point—a point which does not, of course, coincide exactly with the precise line taken by Saturn in the heavens—but during this period Saturn has impregnated the earth from every direction. When the human being is thirty years old, a second impregnation begins. Thus the influence of Saturn upon the whole earth is connected with the human being, and it is ultimately due to this fact that we have a body in which processes of demolition take place.

In the human organism there are not up-building forces alone. If it were so we should be without consciousness. Our vitality has to be damped down in a certain way. The destructive forces must always be there. The development of our organism not only advances but retrogresses and in this retrogression the unfolding of spiritual life takes place. Spiritual life does not proceed from life, but as life retro gresses the spiritual life finds a place in what, figuratively speaking, has been left empty. This process is due to the forces that arise in the earth as a result of impregnation by the Saturn forces. Therefore I placed the sign of Saturn by the side of the third couplet.

Now these Saturn forces by themselves would make little old and wizened people by the age of thirty. At the age of thirty we should begin to walk on crutches. Fichte was willing to respect the human being up to the age of thirty, but he once said that all thirty-year-olds ought to be done away with, for thereafter they are no longer able to cope with the world, they are weak cripples. The state of things Fichte was getting at, however, would irrevocably happen if Saturn were the only planet whose forces could unfold in the earth. But the Saturn forces are modified by the forces of Jupiter and of Mars. Because of these forces the demolition process up to the age of thirty is not so complete. Something still continues and we have to thank Mars and Jupiter for the fact that we are not old men at the age of thirty. If we want to understand why existence is still possible for the human being at the age of forty-five, we must look out into the cosmos.

Moon and Saturn, therefore, are the heavenly bodies which stand nearest to and farthest from us in the planetary system. The planetary system as it is today is really an inorganic structure because as far as Saturn [Translator's note: In the German, the text gives Jupiter, but the sense appears to indicate Saturn.] it came out of what was once a single cosmic body, whereas Uranus and Neptune came from beyond and joined themselves to it. As antiquity did not discover Uranus and Neptune, Saturn was taken to be the outermost planet and it is still justifiable today to go as far as Saturn. Astrologers still have an inkling of these things for they connect Uranus and Neptune only with those human qualities which transcend the personal, make a man a genius, go beyond the individual personal element—where he is concerned with things that no longer have to do with his personal development. All astrological statements are to this effect. Uranus and Neptune only come into play when a man becomes a genius or strives to transcend the human element, when his organization has the tendency to expand or decay too strongly. Uranus and Neptune are planets who have behaved like tramps in the universe and were then held captive by the planetary system belonging to our earth. The near and the far heavenly bodies regulate what is in the human being—the moon regulates his form, Saturn—working from the earth—the formless spiritual, inasmuch as Saturn breaks down form, dissolves it inwardly all the time. And the sun brings about rhythm between the two.

These things must be known. Primeval knowledge was aware that the same forces which correspond with our third couplet:

Behold what is changed in the Earthly
And thou wilt discern the spiritualizing of man,

are the same complex of forces which once expressed itself in the formation of lead. So that we can say: The forces which split up the physical organism in order that the spiritual may find a place, are also present in lead. Forces of disintegration have brought lead into existence. If we introduce lead into the human organism, splittings take place. If there is too little demolition going on within the human being and he needs certain processes of disintegration, we must give him lead in some form. Vice versa, if the condition is such that formative power is lacking, so that the human organism is becoming too “spongy” as it were, ancient knowledge teaches that the forces of the moon which in olden times streamed in to form the substance of silver, must be brought into play. The forces of silver can bring sponginess to form, they give support to the moon forces. The whole planetary system is connected with substances that are remedial:

Saturn = Lead
Jupiter = Tin
Mars = Iron
Sun = Gold
Venus = Copper
Mercury = Quicksilver
Moon = Silver.

These correspondences are treated with unbelievable superficiality nowadays, whereas in reality they are based upon most minute investigations which were carried on in the Ancient Mysteries. Such knowledge had been well and truly tested. Thorough investigation was made of Saturn's constellation when, for example, the forces of disintegration were insufficiently active in an organism and the vitality, the connective forces too strong, so that in his whole constitution the human being was suffering from a condition of organic stupor (for stupor need not necessarily affect only the sensory activity). It was observed that such a condition set in after a certain constellation of Saturn had taken place. Whereas Saturn had formerly worked strongly upon the human being, it was observed that he got into this condition when Saturn had set and could no longer completely unfold its forces. In such a case, lead was given as a remedy. Indications which are still to be found in dilettante books today are actually true, because, not knowing their origin, people have not been able to spoil them. If things had been different, speculation would have taken place and then we should most certainly have erroneous indications. They remain correct because men have lost the knowledge of their origin. They remain through tradition. Human thinking cannot spoil these truths.

What works from out of the earth upon the human being is, in reality, the force of Saturn which has been held fast, sucked in by the earth.

Just think what tremendous consequences these things have in the realm of human knowledge. You simply cannot connect the human being as studied by modern natural science with the moral life. The moral life hovers somewhere in the realm of abstraction. Especially in Protestantism which to the greatest extent of all has lost connection with the spiritual, with the cosmos; everything moral is segregated off, remains mere belief. The reality is that the human being is a creature who is cared for and fostered from out of the cosmos and the moral forces stream into him together with his astrality. Realization of this fact enables you to think of man as being inwardly united with the moral world. In true medicine you are led back to what makes man into a moral being, into a being who in his very organism can experience the moral and no longer merely heeds it as an external commandment.

This is what I wanted to say and I think you can take it away with you as a guide in many things. You can, of course, get the data from somewhere else. But how these data are circumstanced within the human organism—this you can only realize from such things as have now been said. You can read in any medical vade mecum that lead has this or that effect. You will understand why it has such effect if you really assimilate what has been said here. Because these things are drawn from the spiritual world they make far less claim upon the memory than upon man's physical power of assimilation. What a person learns lies in the realm of his own option, but what he experiences otherwise and what is impressed of itself into his memory, is actually there. You will notice something strange about what you assimilate in this way. If you do not constantly live with it in meditation you will soon sweat it off, so to speak. The peculiarity of spiritual truths is that they cannot, properly speaking, become memorized truths. You cannot retain in your organism what you ate a week previously. A ruminant can retain food, but only for a short time. In the ruminant there is organic imitation—a rudiment in the physical body of what otherwise lies entirely in the etheric body, namely, the memory. So far as spiritual truths are concerned, they must be experienced over and over again until they become habit—not retained as memory pictures but become habit. The essence of meditation is that we make an appeal to what, in reality, is present only in earliest childhood. In that period of life we have no picture memory and so our earliest experiences are forgotten. They live in a memory which functions through habit. And it is this form of memory that we must return to when we want inwardly to digest spiritual truths; otherwise we very quickly sweat them off.

Because you want to receive esoteric truths, an appeal must be made to your faculties of meditation and of inner assimilation; otherwise you will not be able to make use of what is given you. If you activate these faculties you will develop that delicate sensitivity which leads you, not instinctively but intuitively to perceive how a plant or stone may work in the human organism—things that are still expressed abstractly in the so-called Doctrine of Signatures. You will be developing not only your physical body but your etheric body too and what I have called memory through habit will give you a more delicate faculty of perception for what is contained in the physical environment and the faculty to behold the world as one to whom the questions about diseases of the lung, heart, etc., come from the human organism and the answers as to the remedial plants, minerals, etc., from the environment.

Question: Many of us want to have a far-reaching understanding of the position in which we find ourselves. We feel inwardly that Anthroposophical truths are something radical and that tremendous things depend upon their practical realization. How can that which we feel so deeply, be realized, and how can we reach an understanding of our own destiny and tasks for the future? We feel that we shall only be able to act truly if we get to understand our own karma in its wide connections and at the same time unfold the courage not to run away from it but to fulfill it in practice in the right way.

I think I hear something between the lines of what you have said and realize in what direction your feelings tend. You must enlarge your question if this is not so. The question you have put, touches, of course, something that must be known today. Especially just recently, there has been a great deal of talk about the end of Kali Yuga among circles of young people, more among the youth than among the old. The reason for this is that at the end of the nineteenth century a new age did indeed dawn in humanity. To begin with, the old life continues. When you have a ball and push it, it rolls and when you take your hand away it still goes on rolling. Similarly, what human beings experienced up to the end of the nineteenth century goes on rolling for the time being. But because the forces are no longer behind it, it is assuming worse forms than it took in the age that has passed away. But side by side with the continuance of the old time, an Age of Light is really dawning in the world, in concealment. An Age of Light is shining into the world and its first rays must be caught by Anthroposophy.

At the present time, of course, I am speaking much more radically about certain karmic relationships than I did before the Christmas Foundation. You will realize this from other lectures which I am giving now. Those who can be at the lecture this evening will find that certain human connections are actually spoken of. But for all that I cannot enter quite concretely into matters which would be beloved by sensationalism. Strict laws must invariably be observed in these things and I know that a certain desire—not necessarily born of a lust for sensation—might be satisfied if one could reveal to every individual his previous earthly life. But one cannot go as far as that. On the other hand certain points of view which may be significant, can be mentioned.

Taking human life in general today, we have, if I may put it so, two kinds of human beings. This is due to the fact that at certain times the spiritual evolution of humanity was different from what it was in other times. There was a wavelike movement, but the waves flowed not only one behind the other, but side by side with each other. For example, at a certain time the evolution of Western Christianity became more superficial, was externalized. It was not possible for human beings to get at the essence of what Christianity had to offer them. A reaction took place among the Kathares. And so there were living, side by side, men who lived very external lives and men who wanted to deepen themselves inwardly. Something similar happened, when, under the influence of Comenius and even earlier than that, the Moravian Brotherhoods were founded far into Hungary and Poland. All the time there were living together men whose souls were striving strongly for spirituality and men who were driven to externalization, simply by the karma of civilization. The fact that one person comes into the one group and another person into another, is connected with earlier karmic conditions. In modern times a great point is how far a man in his earlier incarnation belonged to the one or the other of these groups. Let us suppose, then, that a man is born today who lived in a phase of Christianity which was quite externalized. Such a man will be an entirely different person from one who, let us say, belonged to the Bohemian Moravian Brothers. In what does the difference consist?

We can only discover the essential characteristic of the conclusion of Kali Yuga when we go into the concrete circumstances—otherwise it all remains so much historical construction. The Age of Darkness lasted until the year 1899 when the Age of Light began. This mere fact does not tell us very much. We must enter into the concrete, spiritual facts. Men who are born at the end of Kali Yuga and who have strongly spiritual aspirations—this must not make for conceit, you must receive it simply into your store of knowledge—such men are, speaking in the widest sense, those who have been born from among the heretics, from among those who strove for inner deepening. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were brought down to the earth human beings who had not lived within the general stream of a Christianity that was being externalized, but in such sects which inserted themselves in this general stream and were striving for greater inwardness. What is the result?

Now when we are passing through the time between death and a new birth we learn, in a spiritual way, to know the Human All, just as here on earth we can study the World All that is outside the human being—the universe. The Human All is equally great and equally detailed, for the human being has within him just as much as the cosmos. We can study this with our forces of will when they have been transformed. We acquire an exact knowledge of the human being. Now there is a difference between the two groups of which I have just spoken. Those men who had entered more into externalization were not able, in their passage between death and a new birth, to enter into the spiritual world in the right way. In the spiritual world they passed thoughtlessly by the essentials of human nature. They were reborn and especially those people who were born in the second third of the nineteenth century were men of the kind who were thus externalized in their previous life. They brought into their earthly life no understanding of the human being and his nature. They regarded the body as an instrument for eating, drinking, walking, standing, sitting, but they were not interested in the human being in his reality because they had no interest of this kind in their life between death and a new birth. These were the people who were satisfied with materialism, because they felt no need for knowledge of the human being. The materialists who only want to have knowledge of matter understand the human being least of all.

It may be said with a peaceful conscience that those who are sitting here are reborn heretics (you must not ascribe this to yourselves as a virtue) heretics who experienced a strong urge between death and rebirth to fathom the nature of the human being and thus, subconsciously, to make the human being into a tremendous riddle. This comes to light in the urge to learn more than materialistic medicine has to offer and so, as you have said, an inner fulfillment of karma is certainly indicated. You must not take these things lightly, for if you were to do so you would fall into misunderstandings. You would not reach what you want to reach because you have had certain definite experiences between death and rebirth. And the result of not finding in earthly life that for which one has striven for centuries is not so that it merely makes one superficial. The Age has passed when people who have received between death and rebirth the truths concerning man can become superficial without being punished for it. At the present time young people are certainly not in a position to lead superficial lives and go Scot-free because they ruin themselves inwardly, ruin themselves organically.

The bad thing is not that people today are materialistic in their thoughts, that they chatter about monism and the like. That is not the really bad thing and they will easily get over it. What a man speaks is not of such great significance, but what then goes back into his feeling and will—this weaves in his organs, and if people do not deepen themselves spiritually they will not be able to sleep properly. That is the essential thing. If people undergo no such deepening today what will the consequence be? The consequence will be that hardly will the years 1940-1950 have come, and over greater and greater areas there will be widespread epidemics of sleeplessness. Such people will no longer be capable of working for civilization.

Therefore your karma leaves you no choice: either you leave it unheeded, as was possible before the end of Kali Yuga, or you must heed it. You must really take in all seriousness what I have now told you about the configuration of your karma. This, of course, remains a generalized description, but you can certainly find it useful if you frequently ponder the particular circumstances of your own life. You will discover something remarkable when you think about these special circumstances. The Youth Movement theorizes too much and consequently one hears too much of the same theories. If the young people would really study what youth today is experiencing—it is in truth very different from what the former generation experienced—the Youth Movement would at one bound take on a very different form. We are striving to give our Youth Movement here a concrete form so that it does not remain in the realm of abstraction.

I thought that today we would develop, in another direction, things that were mentioned yesterday. Perhaps this will help to give the questions you have put, and of which Dr. Wegman has told me, a right form.

Through your general destiny as human beings you are finding your way into the medical profession, into the vocation of healing. In this sphere you find a certain current to which, with full justification, you feel a kind of inner opposition. There are often objective reasons for this and you will understand what they are when you realize more and more that modern medicine is really like a foreign body in much of what constitutes European, Western civilization. We see for the first time how things really are when we realize that the reason why our natural science—and also a great deal else in modern spiritual life—has assumed its present form, is that people of importance in medicine and science within our culture were reincarnations of individualities from the Arabian-Mohammedan culture. These matters have recently been much spoken of at the Goetheanum. They are, indeed, connected with what is now happening in the Anthroposophical movement, but for the physicians, too, they are very important. I have said on various occasions that we must turn our attention to that center of spiritual culture which was at its prime when, in Europe, a kind of primitive spiritual life was prevailing under Charlemagne. Over in Asia there was flourishing the spiritual culture centers around Harun al Raschid (766–809). Many of the wise men of those days—including many physicians—were at his court. It was a time, as you will notice, when Christianity had already been working for some centuries.

Christianity itself appears in the world as something that can only be understood slowly and by degrees and, for an external, though not for an inner point of view, it is very strange that the deeper sides of Christianity have, in reality, not been fathomed at all by human beings. Christianity came into the world as an objective fact and the receptive faculties of men were not strong enough to develop the real essence of it in all directions. The objective consequences, therefore, are that Christianity is everywhere living in the sub-consciousness but that for three or four centuries it has been completely ruined by man. Human beings ruined Christianity through their intellect. As well as this there are the terribly dilettante institutions that have been set up in recent times at universities. Originally there were four traditional faculties, namely: philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. The rest that have been added have been based on utter unenlightenment and misunderstanding. Faculties for such subjects as political science, national economy and the like, originated from thoughts which no longer knew anything at all of the essentials.

What has not been understood at all is that, to begin with, four men were sent out by Christ to proclaim Christianity: Matthew, the theologian; Mark, the jurist; Luke, the physician; and John, the philosopher. This fact, which has very deep roots in the spiritual life (things at present are only in germ and have yet to blossom and bear fruit), is also connected with the realization that the texts of the four Gospels cannot completely tally because the one is written from the standpoint of the theologian, the other from the standpoint of the philosopher, a third from the standpoint of the jurist, and a fourth from the standpoint of the physician. This must be thoroughly understood. And because it has not been understood, because the Luke Gospel has not yet been accepted as a guide for the inner will-to-healing, there is no truly Christian will-to-healing in modern thought. There is, instead, the attitude that has crept into spiritual culture through Arabism which has gripped Christianity like a pair of forceps. It is very interesting that Christianity, which originated in Asia, came across to Europe and spread abroad in Europe.

But now just think of the Court of Harun al Raschid, where ancient medicine flourished. The Old Mystery Wisdom, still preserved in tradition, was living in the existing knowledge concerning the being of man. There were two men at that court: Harun al Raschid himself, the organizer of the great academy of spiritual life which grew and developed under his influence; and another, who in earlier times had been an initiate. In the days of Harun al Raschid the initiation did not come to the surface. Harun al Raschid

reincarnated as Lord Bacon of Verulam (1561–1626) and with his kind of thinking which was thoroughly steeped in Arabism, he renewed the natural-scientific thinking, from the West. Such was the path he took in his life between death and rebirth. If you would study Lord Bacon you would find how greatly medicine was influenced thereby. Indeed you would be amazed. The other man, the initiate, was reborn in the soul of Amos Comenius (1592–1670). Comenius' life was one of aspiration towards the spirit, but he turned everything into intellectual conceptions.

Again, another personality in Arabism—he did not live at exactly the same time as Harun al Raschid, but he played a part in the battle of Zeres de la Frontera—was reborn as Charles Darwin (1809–1882). And so the influences that are working in natural science and especially in medicine, are re-embodiments of ancient conceptions from which Christianity was excluded. Such conceptions did not constitute an evolution of Christianity, but Christianity was excluded as Arabism embraced Europe in its fold. Medicine itself was most of all affected in this sense. The impulse which the Luke Gospel can give to medicine has still to be absorbed. To this end you must take with the very greatest earnestness what I said yesterday about understanding the being of man from out of the cosmos and then you will find your true bearings in the tasks which your karma sets you today.

Let us try to picture medicine as it was at the Court of Harun al Raschid. On the one side it contained the heritage of the Hippocratic mode of thinking. Those who have read the first course of lectures to physicians given by me here will perhaps remember that I referred to Hippocrates as being the last man who healed on the basis of the medical wisdom of the Ancient Mysteries. Over in Asia, during the transition to Hippocratic medicine, there came, from northeastern Asia, a strong influence from Mongolian methods of healing. Very much was introduced against which not only European thought but the inner nature of the human being himself could not help rebelling. The inner nature of man was not in harmony with the Mongolian-Tartar influence which thus entered into medical thinking. The reason can be found if we can understand the human being from a fundamental, cosmic point of view.

In the book Occult Science, evolution is described through the Saturn, Sun, Moon phases, followed by the phase of Earth evolution proper. The human being has passed through all these stages of evolution and from what has been said in these lectures you will have learned that there is, firstly, the stream of heredity which works in the model, and secondly, the stream of the individuality which comes from earlier earthly lives. What works in heredity leads back to earlier times but is an Ahrimanic remnant, has dried up. This is what is contained in heredity and it is really with this factor alone that modern orthodox medicine is working. No heed is paid to the other stream that is elaborated in the second period of human life between the change of teeth and puberty—the period which even statistics show to be the most healthy because during it the human being is least prone to fall ill. Modern medicine does not really desire to be connected with health; it prefers to burrow about in disease. This expresses the condition of things very radically but so it is, in reality. To have a real connection with health this understanding of the whole cosmos in man must be brought to the point where the cosmos is actually perceived in the human being. For this we need a knowledge of the data which can enable us to have a picture of the cosmic evolution of man. The Old Saturn evolution, Old Sun evolution, Old Moon evolution—all are contained within the human being. And not until these three stages which lead up to the stage of Earth evolution are grasped is it possible to understand what we really have before us in the earthly human being. There are so many sciences today—but there is no real science concerning Saturn, Sun, Moon, because in our general experience of nature we can no longer remember what was contained in the instinctive, primal wisdom. We cannot even approach the wisdom that was still so alive in Hippocrates, because it has become mere phraseology. It must again be filled with life.

Significant words sound over to us from ancient times, but, generally speaking, no heed is paid to them, least of all is any heed paid to the wonderful indications they contain for medicine. There is a sentence in the Bible to the effect that the divine powers of the world regulated life on the basis of measure, number, and weight. But is there anyone today who regards such words as being anything more than a phrase suggesting the existence of an ancient, divine architect who worked according to the principles of measure, number and weight? A physician, however, has to find measure, number, and weight actually within the human being.

If we consider Saturn—and the Saturn evolution is contained in the human being—we naturally do not find this Saturn evolution as such in the human being as he actually is today, because all the evolutionary stages are synthetically united in him; they are present, but in such a way that the single stages by themselves disappear in the union, in the harmony. Illness, however, calls forth the one or the other phenomenon in its own particular form. And now, what I have described in Occult Science must really be grasped, not with the intellect alone, but in the way that makes us feel how during the Saturn evolution a cosmic warmth was all-pervading. Whenever we study the Saturn evolution we are led back to the element of warmth. Saturn is working in the human being and all that is described about the Saturn evolution—it is all working in the human being, but it does not come to light in earthly man when these evolutionary stages are intermingled within his being. It does, however, work when a human being is ill. A separation then takes place of what is otherwise united into a harmony. The Saturn element works on its own—in fever. We shall have a science of fever for the first time when we make this science of fever cosmic, when we can understand how Old Saturn is working in the human being; we must understand how, in the phenomenon of fever, the cosmos is working in by way of the Saturn forces which, spiritually speaking, have been sucked in by the earth. Realizing that the Saturn forces are distributed over the earth's surface, and appear in their strongest form in the lead forces, we shall get an inner understanding of fever. The divine world order regulates the world according to measure, and in the measure of the fever there is an expression of the measure prevailing in the world order. We must see the principle of measure in the phenomena of fever. Therefore, we must let these words work strongly in us:

Feel in the fever's measure
The Spirit-Gift of Saturn.

Fühle in des Fiebers Maß
Des Saturns Geistesgabe.

It is in very truth the spirit of the human being that makes its appearance in the fever which, in other circumstances, is submerged in the other elements. In fever, the spirit of man asserts itself, but here it is isolated. The most ancient constituent part of the being of man appears, in fever, at the surface of existence.

After the Saturn evolution came the Sun evolution, during which the element of warmth condensed to air on the one side, but, on the other, was rarefied to light. Light and air intermingle, they belong together. When we breathe we take in the rhythm of the air. We also take in the light, and light, in the occult sense, is not merely that which works in the eye. Light is a general expression for what works through the sun. The eye is merely the most characteristic representative of what works through the sun. In the Middle Ages, what works in the light was known as spiritual tincture. The Sun evolution is also within the human being of today and we feel it at once, not as something that is now working on the earth but as the after-working of the Old Sun, when with true feeling we lay our fingers on the pulse of a human being. The number of the pulse beats is an expression of the Old Sun evolution within us. Therefore as the second couplet, we have:

Feel in the pulse's number
The Soul-power of Sun.

Fühle in des Pulses Zahl
Der Sonne Seelenkraft.

Whether we act or do not act like this, my dear friends, is by no means a matter of indifference. Such a thing can be taken seriously, or not seriously. It makes a tremendous difference if you are really mindful of this when you proceed to read the temperature on the thermometer, if, having acquired the faculty by inner practice you think of the picture presented by evolution in the Saturn period. There, because everything lives in the flow of warmth, the whole world appears to you like a spirit gift in which, by way of warmth, love streams into every single thing; and if in this mood of devotion you realize that streaming love exists in the world through Saturn's warmth, if in this mood of reverent gratitude to the love and warmth-bestowing world creative power you recognize what is happening as you test the temperature, then you will have an intuition about what you ought to do.

Similarly we ought not to feel the pulse in the slipshod, mechanical way in which this is often done, but we should actually be able to steep ourselves in the cosmic rhythm that goes out from the sun. In feeling the pulse we should be able also to feel how the human being lives within all that spreads out light, air, and brightness, irradiating the world. Then again our whole being is poured into the will-to-heal. The will-to-heal cannot be acquired by inner commandment but only when the soul's attitude to the world is one of true devotion.

Then you can pass on to examine the other symptoms. You try to discover how far the substances that are working in the human being are not taking on the human form but are adhering to their own form. To what, for example, is diabetes due? In the healthy human being, the sugar is humanized; it does not work through its own force as sugar. The diabetic condition is due to the fact that in his very atoms the human being is too weak to permeate the sugar through and through. In his ego organization he is following the sugar forces—forces which belong to the world outside man. Think of all the forces that express themselves in diabetes, in the residues of the urine, which deposit themselves in the body in migraine and other conditions. Think of all the substances that appear in the body, following their own laws and not the laws of man's nature, and two questions will occur to you.

First of all, how is it possible that there can arise in man a tendency to let substance unfold its own forces within his organism? If this tendency had never been present, the Moon evolution would never have been able to intervene. The moon forces intervene when the substances within the human organism want to go their own way. When this happens the moon forces seize hold of the forces of the substances and, as moon forces, produce the form of man. The human form is permeated with the moon forces. Saturn is the giver of warmth, sun of rhythm, moon of form.

Thus it is, in the whole human being. Think of something which I always emphasize. The brain in us has not really its own weight. If we remove the brain we find that its weight is about 1,500 grams, but when it is in the body it weighs only approximately twenty grams, because, according to the principle of Archimedes, every body in water loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of water displaced. The brain in the cerebral fluid, displaces some of this fluid, acquires buoyancy, and presses down on its base with a weight of only approximately twenty grams. So it is with everything else. The point is that there must be, in the cosmos, forces which up to the necessary degree take away from the human being some of the weight of the substances within him. The weight must be regulated and the third couplet has to do with the weight of substance and its regulation by the cosmos. If you are investigating the workings of metabolism, you are, in reality, investigating whether some substance is manifesting under the influence of its own weight or whether the weight is regulated by the cosmos. This is the regulation by the divine spiritual world according to weight. And the third couplet is:

Feel in the weight of substance
The forming powers of Moon.

Fühle in des Stoffs Gewicht
Des Mondes Formenmacht.

Again with this attitude we should be able to feel, when we are speaking about rheumatism, gout, constipation, diabetes, migraine, about all conditions that are somehow connected with deposits which express the inherent weight of the substances, we should feel that something is entering into our experience that can be expressed in the words: Earthly gravity has laid hold of the human being. Much is contained in such words. You should permeate your investigations with such feelings.

Just think how abstractly, how brutally, how heedlessly investigations are made into these things today and you will realize what is really lacking and has been killed, in spite of the fact that Arabism did conserve much of the wisdom, conscientiousness and skill of ancient times. It has been killed because Moon, Sun and Saturn—this Trinity which was then disguised as Father, Son and Spirit—disappeared and was repudiated by Arabian thought in Mohammedanism with the words: “Away with this Trinity. Mohammed proclaims only one God!” (Mohammed himself did not say this, but the Angel who inspired him, did. He was not one of the best Angels although he was a very wise one.) And so we see that all differentiations in the world are allowed to disappear; things which ought to be known are darkened and our medicine has become an Arabian-Mohammedan medicine. European humanity was incapable of discovering the truth. Today these things must be known or mankind will go to pieces.

Feel in the fever's measure
The Spirit-gift of Saturn.
Feel in the pulse's number
The Soul-powers of Sun;
Feel in the weight of substance
The forming power of Moon;
Then wilt thou see in thy healing will
Earthly man's healing need.

Fühle in des Fiebers Maß
Des Saturns Geistesgabe.
Fühl in des Pulses Zahl
Der Sonne Seelenkraft.
Fühle in des Stoffs Gewicht
Des Mondes Formenmacht.
Dann schaust du in deinem Heilerwillen
Auch des Erdenmenschen Heilbedarf

If these things are grasped with real feeling, we shall realize how in the course of life on earth the individuality who comes from previous earthly lives takes hold of the model which proceeds from the stream of heredity. I have already told you of the struggle that takes place between what is shaped according to the model as the second human body in contrast to the first body that is really a model. If we know that we have in front of us a being who is really working himself to the surface, we also realize that what comes from earlier incarnations is working at this being. Those who permeate these things with their forces of heart and soul have the best possible opportunity to perceive or at least to get an inkling of what is coming over from earlier incarnations.

What is the cause of the condition that appears as illness? The healthy human being has his head organization, whose structure, even externally, is separated from the rest of the organization. The head is a bony structure in which the brain is enclosed. A continuation of the head is also contained in the bones. The head is self-contained and the rest of the human being is joined to it. But in the finer organization of man there is something that demarcates these two parts of his being. It is not so very easy to prove this fact by external anatomy and physiology, but there is a tremendous amount to be learned by studying the transformation of the foodstuffs, for instance, the fact that these foodstuffs do not, in their own form, pass over into the head organization, nor even into the nerves. There is a sharp boundary line which must not be crossed. What is it that must not cross this boundary?

Now from the beginning of earthly life there is working, most strongly of all in the head organization, the forces from earlier earthly lives which have been preserved through the period between birth and death. The forces of the child's individuality proceed from the head. But they must not pass down unsifted into the rest of the organism. A sieve must be there, an intermediate stratum. It is not externally visible but it exists in the organization. Nothing passes downwards unsifted. The lung as an organ or the liver as an organ must not be seized hold of directly by the forces that come from earlier incarnations. They cannot bear this. The human being is in a terrible condition when one is obliged to realize that the forces from earlier incarnations are getting to his liver without having passed through this sieve. In the period between death and a new birth the human individuality transforms into the new head organization the forces that were contained in lung and liver, in the metabolic-limb system, and in part, also, in the rhythmic system. The organization of limbs and metabolism is added for the first time, from outside. The human individuality (who is eternal) may only enter in this when the gate of death has been passed and when the physical, material part of it has fallen away. It is only the forces of the lung and the liver and other organs that pass through the gate of death. Thus, during earthly life, harm arises when the individuality enters into certain organs into which it ought not to enter. Therefore when we are faced with certain conditions of illness we have only to say to ourselves: Here the individuality from the previous earthly life is working on the organ which now ought only to be influenced by the present earthly life. The proper separation is not there. In the sick human being we see the individuality working over from previous earthly lives. This individuality which ought only to live itself out in the realm of the moral, in the realm of destiny, which ought to remain in what the human being does and experiences and ought not to touch the organization in the most earthly part of the human being—this individuality is working partly in the metabolic-limb system, partly in the rhythmic system, partly in the nerve and sense system because the boundary line has become faulty.

Our attitude to the human being is influenced by the fact that we know: In the diseased lung the individuality of the human being is working. When one looks at someone suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis one feels a deep and true sympathy, realizing that the materialism of our time is diverting him into the outer world and that his karma, which ought to live itself out in the moral sphere, in destiny, is, on account of our present spiritual life, thrusting him back into his own bodily nature. The individuality, instead of passing over into the realm of the moral, retreats suddenly, becomes organic, seizes hold of the lungs. The lungs are that part of the metabolic-limb system which is turned inwards, whereas the general direction of this system is outwards. Thus, the individuality, working over from earlier incarnations, takes hold directly of the corporeality.

These things are not so important as theories, but they lead one into the whole mood and attitude which generates the will-to-healing and then finds a real connection with man's need for healing. In our modern materialistic culture there is a sharp division between the one who heals and the one who needs healing. They do not get near to each other. There must arise a feeling for the eternal in the human being and out of this feeling there will develop the right relationship between the healer and the one who is to be healed. We realize then that we must always individualize in our treatment, for every human being has his own karma. In all healing measures we must individualize.

These things must work upon our hearts. They become esoteric when we allow them to work upon us. A document like the Luke Gospel contains the whole mood that we need in order to develop this feeling. Originally there actually were four faculties, a “Luke faculty” among them, but no trace of it exists today because our medicine is so strongly imbued with Arabism. Medicine will be Christianized when once again we reach the cosmic truths. The physician, too, must be conscious of his position in connection with these cosmic truths.

All this will indicate to you how strongly the forces of the moon influence the human form. When the moon forces in the human form work too irregularly we must realize that we heal by getting rid of this irregularity in the form and this can be done if we treat the patient in such a way that cosmic consciousness can find its place. But then, you see, the other side has to be understood. You have to look at something from outside. You cannot look at the eye from outside. The forces which enable us to look at things from outside give us our clear concepts, seeing to it that these clear concepts do not at once become abstraction but that our heart thinks with them. Our concepts must not be confused, but the heart must not be excluded from our abstract thinking. We must function as the whole human being; the heart must always think as well. We must not merely think abstractly about the world but realize that when we send out our thoughts the heart must be there as well. We must understand these forces of the heart which entwine themselves around the thoughts; we must understand once again how to use the staff of Mercury. And this is only possible if we pass over from the moon to Mercury. In connection with the general cultural life, that is what I meant in the lectures dealing with Raphael, for Raphael is the Christian Mercury. If you permeate yourselves with this kind of consciousness you will get the right feeling for your tasks when, as young people today, you enter into medicine.

Everywhere in the world there is cropping up the opposite of what ought to happen. It has appeared in a dreadful form recently in the domain of medicine. Forgive me for referring here to an everyday matter, but it is an example of how this opposite tendency is working. I refer to the principle of health insurance. It is the factor of the physician who is excluded here. In Germany there is art expression which conveys the exclusion of the human element in the physician. In truth, it is the physician who heals—not the products of medical science. But this expression suggests that medical science is something that floats around without the human being. The human being does not come into the picture. A rebuff is thereby given to karma. For karma does not work in such a way that it brings two human beings together blindly. Something of karma comes to light in the free choice of one's physician. But in the purely Ahrimanic character of health insurance arrangements, karma is put completely on one side and the human being is exposed to the Ahrimanic powers who fight against karma. When we come together again I will tell you how the Ahrimanic powers are setting out to nullify the karma of man so that they may attain their goal. This element is playing a direct part in such institutions as that of health insurance where individuals cannot always choose their own physician. I believe the expression ‘healing trade’ actually occurs in the law about health insurance. This shows the whole attitude that exists about health insurance and the conception of medicine as a trade. An illness of civilization is emerging symptomatically in our times—an illness that is making its appearance in many other domains, too, showing how urgently the physician's help is needed for its curing. But just where the physician himself is most acutely exposed to this illness of civilization, his real work is completely paralyzed. There is a terrible factor in such things as health insurance. Of course, it has its good side just as other things which crop up in the world to tempt and mislead. They seem plausible and are not displeasing. When the devil appears he always assumes the form of an angel. Anyone who sees the devil as such, in a vision, may be sure that it is not really the devil, for he always appears in angelic form. If the physician himself is exposed to an illness of civilization in its sharpest form, our culture cannot help becoming diseased. Therefore you must watch where your karma places you so that you do not work merely in the sphere of medicine regarded as a trade but in the sphere that is concerned with illness of the social organism.

In this direction, please formulate your questions. We will then meet once more tomorrow. I have heard you also have a certain need to hear how you can integrate yourselves into the general Youth Movement. We will still be able to supplement what I have said today but what I did bring today I wanted to bring because I thought that it could be necessary for you to know it and work with it.

After the fourth lecture of the Easter Course for physicians and
medical students, Dornach, April 21–25, 1924.

(Rudolf Steiner said the following in response to a question about
the grasping of the fluid man by imaginative perception.)

Now, of course, you will only be able to manage here if you proceed from a comprehensive view, and not from details. One would have to investigate such questions by proceeding from more comprehensive things and especially by meditating on some of the things which I already said. If we take the connections in nature in a comprehensive way—I will only speak of things which will gradually lead to imaginative thinking—we have the drop form. One generally thinks that a drop is held together from within, but it is also possible to think that it is formed from outside or from all sides. Then one has the circumference of the universe in the surface of a drop.

Of course, in these things one should realize that the imaginative idea must be true, and that the present-day ideas which one brings with one from one's general education diverge as far as is possible from the truth.

People have this idea today that there is an infinite space which has stars scattered in it. Now, to proceed from such an idea means that one is imagining things and is brutally ignoring everything but what one has made up in thought. Just take a report which was in the paper a little while ago, and which should be taken more seriously than one thinks; they were trying to show that the cosmos is not empty after a certain distance from the earth, but that it is solid and filled with crystallized nitrogen. Things are so confused today that such a view is possible. Of course, it is untrue, but in any case, these things show one how superficial the assumptions which have been derived from observation till now are. For today someone can just decide to imagine that we live here in an empty space with a slightly condensed earth at the center with solidified nitrogen all around, and that this simulates the starry heavens for us. Of course it is nonsense but it is true that if one reads the literature today one can pick up all kinds of ideas about the way the cosmos is constituted. This report on crystallized nitrogen might just as well have been an April fool's joke, and yet many people probably believe it. One is hardly anymore foolish if one believes this report than if one believes what is generally assumed today. The thinking which is accepted today is brutally materialistic for in reality the universe acts like a hollow sphere and as if forces from the periphery were going into it everywhere. One is really dealing with formations which can only be modified and differentiated in accordance with the stars, so that it is true that we have a copy of the configuration of the stars which we see outside in us. Thus we arrive at an imagination through the idea which our head shows us.

Speaking about heads, take a look at the way a bird is constructed. One is looking at a bird's structure or skeleton in the wrong way if one simply compares it with a whole mammal or human being. You can really only compare a bird's structure with a human head, and one has to imagine that one has a modified bird formation in the human head, and that the bird has the rest of its body attached in various ways as short appendages. Birds' legs are always stunted.

Now imagine that our drop is drawn out into a cylinder. If you expand the drop into a cylinder and you imagine that the part of the head which is differentiated by the cosmos remains, except that it becomes modified in many ways, because you draw the drop out into a cylinder, you then get the human torso. In order to imagine man's torso, one has to think that the skullcap is rudimentary. The third stage is to indent the cylinder here, and then you get the limb man. What I drew here is what you would initially get at the arms. You have to imagine that you expand this to get the arms, and that the second expansion is made through the creation of a second copy from within which comes from the moon. But let us omit the arms to make it easier. So you pass over from a sphere to an expansion and then to indentations. If you get used to making images through expansion and indentations in this way you are beginning to get what you need in order to really accustom your soul to work in the imaginative sphere. For basically all organized life consists of expansion and infolding and just think how wonderful that really is.

So let us say that I imagine a sphere, and then an elongated sphere; this is an expansion in an upwards direction which is brought about by the periphery. If you think that the earth and its forces here are a counterimage of the periphery then you have the earth under the human being as that which indents him. The cosmos expands up above and the earth indents down below. Thus an image is brought from the cosmos and man is indented by the earth. You can now ask what would happen if the earth were not beneath you and the starry heavens weren't over you, and you can answer this in an imaginative way And so if you want to form imaginations you should get used to looking at the universe as a whole when you pass over from solids to fluids, and you should not just try to sort of re-educate yourselves. You should gradually think: solid, sharp contours, whereas the fluidic element is always battling solids and is trying to insert them into the flow and the stream of the entire universe. And you will then get to the point of seeing this expansion and indentation everywhere, and you will thereupon look for counterimages.

Embryologists proceed in such a way that one never really knows why things develop the way that they do. One proceeds from an egg cell and passes over into a clump of cells, and one sees how the thing suddenly folds in and becomes a gastrula. One should realize that what is really happening here is that the cosmos has the possibility of working upon the surface and that the earth can work upon the infolding process.

Take an epidermis cell near the surface. They exist everywhere. Such a cell is here near the surface. The terrestrial principle which brings about the infolding continues to work in the human being. And so these terrestrial principles continue to work everywhere. Thereby there is always a tendency to direct fluidic things in people, so that things always move along in this way and so that an indentation is pushed along; indentation—push from behind, indentation—push from behind, this goes in various directions. Now imagine that this occurs as if some kind of fluid would move forward and become rigid. Look at an organ from this point of view. You can see rigidified, solidified and infolded things everywhere in it, and on the other hand, you can see its outward bulges. Thereby you arrive at the organ's form and at a view of how forces work from various sides, and you see that all these organs are part of a unity. However, you should realize that you must proceed from a quite particular point, namely, from the plastic element. Now, you have already pointed out that one should grasp forms through modeling. But actually try to get a feeling for what happens by taking some soft, plastic material or clay with one hand and pushing it forward with the other hand. Try to observe what is happening at the same time. You get the feeling that the idea of empty space is pure nonsense. Space has different kinds of forces in it everywhere and in this way you gradually learn to understand plastic things.

Now, of course, if you want to understand man in a plastic way you must be able to go to extremes. Thus I can think of a sphere here. I imagine that the sphere becomes expanded on one side and infolded on the other. But now imagine that you go further and that you push it in so far here that you go beyond the expansion; then you get two formations. But now imagine that the formations do not just become acted upon from one side. Imagine that you make an expansion, infolding, expansion, infolding, and then another infolding from below and an expansion on the top, and if you do this three times you get a model of the forms of the two lungs. Thus you can gradually see how the whole human being is connected with such forces within, and then you can go on to the following.

This is a very important idea, and its pathological, therapeutic significance will become completely clear when the book which Dr. Wegman and I are publishing appears (Fundamentals of Therapy). There one will be able to see the connection which exists between a fully developed organ and its function. Let us take the organ's function. This is something which is kept in connection with fluids and which is fluctuating continuously—the same thing which closed the organ off produces the activity. So that you can ask: What is the movement of juices in the stomach? It is something fluid which is basically the same thing as the stomach which has become solid. If you imagine that the movement of juices has become rigidified, you have the stomach. If this were not the case, no organ could be healed. You can only work upon a fluctuating organ and not upon a solid organ.

Silica acts in the same way that the human kidney does. If I give the silica which is in equisetum to a patient I build up the phantom of a kidney in his renal region. The phantom then replaces the astral activity at this place. This presses out old kidney substances and permits some new kidney substances to form from what is in flux, just as it forms there in any case after seven to eight years. However, one accelerates the process by producing this phantom. One should realize that an organ and the activity which forms it are always present together, and that this activity always rigidifies into the organ. This is where you encounter the fluidic human being.

But then you run into something else. You have to be able to press on to the idea that if I look at the solid human being I arrive at the pictures which one sees in anatomical books. But what we see there is only ten percent of the human being. As long as I look at these firm contours in the solid man a liver is a liver, a lung is a lung and a stomach is a stomach. But if I pass over to the fluidic man I will find that this stream of juices is particularly concentrated in the liver, let us say, and that it is constructing a liver out of fluids. However, every organ always wants to become the whole human being. This tendency is present in every organ in the fluid man. So that one should realize that if one cuts a liver out it remains a liver. But if I would take out the fluids with which the liver is created they would have the tendency to become a whole human being. You have to put this into an imagination: on the one side the tendency to take on contours, and on the other side the tendency to permeate everything.

If one is serious about these things they are really as follows. The meditation formulas are the beginning, and through them you will eventually be able to tell yourselves what I am telling you here. The beginning lies everywhere in the formulas, and they are the way to get into imagination oneself. Anyone who begins to meditate has an enormous inner desire in the beginning, but after a certain point when things begin to get serious something in him revolts, because the thing gets enormously complicated.

If one does not approach meditation in an extraordinarily serious way what happens to one is like what happens to someone who looks for Lucifer but sees a picture of Ahriman instead. Then the meditation works in such a way that one gets the opposite of what one is striving for. Or someone looks for Ahriman and sees a picture of Lucifer. That is the trouble. One usually becomes impatient and doesn't stick with it. It is not a question of time but of an intense application of patience, and then five minutes on a meditation can sometimes be a very long time. But it doesn't make any difference whether one loses one's patience in five months or in five minutes. You must have patience and then you will see that you can begin to understand things, and that you can pass over from the solid man to the fluid man.

If you then go on to the aeriform man you will need a musical principle. Here you have to understand the breathing process, and if you really meditate you will become attentive to your breath. The astral, aeriform man appears. You will begin to realize that most people go through life without any real self-knowledge. One learns to feel with one's breath. One of the things which happens first if one is in the habit of thinking in a mathematical or qualitative way is that one may suddenly ask oneself: Are you three halves? One feels as if one were three halves. Why is that? It is because one's breathing is beginning to make one feel that one has a threefold lung on one side and a twofold lung on the other. In this way one can ascend to the astral, aeriform element, by experiencing the proportions of one's inner structures through air.

A way to study the ego organization is to listen exactly to one's own speech. You can also get at the ego organization in a meditative way which ascends to a real understanding, if you take the skeleton of a dog or other mammal and concentrate very hard on its rear and front parts. One part is a modification of the other part. Then you have to pass over to cosmic aspects and think that the rear form was created by moon forces and the front one by sun forces and you should imagine how the sun looks at the moon, and then you have the animal's hindquarters on the moon side and its forequarters on the sun side. Then imagine that a modification of the sun and moon occurs so that man can stand upright and you will get a transformation. Thereby, the whole thing gets shifted up one level, and you can begin to grasp the ego organization. But you have to proceed in the following way: the spatial element must disappear into the plastic element, the plastic element into the musical element and the musical element into what has meaning.

If you proceed in this way, you are moving towards comprehensive things, and this is really the healthier way, because you can get completely confused the other way. You really have to start with these principles and not with the details.

I should still like to add something to what we have been studying, and afterwards to consider the more general theme to which certain of your questions relate.

I want to speak now of something that it is well to consider only after we have listened to what has been given here in the last few days. It is not well to give the general truths first but only to pass on to them when certain things have already been learned. Only so can general truths receive their proper coloring.

We will now picture to ourselves that each of the four members of man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego has its own special structure. The structure of physical body and etheric body is one of space and time. The structure of astral body and ego is purely spiritual. A purely spiritual structure is not governed by space and time. It is possible, nonetheless, to make a picture of the spiritual structure so that we can have a conception of it. This can be done in imaginative consciousness. Hold it firmly in your minds, my dear friends, that on the one side we have to do with a physical etheric structure which in the sleeping human being is separated from the structure of spirit and soul, and, on the other side, with the structure of spirit and soul.

In the sleeping human being we have a physical etheric structure which has sent out the ego and astral body, and again we have the structure of spirit and soul that is separated from physical body and etheric body. These two structures are very different from each other. The physical-etheric structure is differentiated into the single organs, as an organism that has, so to speak, driven out the single organs from the center of life. The astral body and ego structure have, however, been driven inwards from outside—it is as though space and time had been left free by this process. The essential thing is that the physical-etheric structure and the structure of spirit and soul are fundamentally different from one another. In the human being as he stands in the physical world in waking consciousness, the spirit and soul (astral body and ego) are inserted into the physical-etheric organization—to use a form of expression that is not absolutely accurate but enables us to visualize the state of things. To a certain degree they permeate each other. So that every physical organ that is warmed through and irradiated by the etheric body is also filled with life, inasmuch as the cosmos works through the etheric body, and in every physical organ ego organization and astral organization are working, when the human being is in waking consciousness.

And now think of the following: Suppose that astral organization and ego organization impress their own structure upon some organ or system of organs. In other words, something that ought to maintain its physical and etheric structure receives a spiritual structure, becomes an image of the astral and ego organization. This, speaking quite generally, is the cause of physical illnesses. Speaking generally, the cause of physical illnesses is that the body of the human being is becoming too spiritual, in some parts or as a whole. Hence, as was well-known in olden times, real and devoted study of the sick human being throws tremendous light upon knowledge of man as a being of spirit.

In ancient times quite a different idea prevailed of man's nature. Therefore I do not say the following in any sense for the purpose of suggesting that this conception should be re-adopted or made the basis for modern methods. In olden times, when conceptions of the human being were more robust, a man who held heretical views was burned, if such a fate was deemed necessary for the salvation of his soul. These heretics were burned for the salvation of their souls—so at least it was alleged. They were burned in order that they might be freed from what, after their death, would cause them the most terrible sufferings. This procedure was, in earlier times, the outcome of a form of vision; later on, of course, it assumed a really brutal form. Views about the human being were more robust and so it might happen that a certain preparation of melissa (balm mint) would be given to someone who might be regarded as healthy. When he took melissa that had been prepared in a certain way, his consciousness would become slightly dreamy. He became more dreamy than he was before taking the melissa preparation. In this condition, faint imaginations entered into his consciousness. If, for instance, a man was treated in a certain way with henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) he became very susceptible to inspirations. Such investigations revealed that if the solar plexus was stimulated by means of henbane, it was permeated with spirit; in such a case, astral body and ego organization take firm hold of the solar plexus. Or it was noticed that the whole blood supply of the cerebrum became stronger—to a slight extent, but the effect was very significant—by the administration of melissa juice, because the ego organization takes a firm hold by way of the cerebrum. And so the whole human being was tested for the purpose of finding out how he could become spiritual and of perceiving how the single organs could become more spiritual.

It is a preconceived notion to imagine that we think with the head. This is simply not true. We think with legs and with arms and the head beholds what is going on in the arms and legs and receives it into the pictures of thought. I said at Christmas that man would never have learned the law of angles if he had never walked. He would never have learned the mechanical laws of equilibrium if he had had no experience of them through his own center of gravity which lies in his subconsciousness. When we come to the astral body which unfolds these things in the subconsciousness, the human being appears to us to be extraordinarily wise, even if he is often a fool in the physical world, because the geometry that comes to expression in walking, for instance, is all known—if I may put it so—in the subconsciousness, and then perceived by the brain.

Now when the organization of spirit and soul takes too strong a hold of the physical-etheric organization, physical illness ensues. In former times, therefore, the spirit in the physical organs was investigated because everything that can be spoken of as a gift from above is spiritual, of the nature of spirit and soul. But a distinction has to be made here. What the human being received, in a purely spiritual way, as a gift from above, was called a gift and retained this name. But now take a substance like belladonna for example.

Whereas in ordinary plants the physical and etheric principles are at work, there are others where the cosmic astrality works very strongly from outside, where the spiritual element—either the astral or what corresponds in the cosmos to the ego organization—works upon plants or animals. Poisons are then produced instead of the gifts bestowed by the spirit. But the poisons are a true correlate of the spiritual because, in plants and animals, they are the element of cosmic astrality which transcends the plant nature proper. By administering henbane we lead over the astral contained in the warmth mantle of the earth (which marks the boundary of the atmosphere) into the solar plexus and thereby into the diaphragm of the human being. Melissa, which is not a poison in the real sense, produces a gentle working of the spiritual which shows itself only in a form of slight stupor. In melissa, the poisoning process is in statu nascendi. This leads to the principle: physical illness arises when the physical organism or its parts are becoming too strongly spiritual.

But a different condition may set in. It may happen that when a human being is in waking consciousness, the soul-spiritual structure of his astral body or ego organization is transferred with too much strength into some physical organ. But instead of impressing itself upon the physical organism the physical organism forces physical structure upon the structure of spirit and soul, so that when he is asleep the human being becomes, in his astral body and ego, an image of his physical and etheric body. He takes the physical structure into his astral body and ego.

Here we have the difference in the two forms of irregularities which may appear. Even to observation they differ quite essentially. When a human being is ill, the sick organ is, strange to say, spiritualized. It becomes clearer. As though from outside, from its surface inwards, it is laid hold of by spirituality. Long before any definite traces are noticeable in the color of the skin and the like, a sick man appears transparent—shall I say—to occult sight and the spirit and soul is pressing into the transparency.

We notice the opposite condition, where the organization of spirit and soul is taking on the structure of the physical and etheric, when a man in his life of soul and spirit is really asleep. Then he becomes a ghost, a fleeting, wavering ghost of his physical body. He remains like his physical body. He truly becomes a specter of his physical body, and all the crude experiments that are made by spiritualists in connection with manifestations, as they are called, are due to the fact that the spirit and soul in the medium is weakened. That is indeed obvious. In some hidden way, this is what happens. In a dark room the weakened astral body and ego can take on the forms of the organs to the point of visibility. The manifestations are real, but illicit.

Now all so-called mental diseases are due to the spirit and soul—astral body and ego organization—assuming the physical and etheric structure. All so-called mental illnesses are due to this. We may therefore say: Physical illnesses are due to the physical organism or its parts becoming spiritual. Mental illnesses are due to the astral body or ego organization, or one of their parts, taking form in the physical or etheric sense. This universal truth is a very good guiding principle.

These things have a bearing, too, upon questions put by individuals about the connection between medicine and pedagogy, for in the child's organism we have before us every grade between these two extremes. The astral and ego organization in one child will tend to make the physical and etheric body spiritual. In another child the tendency of the astral and ego organization will be to allow the physical and etheric to give them form. Between these two extremes there are all kinds of intermediate stages. This fundamental principle also comes to expression in the temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have a vehement tendency (not as in insanity but of a kind that is controllable) to assume forms belonging to the physical and etheric body, we have the melancholic temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have the tendency to impress their structure on the physical and etheric body, we have to do with the choleric temperament. The phlegmatic and sanguine temperaments lie in between. In the phlegmatic temperament the astral body and ego organization have a tendency, but only in a certain sense, to assume the structure of the physical and especially of the etheric body In the sanguine temperament, the vital principle in the etheric body is strongly influenced by the astral body. So this principle also comes to expression in the temperaments.

What, in radical cases, is the guiding principle for the physician, namely, knowledge of how the spirit and soul and physical-etheric are interlinked in the waking consciousness of a human being, is also a guiding principle for educators, although they have to deal with latent conditions. Pedagogy and medicine are mutual continuations, the one of the other.

Now what you have to do, my dear friends, is to strive with might and main to attain imagination in your conception of man's being. I should therefore like, in this connection, to give you a few fundamental indications.

The form of the human being in the embryonic state is familiar to you as a picture—or at any rate can become so. We know today what the embryo looks like in its earliest stages and the form it takes later on, and from this you can make a connected picture of the human being in the embryonic state. You can also form a connected picture of the human being during childhood. You must try to make both the first and second pictures as intense as possible, as though your thinking were actually touching them, so that it seems as if the embryo were tangible to your thinking and you were inwardly following its forms. Then, in your thoughts, expand the embryo to the size of the child in an equally intense mental picture which you can look at and observe. Then, inwardly metamorphosing the mental picture of the embryo, let it pass into the picture of the child. If you really carry this out, you will be aware of certain difficulties. You will feel: If I enlarge the head of the embryo to the size of a child's head, it becomes very big. I must compress it. I must also inwardly crystallize, as it were, all that in the embryo is still watery and fluid, being part of the fluid man so that it becomes the embryonic brain. Then you will have to stretch and give shape to the limbs in the embryonic state. Inwardly you will have to carry out an act of plastic activity by letting the unplastic limbs of the embryo pass over to become the limbs of the child. It is an extraordinarily interesting inner occupation to let the embryo pass over into childhood in inner contemplation.

Then, going further, you can make the same experiment with the child and the grown-up person. Here there will be greater difficulty. The differences between embryo and child are very considerable and you will have to be extremely active inwardly if you are to succeed. But when you compare childhood with the prime of life, the differences will not be so great. The difficulty will be to fit the one into the other. But if you succeed in this, the imagination of the human etheric body will actually come to birth within you, and comparatively soon.

Shove man's earliest time
[- the embryonic life -]
On into childhood,
And carry childhood on
Into the days of youth.
There will appear to you, condensed, Human ether being
Behind the body's structure.
[- physical body in its structure -]

Schiebe die Frühzeit
[ - Embryonalzeit -]
In des Kindes Alter,
Und des Kindes Alter In die Jugend Zeit.
Dir erscheint verdichtet Menschenäthersein
Hinter Körperwesen.
[ -physischer Leib in seiner Struktur-]

Here you have a guiding principle which you can use just as well as the others I have given during these lectures. But you must fully realize that the acquisition of imaginative consciousness demands effort. It is not to be attained by mere beckoning but only by strenuous work.

Now you can go still further. You can try to picture an old, sclerotic man—old men are, to a certain extent, sclerotic—feeling that you are touching him and in this act of spiritual touching you get the impression that he is really hollow. The impression you get when you touch an old, sclerotic man spiritually is not as if he were more solid, harder, but, on the contrary, as if he were sucking at you. In this spiritual touching the feeling is as if, in the physical world, you were to run a moistened finger along the foam of a breaking wave or along the surface of clay. This, as you know, gives the impression of suction. So it is, spiritually, with a sclerotic old man. You must develop this experience of touch in your visual picture of the old man. This applies not only to the visual act but to any one of the twelve senses, also to the sense of life (Lebenssinn). So you have a picture of age, with its density, which seems to exercise suction. And now just as in the first instance you let the picture of the embryonic period pass on into the picture of childhood and then into that of the prime of life, maturity—now let the picture of old age pass backwards. Picture the mature human being and let your touch experience of the aged man pass back into the picture of man in the prime of life, who does not seem to suck but stands in the world full of vigor. When you let the picture of the embryonic structure pass over into the structure of childhood, you carried out a spatial metamorphosis—what happens now is that with old age you have the impression of a being who has been hollowed out, who sucks all the time, and this hollow being seems to be filled with force and energy when you let the picture pass back into the age of maturity. Whereas the first picture of abounding strength is connected with an experience of being very slightly paralyzed, when the picture of the old man is let pass backwards, vigor seems again to come into his bones and into the whole structure of his solid organism. More care must be taken when this inner process is being carried out. And then the picture of the prime of life must be carried back to that of youth. This is an easier thing to do. We picture a man who already has one or two wrinkles and then let him be merged into the picture of a young, chubby-faced person. When we succeed in doing this, we get the impression of the etheric body being animated, beginning to ring and sound. This gives us an impression of the astral nature of the human being. And so you have a guiding principle for the ascent to inspiration.

Shove old age's density
Back into the prime of life,
And the prime of life
Back into the life of youth.
There will ring forth in cosmic tones The working of man's soul
[—astral body—]
Out of the Ether life.

Schiebe die Altersdichte In die Menschenreifezeit,
Und das reife Alter
In das Jugendleben.
Dir ertönt in Weltenklängen Menschenseelenwirken
[ - der Astralleib also -]
Aus dem Ätherleben.

You will realize from what I have told you that guiding lines for meditation are not given out as a commandment but are based upon things that can be understood. When a human being is guided to meditation in the proper way, conditions are not as they once were in the ancient East, when both the upbringing of children and the development of old age rested upon quite different foundations. When somebody is given meditations today, they are of such a form that he realizes and understands what he is doing with himself. In the East the child was under the guidance of his Dada. This meant that the child was taught and brought up according to the Dada's mode of life. The child learned no more than he was able to learn by watching the Dada. When a grown-up man wished to make progress, he had his Guru. And the Guru taught in no other way than: thus it is and thus it shall be done. The difference in our Western civilization is that an appeal is always made to the free spiritual activity of the human being, so that he is fully aware of what he is doing. He also has insight into how inspiration arises.

If with the powers of healthy human intelligence we have grasped how physical illness and spiritual illness work—and the things I have told you today can be understood by healthy human intelligence—if we go on to realize what we should achieve in meditation, we have reached, with the powers of healthy human intelligence, the boundary of what can be attained. Healthy human intelligence can acquire everything that proceeds from Anthroposophy. When things begin that are not to be understood by healthy human intelligence, then it is right for this intelligence to work only so far as that boundary, and no farther. It is like standing by an lake—a boundary is there, too. We look towards it from the shore. Truly, the healthy human intelligence leads right up to this boundary. No criticism ought to be leveled at you for spreading an obscure, mystical view of the world, for it should be one that is attainable by all healthy human intelligence. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, an article that was written about the lecture, said: Healthy human intelligence can comprehend nothing whatever about the spiritual world and a form of intelligence which does grasp something about the spiritual world is ill; it is not healthy. This was what was held up against me.

I want still to say something else. Your medical studies oblige you to look very intimately into the whole nature and being of man and as young men and women you are in a special position. In all seriousness we must take the fact that the Kali Yuga has passed, that we have entered a new Age of Light although for the reason that the old continues through inertia, humanity is still living in the darkness. From the spiritual universe, light is shining in; as human beings, we are entering an Age of Light; only we must make ourselves fit to realize the intentions of this Age of Light. Young people are especially predestined for this and if with the necessary earnestness they unfold a definite consciousness of why they have been born precisely at the beginning of the Age of Light, it will be possible for them to adjust themselves to what is really demanded in the sense of the true evolution of humanity. And what is demanded now is that we shall look into the human being if we want to explain the world, just as formerly men looked at nature in order to see how the human being is built up out of the forces and processes of nature. Man and his being will have to be understood and the single nature processes as specializations, one-sided processes of what is going on within the human being. When this point is reached a certain inward quality in all the activities of human feeling and the human mind will arise—a quality that has been sought for, although in a rather tumultuous fashion.

Think only of how youth began to deify nature when the Youth Movement of the Age of Light began. It was all abstract, however vitally the impulse may have been felt. The true path of spiritual development for the young man or woman today must lead to the unfolding of intimate feelings for his connection, as a human being, with the world—there must be intimate, tender feelings and what the young absorb spiritually must no longer be a science for the intellect. In that he remains cold—it has always been so. Science must take a form in which every stage that is reached means that one becomes a different human being in feeling and in mind, and acquainted with something that has been forgotten. We also learned to know nature before we came down into the physical world. But then, nature had a different appearance. When a young human being today is led to a coarse, robust, external way of looking at things, the deathblow is struck at what he experienced in pre-earthly existence. If we could succeed in feeling that an old acquaintance of pre-earthly life had entered into our external, material way of looking at things, then feeling would flow into knowledge and understanding. And like a bloodstream, a spiritual bloodstream, this must go through the whole of scientific life, above all through the whole education and teaching of the human being. It is this intimacy with reality that must be acquired in science. Truly the modern age was lacking in understanding in this respect.

Comparatively early in my life I tried to show how the human being, when he confronts the outer world of sense, really has only the half reality, and how he only reaches the whole reality when he unites what arises within him with the outer, material reality. And to begin with, because the times were quite different then—things have always to be prepared—I had to present it in terms of a theory of knowledge. When you read my little book Truth and Science (Mercury Press, 1993), try to let the spiritual rise up into the mind and heart, the spiritual that wells forth from within. Thereby the first step is taken towards this “making inward” of science, especially towards a heart-filled receptivity to world reality. The physician has particular opportunities for this intimate experiencing of reality and therefore the physician, just because he is a physician, can be the person who can make the abstractness prevalent in the other Youth Movement composed of those who are not destined to be physicians, more concrete, more full of heart. A young person today who has some real knowledge of medicine has the advantage when he comes together with someone else who knows nothing but jurisprudence and is, consequently, to be pitied. Medicine can be deepened as we are deepening it here, but with law this is quite impossible. Even up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, something of the spirit still remained in medicine; in jurisprudence spirituality ceased far away in the Middle Ages, when men no longer even dreamed of the spirit and had nothing but recorded statutes. The physician who from the very beginning comes to grips with the most concrete facts of life can have an extraordinarily good effect upon the rest of the youth.

It would be good if you, as physicians, would interest yourselves, too, when opportunity arises, in the educational work that is being done in the Anthroposophical movement. There would be nothing to prevent this if you are in real earnest. The information contained in the Waldorf School Seminary courses cannot be given to everyone, but when somebody shows genuine interest there is nothing against your getting these courses if you really study them from the medical point of view, remembering the close relationship that existed in ancient times between healing and education.

In these days we have quite got away from the conception of man as a being who comes into earthly life burdened with sin, because the modern mind simply does not know what sin really is. What is it that took form as the notion of sin? It is what I have spoken of here as the law of heredity—this is the inherited sin. Individual sin, too, is something that the human being has to overcome in the second half of his life. He has to overcome the sinful model, which comes from heredity. We can also say the sick model, according to ancient conceptions. If the human being were to retain, as his body, what works in his model up to the change of teeth, he would carry it within him his whole life long and at nine years of age he would be a man—how shall I put it?—the whole of his skin would be covered with a kind of moist eczema and if the condition continued he would get little cavities all over his body, would look like a leper, and if he lived on at all the flesh would fall away from his bones. Man is born as a sick being into the world and to educate him, that is to say, to understand and guide what is working according to the model, is the same thing as a mild healing process. Within the Youth Movement and when speaking of education, you should consider yourselves as healers. You can indicate the remedies—which in the first place, of course, remain a spiritual matter—but can certainly be applied physically when a child's condition becomes pathological. In pedagogy, too, there is an art of healing, only it is on another level, another plane. On the other hand, when a patient gives no help at all by working with any guiding principle we may give him for his own subjective consciousness, for the understanding of his illness, for pessimism or optimism in his conception of life—when we simply cannot work educationally—it is exceedingly difficult to help him medically. If the patient—I do not say that he must have blind faith in the remedy for that would be an exaggeration—but if the patient, simply through the individuality of the physician, is brought to a point where he feels the physician's will-to-heal, the reflex action in him is that he will be filled with the will to become healthy. This interplay of the will-to-heal and the will to be healthy plays a tremendous part in the therapeutic process. We can therefore say that there is a reflection of education in healing, and in education a reflection of healing.

Very much depends today upon human beings in the world coming together in the right consciousness. If, therefore, medical youth comes together with the other youth in the right consciousness, the result will certainly be that the medical youth can work very fruitfully on the others. But what is so necessary is to sharpen the consciousness in both directions.

These are the things that I would fain have laid into your souls and hearts, now that you have come here again. I hope they have helped to strengthen still more the bonds between your souls and the Goetheanum and that even in such a concrete domain as that of medicine, the Goetheanum will find human beings who carry out into the world those things that can be found here. You will think rightly about this if you will also feel yourselves as part of the Goetheanum and will often turn your thoughts to what the Goetheanum desires for the world and the growth of civilization. And so the ties of heart that you can form with the Goetheanum may be a very great help to you in the tasks before you. This is what I have had in mind in giving these more intimate addresses and I believe that we shall be able to achieve much if, after what must be the last lecture now, you will carry this feeling out into the world. Thereby we shall also remain together and the Goetheanum will feel itself a center with a definite task. Then the Goetheanum will be a real Goetheanum and you, true Goetheanists. And at the same time, out yonder in the world you will be the supporting pillars which the Goetheanum needs. If things go on in this way, everything will be well.

The first specialized course for medical practitioners given by Rudolf Steiner took place at Easter, 1920. Several medical students also participated: Helene von Grunelius (1897–1936), Manfred von Kries (1899–1984), Henk and Madeleine [‘Maddy’] van Deventer (1888–1983). At an advanced age, Madeleine van Deventer wrote an article in which she recorded her memories: Die anthroposophisch-medizinische Bewegung in den verschiedenen Etappen ihrer Entwicklung [The Anthroposophical Medical Movement in its Various Stages of Development] (Arlesheim, 1982). The following material was taken from her article and also from Wer war Ita Wegman [Who was Ita Wegman] Volume I, by J. E. Zeylmans van Emmichoven, 1990.[1]

From the beginning, a number of medical students took part in the medical courses. [...] During the third course which took place in the autumn of 1922 in Stuttgart, there were about fifteen students. We often gathered in the cafés of Stuttgart. Intense conversations took place there. It had been clear to us for quite some time already, that although Rudolf Steiner's medical lectures satisfied our need for knowledge, they did not meet our humanity. We had repeatedly asked the physicians of the Stuttgart Clinic to request of Rudolf Steiner that he give other lectures to deal with the more human-moral aspect. The answer was: “We can't do that because we haven't yet fully understood the value of what he has already given us.” Where-upon we answered: “We can't wait for that. Who knows how long Rudolf Steiner will still be among us.” We knew, with that assurance which youth may have, that his time was measured, and that it would be unpardonable if he did not hear the questions which would enable him to deal with the more intimate aspect of medical work. When we realized that the path via the ‘older physicians’ led nowhere, we decided to appeal to Rudolf Steiner directly. So after discussing it amongst ourselves we decided to submit the following question at the end of the Stuttgart Course, during the time set aside for questions: “Is it not possible to show us students a way of becoming anthroposophical physicians even while we are still students?” The paper with the question on it was ignored by the discussion leader. It floated down under the table. Rudolf Steiner asked, “What is that note?” He was told, “It is a question from some students.” The only thing left to us was to turn to Rudolf Steiner directly. After the discussion we asked for a meeting with him and were asked to come the next day. Of the fifteen students, only four of us were present the next day (October 29, 1922) in front of Rudolf Steiner's apartment [...]

We brought forth our concern as well as we could. We said quite openly that we weren't able to do much with the lectures in this cycle; they seemed to us to be directed entirely toward the older physicians. We hoped to be able to understand more later, but for now we were unable to find our way there. We were searching more for what was human and moral. One of us mentioned medical school experiences. To get anything positive out of the negative aspects of university teaching, a high level of spiritual knowledge was already necessary. Another voiced the hope that there might be lectures concerning what was generally human with the subtheme of ‘Medicine’, just as there had recently been the Pedagogical Youth Course [The Younger Generation, GA 217] which had dealt with the generally human from the perspective of world history.

Rudolf Steiner listened intensely and then said: “If you want to form a humanitarian group of people, effective in the culture as the pedagogues want to be, that is a contradiction in terms. You see, for the pedagogues, the pedagogy itself could be completely absorbed in what is generally human. That is not possible in your case. You can gather either as a humanitarian group with general cultural tasks, or as medical practitioners and physicians. Both together cannot exist in this form. You may not forget the purely medical within the purely human. Also, the pedagogues are in quite a different situation: through their profession they have maintained a much stronger connection to the living human being, the child. Through their work they really cannot lose touch with the human being. But the academic medicine of today is entirely dead, has no connection at all to the human being and has no idea what happens when it concerns itself with a sick person.

In your case it is actually an entirely different matter. You feel in yourselves a vast abyss across which you have to find a bridge. You must find the bridge from the medical-scientific to that which is moral, loving. You see, if, for example, I speak of that which I call the warmth organization of the human being, then for the moment that is an abstraction for you. But you must find the bridge, so that you experience this warmth organization in such a way that out of the experience of this warmth differentiation in the individual organs, you find your way to what is morally-warm. We will have to arrive at the point where that which we call a ‘warm heart’ can be felt into the physical realm itself. You must find the way out of the scientific-physiological into the spiritual-moral and out of the spiritual-moral to the anatomical-physiological. Such a group of people, that have a ‘warm heart’ and who know right into the physical sphere how the ego in themselves works on the warmth organization, such a group will then be able to affect its surroundings out of much deeper warmth forces; it will be able, through these forces of love, which work into the physical realm, to affect the culture. On the other hand, if such people sink down, in spite of all, to the level of philistines, of narrow-mindedness, then it will become clear that sclerotic and other forces will become effective in a most radically destructive manner, much more destructive than for others!

Gather up fifty, sixty, seventy medical students who share your attitude, and bring them to me and I shall talk to you more of this. Naturally, they will have to be younger medical people, for you see, to the older ones, I really cannot speak of these things. But gather up fifty, sixty, seventy young medical students for me, they must be medical people, and young, of course not schematically according to age; for, indeed, there are old people, too, who are still young. Well, you understand what I mean, bring them to me and I will give a course for you to which one might give the theme: ‘The Humanizing of Medicine.’ ” (The quotations are unfortunately not exact. They were recorded later from memory.)

With that we were dismissed and the search for the young medical people began. [...] All inquiries flowed to Helene von Grunelius who carefully filtered and appraised them.

1923 saw several additional conversations with Rudolf Steiner in connection to our goals. I remember a meeting in the carpentry shop with Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman and the assistant physicians from the Clinic. Besides myself and my brother there must have been one or two other students there. The theme was Rudolf Steiner's indication that we ought to take a notebook and on the left hand side write what the professor says, or a good case history, while on the right hand side we were to transpose the medical symptoms into the language of the human sheaths. As an example, Rudolf Steiner gave the following: ‘The patient has edema of the lower half of the body’, would be transposed into: ‘Weak etheric in the lower half of the body’. It was advice which we did not follow enough, for we lacked confidence. [...]

Helene von Grunelius was, as van Deventer put it, ‘the soul’ of this group. That this was so can also be surmised from her invitation for medical students to the planned course which was to take place in Dornach in January, 1924:

Arlesheim, August, 1923

In the meantime you will have heard more about the incredibly significant lecture cycle held by Dr. Steiner from June 10 to 17, 1923, in Dornach [The Anthroposophical Movement, GA 258]. Through these lectures we anthroposophists should be moved to self-awareness. Why did we become members of the Anthroposophical Society, and are we conscious of the responsibility we have thereby taken on in relation to the spiritual world? If a society like the Anthroposophical Society is to be truly vital and capable of fulfilling its task in the world, then it must always follow a straight path toward its goals. That means that everything that is wanted and worked for in such a society must arise from the heart, the very center of Anthroposophy itself. Dr. Steiner emphasized this most particularly when he came to speak of the scientific tendencies which have sprung up within the anthroposophical movement in the last years. This is where our self-awareness must begin.

For a long time now, we younger physicians have felt that our medical movement is proceeding along a strongly intellectual track. We became particularly conscious of this during the medical course held in Stuttgart in October, 1922 [in Fundamentals of Anthroposophical Medicine, GA 314, Mercury Press]. With the exception of Dr. Steiner's lectures, these lectures, as regards the direction of their thoughts, might just as well have been given at any university. Inwardly, we rebelled against them because we perceived that the human being was not considered in his totality; warmth of heart and the pure will forces were ignored. We, however, really wanted to be able to stand within medicine as anthroposophists, meaning, as complete human beings. We perceived that all our medical work would get the proper impetus only if it arose directly out of the basic impulses of the anthroposophical movement.

We will find our way to true healing in the present time only if we really recall the core of what is anthroposophical. First of all, we must become conscious of our true humanity, and as physicians, especially of our will to heal. It is just Anthroposophy that gives us the possibility of acquiring those capacities which reveal the relation of every single thing in the outer world to the human being, so that we are then able to direct the forces of the outer world to the sick human being, so that they support his own forces of healing.

Another, no less important, task of the physician will be to accompany the human being as steady advisor, showing him how he can overcome the tendencies toward illness slumbering in him because of his onesided soul development, only by unfolding his entire human nature. For ruling the individual human being as well as all of contemporary culture are the destructive forces of the brain and of the intellect, striving toward decline. But if we want to be effective in the ascent of development we must develop in ourselves forces of the future, forces which will make us capable of true healing. We can only acquire perceptions of the human being which are necessary for such working by deepening our studies of the physical and chemical processes on the one hand, and on the other hand, by attempting to grasp, in a living way, the soul-spiritual in the other human being. Only then will we gain a real view of how these realms relate to each other in the human being. Then we will be able to see and to show how the soul-spiritual works into the physical structuring and differentiating, and how this physical in the human being can and must, in turn, be transformed into the soul-spiritual through the efficacy of moral impulses in the warm force of heart.

The task which we physicians must carry within the anthroposophical movement is so great, that only if we unite all our forces can we even attempt it. With the rebuilding of the Goetheanum, a new medical science must also be rebuilt, a humanizing of medicine.

If you would like to work with us in this way, please inform us in detail soon, so that we may begin our work together as soon as possible and meet during the fall or the Christmas holidays.[...]

On November 1, 1923, Helene von Grunelius wrote to her friend Madeleine van Deventer in Utrecht:

[...II was in Arlesheim from Friday evening until today (Thursday). I went there to inquire about the course, since we are now up to thirty-five people. After talking it over with Dr. Wegman, Dr. Steiner committed himself for eight days immediately after the Delegates Conference at Christmas (it will last from December 24 to January 1) in other words from January 2 to 9. I think this will be an opportune time for everyone. I gave him the list. He had no comment (about the names). Dr. Wegman thought he would consider it more closely in a few days, and comment on the individuals and ask questions. So he might cross people off the list if he has the impression that their attitude is not active enough and they're not really ready to follow through courageously on all he intends to bring (at least that's my impression). He expects total work from us. He said: initiative is necessary. There probably are individuals who have it, but it ought to come about that an entire group develops initiative. And that ought to be possible with a group of young people. Then he said how much the continuation and success of our work depends on its being spread in the outer world. We are now at a stage in the medical movement when it is mostly enthusiasm that can be effective, for we haven't much to show yet by way of success in healing.

[...] We can't say anything to the people yet about the course, because we have to wait to see whether Dr. Steiner will have anything to say about the list in the next few days. In any case, only people who have been invited by us or Dr. Steiner can take part in the course (we've already invited Steffen and Wachsmuth). If others ask us, we will say that we are not dealing with a 'medical course' but a particular study amongst a small group with Dr. Steiner. I gave my point of view about the Stuttgart physicians first and also mentioned how the medical conference in September had affected us, whereupon Dr. Steiner said: yes, they would actually be disturbing, if they were present. This judgment was very clear, as was the whole opinion he had of them, which wasn't exactly lofty. We agreed that we would not say anything about this statement, and if the Stuttgart physicians are insulted or complain, we, ourselves, will take the responsibility. I will try to prepare them as carefully as I can for the fact that we will not invite them to the course. [...]

Grunelius' unadorned language reflects the mood clearly. How things stood with those taking initiative for the first ‘Young Doctors' Course’ is evident. Their resistance to the older physicians was no doubt intensified by Dr. Steiner's remarks. On December 5, she wrote another letter to van Deventer with quotations from a letter of Ita Wegman's which show her attitude toward these students.

Dear Maddy, [...] Enclosed is the final (meaning, from our point of view, just about final) list. [...] Names underlined in red are those who have definitely committed themselves to the course. People responded very quickly and enthusiastically. [...] In the meantime, I did hear from Dr. Wegman. She says that, as regards the list, it is very difficult for her and also for Dr. Steiner, since both of them don't know all the people, to say whom they want and whom they don't want. Actually the organizers, meaning you and Maddy van Deventer, should choose the people, invite them and take responsibility for making sure that the people you have invited really understand what it's all about. [...] “What I gather from Dr. Steiner is that the emphasis of the course will be on the morally-human and the anthroposophical in medicine, in other words, mainly for those still studying, and for the young physicians, who, during their studies and the beginning of their practice did not find what they sought as satisfaction in their profession and their studies. So the main focus will be on this not-being-satisfied. Therefore, you must choose people who are really asking and seeking in this way. From what I can tell, not much by way of therapy will be given in this course.” [...]

By the way, we did not send a form letter, instead I wrote personally to everyone. In this case it surely was better and more effective. [...]

At the moment I am circulating the December, 1920 lectures [of December 17, 18 and 19 in GA 202, The Bridge between Universal Spirituality and Physical Man][2] and Hygiene [Health Care As a Social Issue, April 7, 1920 in GA 314][3] amongst the people, so that everyone will have read them by the time the course starts. [...]

Regarding The Bridge lectures [included in this volume] M. P. van Deventer has this to say:

In discussions between Helene von Grunelius and myself, we realized the significance of the lectures we had both heard in December 1920, which were later published and became known by the title The Bridge. The role of the warmth organization as mediator between soul and body appeared to us to be of fundamental significance. The Bridge lectures were available only in the Archives. However, upon being asked, Rudolf Steiner immediately gave us permission to duplicate and distribute them to all future participants for common preparation.

In late summer Rudolf Steiner asked me about the state of the preparations. In the course of the conversation he suddenly became very serious and requested that I tell him exactly what we really wanted. He demanded utter clarity of consciousness. I attempted to speak about the path which we already wanted to embark upon during our studies. I was too reticent, however, to speak about meditative practices. Afterwards I had the feeling as if I had failed an exam. I immediately wrote to Helene von Grunelius and asked her to go to Dornach as soon as possible and continue the discussion.

This continuation took place in late Fall 1923. Helene complained that it was impossible for her to follow the advice of keeping a notebook because she wouldn't know whether what she wrote on the right side was correct. Rudolf Steiner answered: “That doesn't matter. In the course of time you'll correct yourself; besides, you can send the notebooks to me. However, if you would like to gain greater certainty, I can give you a meditation.” Then he gave her the Warmth Meditation and told her that she could pass it on to all future participants. He himself would give it to Dr. Wegman. He called it a chain meditation (passed on from person to person by word of mouth), not a circle meditation. And he described it as the path of the physician towards beholding the Etheric Christ. [...]

In Dec. 1923 we could again report to Rudolf Steiner. By then we had unfortunately only found 30 participants. “Why shouldn't I speak to 30 people,” he said. As a date he gave us the week immediately following the Christmas Foundation meeting, beginning January 2. We wrote this to all participants and invited them at the same time to come already December 24 to participate in the Christmas Foundation meeting.

In this way, all were immediately united with the new stream which began with the new founding of the General Anthroposophical Society and the founding of the High School for Spiritual Science. The ‘Course for Young Doctors’ was thus the first event of the High School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Notes:

1. The English translation of that book, and thus much of the text in this introduction, was done by Dorit Winter and has been published in 1994 by Mercury Press.

2. These three lectures are included in this book starting on p. 221.

3. Available from Mercury Press

Flyer, February 1919

Term:

[ 1 ] 1. The essence of the socialization of the economy is that the organization of production and sales are regulated in accordance with the economic laws inherent in them, and that no "rights" or powers of authority are involved in the resulting economic organism. All "rights" are exercised by the political organism, which is equal to the economic organization and is based on the equality of all men before the law. All intellectual achievements, including technical ideas, are to be placed under the free, individual administration of a third, equal intellectual organism.

[ 2 ] 2. The representatives of the economic organism shall be the elected members of the associations established on the basis of the classification of occupations and the distribution of labor. Representatives of the political organization may be elected on the basis of universal, equal (secret) suffrage. Representatives of the spiritual organization shall be the personalities placed by circumstances at the head of the individual spiritual branches. Delegations elected from the representatives of each of the three bodies serve to connect them. (The three bodies stand side by side like three relatively independent states that organize their common affairs through envoys.)

Practical implementation:

[ 3 ] 3. The transfer of branches of the economy from the present to the future state shall be effected with due regard to the present economic condition, in such a manner that all factors (employers and employees in every form) shall participate in the fundamental (constituent) reorganization, and that the present possible economic organization shall be established on opportunistic conditions.

[ 4 ] 4. The new economic order thus sought must under no circumstances lead to an interruption of consumption by breaking off economic continuity.

[ 5 ] 5. Everything that intervenes in the economic organism as a law that is the same for all people (such as accident prevention, damage through usury and so on) is subject to the powers of the political organization. The general taxes shall be expenditure taxes (which is in no way to be confused with indirect taxes). Revenues as such do not become taxable; they become so at the moment when the public has an interest in them, i.e. when they are transferred into circulation.

Branches of the economy:

[ 6 ] The following can be considered as the most necessary economic sectors to which point 3 should be applied immediately:

1. Mining
2. Iron
3. Electricity
4. Hydropower and its land
5. Gas and water supply
6. Aeronautics
7. Trams; all types of roads
8. Canalization and canal shipping
9. Chemical industry
10. Grain growing and grain processing
11. Sugar industry, brandy and so on
12. Tobacco industry
13. Everything relating to the cultivation of land (whereas the ownership of land belongs to the political body)
14. Insurance
15. Money institutions

The peace treaty

[ 7 ] It is to be effected in such a way that representatives of the three corporations negotiate with foreign countries from the German side with independent mandates emanating entirely from their corporation. A unilateral socialization based on aspects other than those mentioned is also impracticable for Germany for reasons of foreign policy. On the other hand, a justification of foreign policy for the establishment of the three corporations is quite promising.

[ 1 ] The call for a reorganization of social coexistence and cooperation between people is going around the world. The economic, legal-political and spiritual conditions of life that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the horror-filled world catastrophe of that time. An economic system that was unsocial, a legal-political life that was incapable of overcoming the class antagonisms perceived as unjust by the consciousness of the great majority of contemporary humanity, a spiritual culture that, despite its "progress", has proved incapable of being a leader out of an unsocial economic life and a state based on class antagonisms: they must make way for a new one.

[ 2 ] Whether one person today understands socialization to mean this, another that: all those who do not want to live through our time spiritually blind could agree that socialization must call upon all those who have hitherto seen these conditions imposed on them by the power of classes superior to them spiritually, legally or economically to shape their own social conditions. Class struggles can only disappear with the cessation of the intellectual, legal and economic class antagonisms themselves.

[ 3 ] The fact that this is the call of the times is shown by the movement of the proletariat, but also by the correctly understood development of history itself.

[ 4 ] The goal is felt.

[ 5 ] The impulse wants to show the way towards the tripartite social organism.

[ 6 ] This impulse calls for the complete independence of intellectual life, including the educational and school system. It sees the causes of the intellectual inability of our time in the absorption of intellectual culture by the state. He demands the complete self-administration of this culture from a purely objective and general human point of view. It will only be properly educated when no one has any say in the question of how to educate all people to become true people capable of living, except those who can only judge from the depths of human nature itself.

[ 7 ] This impulse demands the restriction of state life to all those living conditions for which all people are equal before one another. On this ground, in a strictly democratic way, with the transformation of the present private capitalist property and forced labor relations, above all such a general human right is to be achieved that confronts the worker as a completely free personality with the labor leader (who is only a spiritual worker).

[ 8 ] This impulse demands an economic life in which the worker confronts the labor manager in such a way that a free social relationship can be established between the two by contract, so that the wage relationship ceases completely. This requires the complete socialization of economic life. Only from the proper participation of all people in appropriate cooperatives, which arise from the professions on the one hand, and from the needs of consumers and producers on the other, can a regulation of the value of goods emerge that ensures a decent existence for all people. Such a regulation of the value of goods can only realize the principle: people must not produce in order to profit, but only in order to consume. It is only possible if, after the detachment of intellectual and state life in the economy, we are dealing with nothing other than the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Any interest in the unobjective, mere utilization of capital, any wage system based on competing economic interests and acting out of such interests, hinders a correct reciprocal pricing of goods and therefore a just distribution of goods.

[ 9 ] In all details of social life, the impulse wants to follow the tripartite social organism:

[ 10 ] 1. development of man in all his faculties through independent spiritual life;

[ 11 ] 2. the establishment of human rights through the exclusion of all non-general human interests from the legal sphere;

[ 12 ] 3. equitable distribution of goods in a correct relation of value of goods (commodities) by reorganizing the present capital and wage system;

[ 13 ] The German people can only hope to be integrated into the international world conditions if it removes the inhibitions that have arisen in its economic, legal and intellectual life as a result of their inorganic fusion in the previous state system through the organic threefolding of the social organism. In this way it can be brought about that through the free development of each of the three members and the higher unity arising from it, the highest economic productivity compatible with the healthy body and soul of man, the true satisfaction of a genuine folkish sense of justice and the all-round revelation of the forces inherent in the German spirit become possible.

[ 1 ] Professor v. Heck is of the opinion that the social conditions which I promise as the final success of my proposals would "solve the social question in a happy way", but that the implementation of my proposals would not have the hoped-for effects, indeed that this implementation, if at all possible, would "not promote but harm" the common good and especially the working class. - One can hardly pass a more devastating judgment on an endeavor that pursues such goals as mine, the threefolding of the social organism. For in comparison with these aims it is of course quite worthless to put forward the dream of a happy solution to the social question and then to make impracticable proposals for bringing about this solution. Pretty much all so-called "solutions to the social question" suffer from this flaw. The moment I was forced to admit that an assessment such as that of Prof. von Heck was right, I would easily consider my own ideas to be refuted. And I would certainly not consider it shameful to make this confession publicly. For the "social question" is, on the one hand, such a comprehensive and difficult one and, on the other, something so binding that the retraction of an unsuccessful attempt can have nothing shameful about it. Prof. von Heck can therefore believe that I can respond to his presentation quite objectively. However, he misunderstands me with regard to the point of view from which he views my endeavor. I am aware that I am not at all aiming to "solve" the social question "in a happy way". I do not believe that anyone who is familiar with the psychology of the individual and the masses can strive for such an "ultimate success". My assumptions are quite different. I believe that I recognize that humanity has currently reached a point in its historical development that demands the threefolding of the social organism out of the nature of today's human being. If this demand is met, it will be possible to master the elementary unrest that has gripped mankind. If it is not met, this unrest will lead to the self-destruction of our culture. It is not because I wish to fantasize about an ultimate goal that I speak of the threefold structure, but because I believe I recognize the causes that demand this threefold structure from the present state of humanity. That is why I have not invented "proposals" for a dreamed-up final goal; rather, for me these proposals are the result of observations that I believe I have made over decades of the social development of humanity. The way in which I have arrived at these observations is proof to me that my "proposals" have nothing utopian about them. But it also makes it understandable to me how so many people come to regard the threefold structure as unclear and impracticable. Such people think they are thinking practically. But they are entangled in theoretical assumptions that they consider to be practical. They have formed these theories according to what was considered practical for a while. If this "practical" then requires a transformation through its own development, they find the newly formed "impractical" because it contradicts their usual ideas. It is precisely among the supposed "practitioners" that one finds such theorists. It seems to me that the threefold structure of the social organism will only be judged correctly by those who not only think they know what has been practical "up to now", but who have a healthy instinct for what may prove practical in its "future" development.

[ 2 ] If Prof. von Heck already misjudges the premises of my "proposals", this misjudgement becomes more and more complete as he continues to pursue what I have presented, since he does not reproduce and oppose my views as such, but replaces them almost point by point with others and then "refutes" these others. I would like to say: he creates his own threefold structure, which has very little to do with mine. I must confess: I would fight this threefold structure no less if it confronted me than Professor von Heck fights it. In this judgment I am in complete agreement with him.

[ 3 ] But I ask: have I really given cause to understand the tripartite structure in such a way that three parliaments should replace the unified state parliament in the way Professor von Heck presents it? Have I ever said or had anything printed that is equivalent to the monster "three states on the same territory"? My idea of the threefold structure demands that the affairs of spiritual culture, on the one hand, and those of economic life, on the other, should not be organized by such a representation of the people as is equivalent to what has hitherto been regarded as a "parliament". The administration of spiritual culture should arise from the same foundations from which the life of the spirit itself unfolds. Those personalities should be in this administration who take an active part in spiritual life, who bring to bear in this administration the same impulses that are at work in spiritual production. And I believe I recognize that such an administration is only possible if the administrators do not sit within the state administration, or are appointed from the spiritual realm into the state realm; but that the spiritual life is placed on a basis independent of the "state". In the state, everything that arises through it must ultimately be the outflow of the sound judgment of every responsible person. For the state strives for democratic organization. In intellectual life, only expert judgment can decide. It seems impossible to me that with further democratization of the state this expert judgment can be found within its framework. I believe that only those who are inclined to take out of democracy what cannot thrive in it can honestly want democratization. I could imagine that a fruitful discussion could arise in this area if the question that comes into consideration were to boil down to the following: Can the administration of intellectual life (especially education) take on a form that merely corresponds to the demands of this life if the democratic state exercises rule in any aspect of this administration? My experience compels me to answer this question in the negative. I believe I know the reasons which lead to its affirmation. But they do not seem valid to me. If my opinion is justified, then the judgments that Professor von Heck puts forward from the point of view of the economic security of intellectual life and compulsory schooling would have to be placed on a completely different basis than his own. I believe I have pointed to this ground on page 88 ff. of my paper "Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage". If what I indicated there is properly put into practice, then institutions will emerge that secure the economic basis of intellectual life and also protect against the "temptation" of "not sending children to school, but using them to earn money." Despite everything that von Heck says, it seems unfathomable why, when considering these questions, it should play a role that "as a result of peace, we are approaching a time of impoverishment that no other nation has experienced". No one can doubt that this last sentence is as true as it can be. But why the school should not get what it can out of this poverty, if this is to happen in other ways than before, is surely not understandable.

[ 4 ] Professor von Heck's argument against the separation of economic life from the state proper is no less riddled with misunderstandings. He says: "The complete separation of legal questions and economic questions, which Steiner demands, is not possible at all." What makes it clear that I am "demanding" the "complete separation" spoken of here? What I see as necessary is this: all legal matters should be organized by the democratic parliament; and the economy should be managed by associations arising from the professions, from production, transport and consumption interests. Through this organization it will come about in economic life that its cycle will be governed solely by the decisions of the individuals experienced in individual branches of the economy and by the credit which economic men enjoy through their position in a branch of the economy. The "natural laws of economic life" will force us to replace democratic electoral intentions, which could at most play a role in the transitional period, with the democratic delegation of capable people in the sense of the two conditions of a healthy economy described above. Democracy and parliamentarism will be recognized in their damaging consequences for economic life when this life is no longer veiled in its peculiarity by the state legislation spread over it, but when it is placed in its self-government on an associative basis. Professor von Heck says: "The law determines the forms of the economy and can only be ordered by a power that oversees economic life." However, this sentence is only correct as long as economic life and legal life are merged. If economic life is left to its own devices, that is, if it exhausts itself in the administration of the production, circulation and consumption of goods (with import and export), then the legal relations of the economic agents remain unorganized by this economic cycle. And these are organized on the territory of the state, outside the economic cycle. Legal relations will then not be the expression of economic forms, but on the one hand their basis in the same way that natural conditions (geographical, climatic, etc.) are the basis of the economy. - Anyone who believes in the axiom that legal forms must be the expression of economic forms must find it difficult to accept the emancipation of law from the economy. But whoever realizes that this "axiom" contradicts the present consciousness of mankind will try to overcome his belief in it. Contemporary man cannot bear to live as a subject of law under the compulsion of economic forms. To close oneself off to this fact and to pay homage to the view that "the law determines the forms of the economy" means little more than declaring the work on an important link in the social question of the present to be a chimera. But one should only do so if the separation of legal life from economic life were to be supported by more weighty reasons than those put forward by Professor von Heck.

[ 5 ] One misunderstands the structure which the social organism is to receive through the threefold structure if, as Professor von Heck does, one expresses the following objection: "Steiner, too, if one looks more closely, leaves three economically very important questions to the legal parliament. He leaves to it the questions of taxation, the creation of workers' rights and the restriction of ownership of the means of production, which should last only for life." It is not correct that in a tripartite social organism taxation should be regulated solely by law. Read about this on page 53 of my "Key Points of the Social Question": "What the political state itself demands for its maintenance will be raised by the tax law. This will develop through a harmonization of the demands of legal consciousness with those of economic life." With regard to labor law, it is possible that it will not be left to legal life as an economic matter, but that it will be removed from the economic cycle, that is, stripped of the character of an economic matter. It is also quite inaccurate what Professor von Heck states as my view on the "restriction of ownership of the means of production". What is in question is not left to the "parliament of law", but is made a matter in the ordering of which the administrations of intellectual life and legal life are involved.

[ 6 ] The requirement concerning taxation can be fulfilled in practice by the fact that formally the constitutional state as a consumer organization stands opposite the economic cycle, just as within this cycle itself a consumer association stands opposite a production cooperative, for example. The regulation of general tax requirements and the use of taxes takes place within the legal system. On the other hand, the distribution of tax claims to the individual economic areas will be the responsibility of the associations resulting from the professions and from the interaction of production and consumption. Professor von Heck says appropriately: "The most difficult task that the future threatens us with is the distribution of the enormous, unheard-of tax burden that peace will impose on us ... These taxes cannot be raised without the most serious interventions in economic life. Therefore, even if Steiner's ideas were implemented, every economic group would have to secure representation in the legal parliament in order to defend itself against overburdening." However, this "most difficult task" can only be solved by separating legal life from economic life in such a way that the solution does not contradict the legal consciousness of individual groups of people. For if the interests of an economic group are represented in a parliament based on a democratic foundation, it will always be the case that the economically more powerful group will impose measures on the less powerful group. It will be able to do so through its own power or by entering into compromises. The formation of a parliamentary majority always makes it possible to assert and suppress interests in an unobjective manner. The situation is different if the administration of economic life is organically separated from that of legal life. In this case, no decisions can be taken on the legal ground that have effects in economic life that are detrimental to any group of people. Everything that happens in economic life will be based on negotiations between the designated associations. In these negotiations, the expertise of one association can be contrasted with that of the other; and the unobjective, merely democratic parliamentarization can be dispensed with. Someone might perhaps say that what we are striving for here could also be realized if the main negotiations in the "legal parliament" were transferred to the committees and experts from the individual economic areas were added to them. It seems to me that this would only be half a measure. What limited good it could do would have to show just how the desired effect could be achieved completely only by separating the economic administration from the legal organization. Professor von Heck does not emphasize strongly enough what it means in the practice of life when the competent representatives have to negotiate from branch to branch in such a way that through them the living conditions of one branch have to promote and limit those of the other, without the influence of unobjective majority decisions. Anyone who takes into account the practical effect of such an institution will not think of saying: "How should scientists and doctors have special expertise for ecclesiastical questions, and farmers, merchants and craftsmen for large-scale industry?" This seems to be the right question, but it does not argue against a self-reliant organization of economic life, but against the representation of economic and cultural interests in a parliament in which everyone has a say in matters about which they know nothing. The negotiations between the economic organizations through their representatives do not require any expertise outside the area that someone has to represent. For the outcome of the negotiations will be determined objectively by the factual significance of one area for the other. The basis for such objectivity is created by the fact that the administrative bodies will be organized around those personalities to whom a leading office is transferred in the manner described on page 86 of the "Key Points of the Social Question". The other members of this administrative body will emerge from the needs of economic management in such a way that the usual election will be replaced by a selection of suitable personalities, since ability will be revealed in the organization of work and the conviction will be established that one's own work will prosper best if the most knowledgeable leader is appointed. The members of higher administrative bodies and a central council will emerge in a similar way from the lower ones. Thus, despite the central council, the overall administration will be built on a federal basis.

[ 7 ] Such a structure of economic administration will only be tolerable to the democratic consciousness if everything that relates to the legal relations of the persons involved in economic life is separated from it and relegated to a democratic parliament. However, these legal relationships include everything that relates to the work that people do for each other.

[ 8 ] Whoever understands my proposals for the tripartite social organism in the way described here, and not in the completely misunderstood way in which they appear in Professor von Heck's rendering, will hardly demand a refutation of the objections listed in the last columns of my critic's article. For these objections stem only from the fact that Professor von Heck does not refer to my exposition, but creates his own threefold structure and then polemicizes against it.

[ 9 ] In the essay "My impression of Dr. Steiner and his theory of threefolding" by Alfred Mantz, it is said that my explanations could only represent something that could be realized "if people were different from what they are". One can only hold this opinion as long as one has not yet sufficiently realized in what sense and with what intention one can develop ideas about the institutions of the social organism. It is true that ideal social conditions are only possible with ideally inclined and developed human beings. But anyone who rejects thoughts about the organization of the social organism because of this one-sided truth is moving in a dubious circle of ideas. He will want to wait with desirable institutions until he has the people suitable for them; during this wait, however, he will only ever have people whom he finds unsuitable. If Mr. Mantz will examine my ideas more closely, he can see that I do not require any other people for the realization of these ideas than those who are available. And I find these people as mature, or as immature in general, as he himself. But I assume, as everyone who does not want to sink into fatalism must assume, that among the people of today there are those who can convince themselves of the necessity of reorganizing our social structure. In the tripartite social organism I see - as I explained in the discussion of Professor von Heck's essay - that which fulfills the demands to which mankind is pressing at the present stage of its development. It seems to me that if those people who can convince themselves of the necessity of the threefold structure succeed in doing what is necessary for its realization, conditions will be created which will give such efforts a basis that will make people different "from what they are". The assertion that I am sketching a picture "that must look very good in a vacuum, but in reality is utopia" is truly wrong, since I am not even touching the reality in which we live, but merely replacing the structure of this reality, insofar as it stems from intentions, inclinations, habits, judgments, etc., with a different one, which should also develop from similar human impulses.

[ 10 ] How little is true of what is written in the essay "Dr. Steiner and the Proletariat" can be seen completely in my book "The Key Points of the Social Question". Anyone who wants to refute the statements in this essay must not attempt to do so by claiming that "capital will never submit to their implementation". For he would first have to prove that he has a social structure in mind for the implementation of which "capital" is not needed. But then why should it be needed precisely for the realization of mine? As Mr. Seeger then goes on to say that through the institutions which I would like to see brought about, the worker could "never get rid of the feeling of having to work only for a single entrepreneur", it must be held against this that my efforts are directed precisely towards finding conditions through which the "physically working man" is given the feeling of being a free man in his work.