The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In a series of lectures on spiritual science, our subject today might well appear insignificant. But considerations which lead into the higher realms of being are often at fault in leaving aside the details of life and its immediate, everyday realities. When lectures set out to deal with eternal life, with the highest qualities of the soul or with great questions concerning the evolution of world and man, people generally are pleased, and well content to leave alone such apparently commonplace matters as those we are to examine today. But everyone who follows the path indicated here for penetrating into the spiritual worlds, will be convinced that to advance quietly, step by step, from the well known to the less known, is a very healthy way.

Moreover, we can draw on many examples to show that eminent men have by no means regarded laughter and tears as merely commonplace. After all, the consciousness which is achieved in the legends and the great traditions of mankind—so often much wiser than the individual human consciousness—has endowed the great Zarathustra, who became so immensely important for Eastern culture, with the famous “Zarathustra smile”, for this consciousness it was particularly significant that this great spirit came smiling into the world. And with a deep understanding of world history, tradition adds that on account of this smile all creatures in the world exulted, while evil spirits and adversaries in all parts of the earth fled away from it.

If we pass from these legends and traditions to the works of a single great genius, we might well call to mind the figure of Faust, into whom Goethe poured so many of his own feelings and ideas. When Faust, despairing of all existence, comes near to killing himself, he hears the Easter bells ring out and cries: “Tears spring forth, the earth holds me again.”¹¹ Tears are used here by Goethe to symbolise the state of soul which enables Faust, after experiencing the most bitter despair, to find his way back into the world.

Thus we can see, if we will only think about it, that laughing and weeping are related to things of great significance. But to speculate on the nature of spirit is easier than to seek the spirit where it is revealed in the world immediately around us. And we can find the spirit—and the human spirit in the first instance—precisely in those gestures of the soul that we call laughing and weeping. They cannot be understood unless we regard them as expressions of a person's inner spiritual life. But in order to do this we must not only accept man as a spiritual being, we have also to understand him. All the lectures in our present winter series have been devoted to this task. Hence we need give only a passing glance now at the being of man as seen by spiritual science. But that is the foundation on which we must build if we are to understand laughing and weeping.

We have seen that man, when we observe him in his totality, possesses a physical body, which he has in common with the mineral realm; an etheric or life-body, which he has in common with the plants; and an astral body which he has in common with the animal kingdom. The astral body is the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, terror and amazement, and also of all the ideas which flow into and out of his soul from waking until he falls asleep. These are man's three external sheaths and within them lives the ego which makes him the crown of creation. The ego works in the soul-life on its three components, the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, and we have seen how it works to bring man ever nearer to fulfilment.

What, then, is the basis of the ego's activities within the human soul? Let us look at some examples of its behaviour.

Suppose that the ego, this deepest centre of man's spiritual life, encounters some object or being in the outer world. The ego does not remain indifferent towards the object or the being; it expresses itself in some way and experiences something inwardly, according to whether the encounter pleases or displeases it. The ego may exult at some occurrence or it may fall into deepest sadness; it may recoil in terror, or it may lovingly contemplate or embrace the source of the event. And the ego can also have the experience of understanding or not understanding whatever is involved.

From our observation of the ego's activities between waking and falling asleep we can see how it tries to bring itself into harmony with the external world. If some entity pleases us and makes us feel that here we have something that warms us, we weave a bond with it; something from ourselves connects with it. That is what we do with our whole environment. During our entire waking life we are concerned, as regards our inner soul-processes, with creating harmony between our ego and the rest of the world. The experiences that come to us through objects or beings in the outer world and are reflected in our soul-life, work on the three constituents of the soul where the ego dwells but also on the astral, etheric and physical bodies. We have already given several examples of how the relation established by the ego between itself and any object or being not only stirs the emotions of the astral body and corrects the currents and movements of the etheric body but affects the physical body also. Who has not noticed how someone will turn pale when something frightening approaches? This means that the bond formed by the ego between itself and the frightening entity works into the physical body and affects the flow of the blood, so that the person concerned turns pale.

We have mentioned also an opposite effect, the blush of shame. When we feel that our relationship with someone in our environment is such that we would like to disappear for a moment, the blood mounts to the face. Here we have two examples of a definite influence on the blood caused by the ego's relation to the outer world. Many other examples could be given of how the ego expresses itself in the astral, etheric and physical bodies.

This search by the ego for harmony, or for a definite relationship between itself and its environment, results in certain consequences. In some cases we may feel that we have established a right relationship between the ego and the object or being. Even if we have good reason for feeling fear of a being, our ego may still feel that it has been in harmony with its environment, including fear itself—though we may not be able to see it in that light until afterwards.

The ego feels especially in tune with its environment if it has been trying to understand certain things in the outer world and finally succeeds. Then it feels united with these things, as though it had gone out of itself and immersed itself in them, and can feel itself rightly related to them. Or it may be that the ego lives with other people in an affectionate relationship: then it feels happy and satisfied and in harmony with its surroundings. These feelings of contentment then pass over into its astral and etheric bodies.

It may happen, however, that the ego fails to establish this harmony and so falls short of what we may call, in a certain sense, the normal. Then it may find itself in a difficult situation. Suppose the ego encounters some object or being it cannot understand; suppose it tries in vain to find a right relationship to this entity; yet it has to take up a definite attitude towards it. A concrete example: suppose we meet in the outer world a being we do not want to understand, because it seems not worthwhile for our ego to penetrate into its nature; we feel that to do so would mean surrendering too much of our own force of knowledge and understanding. In such a case we have to set up a sort of barrier against it so as to keep ourselves free from it. By turning our forces away from it we become conscious of them, while we enhance our own self-consciousness. The feeling that comes over us then is one of liberation.

When this occurs, clairvoyant observation can see how the ego withdraws the astral body from the impressions which the environment or the being might make on it. The impressions will, of course, be made on our physical body unless we close our eyes or stop up our ears. The physical body is less under our control than the astral, so we draw back the astral from the physical and thus save it from being touched by impressions from the outer world. This withdrawal of the astral body, which would otherwise expend its energy on the physical body, appears to clairvoyant observation as an expansion of the astral: at the moment of its liberation it spreads out. When we raise ourselves above a being, we cause our astral body to expand like an elastic substance: we relax its normal tension. By so doing we liberate ourselves from any bond with the being we wish to turn away from. We withdraw into ourselves, as it were, and raise ourselves above the whole situation. Everything that occurs in the astral body comes to expression in the physical, and the physical expression of this expansion of the astral body is laughing or smiling.

These facial gestures, accordingly, indicate that we are raising ourselves above what is happening around us because we do not want to apply our understanding to it and from our standpoint are right not to do so. It would be true to say, therefore, that anything we are not intending to understand will cause an expansion of our astral body and thus give rise to laughter. Satirical papers often depict public men with huge heads and tiny bodies, which is a way of expressing grotesquely the significance of these men for their time. To try to make sense of this would be futile, for there is no law which could unite a huge head with a tiny body. Any attempt to apply our reason to it would be a waste of energy and mental power. The only satisfying thing is to raise ourselves above the impression it makes on our physical body, to become free in the ego and to expand the astral body. For what the ego experiences is passed on in the first place to the astral body, and the corresponding facial gesture is laughter.

It may happen, however, that we cannot find the relationship to our environment that our soul needs. Suppose that for a long time we have loved someone who is not only closely related to our daily life but is associated with particular soul-experiences that arise from this close attachment. Suppose, then, that this person is torn from us for a while. With that loss, a part of our soul-experiences is torn away; a bond between ourselves and a being in the outer world is broken. Because of the soul-condition created by our relationship with this other person, our soul has good reason to suffer from this breaking of a bond it has long cherished. Something is torn from the ego, and the effect on the ego passes over into the astral body. Since in this case something is taken from the astral, it contracts: or, more exactly, the ego presses the astral body together.

This can always be clairvoyantly observed when a person suffers pain or grief from some loss. Just as the expanded astral body loses tension and creates in the physical body the gesture of laughing or smiling, so a contracted astral body penetrates more deeply into all the forces of the physical body and contracts it along with itself. The bodily expression of this contraction is a flow of tears. The astral body, having been left with gaps as it were, wants to fill them by contracting, while making use of substances from its environment. In so doing, it also contracts the physical body and squeezes out the latter's substances in the form of tears. What, then, are these tears?

The ego has lost something in its grief and deprivation. It draws itself together, because it is impoverished and feels its selfhood less strongly than usual, for the strength of this feeling is related to the richness of its experiences in the surrounding world. We not only give something to those we love; we enrich our own souls by so doing. And when the experiences that love gives us are taken away and the astral body contracts, it seeks to regain by this pressure on itself the forces it has lost. Because it feels impoverished, it tries to make itself richer again. The tears are not merely an outflow; they are a sort of compensation for the stricken ego. The ego had formerly felt itself enriched by the outer world; now it feels strengthened by itself producing the tears. If someone suffers a weakening of self-consciousness, he tries to compensate for this by spurring himself on to an inward act of creation, manifest in the flow of tears. The tears give the ego a subconscious feeling of well-being; a certain balance is restored. You all know how people, when they are in the depths of grief and misery, find consolation, a kind of compensation, in tears. You will know, too, how people who cannot weep find sorrow and pain much harder to endure.

The ego, then if it cannot achieve a satisfying relationship with the outer world, will either raise itself to inner freedom through laughter, or it will sink into itself in order to gain strength after a deprivation. We have seen how it is the ego, the central point in man, which expresses itself in laughing and weeping. Hence you will find it easy to understand that in a certain sense the ego is a necessary precondition of laughter and tears.

If we observe a new-born child, we find that during its first days it can neither laugh nor weep. True laughing or weeping begins only around the 36th or 40th day. The reason is that although an ego from a former incarnation is living in the child, it does not immediately seek to relate itself to the outer world. A human being is placed into the world in such a way that he is built up from two sides. From one side he derives all the attributes and facilities acquired by heredity from father, mother, grandfather and so on. All this is worked on by the individuality, the ego that goes on from life to life, bearing with it its own soul-qualities. When a child enters existence at birth, we see at first only an undefined physiognomy, and quite undefined also are the talents, capacities and special characteristics which will emerge later on. But presently we are able to observe how the ego, with the powers of development it has brought from previous lives, works unceasingly on the infant organism and modifies the inherited elements. Thus the inherited qualities are blended with those which pass from one incarnation to another.

That is how the ego is active in the child, but it is some time before the ego can begin to transform body and soul. During its early days, the child shows only its inherited characteristics. The ego, meanwhile, remains deeply hidden, waiting until it can impress on the undefined physiognomy the qualities it has brought from previous lives and will develop from day to day and year to year.

Before the child has taken on the individual character that belongs to it, it cannot express a relationship to the outer world through laughing or crying. For this requires the ego, the individuality, which tries to place itself in harmony with the outer world. Only the ego can express itself in laughter or tears. So it is that when we consider laughing and weeping, we are dealing with the deepest and most inward spirituality of man.

Those who refuse to admit any real distinction between men and animals will of course try to find analogies to laughing and weeping in the animal kingdom. But anyone who understands these things rightly will agree with the German poet who says that animals can rise at most only to howling, never to weeping; they can show their teeth in a grin but they never smile. Herein lies a deep truth which we can express in words by saying that the animal does not raise itself to the individual egohood which dwells in every human being. The animal is ruled by laws which appear to resemble those appertaining to human selfhood but remain external to the animal throughout its life. This essential difference between human beings and animals has already been mentioned here, and it was said that what interests us in the animal is comprised in the species to which it belongs. For example, there are no such great difference between lions and their progeny as we may find between human parents and their offspring. The main characteristics of an animal are those of its type or species. In the human realm every person has his own individual characteristics and his own biography, and this is what concerns us, whereas in animals it is the history of the species. Certainly there are many dog-owners and cat-owners who aver that they could write a biography of their pet, and I even knew a schoolmaster who regularly set his pupils the exercise of writing the biography of a pen. The fact that a thought can be applied to anything is not important; what matters is that we should penetrate with our understanding the essential nature of a being or a thing. Individual biography is significant for man, but not for animals, for the essential part of man is the individuality which goes on and develops from life to life, whereas in animals it is the species that lives on and evolves.

In spiritual science, the enduring element that informs the species is called the animal's group-soul or group-ego, and we regard it as a reality. Thus we say that the animal has its ego outside itself. We do not deny the animal an ego, but we speak of the group-ego which directs the animal from outside. With man, by contrast, we speak of an individual penetrating right into his inmost part and directing each human being from within in such a way that he can enter into a personal relationship with the beings in his environment. The relationships that animals establish through the guidance of the external group-ego have a general character. What this or that animal likes or hates or fears is typical for its species, modified only in minor details among domestic animals and those which live with men. In human beings, what a person feels by way of love and hate, fear, sympathy or antipathy in relation to his environment springs from his individual ego. Thus the special relationship whereby man liberates himself from something in his environment and expresses his relief in laughter, or, in the opposite case, when he seeks for a relationship he cannot find and expresses his frustration in tears—all this can occur in man only. The more the individuality of the child makes itself evident above the animal level, the more does it show its humanity through laughter and tears.

If we are to take a true view of life, we must not attach primary importance to such crude facts as the similarities of bone and muscle in men and animals or the resemblances between some other organs. We must look for man's essential characteristics as evidence of his status as the highest of earthly beings in subtler aspects of his nature. If anyone cannot see the significance of such facts as laughter and tears for bringing out the difference between men and animals, one has to say: Nothing can be done to help a person who cannot rise to the facts which matter most in coming to understand man in his spirituality.

The facts we are now considering in the light of spiritual science can illuminate certain scientific findings, but only if the facts are placed in the context of a great spiritual-scientific whole. If we observe a person laughing or weeping, we can see that a change in the breathing process occurs. When sorrow goes as deep as tears, leading to a contraction of the astral body, and hence to a contraction also of the physical body, the in-breathing becomes shorter and shorter and the out-breathing longer and longer. In laughter the opposite occurs: the in-breathing is long and the out-breathing short. When a person's astral body is relaxed, and with it the finer parts of the physical body, the situation resembles that of a hollow space from which all the air is pumped out and immediately the outside air rushes in. A kind of liberation of the outer corporeality occurs in laughter, and then a long breath of air is drawn in. In weeping the opposite occurs. We press the astral together and with it the physical body, and the contraction causes an out-breathing in one long stretch.

Here, again, we have an instance where a soul-experience is brought by the ego into connection with the physical, right down into the physical body of man.

If we take these physiological facts, they will wonderfully illuminate an event which is recorded symbolically in the ancient religious records of mankind. You will remember the passage in the Old Testament which tells how man was raised to fully human status when Jahve or Jehovah breathed into him the breath of life and thereby endowed him with a living soul.¹² That is the moment when the birth of selfhood is impressed on our attention. Thus in the Old Testament the breathing process is shown as an expression of true ego-hood and brought into relation with the soul-quality of man. If we then recall how laughing and weeping are a unique expression of the human ego, we see at once the intimate connection between the breathing process and the soul-nature in man; and then, in the light of this knowledge, we come to look on the ancient religious records with the humility that such a deep and true understanding must instil in us.

For spiritual science these records are not necessary. Even if they were all destroyed in a great catastrophe, spiritual-scientific research has the means to discover for itself what lies at the root of them. But when the facts have been ascertained by this means, and when later the same facts are found to be unmistakably rendered in the symbolic-pictorial language of the old records, our understanding of the records is greatly enhanced. We feel that they must originate from seers who knew what the spiritual-scientific researcher discovers—spiritual vision meets spiritual vision across thousands of years, and from this knowledge we gain the right attitude towards these records. When we are told how God breathed his own living breath into man, whereby man would find his own in-dwelling ego, we can see from our study of laughter and tears how true to human nature is this symbolically recorded event.

There is one other point I will mention, but only briefly, or it would lead us too far afield. Someone might say to me: you have started at the wrong end, you ought to have started with the external facts. The spiritual element should be sought where it appears purely as a natural occurrence—for example when a person is tickled. That is the most elementary fact about laughter. How do you reconcile that with all your fantasies about the expansion of the astral body and so forth?

Well, it is just in such a case that an expansion of the astral body occurs, and everything I have described comes to pass, though on a lower level. If someone tickles himself on the soles of his feet, he knows very well what is happening and is not impelled to laugh. But if he is tickled on the sole by someone else, he will reject it as an alien incursion, not to be rationally understood. Then his ego will try to rise above it, to liberate itself and set the astral body free. This freeing of the astral from an inappropriate contact expresses itself in laughter without motive. That signifies precisely a liberation, a rescue of the ego on a fundamental level, from the attack made on us by the tickling of our feet.

Laughing at a joke or at something comic is on the same level. We laugh at a joke because laughter brings us into a right relationship with it. A joke associates things which in serious life are kept apart; if the connection between them could be logically grasped, it would not be comic. A joke sets up relationships which—unless we are topsy-turvy minded—do not call for understanding but only for playing a sort of game. Directly we feel masters of the game, we free ourselves and rise above the content of the joke. This liberation, this raising ourselves above something, we shall always find when laughter breaks out.

But this kind of relationship to the outer world may or may not be justified. We may rightly wish to liberate ourselves through laughter; or alternatively our own cast of mind may make us unwilling or unable to understand what is going on. Laughter will then derive from our own limitations, not from the nature of things. This is what happens when an undeveloped human being laughs at someone because he cannot understand him. If an undeveloped human being fails to find in another the commonplace or philistine qualities that he regards as right and proper, he may think he need not try to understand the other person and so he tries to free himself—perhaps because he does not want to understand. So it can easily become a habit to liberate oneself through laughter on all occasions. There are indeed certain people for whom it is quite natural to laugh and bleat at everything, without ever trying to understand anything; they fluff out their astral and so are continually laughing. Or it may be that attitudes currently in fashion make it seem that some everyday behaviour is not worth any attempt to understand it. Then people will allow themselves a smile, feeling that they are superior to this or that. Hence you will see that laughter does not always express a feeling of justified withdrawal; the withdrawal can also be unjustified. But the fundamental facts concerning laughter are not affected either way.

It may happen also that someone makes calculated use of this form of human expression. Consider a speaker who calculates the effect his words will have on his hearers, whether they agree with him or not. Now it may be justified for him to refer to things so trivial or so far below the level of his audience that they can be described without weaving any intimate link between them and the souls of his hearers. In fact, by so doing he may help them to free themselves from the trivialities that surround the subject which he really wants to get them to understand. But there are also speakers who always want to get the laugh on their side. I have heard them saying: If I am to win I must stimulate laughter, so that I will have the laughers on my side—for if anyone has the laughers on his side, his case is as good as won! That may spring from inward dishonesty. For anyone who appeals to laughter is evoking a response which is intended to raise his hearers above something. But if he presents the matter in such a way that his hearers need not try to understand it but can laugh at it only because it has been brought down to a level where it appears trivial—then he is counting on human vanity, even though his hearers may not be aware of it. So you can see that this counting on laughter may involve a certain dishonesty.

In the same way it is sometimes possible to win people over by stirring in them the feelings of comfort and well-being which I have described as being associated with tears. In such cases, when some loss is brought before a person in imagination only, he may indulge himself in craving for something he knows he cannot find. By contracting his ego he feels his selfhood strengthened; and often this kind of appeal to the emotions is really an appeal to human selfishness. All these forms of appeal can thus be grossly misused, because pain and grief, mockery and scorn, which may be accompanied by tears or laughter, are all connected with strengthening or liberating the ego and so with human egohood. When therefore such appeals are made, it may be our selfishness that is addressed, and it is selfishness that destroys the bonds between man and man.

In other lectures we have seen that the ego not only works on the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, but through this work is itself made stronger and brought nearer fulfilment. Hence we can readily understand that laughing and weeping can be a means whereby the ego can educate itself and further strengthen its powers. No wonder, then, that among the great sources of education for human development we rank those dramatic creations which stimulate the soul-forces that find expression in laughter and tears.

Our experience of tragic drama does in fact have the effect of pressing the astral body together and so imparting firmness and inner cohesion to the ego. Comedy expands the astral body, inasmuch as a person raises himself above follies and coincidences and thereby liberates the ego. Hence we can see how closely connected with human development are tragedy and comedy, when through artistic creations they come before our souls.

Anyone who can observe human nature in its smallest details will find that everyday experiences can lead to an understanding of the greatest facts. Artistic productions, for example, can make us see that in human life there is a kind of pendulum which swings to and fro between laughter and tears. The ego can progress only by being in motion. If the pendulum were at rest, the ego would not be able to expand or develop; it would succumb to inward death. It is right for human development that the ego should be able to free itself through laughter and on the other hand to search for itself through tears. Certainly a balance between the two poles must be found: the ego will find completion only in the balance, never in swinging to and fro between exultation and despair. It will find itself only at the point of rest, which can swing over as easily to one extreme as to the other.

The human being must gradually become the guide and leader of his own development. If we understand laughter and tears, we can see them as revelations of the spirit, for a human being becomes transparent, as it were, if we know how in laughter he seeks an outward expression of inner liberation, while in tears he experiences an inner strengthening after the ego has suffered a loss in the external world.

To the question as to what laughter fundamentally is, we can reply: It is a spiritual expression of man's striving for liberation, in order that he may not be entangled in things unworthy of him but with a smile may rise above things to which he should never be enslaved. Similarly, tears are an expression of the fact that when the thread linking him to someone in the outer world has been broken, he still seeks for such a link in the midst of his tears. When he strengthens his ego through weeping, he is in effect saying to himself, I belong to the world and the world to me, for I cannot endure being torn away from it.

Now at last we can understand how this liberation, rising above everything base and evil, could be expressed in the “Zarathustra smile”, at which all creatures on earth exulted, while the spirits of evil fled away. That smile is the symbol in world-history of the spiritual elevation of the ego above everything that might strangle it. And if the ego comes to an occasion when it feels that existence is worthless and that it wants to have no more to do with the world, and if then a power rises up in the soul which impels the ego to affirm, “The world belongs with me and I with the world”, then this feeling is rendered in Goethe's “The tears flow forth—the earth holds me again!”

These words give voice to a conviction that we cannot be shut off from the earth and that even in our tears we assert our intimate connection with the world at the very moment when it seems to be taken from us. And for this assertion there is justification in the deep secrets of the world.

Man's connection with the world is made known to us by the tears on his face, and his liberation from everything base by the smile upon his countenance.

• 11. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, 1.784.
• 12. Genesis 2, 7

The subject of today's lecture¹³ is one on which widespread confusion prevails. Not long ago I heard a cultured scholar declare that Goethe should be numbered among the mystics, for he had admitted the existence of a dark, inscrutable element, beyond the range of knowledge. And many people would probably agree with that opinion. What indeed is not called mysticism or mystical nowadays? When a person is not clear about something, if his response to it hovers between not-knowing and a dim inkling, he will call it mystical or mysterious. When people are tempted by a certain lack of thought and psychological knowledge to assert that nothing reliable is known about something, and then go on to deny that anyone else may have knowledge of it, as is the wont today, they dismiss it as mystical.

If, however, we study the historical origin of the word, we shall gain a quite different idea of what great men have understood by mysticism and of what they believed it offered them. We shall see that there have been men who, far from regarding that which is obscure and inscrutable as the content of mysticism, have spoken of its goal as attainable only through a higher clarity, a brighter light in the soul; so much so that for them the clarity of science leaves off where the clarity of mysticism begins. That is the conviction of those who believe they have experienced real mysticism.

We find some mysticism in the earliest periods of human evolution, but what was called mysticism in the Mysteries of the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Asiatic peoples is so far removed from our conceptual thinking that it is hard to give any idea of mysticism if we go by those old forms of mystical experience.

We can come nearest to present-day concepts if we start with the still fairly recent forms of mysticism found among the German mystics from Meister Eckhart¹⁴ onwards, during the 13th and 14th centuries, up to their culmination in that incomparable mystic, Angelus Silesius.¹⁵ If we examine their mysticism, we find that it sought to reach a true knowledge of the deepest foundations of the world by a purely inward soul-experience; above all, by the liberation of the soul from all external impressions and perceptions, so that the soul would draw back from the outer world and try to plunge into the depths of its own inward life. In other words, a mystic of this type believes that by this means he can find the divine ground of the world, which he would not be able to do if he attempted to analyse natural phenomena, however intensively, and to grasp them with his intellect. His view is that outward sense-impressions form a kind of veil through which human cognition cannot penetrate in its search for the divine foundations of the world. The inward experiences of the soul, however, form a much thinner veil, and it is possible to penetrate through this to the divine ground, which also lies at the foundation of external appearances. This is the mystical way of Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler¹⁶ and Suso¹⁷ and other mystics of that century, leading to Angelus Silesius.

We must be clear that these mystics were expecting to find more than only that which could be regarded as the immediate result of their inward search. In the course of this winter's lectures we have dealt with this inward search in all its manifold aspects. We saw that if we look into what is rightly called man's inner being, we come first to the darkest depths of the soul, where the soul is still subject to emotions of fear, terror, anxiety and hope, and to the whole gamut of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. We called this part of the soul the sentient soul. We went on to distinguish in these dark foundations of soul experience what we call the intellectual soul, which is achieved when the ego assimilates external impressions and quietly allows that which emerges in the sentient soul to live itself out and find equilibrium. We said also that inner truth, as we may call it, arises in the intellectual soul. When the ego then works further on what it has gained on its way to the intellectual soul, it raises itself to the consciousness soul, where for the first time a clear knowledge of the ego is possible, and where man is led out from inner life to a real knowledge of the world. If we keep before us these three members of the soul's life, we have the outline of what we find when we sink ourselves directly into our inner being; and we find out how the ego works on the three soul members.

Those mystics who sought for knowledge in the way described, believed that they could find something else through this immersion in the depths of the soul. For the inward experiences of the soul's life were for them only a veil they had to pass through in order to reach the source of being. Above all, they believed that if they attained to that source, they would themselves undergo, as a further inward experience, what is presented in external history as the life and death of Christ.

Now when this mystical descent into the soul occurs, even if only in the mediaeval sense, the process is as follows. The mystic has in front of him the external world, with its realms of light and colour and all the other impressions it makes on his senses, and he works on all this with his intellect. But he remains in thrall to the external world and cannot penetrate through its appearances to their source. His soul retains conceptual images of the outer world, and above all it retains all its experiences, whether as pleasure or pain, sympathy or antipathy, from the impressions it receives. A human being's ego, with his interests and his entire inner life, always directs him towards the outer world and the impressions the latter makes upon him. When, therefore, a mystic first attempts to turn away from the outer world, he has to reckon with everything that the outer world has engendered in his soul from morning till evening. So at first his inner life appears to him as a repetition, a reflected image, of outer life.

Is the soul left empty, then, when it exerts itself to forget everything reflected within it from the outer world, to obliterate all impressions and conceptual images drawn from that world? The true mystical experience depends on the fact that the soul has other possibilities, so that when it banishes not only its memories but its feelings of sympathy and antipathy, it still has some content. The mystic feels that impressions of the outer world, with their brightly coloured pictures and their effects on the soul, have the result of suppressing something which exists in the soul's hidden depths. The mystic feels that when he is open to the external world, its life is like a powerful light which outshines and blots out the finer experiences of the soul. But when all impressions from the outer world are erased, the inner spark, as Eckhart calls it, shines forth. He then experiences in the soul something which had previously seemed not to be there, for it was imperceptible in face of the dazzle of the outer world.

For the sake of clarity, the mystic then asks if what he experiences in the soul is comparable with what he encounters in the outer world. No: there is a radical difference. Our relation to things in the outer world is such that we cannot penetrate into their inwardness, for they show us only their outer sides. When we perceive colours and sounds, it is possible for us to realise that behind them lies something which for the moment we must regard as their hidden side; but with the experiences that arise in the soul it is different once we have obliterated the impressions and conceptual images of the outer world: we cannot say that they show us only their outer side, for we are within them and are part of them. And if we have the gift for opening ourselves to the inner light, they show themselves to us in their true being, and we see them to be entirely different from anything we encounter in the outer world. For the outer world is subject everywhere to growth and decline, to flowering and withering, to birth and death. And when we observe what reveals itself in the soul when the little spark begins to shine, we see that all ideas of growth and decline, of birth and death, are not applicable to it, for here we encounter something independent; and we see that concepts which belong to the outer world, including that of outside and inside, are not relevant to it. Hence it is no longer the surface or outer side of things that we grasp, but the thing itself in its true being.

It is precisely through this inward knowledge that we gain assurance of the imperishable element in ourselves and of its kinship with what we must think of as the spirit, the primal basis of everything material. This experience leads the mystic to feel that he must overcome and kill all his former experiences; that his ordinary soul-life must die, and then his real soul, the victor over birth and death, will arise within him. This awakening of the inner kernel of the soul, after the death of ordinary soul-life, is experienced by the mystic as an inner resurrection, an analogue of the historical life, death and resurrection of Christ. Thus he sees the Christ-event taking place in his soul and spirit as an inner mystical experience.

If we trace out this mystical path, we find that it must lead to what may be called a unity of all experience. For it belongs to the nature of our soul-life that we pass from the multiplicity of sense-perceptions, the flow and ebb of perceptions and feelings and the rich variety of thoughts, to a simplification; for the ego, the centre-point of our life, is always working to create unity in our entire life of soul. It is clear, then, that when the mystic treads the path of soul-experiences, they come before him in such a way that everything manifold and multiple strives towards the unity prescribed by the ego. In all mystics, accordingly, we find an outlook which could be called spiritual monism. When the mystic raises himself to the knowledge that the inner being of the soul has qualities radically different from those found in the external world, he experiences in his inner being the consonance of the soul's kernel with the divine-spiritual ground of the world, which he therefore represents as a unity.

What I have now been saying should be regarded simply as descriptive. It is impossible to reproduce in a modern sense what the mystic reveals except in the form of individual mystical experience passed through by the soul as its most intimate concern. Then the strange things told us by the mystic can be compared with one's own experience. But external criticism is not possible if one has no personal experience, because another person's description of individual experience has to be relied on. But from the basic standpoint of these lectures we can form a clear picture of the mystic's path. It is essentially a path into the inner life, and the history of human development shows it to be one of the paths taken by the human spirit in its search for enlightenment. Various opinions as to which is the right path may be held, but if we are to give a clear answer to the question “What is mysticism?”, we must throw some light on the other path that can be pursued.

The mystic's path leads him to unity, to one divine-spiritual Being. This he does by following the path which leads into his inner being where the ego gives him the unity of soul experience. The other path is the one that the human spirit has always taken when it seeks to pierce through the veil of the external world to the foundations of existence. Here, in conjunction with many other things, it has been above all the human thinking which has tried to reach a deeper understanding of what lies behind the surface of things through that which can be perceived by the senses and grasped by ordinary intelligence. Whither does such a path necessarily lead, in contrast to the goal of mysticism? If all relevant relationships are taken into account, it must lead from the manifold variety of external phenomena to the conclusion that a similar multiplicity of spiritual grounds must exist. In modern times such men as Leibniz¹⁸ and Herbart,¹⁹ who followed this way of thought, have seen that one cannot explain the wealth of external phenomena in terms of any kind of underlying unity. In brief, they found the true antithesis—monadology—to all mysticism. They reached the view that the world is founded on the activities of a multiplicity of monads, or spiritual beings.

Thus Leibnitz, the great thinker of the 17th and 18th century, said to himself: When we look at what comes to meet us in space and time, we go astray if we believe that it all springs from a unity; it must come from many unities working together. And this reciprocal activity of monads, a world of monads or spiritual beings, brings about the phenomena perceived by human senses.

I cannot go further into this today, but a deeper study of spiritual development would show that all those who have sought for unity on the outward path were subject to an illusion, for they projected outwards, like a sort of shadow, the unity which is experienced inwardly in mysticism, and they believed that this unity was the basis of the external world and could be apprehended by thinking. Healthy thinking, however, finds no unity in the outer world, but recognises that its manifold variety arises from the inter-working of a variety of beings, or monads. Mysticism leads to unity because the ego works in our inner being as a single centre of the soul. The path through the external world leads by necessity to multiplicity, plurality, monadology, and thus to the view that many spiritual beings must work together in order to engender our world, while human knowledge of the world is achieved through a multiplicity of organs and observations.

Now we come to a point of far-reaching importance which receives all to little attention in the history of thought. Mysticism leads to unity; but its recognition of the divine ground of the world as a unity derives from the nature of the ego, the inner constitution of the soul.

The ego sets its seal of unity when the mystic looks up to the Divine Spirit. Contemplation of the external world leads to a multiplicity of monads. But it is only our way of observing the outer world and the way in which it comes to meet us that lead to multiplicity and which therefore prompted Leibniz and Herbart to postulate multiplicity as the foundation of the world. Deeper research leads to a realisation that unity and multiplicity are concepts inapplicable to the divine-spiritual ground of the world, for we cannot characterise it as either a unity or a multiplicity. We must say that the divine-spiritual transcends these concepts and cannot be fathomed by them.

This is a principle which throws light on the supposed conflict between monism and pluralism, so often portrayed as opposites in philosophical debates. If the disputants would only realise that their concepts are inadequate for any approach to the divine ground of the world, they might come to see the subject of their debate in the right light.

Now we have learnt what the essence of real mysticism is. It is an inner experience of such a kind that it leads the mystic to real knowledge. He will not be justified in regarding the unity he experiences as objective truth, for its appearance of unity derives from his own ego, but he may truly say that he experiences the substantiality of spirit as one living within it.

If we pass on from this general account of mysticism to individual mystics, we often encounter facts which are called in evidence against mysticism by its opponents. The inner experience of individuals takes various forms, so that the experiences of one mystic may not agree entirely with those of another. But if two persons have different experiences of something, it by no means follows that their reports are untrue. If one person sees a tree from the right and another sees it from the left, and each describes it from his own point of view, it will be the same tree and both descriptions may be correct. This simple example will show why the soul-experiences of mystics differ: after all, a mystic's inner life does not come before him as a complete blank. However much it may be his ideal to obliterate external experiences and to withdraw his attention from them completely, they will yet leave a trace in his soul, and this makes a difference. The mystic will be subject also to some influence from the character of the nation from which he descends. Even if he casts out from his soul every external experience he has had, his inner experience will still have to be described in words and concepts drawn from his own life. Two mystics may experience exactly the same thing, but they will describe it differently as a result of their earlier lives. It is only if we are able through our own personal experience to allow for these individual variations in description and representation that we can come to recognise that fundamentally the reality of mystical experience is always the same. It is just as though we were to photograph a tree from various angles: the photographs would differ but they would all be of the same tree.

There is another point, which might in a sense be considered an objection against mystical experience, and since I must speak quite objectively, with no bias one way or the other, I have to say that this objection is valid and applies to all forms of mysticism. Just because mystical experience is so intimate and inward, and has an individual character derived from the mystic's earlier years, it is extraordinarily difficult for anything he says about his mystical life, closely bound up as it must be with his own soul, to be rightly understood or assimilated by another soul. The most intimate aspects of mysticism must always remain intimate and very hard to communicate, however earnestly one may try to understand and enter into what is said. The point is that two mystics, if both are far enough advanced, may have the same experience—and anyone well-disposed will then recognise that they are speaking of the same thing—but they will have passed through different experiences during their earlier years, and this will give their mysticism an individual colouring. Hence the expressions used by a mystic and his style of utterance, in so far as they derive from his pre-mystical life, will always remain somewhat incomprehensible unless we make an effort to understand his personal background and so come to see why he speaks as he does. This, however, will divert our attention from what is universally valid to the personality of the mystic himself, and this tendency can be observed in the history of mysticism.

With the deepest mystics, especially, we must set aside any idea that the knowledge they have gained can be imparted and assimilated by other people. Mystical knowledge cannot at all easily be made part of general human knowledge. But this only goes to strengthen our interest in the personality of the mystic, and it is endlessly attractive to study him in so far as the universal human image is reflected in him. What the mystic describes and values only because it leads him to the foundations and sources of existence will in itself have little interest for us as regards the objective nature of the world; what interests us will be the subjective side of it and its bearing on the mystic as an individual. In studying mysticism, accordingly, we shall find value in precisely what the mystic tries to overcome—in the personal, the immediate, his attitude to the world. Certainly we can learn a great deal about the depths of human nature if we observe the history of mankind from the aspect of the mystic as it were, but it will be very hard for us—this can never be too strongly emphasised—to find in a mystic's words as he expresses them anything that can have direct validity for us.

Mysticism is the opposite of monadology, or pluralism, which derives from observing and reflecting on the external world which all men have in common. The resulting systems of the latter may contain error upon error, but they can be discussed and something made of them from whatever point of development the individual has reached.

The mysticism I have been describing here can thus be extremely attractive, but we shall recognise its limits quite objectively if we allow our souls to assimilate what has just been said about it.

Further light is thrown on mysticism if we assess it in relation to the method of spiritual science, a method drawn from the deeper levels of present-day spiritual life with the aim of penetrating to the primal foundations of existence. If a subject gives difficulty because of the subtlety of its ideas, the best way of understanding it is often to compare it with some related subject.

You have often heard it said in these lectures that there is a path of ascent to the higher worlds. In a certain sense it is a threefold path. We have described the outward path, and then the inward path taken by the mediaeval mystics, and we have defined the limits of the latter. Now we will turn to what can be called the proper path of spiritual science, or spiritual research.

We have already seen that this way of knowledge does not simply require the student to take either the outward path, leading to the spiritual basis of the sense-world and therefore to plurality, or the inward path leading to the deeper foundations of one's own soul and finally to the mystical unity of the world. Spiritual science says that a man is not bound to follow only those paths which his own immediate knowledge opens for him, but that he possesses hidden, slumbering faculties of cognition, and that starting from them he can find other paths than the two just mentioned.

A person who follows either of these two paths remains as he already is and has become; he may seek to pierce the veil of the sense world and penetrate to the foundations of existence; or he may obliterate external impressions and allow the inner spark to shine out. But in spiritual science it is fundamental that man need not remain as he is today, with his existing faculties of knowledge. Just as man has evolved to his present stage, so, by using the appropriate method, he can develop faculties of knowledge higher than those he has now.

If we are to compare this method with the mystical mode of knowledge, we must say: If we eliminate outer impressions we can discover the inner spark, and see how it shines when all else is extinguished, but we are still only drawing on what is already there. Spiritual science is not content with that; it comes to the spark, but does not stop there. It seeks to develop methods which will turn the little spark into a much stronger light. We can take the outward path or the inward path, but since we are to develop new powers of cognition, we take neither path immediately. The modern form of spiritual scientific research is distinguished both from mediaeval mysticism and from pluralism and also from the old teachings of the Mysteries, by developing inner faculties of cognition in such a way that the outward path and the inward path are brought together. Thus we follow a path that leads equally to both goals.

This is possible because the development of higher faculties by the methods of spiritual science leads man through three stages of knowledge. The first stage, which proceeds from ordinary knowledge and goes beyond it is called Imagination; the second stage is called Inspiration, and the third is called Intuition, in the true sense of the word. How is the first stage attained and what is accomplished in the soul for higher faculties to arise? The way in which they are developed will show you how pluralism and mysticism are transcended along this path. The example most helpful for an understanding of Imagination, or imaginative cognition, has already been mentioned more than once: it is drawn from the methods applied by the spiritual scientist to himself. It is one of many such examples and is best given in the form of a dialogue between master and pupil.

The teacher who wants to educate a pupil in the higher faculties leading to Imagination would say: “Look at the plant; it grows up out of the soil and unfolds leaf by leaf until it is a flower. Compare it with man as he stands before you. Man has something more than the plant, for the world is reflected in his ideas, feelings and sensations; he excels the plant in possessing human consciousness. But he has had to pay for this consciousness by absorbing into himself on his way towards becoming man, passions, impulses and desires which may lead him into error, wrong and evil. The plant grows according to its natural laws; it unfolds its being according to these laws, and it stands before us, pure, with its green sap. Unless we indulge in fancies we cannot attribute to it any desires, passions or impulses which could divert it from the right path. If now we observe the blood as it circulates through man, the blood which is the external expression of human consciousness, of the human ego, and contrast it with the green chlorophyll sap permeating the plant, we shall realize that this streaming, pulsating blood is the expression as much of man's rise to a higher stage of consciousness as it is of the passions and impulses which drag him down.

“Then”—the teacher might continue—“imagine that man develops further; that through his ego he overcomes error, evil and ugliness, everything which tries to drag him down to evil; that he purifies and refines his passions and affections. Picture an ideal which man strives to realise, when his blood will no longer be the expression of any passions, but only of his inner mastery of all that might drag him down. His red blood may then be compared with what the green sap has become in the red rose. Just as the red rose shows us the plant sap in all its purity, and yet at a higher stage than it had reached in the plant, so the red blood of man, when purified and refined, can show what man becomes when he has mastered everything that might drag him down.”

These are the feelings and images that the teacher can evoke in the pupil's mind and soul. If the pupil is not a dry stick, if he is able to enter with his feelings into the whole secret symbolised by this comparison, his soul will be stirred and he will experience something which will come before his spiritual vision as a symbolic picture, The picture can be of the Rose Cross: the black cross symbolising what has been slain in man's lower nature and the roses representing the red blood, so purified and refined that it has become a pure expression of his higher soul-nature. Thus the black cross wreathed with red roses becomes a symbolical summing-up of what the soul experiences in this dialogue between teacher and pupil.

If the pupil has opened his soul to all the feelings and images which can make the Rose Cross a true symbol for him; if he does not merely claim to have placed the Rose Cross before his inner vision, but if with pain and struggle he has won through to a heightened experience of its essence, he will know that this picture, or similar ones, call forth something in his soul—not merely the little spark but a new power of cognition which enables him to look at the world in a new way. Thus he has not remained as he formerly was, but has raised his soul to a further stage of development. And if he does this again and again, he will finally attain to Imagination, which shows him that in the outer world there is more than meets the eye.

Now let us see how this way of knowledge came into being. Did we say to ourselves: We will take the outward path and seek for the foundations of things? To a certain extent, yes. We go out to the external world, but we are not searching for the basis of things, or for molecules and atoms; we are not concerned with what the outer world sets directly before us, but we retain something from it. The black cross could not arise in the soul if there were no wood in the world; the soul could not imagine a red rose unless it had received an impression of one from the world around it. Hence we cannot say, as the mystic does, that we have obliterated everything external and turned our attention away entirely from the outer world. We submit to the outer world and take from it something that it alone can give, but we do not take it just as it comes, for the Rose Cross is not found in nature. How was it, then, that rose and wood, drawn from the outer world, were combined into a symbolic picture? It was the work of our own souls. The experience that comes to us when we devote ourselves to the outer world, not merely staring at it but becoming absorbed in it, and what we can learn from comparing plant with man as he develops—all this we have made into an inner mystical experience. But we have not taken immediate possession of our experience, as the mystic does; we sacrifice it to the outer world, and, with the help of what the world can give outwardly and the soul inwardly, we build up a symbolic picture in which outer and inner mystical life are fused. The picture stands before us in such a way that it does not lead directly either to the outer world or to the inner world, but it works as a force. If we place it before our souls in meditation, it creates a new spiritual eye, and then we can see into a spiritual world which previously we could not find, either in the inner world or in the outer. And then we can discern that what lies at the basis of the external world, and can now be experienced through imaginative cognition, is identical with what can be found in our own inner being.

If now we ascend to the stage of Inspiration, we have to strip away the content of our symbolic picture. We have to do something very similar to the procedure of the mystic who takes the inward path. We have to forget the rose and the cross, to banish the whole picture from our mind's eye. However difficult this may be, it has to be done. In order to bring before us inwardly the symbolical comparison between plant and man, our soul had to exert itself. Now we have to concentrate our attention on this activity, on what the soul had to do in order to call up the image of the black cross as a symbol of what has to be overcome in man. When we thus deepen ourselves mystically in the experience of the soul during this activity, we come to Inspiration, or inspirational cognition.

The awakening of this new faculty not only brings the appearance of the little spark in our inner being: we see it lighting up as a powerful force of cognition, and through it we experience something which reveals itself as closely related to our inner being and yet wholly independent of it. For we have seen how our soul-activity is not only an inner process but has exercised itself on something external. So we have here a knowledge of our inner being, as a residue of mysticism, which is also knowledge of the outer world.

Now we come to a task which is opposed to that of the mystic. We have to do something similar to what ordinary natural science does: we have to go forth into the external world. This is difficult, but essential for rising to the stage of Intuition, or intuitive cognition.

Our task now is to divert our attention from our own activity, forget what we have done to bring the Rose Cross before our inner sight. If we are patient and carry out the exercises long enough and in the right way, we shall see that we are left with something which we know for certain is entirely independent of our own inner experience and has no subjective colouring, and yet shows by its objective being that it is akin to the centre of the human being, the ego. Thus in order to reach intuitive knowledge we go out from ourselves and yet come to something which is closely akin to our inner being. So we rise from our own inward experience to the spiritual, which we no longer experience within ourselves but in the external world. Thus on the path of spiritual science, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, we overcome the shadow-sides both of pluralism and ordinary mysticism.

Now we can give an answer to the question—What is mysticism? It is an endeavour by the human soul to find the divine-spiritual source of existence through immersing itself in its own inner being. Fundamentally, spiritual-scientific cognition also must take this mystical path, but it is well aware that it must first prepare itself and not set out prematurely. Mysticism is thus an enterprise which springs from a justified urge in the human soul, thoroughly justified in principle, but undertaken too early if the soul has not first sought to make progress in imaginative cognition. If we try to deepen our ordinary life through mysticism, there is a danger that we may not have made ourselves sufficiently free and independent of ourselves, so that we are unable to form a picture of the world not coloured by our personality. If we rise to the stage of Inspiration, we have poured out our inner being into something drawn from the outer world; and then we have gained the right to be a mystic. All mysticism should therefore be undertaken at the proper stage of human development. Harm is done if we try to achieve mystical knowledge before we are ready for it.

In justified mysticism, accordingly, spiritual science can recognise a stage which enables us to understand the real aim and intention of spiritual-scientific research. There is hardly anything from which we can learn as much in this respect as we can from a devoted study of the mystics. It must not be thought that the spiritual scientist, when he recognises something justified in mysticism, is denying the need for further progress. Mysticism is justified only if it is raised to a certain level of development, so that its methods yield results which are not merely subjective but give valid expression to truths concerning the spiritual world.

We need not say much about the dangers which a premature devotion to mystical methods can incur. They involve a descent into the depths of the human soul before the mystic has prepared himself in such a way that his inner being can grow out into the external world. He will often then be inclined to shut himself off from the outer world, and fundamentally this is only a subtle, refined form of egotism. This often applies to mystics who turn away from the outer world and indulge in those feelings of rapture, exaltation and liberation which flood into their souls when this golden mood pervades their inner life. This egotism can be overcome if the ego is constrained to pass outside itself and make its activity flow into the external world by the creation of symbols. In this way an imaginative symbolism leads to an experience of truth which strips away egotism. The danger incurred by a mystic who strives after knowledge too early in his development is that he may become an eccentric or a refined egoist.

Mysticism is justified, and what Angelus Silesius says is true:

If you transcend yourself in God's prevailing,
Then in your spirit will ascension reign!²⁰

It is true that by developing his soul man attains not only to his own inner being but to the spiritual kingdoms which underlie the outer world. But he must take in full earnest the work of transcending himself, and this must not be confused with a mere brooding within himself just as he is. He must take seriously the words of Angelus Silesius, both the first line and the second. We fail to do this if we withdraw from any aspect of the divine revelation; we let God hold sway only if we are able to sacrifice our inner being to all that can flow into us as revelation from the outer world. If we bring this way of thinking into relation with our spiritual-scientific cognition, we shall be taking the second line in the right sense. We let the divine-spiritual ground of the outer and inner worlds hold sway in us, and only then can we hope that we shall be “on Heaven's way.” This means that we shall come to a spiritual realm which is coloured neither by our own inner world nor by the outer world—a realm which has the same ground as the infinite world of stars shining in on us, as the atmosphere which envelops the earth, as the green plant-cover, as the rivers flowing into the sea; while the same divine-spiritual element lives in our thinking, feeling and willing and permeates our inner and outer worlds.

These examples will show that to read a saying such as this one by Angelus Silesius is not enough; we must take it up at the right stage, when we are first able to understand it truly. Then we shall see that mysticism, because it has the right kernel, can indeed lead us to the point where we shall be ripe for learning gradually to see into spiritual realms, and that mysticism in the highest and truest sense can make real for us what can be found in the beautiful words of Angelus Silesius:

When you raise yourself above yourself and truly let the divine spiritual ground of worlds hold sway in you, you will tread the heavenly way to the divine-spiritual sources of existence.

• 13. On this subject and the mystics mentioned in the lecture cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Multimedia Publishing Corp., New York, 1980.
• 14. Meister Eckhart, 1260–1327.
• 15. Angelus Silesius, 1624–1677.
• 16. Johannes Tauler, c. 1300–1361.
• 17. Heinrich Suso, c. 1300–1366.
• 18. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1646–1716. Cf. for example his Monadology, a short treatise which he wrote in 1714 (without title) as a summary of his philosophy of unities.
• 19. Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841. Philosopher and pedagogue.
• 20. Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Book 4, Verse 56.

In the lecture on mysticism, we spoke of the particular form of inward deepening which appears in the mysticism of the Middle Ages from the time of Meister Eckhart down to Angelus Silesius. Its characteristic is that the mystic seeks to make himself free and independent of all the experiences that come to him from the external world. He tries to press on to an experience which will prove to him that when everything to do with ordinary life has been extinguished and the soul withdraws into itself, it still has within it a world of its own, so to speak. This world is always there but is outshone by the external experiences that work so powerfully on human beings, and thus it appears as a light so weak that most people never notice it. Hence the mystic often calls it the little spark. But he is sure it can be fanned into a powerful flame which will illuminate the sources and foundations of existence. In other words, it leads a man along the path of his own soul to a knowledge of his origin, which can indeed be called “knowledge of God.”

In the same lecture we observed how the mediaeval mystics supposed that the little spark had to grow by itself, its own nature remaining unchanged. In opposition to this, we emphasised that modern spiritual research calls for a development of these inner soul-forces under conscious control, so that they can rise to higher forms of cognition, which we called Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. So this inwardly devoted mediaeval mysticism comes before us as a sort of first step towards true spiritual investigation. If we are able to immerse ourselves in the inward fervour of a Meister Eckhart; if we recognise the immeasurable force of spiritual knowledge that this mystical devotion gave to Johannes Tauler; if we appreciate how deeply Valentin Weigel²¹ or Jacob Boehme²² were led into the secrets of existence by all that they achieved through this physical devotion (though they certainly advanced beyond it); if we understand how Angelus Silesius was enabled through this same devotion not only to gain illuminating insights into the general laws of spiritual world-order but to give heart-warmingly beautiful expression in his writings to the secrets of the world—if we bear all this in mind, we shall realise the power and depth that resides in this medieval mysticism, and the endless help it can give to anyone who wishes to follow the spiritual-scientific path for himself.

Mediaeval mysticism can thus be regarded—particularly in the light of the last lecture—as a great and wonderful preparatory school for spiritual-scientific research. And how could it be otherwise? After all, the aim of the spiritual scientist is to develop the little spark through his own inner forces. The only difference is that the mystics believed that they could surrender themselves in peace of soul to the little spark and that it would come to shine ever more brightly of its own accord, whereas the spiritual scientist is convinced that we must use our capacities and forces, placed by the wisdom of the world in the service of our will, to kindle the spark to a brighter flame. If, then, the mystical frame of mind is a good preparation for spiritual science, we have, in turn, as a preparation for mystical devotion, the activity of soul which can be called, in the true sense, prayer. Just as the mystic is able to attain to his inward devotion because he has—even though unconsciously—trained his soul for it, so, if we wish to work our way along the same path to physical meditation, we can look for a preparatory stage in true prayer.

During recent centuries, the nature of prayer has been misunderstood in all sorts of ways by this or that spiritual movement, and to gain a true understanding of it will not be easy. If, however, we remember that these centuries have been marked especially by the emergence of egotistic spiritual trends which have laid hold of wide circles of people, we shall not find it surprising that prayer has been dragged down to the level of egotistic wishes and desires. And it must be said that prayer can hardly be more utterly misunderstood than when it is permeated by some form of egotism. In this lecture we shall try to study prayer entirely in the light of spiritual science, free from any sectarian or other influence.

As a first approach, we might say that while the mystic assumes that he will find in his soul some kind of little spark which his mystical devotion will cause to shine ever more brightly, prayer is intended to engender the spark. And prayer, from whatever presuppositions it proceeds, proves its effectiveness precisely by stirring the soul either to discover gradually the little spark, if it is there, gleaming but hidden, or to kindle it.

If we are to study the need for prayer and its nature, we shall have to enter on a description of the soul in depth, bearing in mind the always relevant saying of the old Greek sage, Heraclitus, quoted in an earlier lecture: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search, so all-embracing is the soul's being.”²³ And although in prayer we are at first seeking only for the soul's inner secrets, the intimate feelings stirred by prayer can give even the simplest person some inkling of the endless expanses of soul-life. We have to realise that the soul is engaged in a process of living evolution. It not only comes from the past and is always travelling towards the future; the effects of the past extend into every present moment, and so in a certain sense, do those of the future.

Anyone who looks deeply into the life of the soul will see that these two streams, one from the past and one from the future, are continually meeting there. The fact that we are influenced by the past is obvious: who could deny that our energy or idleness of yesterday has some effect on us today? But we ought not to deny the reality of the future, either, for we can observe in the soul the intrusion of future events, although they have not yet happened, After all, there is such a thing as fear of something likely to happen tomorrow, or anxiety about it. Is that not a sort of feeling or perception concerned with the future? Whenever the soul experiences fear or anxiety, it shows by the reality of its feelings that it is reckoning not only with the past but in a very lively manner with something hastening towards it from the future. These, of course, are single examples, but they will suffice to suggest that anyone who surveys the soul will find numerous others to contradict the abstract logic which says that since the future does not yet exist, it can have no present influence.

Thus there are these two streams, one from the past and one from the future, which come together in the soul—will anyone who observes himself deny that?—and produce a kind of whirlpool, comparable to the confluence of two rivers. Closer observation shows that the impressions left on us by past experiences, and in which we have dealt with them, have made the soul what it is. We bear within ourselves the legacy of our doing, feeling and thinking in the past. If we look back over these past experiences, especially those in which we played an active part, we shall very often be impelled to an assessment of ourselves. We have become capable from our present standpoint of disagreeing with some deeds that happened in our past; we have reached the stage of even being able to look back with shame, perhaps, at some of our past actions.

If we compare our present with our past in this way, we shall come to feel that within us there is something far richer and more significant than whatever we have made of ourselves through our individual powers. If there were not something extending beyond our conscious selves, we should be unable to reproach ourselves or even to know ourselves. We must, then, have within us something that is greater than anything we have employed to form ourselves in the past. If we transform this realisation into a feeling, we shall be able to look back at everything in our past actions, at experiences that memory can bring clearly before us, and we shall be able to compare these memories with something greater, with something in our soul that guides us to stand face to face with ourselves and to judge ourselves from the standpoint of the present. In short, when we observe the stream flowing into us from the past, we feel that we have within us something that extends beyond ourselves. This intimation is the first awakening of a feeling of God within us; a feeling that something greater than all our will-power dwells within us. And thus we are led to look beyond our limited ego towards a divine-spiritual ego. That is the outcome of a contemplation of the past, transformed into perceptive feeling.

What, then, does the stream from the future say to us, again in terms of perceptive feeling? It speaks to us in even clearer and more emphatic language, since we are here concerned directly with emotions of fear and anxiety, hope and joy. For the relevant events have not yet occurred; only the feelings connected with them strike into the soul. And we know that this stream from the future may bring different effects and responsibilities from those we expect. If we ran relate ourselves rightly to whatever experiences are surely coming towards us from the dark womb of the future, we shall see how this continually stimulates the soul. We feel how in the future the soul can become far richer, wider in scope, than it now is; we feel that we are already related to the approaching future and that our soul must be a match for anything it may bring.

If in this way we observe how past and future flow into the present, we can see how the life of the soul grows beyond itself. When the soul, on looking back over the past, becomes aware—whether as a judgment or with regret or shame—of a power from the past which is playing into the present but which is greater than itself, this realisation will evoke in the soul a reverence towards the divine. And this reverence, which we can feel working upon us but which is more than we can consciously grasp, evokes one mode of prayer—for there are two which bring the soul into an intimate relationship with God. For if the soul surrenders itself in innermost calm to the feelings engendered by the past, it will begin to wish that the power it had left unused, which it had not penetrated with its ego, might now become a present reality. Then the soul can say to itself. If this power were within me, I should be different now. The divine element I aspire to did not belong to my inner life; that is why I failed to make myself into something of which I could approve today. Having come to this realisation, the soul might continue: How can I draw into myself the unknown which indeed lived in all my actions and experiences, but without my being aware of it, for I was not able to grasp it with my ego? When the soul is brought to this frame of mind, whether through a feeling, a word or an idea, we have the prayer directed to the past. This means that the soul is seeking to draw near to the divine along one devotional path.

Now we will turn to the gleam of the divine that comes with the stream from the unknown future. Here a different frame of mind is evoked. As we have just seen, when we look back over the past we realise that we have not developed our innate capabilities; we see how our shortcomings have prevented us from responding to the divine light that shines in on us, and this feeling leads us to the prayer of devotion, prompted by the past. What, then, is the influence coming from the future that in a similar way makes us aware of our defects which restrict our ascent to the spiritual?

We need only to remember the feelings of fear and anxiety that gnaw at our soul-life in face of the unknown future. Is there anything that can give the soul a sense of security in this situation? Yes, there is. It is what we may call a feeling of humbleness towards anything that may come towards the soul out of the darkness of the future. But this feeling will be effective only if it has the character of prayer. Let us avoid misunderstanding. We are not extolling something that might be called humbleness in one sense or another; we are describing a definite form of it—humbleness to whatever the future may bring. Anyone who looks anxiously and fearfully towards the future hinders his development, hampers the free unfolding of his soul-forces. Nothing, indeed, obstructs this development more than fear and anxiety in face of the unknown future. But the results of submitting to the future can be judged only by experience. What does this humbleness mean?

Ideally, it would mean saying to oneself: Whatever the next hour or day may bring, I cannot change it by fear or anxiety, for it is not yet known. I will therefore wait for it with complete inward restfulness, perfect tranquillity of mind. Anyone who can meet the future in this calm, relaxed way, without impairing his active strength and energy, will be able to develop the powers of his soul freely and intensively. It is as if hindrance after hindrance falls away, as the soul comes to be more and more pervaded by this feeling of humbleness toward approaching events.

This feeling, however, cannot be called forth in the soul by some edict, or by an arbitrary decision with no firm basis. It springs from the second mode of prayer, directed towards the future and the wisdom-filled course of events therein. To give ourselves over to this divine wisdom means that we call up again and again the thoughts, feelings and impulses that go with a recognition that what will come must come and that in one direction or another it must have good effects. To call forth this frame of mind and to give it expression in words, perceptions and ideas—that is the second mode of prayer the prayer of devotional submission.

It is from these feelings that impulses to prayer must come. For they are present in the soul itself, and fundamentally they lead towards prayer in every soul that raises itself even a little above the immediate present. The pre-condition of prayer, one might say, occurs when the soul turns its gaze away from the transitory present towards the eternal, which embraces past, present and future. It is because this raising of oneself above the present is so necessary that Goethe gives to Faust the great lines, addressed to Mephistopheles:

If to the moment fleeting past
‘Linger’, I cry, ‘thou art so fair!’

This means: if I were to be satisfied with living merely for the moment—

Then in fetters you may bind me,
Let me perish, for all I care!²⁴

Hence one could also say: It is for the power to pray that Faust begs in order to escape from the fetters of his companion, Mephistopheles.

The experience of prayer, accordingly, leads us on the one hand to observe our narrowly restricted ego, which has worked its way from the past into the present, and shows us clearly how very much more there is in us than we have put to use; on the other hand it leads us to look towards the future and shows us how much more can flow from the future into our ego than our ego has grasped so far. If we understand this, we shall find in every prayer a force that leads us beyond ourselves. For what else is prayer than the lighting-up within us of a power that seeks to transcend what our ego is at the moment? And if the ego is seized by this striving, it already has the power to develop itself. When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever put to use, then prayer is a cry to the divine that it may fill us with its presence. When we have come to this knowledge through our own feelings and perceptions, we can number prayer among the forces that will aid the development of our ego.

We can do the same with prayer directed towards the future. If we live in fear and anxiety about the approaching future, we lack the attitude of humbleness that prayer can bring. We fail to realise that our destiny is ordered by the wisdom of the world. But if we meet the future with humbleness and devotion, we draw near to it in fruitful hope. So it is that humbleness, which may seem to diminish us, becomes a powerful force, enriching the soul and carrying our development to higher levels.

We need not expect any external results from prayer, for we know that through prayer we have implanted in our souls a source of light and warmth: of light, because we set the soul free in its relation to the future and dispose it to accept whatever may emerge from that dark womb; of warmth, because prayer helps us to recognise that, although in the past we failed to bring the divine element to fruition in our ego, we have now pervaded our feelings with it, so that it can be an effective power within us, The prayer that springs from looking back over the past gives rise to that inner warmth which is spoken of by all who understand prayer in its true nature. And the inward light comes to those who understand the prayer of humbleness towards the future.

From this point of view it will not seem surprising that the greatest mystics found in their devotion to prayer the best preparation for what they hoped to achieve through inward contemplation. They led their soul to the point where they were able to kindle to brightness the little spark within them. It is precisely through entering into the past that we can gain access to that wonderful feeling of intimacy which true prayer can bestow. Preoccupation with the external world estranges us from ourselves, just as in the past it prevented the more powerful element in us, the ego conscious of itself, from emerging. We were given over to external impressions and the manifold demands of outer life; they tear us apart and keep us from recollecting ourselves in tranquillity. This is what prevented the stronger divine power within us from unfolding. But now, if we allow it to unfold in the intimacy of prayer, we shall not be subject to the disintegrating effects of the outer world. We shall feel that wonderful inner warmth which fills us with inner blessedness and can truly be called divine. Through their experience a soul that is losing itself in externals can be enabled to collect itself. During prayer we are warmed in the feeling of God; we not only feel the warmth, but we live intimately within ourselves.

On the other side, when we approach the things of the outer world, we always find them involved with what has been called the dark womb of the future. Close observation shows that in everything we encounter in the outer world there is always a hint of the future. If we feel fear and anxiety as to what may befall us, something always thrusts us away. The outer world stands before us like an impenetrable veil. If we develop the feeling of devoted humbleness towards whatever may come to us from the future, we find that we are able to meet everything in the outer world with the confidence and hope that this feeling engenders. And then we know that in all things the light of wisdom shines towards us. Failing this, in everything we come up against we meet a darkness which spreads into our feelings. So it is hope for illumination from the whole world that comes to us in the prayer of devoted submission.

If in the physical world we are standing somewhere surrounded by the blackness of night, we may feel abandoned and pressed in on ourselves. When morning brings the light, we feel that we are set free, but not as though we were wanting to escape from ourselves, but as though we could now carry forth into the outer world our best desires and aspirations. Similarly, we can feel how surrender to the world, which estranges us from ourselves, is overcome by the warmth of prayer, which unites us with ourselves. And when we carry this warmth of prayer into the feeling of humbleness, it becomes a light. And now, when we go out from ourselves and unite ourselves with the outer world and behold it, we no longer feel torn apart and estranged by it, but we feel that what is best in our soul flows out and unites us with the light that shines in on us from the outer world.

These two modes of prayer are expressed better in images than in ideas. We can think, for instance, of the Old Testament story of Jacob and his soul-convulsing contest in the night.²⁵ He appears to us as if we ourselves were given over to the manifold pressures of the world, where at first the soul is lost and cannot recover itself. When the striving to find ourselves begins, it sets off a conflict between our higher and our lower ego. Then our feelings surge up and down; but prayer will help us to work our way through, until at last comes the moment prefigured in the story of Jacob, where we are told that his night-long struggle is resolved and is harmonised when the rising sun shines upon him. That is in fact what prayer can do for the soul.

Seen in this light, prayer is free from all superstition. For it brings out the best in us and works directly as a force in the soul. Prayer is thus preparatory to mystical contemplation, just as mystical contemplation is itself a preparation for what we know as spiritual research. Our discussion of prayer will have illustrated something often mentioned here—that we pile error upon error if we believe that we can find the divine, or God, within ourselves by mystical means. This mistake was repeatedly made by mystics and even by ordinary Christians during the Middle Ages. It occurred because the practice of prayer came to be permeated by egotism, an egotism which impels the soul to say to itself: I will become more and more perfect and will think of nothing else but my own perfection. We can hear an echo of this egotistic desire when a misguided form of theosophy asserts that if only we turn aside from everything external, we can find God within ourselves.

We have seen that there are two modes of prayer. One leads to inner warmth; the other, imbued with the feeling of humbleness towards the future, leads out into the world and so to illumination and true knowledge. Anyone who looks at prayer in this way will soon see that the knowledge acquired by ordinary intellectual methods is unfruitful compared with another kind. Anyone who knows what prayer is, will be familiar with that withdrawal of the soul into itself, where it frees itself from the disruptive multiplicity of the world and collects itself inwardly, raising its thoughts above the present moment and devoting them to the past and the future. If we are acquainted with this state, when our whole environment becomes calm and silent, when only the finest thoughts and feelings of which we are capable are present in the soul, when perhaps even these vanish and only a fundamental feeling remains, pointing in two directions, towards the God who announces himself from the past and towards the God who announces himself from the future—then, if we have come to live in this feeling, we know that great moments come for the soul, so that it says to itself: I have turned away from everything that my clever thinking creates in my consciousness, from everything brought about by my feelings and perceptions, from all the ideals set up by my will-power and my education—I have swept all this away. I was devoted to my highest thoughts and feelings—even these I have now banished and have kept only the fundamental feeling already mentioned. If we have reached this stage, we know that in the same way as the wonders of nature meet us when we look at them with pure eyes, so do new feelings, hitherto unknown to us, shine into the soul. Impulses of will and ideals strange to us spring up in the soul, so that from this ground the most fruitful moments arise.

So it is that prayer in the best sense can imbue us with a wisdom beyond our immediate capacities; it can give us the possibility of feelings and perceptions to which we have not yet attained. And if prayer carries our self-education further, it can endow us with a strength of will to which we have not yet been able to rise. Certainly, if we are to accomplish all this, we shall need first to cultivate and cherish the finest feelings and impulses in our souls. And here we must again call attention to the prayers that have been given to mankind on the most solemn occasions from the earliest times.

In my booklet, The Lord's Prayer,²⁶ you will find an account of its contents showing that its seven petitions embrace all the wisdom of the world. Now you might be inclined to say: We are told in this booklet that the seven petitions can be understood only by someone who has come to know the deeper sources of the universe, but obviously the simple man, when he repeats the prayer, will not be able to fathom these depths. But it is not necessary that he should. For the Lord's Prayer to come into being, the all-embracing wisdom of the world had to set down in words what can be called the deepest secrets of man and the world. Since this is the content of the Lord's Prayer, it works through its wording, even for people who are far from understanding its depths. That is indeed the secret of a true prayer. It has to be drawn from the wisdom of the world, and so it can be effective even if it is not understood. We can come to understand it if we rise to the higher stages for which prayer and mysticism are a preparation. Prayer prepares us for mysticism, mysticism for meditation and concentration, and from that point we are directed to the real work of spiritual research.

To say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect is simply not true. Who understands the wisdom of a flower, yet we can all take pleasure in it? Similarly, if the wisdom of the world has gone into the creation of a prayer, the prayer can pour its warmth and light into the soul without its secrets being grasped. However, unless it has been created out of wisdom, it will not have this power. The depth of wisdom in a prayer is shown by its effectiveness.

Although a soul can truly develop itself under the influence of this power, it must also be said that a true prayer has something to give to all of us, whatever stage of development we may have reached. The simplest person, who perhaps knows nothing more than the words of the prayer, may still be open to the influence of the prayer on his soul, and it is the prayer which can call forth the power to raise him higher. But, however high a stage we may have reached, we have never finished with a prayer; it can always raise us to a still higher level. And the Lord's Prayer is not for speaking only. It can call forth the mystical frame of mind, and it can be the subject of higher forms of meditation and concentration. This could be said of many other prayers.

Since the Middle Ages, however, something has come to the fore, a kind of egotism, which can impair the purity of prayer and its accompanying state of mind. If we make use of prayer with the aim only of withdrawing into ourselves and making ourselves more perfect—as many Christians did during the Middle Ages and perhaps still do today—and if we fail to look out at the world around us with whatever illumination we may have received, then prayer will succeed only in separating us from the world, and making us feel like strangers in it. That often happened to those who used prayer in connection with false asceticism and seclusion. These people wished to be perfect not in the sense of the rose, which adorns itself²⁷ in order to add beauty to the garden, but on their own account, so as to find blessedness within their own souls.

Anyone who seeks for God in his soul and refuses to take what he has gained out into the world will find that his refusal turns back on him in revenge. And in many writings by saints and mystics who have known only the prayer that gives inner warmth—even in the writings of the Spanish mystic, Miguel de Molinos²⁸—you will come upon remarkable descriptions of all sorts of passions and urges, fights, temptations and wild desires which the soul experiences when, it seeks perfection through inward prayer and complete devotion to what it takes to be its God. If someone tries to find God and to approach the spiritual world in a one-sided way, if he brings to his prayers only the kind of devotion that leads to inner warmth, and not the other kind that leads to illumination, then the other side will take its revenge. If I look back over the past with feelings of regret and shame and say to myself—there is something great in me to which I have never allowed full scope, but now I will let it permeate me and perfect me—then in a certain sense a feeling of perfection does arise. But the imperfection which remains in the soul turns into a counter-force and storms out all the more strongly in the form of temptations and passions. But as soon as the soul, after having recollected itself in inner warmth and intimate devotion, looks for God in all the works where he is revealed and strives for illumination, it comes out of itself, turns away from the narrow, selfish ego, and the storms of passion are stilled. That is why it is so bad to allow egotism to find its way into mystical devotion and meditation. If we wish to find God, but only in order to keep him in our own souls, we show that an unhealthy egotism has crept into our highest endeavours. Then this egotism will take revenge upon us. We shall be healed only if, after having found God within us, we pour out into the world, through our thoughts and feelings, our willing and doing, what we have inwardly gained.

We are often told today, especially on the ground of Theosophy wrongly understood—and warnings against this can never be given too often—that you cannot find the divine in the outer world, for God dwells within you. You have only to take the right path into your inner life and you will find God there. I have even heard it said by someone who liked to flatter his audience: You have no need to learn or experience anything to do with the great secrets of the universe; you need only look within yourselves and there you will find God!

An opposing view to this, must be made clear before we can approach the truth. A mediaeval thinker found the right thing to say about inward devotion, which is indeed justified if kept within its right limits. We must never forget that it is not untruths that do most harm, for the soul will soon detect them. Much worse are statements which are true under certain circumstances, but thoroughly false if they are misapplied. In a certain sense it is true to say that we have to seek for God within ourselves, but just because this is true, it is all the more harmful if it is not kept within its bounds. A mediaeval thinker said: “Who would search everywhere out-of-doors for a tool he needs when he knows for certain that it is in his house? He would be a fool if he did so. Equally foolish is someone who searches in the outer world for an instrument with which to gain knowledge of God when he has it within his own soul.” Notice the word he uses—tool or instrument (Werkzeug). It is not God himself that one should seek in one's own soul. God is sought by means of an instrument, and this at least will not be found in the outer world. It must be sought within the soul—through true prayer, through mystical devotion, meditation and concentration at various levels. With the aid of this instrument we must approach the kingdoms of the world. Then we shall find God everywhere, for he reveals himself in all the kingdoms of the world and at all stages of existence. Thus we seek in ourselves for the instrument, and with its aid we shall find God everywhere.

Observations such as these on the nature of prayer are not popular today. How on earth—people say—can prayer change anything, whatever we may ask for? The course of the world follows necessary laws and we cannot alter them, but if we want to recognise a force, we must look for it where it is. Today we have sought for the power of prayer in the human soul, and we found that it is something which can help the soul forward. And anyone who knows that it is the spirit which works in the world—not an imaginary, abstract spirit but actual, active spirit—and that the human soul belongs to the realm of the spirit, will know that not only material forces, following unalterable laws, are at work in the world; but spiritual beings are also at work there, although their activities are not normally visible. If we strengthen our spiritual life through prayer, we need only wait for the effects; they will certainly come. But the effects of prayer in the outer world will be sought only by someone who has first recognised the power of prayer as a reality.

Anyone who does recognise this might try the following experiment. Let him look back over a period of ten years during which he scorned prayer, and then over a second period of ten years during which he recognised its power. If he then compares the two periods, he will soon see how the course of his life has changed under the influence of the forces which prayer poured into his soul. Forces are made evident by their effects. It is easy to deny the existence of forces if nothing is done to call them forth. How can anyone have the right to deny the power of prayer if he has never sought to make it effective within him? Can we suppose that we should know the light if we had never kindled it or looked for it? We can learn to recognise a force which works in and through the soul only by making use of it.

I must admit that the time is not yet ripe for going into the wider effects of prayer, however unbiased the discussion might be. The idea that a congregational prayer, in which the forces of all the participants flow together, has a heightened power and therefore an enhanced strength of reality—that is outside the grasp of ordinary thinking today. Hence we must be content with what we have brought before our souls with regard to the inner nature of prayer. And that is enough, for anyone who understands it will certainly see through many of the objections to prayer that are so easily advanced nowadays.

What are these various objections? We are asked, for example, to contrast an active present-day man who uses his powers to help his fellow human beings with a man who quietly withdraws into himself and works on the forces of his soul through prayer—surely we must regard this second man as an idler compared with the first? You will pardon me if I say, out of a certain feeling for the knowledge of spiritual science, that another point of view exists. I will put it in a somewhat exaggerated way, but there are good grounds for it. Anyone familiar today with the underlying causes of life will feel that many writers of leading articles in newspapers would be rendering better service to their fellows if they prayed and worked for the improvement of their souls, far-fetched as this may sound. Would that more people were persuaded that to pray is more sensible than writing articles. The same could be said of many other intellectual occupations.

Moreover, to understand the whole life of man, an understanding is necessary of the force that works through prayer, and this comes out with especial clarity if we look at particular aspects of cultural life. Who can fail to recognise that prayer, not in its one-sided egotistic sense but in the wider view of it that we have taken today, is a constituent of art? Certainly, in art we find also the quite different aspect expressed in comedy, in the humorous approach which raises itself above what it portrays. But there are also odes and hymns, which are not far removed from prayer, and even pictorial art shows examples of what could be called “prayers in paint.” And who would deny that in a great majestic cathedral we have something like a prayer expressed in stone and reaching heavenwards?

If we are able to grasp all this in the context of life, we shall recognise that prayer, seen in accordance with its true nature, is one of the things that lead mankind out of the finite and the transient to the eternal. This was felt especially by those who found the way from prayer to mysticism, as did Angelus Silesius, mentioned today and in the previous lecture. He felt that he owed the inner truth and glorious beauty, the warm intimacy and shining clearness of his mystical thoughts—as shown for example in “The Cherubinean Traveller”—to his self-training in prayer, which had worked so powerfully on his soul. And what is it, fundamentally, that permeates and illuminates all mystics such as he? What is it but the feeling of eternity for which prayer has prepared them? Everyone who prays can have some intimation of this feeling, if through prayer he attains to true inner rest and inwardness, and then to liberation from himself. It is this intimation which allows us to look beyond the passing moment to eternity, and links past, present and future together in our souls. When we turn in prayer to those aspects of life where we seek for God, then—whether we are aware of it or not—the feelings, thoughts and words which enter into our praying will be permeated by the feeling for eternity which is expressed by Angelus Silesius in lines with which we may well conclude today. They can bring to every true prayer, even if unconsciously, something like a divine aroma and sweetness:

Forsaking time, I am myself eternity,
Then I am one with God, God one with me.²⁹

• 21. Valentin Weigel, 1533–1588.
• 22. Jakob Boehme, 1575–1624.
• 23. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Herakleitos aus Ephesus, Nr 45. Also, The art and thought of Heraclitus. An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary by Charles H. Kahn. CUP, Cambridge, 1979, No. XXXV.
• 24. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, 11. 1699–1702.
• 25. Genesis 32, 24–32
• 26. The Lord's Prayer, Anthroposophic Press Inc., Spring Valley, N.Y., 1977.
• 27. Cf. Friedrich Rückert's poem “Welt und Ich”: “in adorning itself,/The rose adorns the garden too”.
• 28. Miguel de Molinos, 1640–1697, Spanish mystic. See his Guida Spirituale (1675). Molinos was sentenced to life imprisonment in Rome for this book by the Pope in 1686.
• 29. Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Book 1, Verse B.

It has probably become clear to those people who attended the lectures which I was permitted to hold here this winter more or less regularly that this lecture cycle has dealt with a series of far-reaching questions concerning the soul. It is the intention of today's lecture, also, to deal with such a question, namely the nature of sickness and healing.

What might be said on the relevant facts in life from the point of view of spiritual science, in so far as they are only physical expressions of spiritual causes, was explained in earlier lectures held here—for example “Understanding Sickness and Death”³⁰ or “Illusory Illness” and “The Feverish Pursuit of Health “.³¹ Today I want to deal with significantly deeper questions in the understanding of sickness and healing.

Sickness, healing and sometimes the fatal course of some illnesses deeply affect the human life. And since we have inquired repeatedly into the preconditions, the spiritual foundations which lie at the base of our reflections here, we are justified in also inquiring into the spiritual causes of these far-reaching facts and consequences of human existence. In other words, what can spiritual science say about these experiences?

We will have to investigate deeply once again the meaning of human life as it develops in order to clarify how illness, health, death and healing stand in relation to the normal course of development of the human being. For we see the events referred to affecting this normal course of development. Do they perhaps contribute something to our development? Do they advance or retard us in our development? We can only reach a clear conception of these events if here, too, we take the whole of the human being into account.

We have often said here that the latter is constituted of four members: first, the physical body which the human being has in common with all mineral beings of his environment which take their form from the physical and chemical forces within them. The second member of the human being we have always called the ether or life body. This he has in common with all living things; that is, with the plant and animal beings of his environment. Then we spoke of the astral body as the third member of man's being; this is the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of all the emotions, images, thoughts and so on which flood through us throughout the day. This astral body the human being has in common only with the animal world of his environment. And then there is the highest member of the human being which makes him the crown of creation; the bearer of the ego, his self-consciousness. When we consider these four members, we can say in the first instance that there appear to be certain differences between them, even to the superficial view. The physical human body is there when we look at the human being, at ourselves, from outside. The external physical sense organs can observe the physical body. With the thinking which is tied to these organs, the thinking which is tied to the instrument of the brain, we can understand this physical body of the human being. It is revealed to our external observation.

The relation to the human astral body is quite different. We have already seen from previous descriptions that the astral body is only an outward fact, so to speak, for the truly clairvoyant consciousness; the latter can see the astral body in the same way as the physical one only by schooling the consciousness as has been frequently described. In ordinary life the astral body of the human being is not observable from the outside; the eye can only see the outer expression of the instincts, desires, passions, thoughts and feelings which surge through it. But in contrast, the human being observes within himself these experiences of the astral body. He observes what we call the instincts, desires, passions, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Thus it can be said that the relationship between the astral and the physical body is such that in normal life we observe the former internally, but the physical body externally.

Now in a certain sense the other two members of the human being, the ether body and the bearer of the ego, are situated between these two extremes. The physical body is observable purely from the outside, the astral body purely from the inside. But the intermediary member between the physical body and the astral body is the ether body. It cannot be observed from the outside, but it affects the outside. The forces, the inner experiences of the astral body initially have to be transferred to the ether body; only then can they act on the physical instrument, the physical body. The ether body acts as an intermediary member between the astral body and the physical body, forming a link between outside and inside. We can no longer see it with the physical eyes, but that which we can see with the physical eyes is an instrument of the astral body only because the ether body is connected towards the outside with the physical body.

Now in a certain sense the ego acts from the inside to the outside, whilst the ether body acts from the outside inwards to the astral body; for by means of the ego and the way it affects the astral body the human being gains knowledge of the outside world, the physical environment, from which the physical body itself originates. Animal existence takes place without individual, personal knowledge because the animal does not have an individual ego. The animal inwardly lives through all the experiences of the astral body, but does not use its pleasure and pain, sympathy or antipathy to gain knowledge of the outside world. What we call pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sympathy or antipathy are all experiences of the astral body in the animal; but the animal does not commute its pleasure into a celebration of the beauty of the world, but it remains within the element which causes the pleasure. The animal lives immediately within its pain; the human being is guided by his pain beyond himself into discovery of the world because the ego leads him out again and unites him with the outside world. Thus we see on the one hand how the ether body is directed inwards into the human being towards the astral body, whereas the ego leads into the outside world, into the physical world which surrounds us.

The human being leads an alternating life. This alternating life can be observed everyday. From the moment of waking in the morning we observe in the human soul all the in and out flooding experiences of the astral body—joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, feelings, images, etc. We see how at night these experiences sink down to a level of undefined darkness as the astral body and the ego enter an unconscious, or perhaps better said, subconscious state. When we look at the waking human being between morning and evening, the physical body, ether body, astral body and ego are interwoven, are inter-linked in their effects. When the human being goes to sleep at night, the occult consciousness can see that the physical body and the ether body remain in bed and that the astral body and the ego return to their proper home in the spiritual world, that they withdraw from the physical body and the ether body. It is possible to describe this in still a different way which will enable us to deal with the present subject in the appropriate way.

The physical body, which only presents us with its outward aspect, sleep remains in the physical world as the outward human being and keeps the ether body, the mediator between inner and outer, with it. That is why in the sleeping human being there can be no mediation between outer and inner because the ether body, as mediator, has entered the outside world. Thus one can say in a certain sense that in the sleeping human being the physical body and the ether body are merely the outer human being; one could even describe the physical and ether bodies as the “outer human being” per se, even though the ether body is the mediator between outer and inner. In contrast, the astral body in the sleeping human being can be described as the “inner human being”. These terms are also true of the waking human being, because all the experiences of the astral body are inner experiences under normal circumstances and what the ego gains in knowledge of the outside world in waking life is taken up inwardly by the human being to be assimilated as learning. The external becomes internalised through the ego. This demonstrates that we can speak of an “outward” and an “inward” human being, the former consisting of a physical and ether body, the latter of ego and astral body.

Now let us observe the so-called normal human life and its development in essence. Let us ask the question: Why does the human being return with his astral body and his ego to the spiritual world every night? Is there any reason for the human being to go to sleep? This subject has been mentioned before, but it is necessary for the topic we are dealing with today. Normal developments have to be understood in order to recognise the apparently abnormal states as they manifest themselves in sickness and healing. Why does the human being go to sleep every night?

An understanding of this can only be reached if one considers fully the relationship between the astral body and the ego and the “outer human being”. We described the astral body as the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of instincts, desires, passions, of the surging imagination, perceptions, ideas and feelings. But if the astral body is the bearer of all these things, why is it that at night the human being does not have these experiences, even though the actual inner human being is connected with the astral body in such a manner that the physical and the ether bodies are not present? Why is it that during this period these experiences sink down into an undefined darkness? The reason is that the astral body and the ego, although they are the bearers of joy and sorrow, judgments, the imagination, etc., cannot experience directly those things of which they are the bearers. In our human life the astral body and the ego under normal circumstances are dependent on the physical body and the ether body for awareness of their own experiences. Our soul-life is not something which is immediately experienced by the astral body. If this were the case, then we would also experience it during the night when we remain united with the astral body. Our daytime soul-life is like an echo or a mirror-image. The physical body and the ether body reflect the experiences of the astral body. Everything which our soul conjures up for us between waking up and going to sleep, it can only do because it sees its own experiences in the mirror of the physical and ether or life bodies. At the moment when we leave the physical and ether bodies at night we still have all the experiences of the astral body in us but we are not conscious of them because in order to be conscious of them the reflecting qualities of the physical body and the ether body are required.

Thus in the whole of our life as it takes its course from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night we see an interaction between the inner and the outer human being, between the ego and the astral body on the one hand and the physical body and the ether body on the other. The forces which are at work here are the forces of the astral body and the ego. For under no circumstances could the physical body as the sum of physical attributes bring forth our soul-life out of itself and neither could the ether body. The reflecting forces come from the astral body and the ego in the same way as the image which we see in the mirror does not originate in the mirror but in the object which is reflected in the mirror. Thus all the forces which cause our soul-life lie in the astral body and the ego, in the inward nature of the human being. And they become active in the interaction between inner and outer world, they reach out, so to speak, for our physical and ether bodies, but at night we see them enter the state which we call “tiredness”. We see them exhausted at night. And we would be unable to continue our life if we were not in a position to enter a different world each night than the one which we inhabit from morning to evening. In the world which we inhabit when we are awake we can make our soul-life perceptible, we can create it before our soul. That we do with the forces of the astral body. But we also exhaust these forces and cannot replenish them out of our waking life. We can only replenish them out of the spiritual world which we enter each night and that is why we sleep. We would be unable to live without entering the world of night and fetching from the spiritual world the forces which we use during the day. Thus the question what we bring into the physical world when we enter our ether and physical bodies is answered.

But do we not also carry something from the physical world into the spiritual world at night? That is the second question, and it is just as important as the first one.

In order to answer this question, we have to deal with a number of things which are a part of normal human life. In ordinary life we have so-called experiences. These experiences are significant in our life between birth and death. An example which has often been mentioned here will illuminate this, the example of learning to write. When we put pen to paper in order to express our thoughts, we practise the art of writing. We can write, but what are the conditions required that we can do so? It is necessary that in a certain span of existence between birth and death we have a whole series of experiences. Think of all the things which you went through as a child, from the first clumsy attempts to hold the pen, put it to paper, etc., etc. One might well thank God that one does not have to recall all those things. Because it would be a dreadful situation if every time that we wanted to write we had to recall all the unsuccessful attempts at tracing the lines, perhaps also the punishments connected therewith, and so on in order to develop what we call the art of writing. What has taken place? Development in an important sense has taken place in the human life between birth and death. We have had a whole series of experiences. These experiences took place over a long period of time. Then they were refined, as it were, into an essence which we call the “ability” to write. All the other things have sunk into the indeterminate shadow of forgetfulness. But there is no need to remember them, because our soul has developed to a higher stage from these experiences: our memories flow together into essences which appear in life as our capabilities and abilities. That is our development in the existence between birth and death. Experiences are transformed initially into abilities of the soul which can then come to expression by means of the outer tools of the physical body. All personal experiences between birth and death take place in such a manner that they are transformed into abilities and also into wisdom.

We can gain an insight into how this transformation takes place if we take a look at the period between 1770 and 1815. A significant historical event took place during this period. A large number of people were contemporaries of this event. How did they respond to it? Some of them did not notice the events passing by them. Impassively they neglected to turn the events into knowledge, wisdom of the world. Others transformed them into a deep wisdom, they extracted the essence.

How are experiences transformed in the soul into ability and wisdom? They are transformed by being taken in their immediate form into our sleep each night, into those spheres where the soul or the inner human being reside during the night. There the experiences which occur over a period of time are changed into essences. Any observer of life knows that if one wants to master and co-ordinate a series of experiences in a single sphere of activity it is necessary to transform these experiences in periods of sleep. For example, a thing is best learnt by heart by learning it, sleeping on it, learning it again, sleeping on it again. If one is not able to immerse the experiences in sleep in order for them to emerge as abilities or in the form of wisdom or art, then they will not be developed.

This is the expression on a higher level of what we are faced with as necessity on a lower one. This year's plant cannot become next year's one if it does not return to the dark lap of the earth in order to grow again the following year. Here development remains repetition. Where it is illuminated with the human spirit it is a true “development”. The experiences descend into the nocturnal lap of the unconscious and they are brought forth again, initially still as repetition; but eventually they will have been transformed to such an extent that they can emerge as wisdom, as abilities, as life experience.

Thus life was understood in times when it was still possible to observe the spiritual worlds more deeply than is the case today. That is why, where leading personalities of ancient cultures wanted to speak of certain things by means of an image we see indications of these significant foundations of human life. What would someone have to do if he wanted to prevent a series of daytime experiences catching fire in his soul and being transformed into certain abilities? What, for example, happens when someone experiences a certain relationship with another person over a period of time? These experiences with the other person descend into the night-time consciousness and re-emerge from night-time consciousness as love for another person, which, when it is healthy, is an essence, as it were, of the consecutive experiences. The feeling of love for the other person has come about in such a way that the sum of experiences has been drawn together into unity, as if woven into a fabric. Now what would someone have to do to prevent a series of experiences turning into love? He would have to take the special measure of preventing the nightly natural process which turns our experience into essence, the feeling of love, from taking place. He would have to unravel again at night the fabric of daytime experience. If he can manage this his achievement is that his experience of the other person, which turns into love in his soul, has no effect on him.

Homer was alluding to these depths of human soul-life in his image of Penelope and her suitors.³² She promises marriage to each one after she has completed a certain fabric. She manages to avoid having to keep her promise only by unravelling each night what she has woven during the day. Great depths are revealed where the seer is also artist. Today there is little feeling left for these things and such interpretations of poets who were also seers are declared arbitrary and phantastical. This can harm neither the ancient poets nor the truth, but only our time, which is thus prevented from entering into the depths of human life.

Thus something is taken into the soul at night which returns again. Something is taken into the soul which the soul develops and which raises it to ever higher levels of ability. But now it must be asked: where does this development of the human being reach its limit? This frontier can be recognised if we observe how the human being when he wakes up in the morning always returns to the same physical body and ether body with the same abilities and talents, the same configuration which they have possessed from birth. This configuration, these inner structures and forms of the physical and ether bodies cannot be altered by human being. If we were able to take the physical or, at least, the ether body into the state of sleep then we would be able to change them. But in the morning we find them again unchanged from the evening. Here there is a clear limitation to what can be achieved by development in the life between birth and death. Development between birth and death is essentially restricted to experiences of the soul; it cannot extend to physical experience.

Thus for all the opportunities someone might have to pass through experiences which could deepen his musical appreciation, to awaken in his soul a profound musical life, it could not be developed if he did not have a musical ear, if the physical and etheric formation of his ear did not permit him to establish the harmony between the outer and the inner human being. In order for the human being to be whole, all the members of his being have to form a unity, to be in harmony. That is why all the opportunities which a person with an unmusical ear might have to go through experiences which would enable him to rise to a higher level of musical appreciation have to remain in the soul, have to resign themselves. They cannot come to fruition because the boundary is drawn each morning by the structure and form of the internal organs. These things are not dependent merely on the more rough structures of the physical and ether bodies but on very subtle relationships therein. Every function of the soul in our current normal life has to find expression in an organ; and if the organ is not formed in a suitable way then this is prevented. Those things which cannot be demonstrated by physiology and anatomy, the subtle sculpting within the organs, are precisely the things which are incapable of transformation between birth and death.

Is the human being completely powerless, then, to transfuse into his physical and ether bodies the events and experiences which he has taken into his astral body and ego? For when we look at people we can see that the human being can even shape his physical body within limits. One only needs to observe a person who has spent ten years of his life in deep inner contemplation: the gestures and physiognomy will have changed. But this occurs within very narrow confines. Is it always the case?

That this is not always confined to the narrowest of limitations can only be understood if we take recourse to a law which we have often mentioned here, but which needs to be recalled frequently because it is so alien to our present time, a law which can be compared with another one which became established for mankind in the 17th century on a lower level.

Up until the 17th century it was believed that the lower animals, insects, etc., could originate from river mud. It was believed that nothing more than pure matter was required to generate earth-worms and insects. This was thought to be true not only by amateurs but also by scholars. If we go back to earlier times we find that everything was systematised in such a way that, for example, instructions were given on how to create life from the environment. Thus a book from the 7th century AD³³ describes how the carcass of a horse has to be beaten tender in order to create bees. Similarly bullocks created hornets, donkeys, wasps. It was in the 17th century that the great scientist Francesco Redi³⁴ first pronounced the axiom: life can only originate from life! Because of this truth, which is taken as self-evident today so that no one can understand how anything else could ever have been believed, Redi was considered a dreadful heretic still in the 17th century and he barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

It is always like that with such truths. At first those who proclaim them are branded as heretics and fall prey to the inquisition. In the past people were burned or threatened with burning. Today this type of inquisition has been abandoned. No one is burnt anymore. But those who today sit on the curule chair of science regard all those who proclaim a new, higher level of truth to be fools and dreamers. People who today espouse in a different way the axiom regarding living things which Francesco Redi put forward in the 17th century are considered to be fools and dreamers. Redi pointed out that it is inexact observation to believe that life can originate immediately from dead matter but that it must be traced back to similar living matter, to the embryo which draws its matter and strength from the environment. Similarly spiritual science today must point out that what enters existence as soul and spiritual nature must originate from soul and spirit and is not an assembly of inherited characteristics. As the embryonic form of the earth-worm draws on the matter of its environment to develop, so the soul and spiritual kernel equally has to draw on the substances of its environment in order to develop. If we pursue the soul and spiritual nature in the human being backwards, we come to an earlier soul and spiritual element which exists before birth and which has nothing to do with heredity. The axiom that soul-spiritual elements can only arise from soul-spiritual elements entails in the last instance the axiom of repeated earth lives, of which a closer study of spiritual science furnishes the proof. Our life between birth and death leads back to other lives which we went through in earlier times. The soul and spiritual element originates in the soul and in the spirit, and the causes of our present experiences between birth and death lie in a previous soul and spiritual existence. When we pass through the gates of death we take with us what we assimilated in this life as transformation from causes into abilities. This we return with when we enter a future existence through birth.

In the time between death and birth we are in different circumstances than when we enter the spiritual world each night through sleep from which we wake up again in the morning. When we wake up in the morning, we find our physical and ether bodies as we left them the previous evening. We cannot transform them with our experiences in life between birth and death. We find our limitation in the finished ether and physical bodies. But when we enter the spiritual world through the gate of death we leave the physical and ether bodies behind and retain only the essence of the ether body. In the spiritual world we have no need to take account of an existing physical and ether body. In the whole period between death and a new birth the human being can work with purely spiritual forces, he is dealing with purely spiritual substance. He takes from the spiritual world what he requires to create the archetype of his new physical body and ether body and forms these archetypes up to the time of his new birth, weaving into them all the experiences which the soul was unable to utilise between birth and death in the previous physical and ether bodies. Then the moment arrives when this purely spiritual archetypal image has been finished and when the human being is able to sculpt into the physical and ether bodies what he has woven into the archetypal image; the archetype is thus active in this particular state of sleep which the human being is passing through.

If the human being were able to bring with him in a similar manner his physical body and ether body each morning on waking up, then he would be able to form them from out of the spiritual world; but he would also have to transform them. But birth means waking up from a state of sleep which encompasses the physical and ether bodies in the existence before birth. It is at this point that the astral body and ego descend into the physical world, into the physical body and the ether body, into which they can now sculpt everything which they could not form into the complete bodies of the previous life. Now, in a new life, they can express in an ether body and a physical body everything which they were able to raise to a higher stage of development but which they were unable to put into practice in the previous life because the complete ether body and physical body made it impossible.

Were we not able to destroy our physical and ether bodies, were the physical body unable to pass through death, it would be impossible to integrate our experiences into our development. However much we regard death with fear and shock and feel pain and sorrow at the death which will affect us, an objective view of the world teaches us in fact: we have to want death! For death alone gives us the opportunity to destroy this body in order to enable us to construct a new one in the next life so that we can bring into life all the fruits of earthly existence.

Thus two currents are active together in the normal course of human life: an inner and an outer. These two currents reveal themselves to us in parallel in the physical and the ether bodies on the one hand and in the astral body and the ego on the other. What can the human being do between birth and death in relation to the physical and ether bodies? Not only the astral body is exhausted by the life of the soul, but the organs of the physical body and the ether body are also exhausted. We can now observe the following: whilst the astral body is in the spiritual world during the night, it also works on the physical body and the ether body to restore them to their normal state. Only in sleep can what has been destroyed during the day in the physical and ether bodies be restored. Thus the spiritual world does indeed work on the physical and ether bodies, but with limitations. The abilities and structure of the physical body and ether body are given at birth and cannot alter except within very narrow margins. Two streams are active in cosmic development, as it were, which cannot abstractly be made to harmonize. If someone tried to unite these two streams in abstract reflection, tried to develop lightly a philosophy which said: “Well, the human being has to be in harmony, therefore the two streams have to be harmonious in man!” he would be making an enormous error. Life does not work according to abstractions. Life works in such a way that these abstract visions can only be achieved after long periods of development. Life works in such a manner that it creates states of equilibrium and harmony only by passing through stages of disharmony. This is the living interaction in the human being and indeed it is not meant to be made harmonious by reflection. It is always an indication of abstract, dry thinking if a harmony is imagined into a situation where life has to develop towards a stage of balance through disharmony. It is the fate of human development that we must have harmony as an aim which cannot, however, be reached if it is merely imagined into a given stage of human development.

It will now be easier to understand when spiritual science says that life presents different aspects, depending on whether we regard it from the point of view of the inner or outer human being. The person who wanted to combine these two aspects by some abstraction would leave out of account that there is more than one ideal, one judgment, but that there are as many judgments as there are points of view and that it is only when these different points of view act together that the truth can be found. This allows us to assume that life's view of the inner human being might be different from its view of the outer human being. An example will make clear that truths are relative, depending on whether they are regarded from one aspect or another.

It is certainly quite appropriate for a giant who has a hand the size of a small child to talk of his little finger. Whether a dwarf the size of the small child can also talk of the giant's little finger is another matter. Things by necessity are complementary truths. There is no absolute truth as regards outer things. Things have to be looked at from all different points of view and truth has to be found through the individual truths which illuminate one another. That is also the reason why in life as we can observe it the outer human being, physical body and ether body, and the inner human being, astral body and ego, need not in a given period of life be in complete harmony. If there were complete harmony then the case would be that when the human being enters the spiritual world at night he would take the events of the day with him and would transform them into the essence of ability, of wisdom, and so on, and the forces which he brought with him from the spiritual world in the morning into the physical world would be used only in relation to the soul life. But the frontier which we described and which is drawn for the physical body would never be crossed. Then, also, there would be no human development. The human being has to learn to take note of these limitations himself; he has to make them part of his judgment. The possibility must be given for him to breach these limits to the greatest possible extent.

And he breaches them continually! In real life these frontiers are crossed continually so that for example the astral body and the ego do not keep within the limits when they affect the physical body. But in doing so they breach the laws of the physical body. We then observe such breaches as irregularities, as disorganisation of the physical body, as the appearance of sickness, caused by action of the spirit—the astral body and the ego. Limits can be breached also in other ways, namely that the human being as inner being does not manage to correlate with the outside world, that he fails to relate fully to the outside world. This can be shown in a very dramatic example.

When the famous eruption of Mount Pelee³⁵ in Central America took place, very noteworthy and instructive documents were found in the ruins afterwards. In one of them it said: “You need not fear any more because the danger is past; there will be no more eruptions. This is shown by the laws which we have recognised as the laws of nature.” These documents, which stated that further volcanic eruptions were impossible according to the current state of knowledge of nature, had been buried—and with them the scholars who had written these documents on the basis of their normal scholarly knowledge. A tragic event took place here. But that precisely demonstrated the disharmony of the human being with the physical world quite clearly. There can be no doubt that the intelligence of the scholars who investigated these natural laws would have been adequate to find the truth if they had been sufficiently trained. For they were not lacking in intelligence. But although intelligence is necessary, it is insufficient on its own, Animals, for example, leave an area if such an event is imminent. That is a well-known fact. Only the domesticated animals perish with the human beings. The so-called animal instinct is therefore sufficient to develop a far greater wisdom as far as those future events are concerned than human wisdom today. “Intelligence” is not the decisive factor; our current intellect is present also in those who commit the greatest follies. Intelligence is therefore not lacking. What is lacking is sufficiently matured experience of events. As soon as the intelligence lays something down which appears plausible to its narrow limited experience it can come into disharmony with the real outward events and then the outer events break down around it. For there is a relationship between the physical body and the world which the human being will gradually learn to recognise and grasp with the forces which he possesses today already. But he will only be able to do this once he has accrued and assimilated the experiences of the outside world. Then the harmony which will have developed as a result of this experience will have been created by no other intellect than the one we have today; for it is precisely in the present that our intellect has developed to a certain stage. The only thing lacking is the ripening of experience. If the maturing of experience does not correspond to the outside then the human being becomes disharmonious with the outside world and can be broken on events in the outer world.

We have seen in an extreme example how disharmony between the physical bodies of the scholars and the stage which they had reached inwardly in the development of their soul came about. Such disharmony occurs not only when momentous events happen to us; such disharmony is given in principle and in essence always when any outer harm befalls our physical and ether bodies, when outer harm affects the outer human being in such a way that he is not capable of countering this harm with his inner forces, to ban it from his life. This applies whether it is externally visible or an internal sickness, which is, however, in reality only an external one. For if we have an upset stomach, then that is essentially the same as if a brick drops on our head. This is the situation which occurs when conflict arises—or is allowed to arise between the inner human being and the external world, when the inner human being cannot match the outer human being.

Fundamentally all illnesses are such disharmony, such breaching of the division between inner and outer human being. Something is created by the continual breach of these divisions which will become harmony only in the far distant future, which remains an abstraction if our thinking tries to impose it on our life. The human being only develops his inner life by beginning to realise that at his present stage he is not yet able to match outer life. This is true not only of the ego, but also of the astral body. The human being experiences consciously between waking up and going to sleep those things which are penetrated by the ego. The working of the astral body, the way in which it breaches its limits and is impotent to create proper harmony between the inner and the outer human being, lies outside normal human consciousness. But it is present, nevertheless. All these things reveal the deeper inner nature of sickness.

What are the two possible courses which an illness can take? Either healing or death occurs. In the normal development of life death must be seen as the one side and healing as the other.

What does healing signify for the development of the human being? First of all it must be clarified what sickness means for the overall development of the human being.

In sickness there is disharmony between the inner and the outer human being. In a certain way the inner human being has to withdraw from the outer one. A simple example is when we cut our finger. We can only cut the physical body, not the astral. But the astral body always transfuses the physical one and the result is that the astral body does not find in the cut finger what it should find when it penetrates into its smallest recesses. It feels disconnected from the physical part of the finger. That, in essence, is the nature of a whole number of illnesses that the inner human being feels disconnected from the outer, that it cannot penetrate the outer human being because an injury causes a division. Now health can be restored to the human being by outer means or the inner human being can be strengthened to such an extent that it is able to heal the outer human being. The link between outer and inner human being is re-established to a greater or lesser degree after healing, the inner human being can again live in the healed outer one.

This is a process which can be compared to waking up: after an artificial withdrawal by the inner human being we return to the experiences which are only available in the outside world. Healing makes it possible for the human being to return with those things which he could not otherwise bring back. The healing process is assimilated into the inner human being and becomes an integral part of this inner human being. Return to health, healing, is something which we can look back on with satisfaction because in a similar manner that sleep makes the inner human being progress we are given something by healing which allows the inner human being to progress. Even if it is not immediately visible, we are elevated in our soul experience, are enhanced in our inner human being by a return to health. In sleep we take with us into the spiritual world the things we have won through healing and the latter is therefore something which strengthens us as far as the forces which we develop in sleep are concerned. All these thoughts on the mysterious relationship between healing and sleep could be developed in full if there were the time, but it can be seen, nevertheless, how healing can be equated with what we take into the spiritual world at night; with that which brings progress into our processes of development in so far as they can be made to progress at all between birth and death. Those things which in normal life we draw in from outer experience come to expression in our soul-life between birth and death as higher development. But not everything which assimilated through healing emerges again. We can also take it through the gate of death and it can be of benefit to us in the next life. But spiritual science shows us the following: we should be thankful each time that we are healed, for each healing signifies an enhancement of our inner human being which can only be achieved with the forces which we have assimilated inwardly.

The other question is: what is the significance for the human being of the illness which ends in death?

In a certain sense it means the opposite, that we cannot restore the disturbed balance between the inner and the outer human being, that we cannot in the correct way cross the frontier between the inner and the outer human being in this life. As we have to accept our unchanged healthy body when we wake up in the morning we have to accept our unchanged damaged body when an illness ends with death and are incapable of making it change. The healthy body remains as it is and receives us in the morning; the damaged body can no longer receive us and we end up in death. We have to leave the body because we are no longer able to re-establish its harmony. But we then take our experiences into the spiritual world without the benefit of an outer body. The fruits which we gain as a result of our damaged body no longer receiving us become an enrichment for the life between death and a new birth. Thus, also, we have to be thankful to an illness which ends in death because it gives us the opportunity of enhancing the life between death and a new birth and to gather together the forces and experiences which can only mature during that time.

Thus we have here the consequences for the soul of illnesses which end in death and illnesses which end in healing. That gives us two aspects: we can be thankful to an illness which ends in healing because we have become strengthened in our inner self; and we can be thankful to an illness which ends in death because we know: in the higher stage which we enter in the life between death and a new birth death is of great significance for us because we will have learnt from it that our body must be different when we construct it for the future. And we will avoid the harmful aspects which caused us to fail before. The healing process makes our inner life progress, death influences the development in the outer world.

The necessity therefore arises that we take two different points of view. Nobody should think that it would be correct to say from the point of view of spiritual science: if death, which results from illness is something for which we must be grateful, if the course of an illness is something which elevates us in our next life, then we should really permit all illness to end in death and not make any attempt at healing! To speak like that would not be in the spirit of spiritual science, for the latter is not concerned with abstractions but with those truths which are arrived at from different points of view. We have the duty to make every attempt at healing with all the means at our disposal. The task to heal to the best of our ability lies embedded in the human consciousness. Thus the view that death, when it occurs, is something to be grateful for is not one which is normally present in ordinary human consciousness, but can only be won if we transcend it. From the “viewpoint of the gods” it is justified to let an illness end in death; from the human viewpoint it is justified only to do everything to bring about healing. An illness which ends in death cannot be judged on the same level. Initially these two views are irreconcilable and they have to progress in parallel. Any abstract harmonising is of no use here. Spiritual science has to advance to a recognition of the truths which stem from one particular side of life and of other truths which are representative of another side.

The sentence “healing is good, healing is a duty” is correct. But so is the other sentence “death is good when it occurs as the result of illness; death is beneficial for overall human development.” Although these two sentences contradict one another, both of them contain living truths which can be recognised by living knowledge. Precisely where two streams, which can only be made harmonious in the future, enter human life it is possible to see the error of thinking in stereotypes and the necessity to regard life in broad outline. It has to be clearly understood that so-called contradictions, when they refer only to experience and a deeper knowledge of the matter, do not limit our knowledge but lead us gradually into a living knowledge because life itself develops towards harmony.

Normal life proceeds in such a manner that we create abilities from experiences and that the things which we cannot assimilate between birth and death are woven into the fabric which we then make use of between death and a new birth. Healing and fatal illness intertwine with this normal course of human life in such a manner that every healing is a contribution to the elevation of the human being to a higher stage, and every fatal illness, too, leads the human being to higher levels. The former as far as the inner human being is concerned and the latter as far as the outer human being is concerned. Thus there is progress in the world in that it moves not in one but in two opposing currents. It is precisely in sickness and healing that the complexities of human life become visible. If sickness and health did not exist, normal life could only proceed in such a manner that the human being would spin the thread of his life hanging on to the apron strings of existence, never going beyond his limits. And the forces to construct his body anew would be given to him from the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In such a situation the human being would never be able to unfold the fruits of his own labour in the development of the world. These fruits can be unfolded by the human being in the close confines of life only in that he can err. For only by a knowledge of error can truth be arrived at. It is only possible to assimilate truth such that it becomes part of the soul, such that it influences development, if it is extracted from the fertile soul of error. The human being could be perfectly healthy if he did not interfere in life with his errors and imperfections by breaching his limits. But health which has the same origins as the inwardly recognised truth, health for which the human being wrestles from one incarnation to the next with his own life, such health only comes about through the reality of mistakes, through illness. The human being learns to overcome his mistakes and errors in healing on the one hand, and on the other he meets the mistakes which he was not able to overcome in life in the existence between death and a new life so that he learns to surmount them in the next life.

We can now return to our dramatic example and say: the intellect of those scholars who made such a wrong judgment at the time will not only become more cautious in jumping to conclusions, but it will let the experience ripen in order gradually to create harmony with life.

Thus it can be observed how healing and sickness affect human life so that the human being could never achieve his aims by his own effort without them. We can see how their seemingly abnormal intervention in our development belongs to human existence, as does error, if our aim is to recognise truth. We could say the same about sickness and healing as a great poet in an important epoch said about human error: “The striving human being errs.”³⁶ This might give the impression as if the poet had wanted to say: “The human being always errs!” But the sentence is reversible and might be said: “Let the human being strive whilst he still errs!” Error gives birth to renewed striving. The sentence “The striving human being errs” need not, therefore, fill us with despair, for every error brings forth new striving and the human being will continue to strive until he has overcome the error. That is as much as to say that error in itself points beyond itself and leads to human truth. And similarly it can be said: sickness may occur in the human being, but he must develop. Through illness he develops to health. Thus illness points beyond itself in healing and even in death, and produces a state of health which is not alien to man but which grows out of the human being and is in accord with this being.

Everything which appears in this context is well suited to showing us how the world in the wisdom of its existence avails the human being at every stage of his development of the opportunity to grow beyond himself in the sense of the saying by Angelus Silesius with which we concluded the lecture “What is Mysticism?” At that time we were referring to more intimate spheres of development; now we can expand its meaning to the whole field of sickness and healing and we can truly say:

If you transcend yourself in God's prevailing,
Then in your spirit will ascension reign!³⁷

• 30. “Wie begreift man Krankheit und Tod”, Berlin, 13th December 1906, in: Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen in unserer Zeit und deren Bedeutung für das heutige Leben, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 55)
• 31. “Der Krankheitswahn im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft”, Berlin, 13th February 1908; “Das Gesundheitsfieber im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft”, Berlin, 27th February 1908. The parallel lectures held in Munich (3rd and 5th December 1907) are printed in Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 56)
• 32. See Odyssey, 19th Book, 1.137 ff.
• 33. The reference is to the work De Natura Rerum by Isidore of Seville, c. 560-636, the last Occidental Church Father. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 18th January 1912 in Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 61)
• 34. Francesco Redi, 1626–1698. Italian doctor, scientist and poet. Cf. his work Osservazione intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684.
• 35. Volcano on the West Indian island of Martinique; largest eruption on 8th May 1902.
• 36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, Prologue in Heaven, 1.317.
• 37. See note 20.

If we examine the human soul, comparing one individual with another, we find the greatest possible variety. In these lectures we have spoken of some typical differences and the reasons for them, relating them to character, temperament, capacities, forces and so on. One significant difference, the difference between positive and negative man, will occupy us today.

At the start, I want to make it clear that this treatment of the subject—which will be fully in keeping with my other lectures—has nothing in common with the superficial but popular descriptions of people as positive and negative. Our account will stand entirely on its own ground.

We might first look round for a kind of clarifying definition of what is meant by a positive or negative person, and thus we might say: In the sense of a true and penetrating teaching concerning human souls, we could designate a positive person as one who, in face of all the impressions pouring in on him from the outer world, is able to maintain the firmness and security of his inner being, at least up to a certain point. Hence he will have clear-cut ideas and concepts, together with certain inclinations and aversions, which outer impressions cannot disturb. Again, his actions follow certain urges and impulses which will not be affected by whatever transient impressions may come to him from daily life.

A negative man, on the other hand, can be described as one who readily submits to changing impressions and is strongly influenced by ideas which come to him from this or that person or group. Hence he is easily impelled to change what he had been thinking or feeling and to take something different into his soul. In his actions he is drawn away from his own impulses by all kinds of influences from other people.

These could be our definitions, roughly speaking. But if we inquire how these deeply rooted characteristics of human nature work out in practice, we shall soon be convinced that we have gained very little from our definitions and that to search for any such convenient labels is fairly useless. For if we try to apply them to real life we have to say: A man of strong passions and impulses, which have carried a certain enduring stamp since childhood, will have allowed all sorts of good and bad examples to pass him by without affecting his habits. He will have formed certain ideas and concepts about this or that and he will stick to them, whatever other facts may be brought before him. Countless obstacles will mount up before he can be convinced of anything different. Such a man would indeed be positive, but it would lead to nothing for him but a dull life, shut off from new impressions, seeing and hearing nothing that could enrich or enlarge his experience.

The other type of man, ready at any time to welcome new impressions and always prepared to correct his ideas if facts go against them, would become—perhaps in a relatively short time—a quite different being. As he goes through successive periods in his life he will seem to be hastening on from one interest to another, so that the character of his life will be quite transformed as time goes on. Compared with the other, “positive” type of man, he will certainly have made more of life—but according to our definition we should have to call him “negative”.

Again, a man of robust character, whose life is governed by custom and routine, might be led by the fashion of the moment to travel in a country richly endowed with art treasures. But he has loaded his soul with so many fixed responses that he passes by one work of art after another, at most consulting his Baedeker to see which are the most important, and finally he goes home with his soul not in the least enriched by all this trailing from gallery to gallery, from landscape to landscape. We would have to call him a very positive man.

By contrast, someone else might follow much the same course of travel, but his character is such that he gives himself up to every picture, loses himself enthusiastically in it, and so it is with the next picture and the next. Thus he passes along with a soul that surrenders to every detail, with the result each impression is wiped out by the next, and he returns home with a kind of chaos in his soul. He is a very negative person, the exact opposite of the other man.

We could go on giving the most varied examples of the two types. We could describe as negative a person who has learnt so much that on every subject his judgment is uncertain; he no longer knows what is true or false and has become a sceptic with regard to life and knowledge. Another man might absorb just as many of the same impressions, but he works on them and knows how to fit them into the whole of his acquired wisdom. He would be a positive man in the best sense of the word.

A child can be tyrannically positive towards grown-ups if it asserts its own inherent nature and tries to reject everything opposed to it. Or a man who has been through many experiences, errors and disappointments may nevertheless surrender to every new impression and may still be easily elated or depressed: compared with the child he will be a negative type. In brief, it is only when we allow the whole of a man's life, to work upon us, not in accordance with any theoretical ideas but in all its variety, and if we use concepts only as an aid in ordering the facts and events of a life, that we can rightly approach these decisive questions concerning positive and negative man. For in discussing the individual peculiarities of human souls we touch on something of the utmost importance. If we did not have to think of man in all his completeness as a living entity, subject to what we call evolution—so often discussed here—these questions would be much simpler.

We see the human soul passing from one stage of evolution to the next, and, if we are speaking in the true sense of spiritual science, we do not picture the life of an individual between birth and death as following always a uniform course. For we know that his life is a sequel to previous lives on earth and the starting-point for later ones. When we observe a human life through its various incarnations, we can readily understand that in one earthly life a man's development may go somewhat slowly, so that he retains the same characteristics and ideas throughout. In another life he will have to catch up with all the more development, leading him to new levels of soul-life. The study of a single life is always in the highest degree insufficient.

Let us now ask how these indications concerning positive and negative types can help us in studying the human soul on the lines laid down in previous lectures. We showed that the soul is by no means a chaotic flux of concepts, feelings and ideas, as it may seem to be at a casual glance. On the contrary, the soul has three members which must be clearly distinguished. The first and lowest of these we called the sentient soul. Its primal form is best seen in men at a relatively low stage of development who are wholly given up to their passions, impulses, wishes and desires and simply pursue every wish, every desire, that arises within them. In men of this type the ego, the self-conscious kernel of the human soul, dwells in a surging sea of passions, desires, sympathies and antipathies, and is subject to every storm that sweeps through the soul. Such a man will follow his inclinations not because he dominates them but because they dominate him, so that he gives way to every inner demand. The ego can scarcely raise itself out of this surge of desires. When the soul develops further, we see more and more clearly how the ego works from a strong central point.

In due course, as evolution proceeds, a higher part of the soul, which exists in everyone, gains a certain predominance over the sentient soul. We have called this higher part the intellectual soul or mind soul. When man ceases to follow every inclination or impulse, then in his soul something emerges which has always been there but can be effective only when the ego begins to control his inclinations and desires and to impose on the ever-changing impressions he receives some kind of coherence in his inner life. Thus when this second member of the soul, the intellectual soul, comes to prevail, it deepens our picture of man.

Next, we spoke of the highest member of the soul, the consciousness soul, where the ego comes to the fore in full strength. Then the inner life turns towards the outer world. Its conceptual images and ideas are no longer there only to control the passions, for at this stage the entire inner life of the soul is guided by the ego, so that it reflects the outer world and gains knowledge of it. When we attain to this knowledge, it is a sign that the consciousness soul has come to dominate the life of the soul. These three soul-members exist in all human beings, but in every case one of them predominates.

The last lectures have shown that the soul can go further in development—must indeed go further even in ordinary life, if we are to be human beings in the true sense of the word. A man whose motives for action derive entirely from external demands, who is impelled to act only by sympathy or antipathy, will make no effort to realise in himself the true quality of human nature. This will be achieved only by someone who raises himself to moral ideas and ideals, derived from the spiritual world, for that is how we enrich the life of the soul with new elements. Man has a “history” only because he can carry into life something which his inner being draws from unknown depths and impresses on the outer world. Similarly, we would never reach a real knowledge of world secrets if we were not able to attach external experiences to ideas. We draw forth these ideas from the spirit in ourselves and bring them to meet the outer world, and it is only by so doing that we can grasp and elucidate the outer world in its true form. Thus we can infuse our inner being with a spiritual element and enrich our soul with experiences that we could never gain from the outer world alone.

As described in the lecture on mysticism, we can rise to a higher form of soul-life by cutting ourselves off for a while from impressions and stimuli from the outer world, by emptying the soul and devoting ourselves—as Meister Eckhart puts it—to the little flame which is usually outshone by the continual experiences of daily life but which can now be kindled into flame. A mystic of this order rises to a soul-life above the ordinary level; he immerses himself in the mysteries of the world by unveiling within himself what the world-mysteries have laid down in his soul. In the next lecture we saw that if a man awaits the future with calm acceptance, and if he looks back over the past in such a way as to feel that dwelling within him is something greater than anything evident in his daily life, he will be impelled to look up in worship to this greater thing that towers above him. We saw that in prayer a man rises inwardly above himself towards something that transcends his ordinary life. And finally, we saw that by real spiritual training, which leads him through the three stages of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, he can grow into a world which is as unknown to ordinary people as the world of light and colours is to the blind. Thus we have seen how the soul can grow beyond the normal level, and so we have gained a glimpse of the development of the soul through the most varied stages.

If we look at people around us, we find that they are at widely different levels of development. One man will show in life that he has the potential for raising his soul to a certain stage and will then be able to carry through the gate of death what he has gained. If we study how people go from stage to stage, we come to the concepts of positive and negative but we cannot now say simply that an individual is positive or negative, for he will exhibit each characteristic at different stages of his progress.

To start with, a man may have the strongest, most headstrong impulses in his sentient soul; he will then be impelled by definite urges, passions and desires, while his ego-centre remains in relative obscurity and he may be hardly aware of it. At that point he is very positive and pursues his life as a positive type. But, if he were to remain in that condition, he would make no progress. In the course of his development he must change from a positive into a negative person, for he has to be open to receive whatever his development requires. If he is not prepared to suppress the positive qualities in his sentient soul, so that new impressions can flow in; if he is unable to raise himself out of the positive qualities given him by nature and to acquire a certain negative capacity to receive new impressions, he will get no further.

Here we touch on something which is necessary for the soul but can also be a source of danger—something which shows very clearly that only an intimate knowledge of the soul can guide us safely through life. The fact is that we cannot progress if we try to avoid certain dangers affecting the life of the soul. And these dangers are always present for a negative person, since he is open to the influx of external impressions and to uniting himself with them. This means that he will take in not only good impressions, but also bad and dangerous ones.

When a very negative person meets another person, he will be easily carried away by hearing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with judgment or reason, and he will be influenced not only by what the other person says but by what he does. He may imitate the other person's actions and examples, to the point even of coming to resemble him quite closely. Such a man may indeed be open to good influences, but he will be in danger of responding to every kind of bad stimulus and making it his own.

If we rise from ordinary life to the level where we can see what spiritual facts and beings are at work in our vicinity, we must say that a man with negative soul-qualities is particularly open to the influence of those intangible, indefinable impressions which are hardly evident in external life. For example, the facts show that a man alone is a quite different being from what he is in a large assembly of others, especially if the assembly is active. When he is alone, he follows his own impulses; even a weak ego will look for the source of its actions in itself. But in a large assembly there is a sort of mass-soul in which all the various urges, desires and judgments of those present flow together. A positive man will not easily surrender to this collective entity, but a negative man will always be influenced by it. Hence we can repeatedly experience the truth of what a dialect poet, Rosegger, has said in a few words. He puts it crudely, but there is more than a grain of truth in what he says:

Oaner is a Mensch,
Zwoa san Leit',
San's mehra, san's Viecher.³⁸

We can often notice that men are wiser alone than they are in company, for then they are almost always subject to the prevailing average mood. Thus a man may go to a meeting without any definite ideas or feelings; then he listens to a speaker who takes up with enthusiasm some point which had previously left him cold. He may be affected not so much by the speaker as by the acclamation won from the audience. This grips him and he goes home quite convinced.

Mass-suggestion of this kind plays an enormous part in life. It illustrates the danger to which a negative soul is exposed, and in particular the danger of sectarianism, for while we might fail to convince an individual of something, it becomes relatively easy to do so if we can bring him under the influence of a sect or group, for here mass suggestion will be at work, spreading from soul to soul. There are great dangers here for persons of a negative type.

We can go further. In earlier lectures we have seen how the soul can raise itself into higher realms of spiritual life. And in my Occult Science³⁹ you will find an account of how the soul must train itself to accomplish this stage-by-stage ascent. In the first place it has to suppress the positive element in itself and open itself to new impressions by putting itself artificially into a negative mood. Otherwise it will make no progress. We have often explained what the spiritual researcher has to do if he wishes to reach the higher levels of existence. He has to bring about, deliberately and consciously, the condition which occurs normally in sleep, when the soul receives no outer stimuli. He has to shut out all external impressions, so that his soul is quite empty. Then he must be able to open his soul to impressions which at first, if he is still a beginner, will be quite new to him, and this means that he has to make himself as negative as possible. And everything in mystical life and knowledge of higher worlds that we call inner vision, inward contemplation, does fundamentally bring about negative moods in the soul. There is no way round that. When a man suppresses all stimuli from the outer world and consciously achieves a condition in which he is entirely sunk in himself and has banished all the positive characteristics that had previously been his, then he is bound to become negative and self-absorbed.

Something similar occurs if we employ an easier external method which cannot of itself lead us to a higher life but can give us some support in our ascent—if for instance we turn from foods which stimulate positive impulses in a sort of animal fashion to a special diet, vegetarian or the like. We cannot bring about our ascent into higher worlds by vegetarianism or by not eating this or that; it would be altogether too easy if we could eat our way up to those heights. Nothing but work on our own souls can get us there. But the work can be made easier if we avoid the hampering influence that particular forms of nourishment can have. Anyone who is trying to lead a higher, more spiritual life can readily convince himself that his forces are enhanced by adopting a certain diet. For if he cuts out the foods which tend to foster the robust and positive elements in himself, he will be brought into a negative condition.

Anyone who stands on the ground of genuine spiritual science, free from charlatanry, will never refuse to recognise the things, including external things, which are in fact connected with endeavours to lead a true spiritual life. But this means that we may be exposed also to bad spiritual influences. When we educate ourselves in spiritual science and eliminate everyday impressions, we open ourselves to the spiritual facts and beings which are always around us. Among them, certainly, will be the good spiritual powers and forces which we first learn to perceive when the appropriate organ has unfolded within us, but we shall be open also to the evil spiritual powers and forces around us just as if we are to hear harmonious musical sounds, we must be open also to discordant ones. If we want to penetrate into the spiritual world, we must be clear that we are liable to encounter the bad side of spiritual experiences. If our approach to the spiritual world were to be entirely negative, we would be threatened by one danger after another.

Let us look away from the spiritual world and consider ordinary life. Why should a vegetarian diet, for example, make us negative? If we become vegetarians because of some popular agitation but without adequate judgment, or as a matter of principle without changing our ways of living and acting, it may under certain conditions have a seriously weakening effect on us in relation to other influences, and particularly perhaps on certain bodily characteristics. But if we have gone over to a life of initiative, involving new tasks that arise not from external life but from a richly developing life of the soul, then it can be immensely useful to take a new line in diet also and to clear away any hindrances that may have arisen from our previous eating habits.

Things have very different effects on different people. Hence the spiritual-scientific researcher always insists on something that has often been emphasised here: he will never impart to anyone the means of rising into higher worlds without making it clear to him that he must not merely cultivate the negative soul-qualities that are necessary for receiving new impressions, nor must be content to develop inner vision and inward concentration, for a life which is to rise to a new level must have a content which is strong enough to fill and sustain it. If we were merely to show someone how he can acquire the strength that will enable him to see into the spiritual world, we should be exposing him to bad spiritual forces of every kind, through the negativity that goes with such endeavours. But if he is willing to learn what the spiritual investigator can tell him about the higher worlds, he will never remain merely negative, for he will possess something which can imbue his soul with positive content at a higher stage. That is why we so often emphasise that the seeker must not only strive for higher levels, but must at the same time give careful study to what spiritual science communicates. That is how the spiritual researcher takes account of the fact that anyone who is to experience new realms has to be receptive, and therefore negative, towards them.

What we have to call forth, when we set out consciously to develop the soul, can be seen in the various people we encounter in ordinary life, for the soul does not go through development only in its present life but has done so in previous lives and is at a definite stage when it enters earth-existence. Just as in our present life we have to proceed from stage to stage, and must acquire negative characteristics on our way to a positive stage, so the same thing may have happened when we last went through the gate of death and entered a new life with positive or negative characteristics. The design which sent us into life with positive qualities will leave us where we are and act as a brake on further development, for positive tendencies produce a clearly-defined character. A negative tendency, on the other hand, does make it possible for us to receive a great deal into our soul-life between death and a new birth, but it also exposes us to all the chance happenings of earthly life, and especially to the impressions made on us by other people. Thus when a man of negative type meets other persons, we can usually see how their characteristics leave their mark upon him. Even he himself, when he comes close to a friend or to someone with whom he has had an affectionate relationship, can feel how he becomes more and more like the other: in cases of marriage or deep friendship even his handwriting may be influenced. Observation will indeed show how in marriage the handwriting of a negative person may come to resemble increasingly that of his or her spouse.

So it is that negative types are susceptible to the influence of other people, especially of those close to them. Hence they are exposed to a certain danger of losing themselves, so that their individual soul life and ego-sense may be extinguished.

The danger for a positive type is that he will not be readily accessible to impressions from other people and will often fail to appreciate their characteristic qualities, so that he passes them all by and may be unable to form a friendship or close association with anyone. Hence he is in danger of his soul becoming hardened and desolate.

We can gain deep insight into life when we consider people in terms of the positive and negative aspects in human beings, and this applies also to the different ways in which they respond to the influence of Nature around them. What then is it that acts on a person when he is influenced by other people or when he absorbs impressions from the outer world?

There is one thing that always imparts a positive character to the soul. For modern man, regardless of his stage of development, it is sound judgment, rational weighing up, clarifying for oneself any situation or relationship that may arise in life. The opposite of this is the loss of healthy judgment, so that impressions are admitted to the soul in such a way that positive qualities are no protection against them. We can even observe that when certain human activities slip down into the unconscious, they often have a stronger effect on other people than when they arise from the conscious exercise of normal judgment.

It is unfortunate, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that when facts concerning the spiritual world are given in a strictly logical form, a form well recognised in other spheres of life, people are inclined to evade them; they find it uncongenial that such facts should be presented in a rational sequence of cause and effect. But if these communications are imparted to them in such a way that their judgment is not evoked, they are far more ready to respond. There are even people who are highly mistrustful of information about the spiritual world if it is given in rational terms, but very credulous towards anything they may hear from mediums who seem to be inspired by some unknown power. These mediums, who do not know what they are saying and who say more than they know, attract many more believers than do persons who know exactly what they are saying. How is it possible—we often hear it said—for anyone to tell us about the spiritual world unless he is in at least a half-conscious state and evidently possessed by some other power? This is often taken as a reason for objecting to the conscious communication of facts drawn from the spiritual world. That is why running to mediums is much more popular than paying heed to communications based on sound judgment and set forth in rational terms.

When anything that comes from the spiritual world is thrust down into a region from which consciousness is excluded, there is a danger that it will work on the negative characteristics of the soul, for these characteristics always come to the fore when we are approached by an influence from dark subconscious depths. Close observation shows again and again how a relatively stupid person, thanks to his positive qualities, can have a strong effect on a more intelligent person if the latter is easily impressed by anything that emerges from subconscious obscurity. So we can understand how it happens in life that persons with fine minds are the victims of robust characters whose assertions derive solely from their own impulses and inclinations.

If we take one further step, we shall come to a remarkable fact. Consider a man who not merely belies his own reason now and then but suffers from mental illness and says things that spring from this deranged condition. So long as his illness is not noticed, he may have an uncommonly strong influence on persons of finer nature.

All this belongs to the wisdom of life. We shall not get it right unless we realise that a man with positive qualities may not be open to reason, while a negative type of man will often be subject to irrational influences he cannot keep out. A subtler psychology will have to take account of these things.

Now we will turn from impressions made by individuals on one another and come to impressions received by people from their surroundings. Here, too, we can gain important results in the context of positive and negative.

Let us think, for example, of a researcher who has worked very fruitfully on a special subject and has brought together a large number of relevant facts. By so doing he has accomplished something useful for mankind. But now suppose that he connects these facts with ideas gained from his education and his life up to date or from certain theories and philosophical viewpoints which may give a very one-sided view of the facts. In so far as the concepts and ideas he has inferred from the facts are the outcome of his own reflective thinking, they will have a healthy effect on his soul, for by working out his own philosophy he will have imbued his soul with positive feelings. But now suppose that he meets some followers who have not themselves worked over the facts but have merely heard of them or read them. They will lack the feelings that he evoked in himself through his work in laboratory or study, and their frame of mind may be entirely negative. Hence the same doctrine, even though it be one-sided, can be seen as making the leader of their school positive in his soul, while on the whole throng of followers, who merely repeat the doctrine, it can have an unhealthy, negative effect, making them weaker and weaker.

This is something that runs through the whole history of human culture. Even today we can see how men of an entirely materialistic outlook, which they themselves have worked hard to develop from their own findings, are lively positive characters whom it is a pleasure to meet, but in the case of their followers, who carry in their heads the same basic ideas but have not acquired them by their own efforts, these ideas have an unhealthy, negative, weakening effect. Thus we can say that it makes a great difference if a man achieves a philosophical outlook of his own or if he merely takes it from someone else. The first man will acquire positive qualities; the second, negative qualities.

Thus we see how our attitude to the world can make us both positive and negative. For example, a purely theoretical approach to Nature, especially if it omits everything we can actually see with our eyes, makes us negative. There has to be a theoretical knowledge of Nature. But we must not be blind to the fact that this theoretical knowledge gained by the systematic study of animals, plants and minerals and embodied as laws of Nature in the form of concepts and ideas—works on our negative qualities in such a way as to imprison us in these ideas. On the other hand, if we respond with living appreciation to all that Nature in its grandeur has to offer, positive qualities are called forth in our souls—if for example we take delight in a flower, not pulling it to pieces but responding to its beauty, or if we open ourselves to the morning light when the sun is rising, not testing it in astronomical terms but beholding its glory. For anything we adopt by way of a theoretical conception of the world does not implicate our souls; we allow it to be dictated to us by others. But our whole soul is actively involved when we are delighted or repelled by the phenomena of Nature. The truth of Nature is not concerned with the ego, but that which delights or repels us is; for how we respond to Nature depends on the character of our ego.

Thus we can say: Living participation in Nature develops our positive qualities; theorising about Nature does the reverse. But we must qualify this by repeating that a researcher who is the first to analyse a series of natural phenomena is far more positive than one who merely adopts his findings and learns from them. This distinction should be given attention in wide fields of education. And a relevant fact is that wherever there has been a conscious awareness of the things we have been discussing today, the negative characteristics of the human soul have never been cultivated on their own account. Why did Plato inscribe over the entrance to his school of philosophy the words: “Only those with a knowledge of geometry may enter here”?⁴⁰ It was because geometry and mathematics cannot be accepted on the authority of another person. We have to work through geometry by our own inner efforts and can master it only by a positive activity of our souls. If this were heeded today, many of the philosophical systems that buzz around would not exist. For if anyone realises how much positive work has gone into formulating a system of ideas such as geometry, he will learn to respect the creative activity of the human mind; but anyone who reads Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe,⁴¹ for instance, with no notion of how it was worked out, may quite easily arrive at a new world-outlook, but he will do so out of a purely negative state of soul.

Now in spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, we have something which unconditionally requires a positive response. If someone is told that with the aid of popular modern devices, photographs or lantern-slides, he can see some animal or some natural phenomenon brought before his eyes on the screen, he will watch it quite passively, in a negative frame of mind; he will need no positive qualities and will not even need to think. Or he might be shown a series of pictures illustrating the various phases of a glacier on its way down the mountain it would be just the same. These are just examples of how wide is the appeal of these negative, attitudes today. Anthroposophy is not so simple. Photographs could at most give a symbolical suggestion of some of its ideas. The only way of approach to the spiritual world is through the life of the human soul. Anyone who wishes to penetrate fruitfully into spiritual science must realise that its most important elements are not going to be the subject of a demonstration. He is therefore advised that he must work on and with his soul, so as to bring out its most positive qualities. In fact, spiritual science is in the highest sense competent to cultivate these qualities in the human soul. Herein, too, resides the healthiness of its world-outlook, which makes no claim except to arouse the forces sleeping in the soul. In appealing to the activity inherent in every soul, Anthroposophy calls forth its hidden forces, so that they may permeate all the saps and energies of the body; thus it has a health-giving effect, in the fullest sense, on the whole human being. And because Anthroposophy appeals only to sound reason, which cannot be evoked by mass-suggestion but only through individual understanding, and because it renounces everything that mass-suggestion can evoke, it reckons with the most positive qualities of the human soul.

Thus we have brought together, without embellishment, a number of facts and examples which show how man is placed in the midst of two streams, the positive and the negative. He cannot rise to higher stages unless he leaves a lower positive stage and goes over to a negative, receptive condition, so that his soul acquires new content; he takes this along with him and thus becomes positive once more on a higher level. If we learn how to observe Nature rightly, we can see how world-wisdom arranges things so that man may be led from a positive to a negative phase, and on to a positive phase once more.

From this point of view, it is illuminating to study particular topics—for example, Aristotle's famous definition of the tragic.⁴² A tragedy, he says, brings before us a complete dramatic action which can be expected to evoke fear and pity in the spectators, but in such a way that these emotions undergo a catharsis or purgation. Let us note that man, on coming into existence with his usual egotism, is at first very positive: he hardens himself and shuts himself off from others. But then, if he learns to sympathise with others in their sorrows and feels their joys as his own, he becomes very negative, because he goes out from his ego and participates in the feelings of other people.

We become negative also if we are deeply affected by some undefined fate which seems to hang over another person, by what could happen on the morrow to someone with whom we are in close sympathy. Who has not trembled when someone is hastening towards a deed which will lead him to disaster—a disaster we can foresee but which he, driven by his impulses, is powerless to avert? We are afraid of what may come of it, and this induces in us a negative state of soul, for fear is negative. We would no longer have any real part in life if we were unable to fear for someone who is approaching a perilous future. So it is that fear and sympathy make us negative. In order that we may become positive again, tragedy sets before us a Hero. We sympathise with his deeds, and his fate touches us so nearly that our fates are aroused. At the same time the course of the dramatic action brings the picture of the Hero before us in such a way that our fear and pity are purified; they are transformed from negative feelings into the harmonious contentment bestowed on us by a work of art, and so we are raised once more into the positive mode.

Thus the old Greek philosopher's definition of tragedy shows us how art is an element in life which comes to meet an unavoidably negative state of feeling and transmutes it into a positive condition. Art, in all its realms, leads us to a higher level when we have first to be negative in order to progress from a less developed state.

Beauty, initially, must be seen as that which is intended to come before us in order to help us rise beyond our present stage. Ordinary life is then suffused with the radiance of a higher state of soul, if we have first been raised through art to a higher level.

Thus we see how positive and negative alternate, not only in individuals but in the whole life of man, and we see how this contributes to raising both the individual from one incarnation to the next and humanity as a whole. We could easily show, if there were time, how there have been positive and negative epochs and historical periods. The idea of positive and negative throws light into every sphere of the soul's life and of the life of humanity at large.

It never happens that one man is always negative and another always positive. Each of us has to go through positive and negative conditions at different stages of existence. Only when we see the idea in this light shall we accept it as a truth and therefore as a basis for the practice of living. And our discussion today has confirmed the saying that we have put at the beginning and end of these lectures—the saying by the old Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who, because he could see so deeply into human life, was called the Obscure: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search, so all-embracing is the soul's being.”⁴³

Now someone might say: “All study of the soul must then be useless, for if its boundaries can never be discovered, no research can establish them and one could despair of ever knowing anything about them.” Only a negative man could take that line. A positive man would add: “Thank God the life of the soul is so far-ranging that knowledge can never encompass it, for this means that everything we comprehend today we shall be able to surpass tomorrow and thus hasten towards higher levels.” Let us be glad that at every moment the life of the soul makes a mockery of our knowledge. We need an unbounded soul-life, for this limitless perspective gives us hope that we may continually surpass the positive and rise from step to step. It is precisely because the extent of our soul-life is unbounded and unknowable that we can look forward with hope and confidence. Because the boundaries of the soul can never be discovered, the soul is able to go beyond them and rise to higher and ever-higher levels.

• 38. Peter Rosegger, 1843–1918. Styrian writer: “One is a man/Two are people/Any more are cattle”.
• 39. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1969.
• 40. These words over the entrance to the Platonic Academy can be found neither in Plato nor in any of his Greek and Roman contemporaries. They are first found in commentators on Aristotle in the 6th century AD; thus Elias, Aristotelis Categorias commentaria, ed. A. Busse (Comm. in Arist. Graeca XVIII, pars 1), Berlin 1900, 118.18; and Philoponus Joannes, Aristotelis de Anima Libris commentaria, ed. M. Hayduck (Comm. in Arist. Graeca XV), Berlin 1897, 117.29.
• 41. Ernst Haeckel, 1834–1919. Die Welträtsel Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie, Bonn 1899.
• 42. See Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 6.
• 43. See note 23.

The cycle of lectures which I was permitted to hold this winter before you, had the task of illuminating from the point of view of spiritual science as characterised in the first lecture here, the most various manifestations of human soul-life and of life in a wider context. Today, let us observe an area of human life which can lead to misery, suffering and perhaps also to the loss of hope. To make up for this, in the next lecture we will touch on a field entitled “Human Conscience”, which will lead us back to the heights where human dignity and value, the power of human self-consciousness is revealed most. And then, this year's cycle will be concluded with a reflection on “The Mission of Art”, which will try to show the thoroughly healthy side of what might appear to us today from its most terrible, dark aspect of life.

When error and mental disorder are spoken of, images of deepest human suffering arise in every person's soul, and images, too, of deepest human sympathy. And everything which thereby arises in the soul can also be a challenge to illuminate a little this chasm in the human soul with the light which we hope to have gained in these lectures. Particularly the person who increasingly accustoms himself to proceed in the way of thinking which has passed before our soul here must have the hope that the spiritual-scientific method of observation can illuminate in certain respects this sad chapter of human life. For anyone with some knowledge of the literature, and I am now referring less to the rapidly expanding non-specialist literature than to the specialist one, will be able to note from the point of view of spiritual science that it reaches an extraordinarily long way in some respects and offers a wealth of material for the assessment of the relevant facts. But on the other hand in no literature does it become so clear how little the different theories, views and modes of thinking in our time are appropriate to providing a framework for the experiences and scientific observations which have been collected. In this field in particular it can be seen clearly how spiritual science is in harmony with true and genuine science, with everything which we come up against as scientific facts, results and experiences. But it can also be seen how at each stage it finds a contradiction between these experiences and the way that they are interpreted from the current scientific point of view. As in other fields, we will again only be able to deal with the subject in outline, but perhaps it will provide the stimulus to gain a relevant understanding which can also flow into our practical life, so that we are increasingly capable of orientating ourselves in respect of the sad condition which we are about to touch upon.

In using the words “error” and “mental disorder” we will be aware that the one is fundamentally different from the other. Nevertheless, the exact observer of a soul-life which can be described truly as mentally disordered will find expressions and appearances which only seem to be different in degree from error committed in some respect in a life which is otherwise regarded as normal. But such observations are liable to misinterpretation in so far as certain directions of thought have the tendency to blur the individual divisions and to state that in fact no firm line exists between a healthy normal soul-life and one which can be described with the words “mental disorder”.

Such statements contain a certain danger which must be emphasised when the occasion occurs. And the danger lies not in the fact that the statement is wrong, but that it is correct. This may sound paradoxical, but nevertheless it is true, that wrong statements are sometimes less dangerous than correct ones which can be interpreted and put into practice in a one-sided way because the danger inherent in their correctness is not noticed. It is often thought to be sufficient that if something can be proved in a certain context it is correct; but it should be realised that every matter which is correct also has its reverse aspect and that any truth which we discover is true only in respect of certain facts and experiences. The danger arises in the moment that it is extrapolated to cover other areas, when it is carried too far and becomes dogmatic belief. That is the reason why in general not much is achieved if we know that a truth exists; the important thing is that in true knowledge we should know the limits within which that knowledge is valid.

We can certainly observe phenomena in normal healthy soul-life which, if they go beyond a certain point, are also pathological symptoms. The full weight of this statement will be noticed only by someone who is properly accustomed to observe life on a more intimate level. Who would deny the pathological aspect which can be included under the heading of “mental disorder” when someone is incapable of linking one comprehended concept with a second one at the right moment, so that he applies the first one in a new and completely inappropriate situation and acts on the basis of an idea which was correct for an earlier situation but not for a later one. Who would deny that this borders on the pathological? If it happens beyond a certain degree it is directly a symptom for mental disorder. But on the other hand, who would deny that there are people who are unable to advance in their work because of their long-windedness, their laboriousness. Here there is a situation in normal soul-life—the impossibility of progressing from an idea—where the point is approached at which it is necessary to stop speaking of error and start speaking of pathological mental disorder.

Let us assume, for example, that someone is prone to the error—and this really does happen—that when someone in the vicinity clears their throat this does not sound to him like a normal cough but gives him the illusion that people are saying unkind things about him. If that person then adjusts his life and actions in response to this illusion he will be considered as someone who is mentally disordered. And yet there is a thin line between this and occurrences in normal life where it happens that someone has overheard something and interprets the meaning in such a way that he thinks he hears something completely different to what was actually said. One meets cases where someone says: “Some person or other said this or that about me” and no trace can be found that the other person actually said that. It is not very easy to determine where the normal soul-life turns from its healthy course into disorder of the soul.

This may seem paradoxical, and it may provoke some reflection in this field, if we imagine that someone in an avenue of trees has the quite normal perception of seeing the trees nearby at their proper distance whilst those further away appear to move closer together and, deciding to tie ropes between the trees, he thereupon makes the lengths of rope shorter the further the trees are away. There we have an example of a person drawing the wrong conclusions from a perfectly healthy observation. But healthy observation only comes about because there is illusion. The illusion is also an observation. The unhealthy, harmful aspect of illusion only comes about when it is considered to be the same reality as a table standing before one. Only when the observations cannot be interpreted in the correct way can it be described as pathological. Now we can compare the case that someone has a hallucination and considers it to be reality in the normal physical sense with the paradox that someone was going to tie the trees of an avenue together with pieces of rope which became shorter and shorter. Logically, in principle, there would be no difference between the two things. Nevertheless, how easily can an illusion lead us to make a wrong judgment and how rarely would we make a similar wrong judgment in observing an avenue! Some people might consider all this silly. But all the same it is necessary to take such particulars into account, for otherwise one can quickly become side-tracked and does not see how easily normal soul-life can become disordered.

Now we can give further examples of still more striking cases concerning people whose soul-life is considered healthy and clear-sighted to the highest degree. I want to mention a German philosopher who is currently considered among the foremost in his field by those who work in it. The philosopher told of his following experience:

He was once in conversation with a person and this conversation led them to talk about a scholar known to both of them. At the moment when the conversation turned to the scholar, the philosopher was reminded of an illustrated book on Paris and immediately following that of a photograph album of Rome. Meanwhile the conversation continued about the scholar. The philosopher reflected how it was possible that during the conversation the image of first the illustrated book on Paris and then the photograph album of Rome could appear. And, indeed, he managed to establish the correct connections. For the scholar about whom they were talking had a noteworthy goatee. This goatee immediately called forth in the subconscious of the philosopher the image of Napoleon III, who also had a goatee; and this idea of Napoleon III which had pushed its way into his consciousness led via France to the illustrated work about Paris. And now the image of another man appeared before him who also had a Van Dyke beard, the image of Victor Emanuel of Italy; and this image led via Italy to the photograph album of Rome. There we have an arbitrary, haphazard sequence of ideas which unfolds whilst something completely different is happening in the fully conscious soul-life. Let us assume, now, that a person reached the point where the illustrated work about Paris arose in him and he then could no longer keep hold of the thread of the conversation, and immediately afterwards he had the subsequent idea of the photograph album of Rome; he would be subject to a haphazard life of ideas; he would be unable to hold an orderly conversation with anyone but would be enmeshed in a pathological soul-life which would lead him without rhyme or reason from one set of ideas to the next.

But our philosopher proceeds further and contrasts this with another case by which he hopes to recognise how these things are related. Once he went to the tax office to pay his taxes. He had to pay 75 marks. And since, in spite of his philosophy, he was an orderly man, he had entered these 75 marks in his expenditure book and had then proceeded with his other work. Later he wanted to remember the amount of tax which he had paid. He could not remember. He thought; and, being a philosopher, went to work systematically. He tried to recall the amount by the association of ideas. He concentrated on his walk to the tax office and he recalled the picture of the four gold twenty mark pieces which he had in his purse and, further, the image of the five marks which had then been given to him as change. He recalled these two images and was now able to discover by a simple subtraction that he had paid 75 marks tax.

Here we have two completely different cases. In the first the soul-life acts of its own accord, as it were, without any kind of control by the conscious sequence of ideas; it produces the image of the illustrated work about Paris and the image of the photograph album of Rome. In the second case we see how the soul acts quite systematically, choosing every step it takes. There really is a considerable difference between the two soul processes. But the philosopher fails to draw attention to something which the spiritual researcher would immediately notice. For the essential thing in the first case is that his attention is fixed on the other person, that the whole of his conscious soul-life is taken up with holding the conversation with the other person and that the haphazard images surface as if on a different level of consciousness, left to themselves. In the second case, the philosopher turns the whole of his attention to determining the sequence of ideas. This explains why the images occur haphazardly in the first case, whilst in the second they are under the control of the conscious soul-life.

But why are there images in the first place? The philosopher fails to answer that. Those who observe life, who know similar cases and are in a position to take into account the nature of the philosopher concerned (I happen to know not only the case but also the man) will be able to set up the following hypothesis. The philosopher was talking of a man who did not particularly interest him. A certain effort was necessary to keep up the concentration on the conversation. Because of this he had a certain amount of soul-life to spare which was not engaged in the conversation and which turned inwards. But he did not have the strength to control the resultant sequence of images so that they occurred haphazardly because he had to give his attention to the uninteresting conversation. This gives an indication how such images occur in the background of conscious soul-life as shadows. Numerous other examples could be given. I chose this example because it is very characteristic and much can be learnt from it.

Now the question may be asked: does such an event not prompt us to investigate human soul-life more deeply? And also: how can such a split in the soul-life come about in the first place? And here we come to the realm where experience of that unhappy subject we are dealing with today can be fitted quite naturally into what we have dealt with so often this winter. The philosopher mentioned in the example is faced with a riddle when recounting his experiences. He does not like to continue once he has told the facts because our external science stops short of knowledge about the essence of things and the human being, however much it may be descriptive.

Our observation of the essential nature of the human being has demonstrated that man must be looked at in more ways than is done by external science, that we have to distinguish an outer and an inner human being. We have shown in numerous areas that sleep has to be regarded differently from the way it is understood in ordinary science. We have shown how what remains in bed of the sleeping human being is only the outer man and that ordinary consciousness cannot follow the invisible higher true inner human being who leaves the outer human being in sleep. Ordinary consciousness just does not see that something leaves the human being which is just as real as that part which remains in bed, that the inner human being is given over to his real home, the spiritual world, between going to sleep and waking up. And it also fails to recognise that he extracts from there what he needs between waking up and going to sleep in order to sustain the ordinary soul-life. That is why we have to regard separately and clearly differentiate the outer human being, who is present with his laws also in sleep, and the inner human being, who is only present in the outer human being in the waking states, but separates himself in sleep. As long as this distinction is not made we will not be able to understand the most important events in human life. Those, who for reasons of convenience see everything as a unity and without a second thought want to establish monism everywhere, will accuse us of being dualists because we divide the human being into two members—an inner and an outer one. But such people should also admit the horrible dualism of the chemist splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. It is not possible to be a monist in the higher sense if one does not recognise that the monon is something which lies much deeper. But those who see unity only in the most immediate things hinder themselves from being able to observe the manifold nature of life, from recognising those things which alone can explain life.

Now it was also shown that we have to distinguish individual members within the outer and the inner human being. In the outer human being we first distinguished the physical body which we can see and feel. Then there is another member which we call the ether body, which fashions and builds up the physical body. Physical body and ether body remain in bed during sleep. Then the parts which withdraw from the physical and ether bodies during sleep into the spiritual world were described in these lectures as the astral human body which, in turn, encloses the bearer of the ego. But we made still more subtle distinctions. In the astral body we distinguished three soul members, and a careful differentiation of these three members permitted an explanation of many occurrences in life.

We called the lowest soul member the sentient soul, the second member we noted as the intellectual or mind soul and the third one as the consciousness soul. Therefore, when we refer to the inner human being, we do not speak of a chaotic, undifferentiated intermingling of all kinds of will impulses, feelings, concepts and ideas, but we can carefully differentiate in the soul between these three members. Now in ordinary human life there is a certain interrelationship between the outer and the inner human being. The interrelationship can be characterised as follows: the sentient soul, our lowest soul member which contains our desires and passions to which we are slavishly subject if the higher soul members are little developed, is interrelated with the sentient body; this is similar to the sentient soul, but in the human being it is considered as belonging to the outer human being. The astral body has to be described separately from the sentient body here. For the three individual soul members are only modifications of the astral body, not only fashioned but also separated from it. In the waking state the sentient soul is in constant exchange with the sentient body. Similarly, the intellectual or mind soul is in constant interchange with the ether body, and the consciousness soul is in a certain sense intimately connected with the physical body. That is why we are dependent on waking consciousness as far as everything which is to enter the consciousness soul is concerned. The things transmitted by the physical body, the senses, the activity of the human brain, initially enter the consciousness soul.

Thus we have two three-membered sections of the human being which correspond to one another: the sentient soul and the sentient body, the intellectual or mind soul and the ether body, the consciousness soul and the physical body. This correspondence can help us to unravel the threads leading from the inner to the outer human being which can show us how man's normal soul-life may be disturbed if they fail to function in their normal way. Why does this happen?

The sentient soul is dependent on the effects of the sentient body, and when there is an incorrect correspondence between the sentient soul and the sentient body the healthy soul-life of the sentient soul is interrupted. A similar thing occurs when the intellectual soul cannot regulate the ether body in the correct way to make it a proper instrument for the intellectual soul. And the consciousness soul, too, will appear abnormal when the physical body is a hindrance and obstacle for the normal expression of the consciousness soul. If we divide the human being systematically in this way, an order of correspondence can be seen which is essential for a healthy soul-life. And it can also be understood that all sorts of interruptions can occur in the interrelationship between the sentient soul and the sentient body, the intellectual soul and the ether body, the consciousness soul and the physical body. And only the person who can recognise the threads running through this intricate organism and the irregularities which can arise will be able to recognise the disorder which can occur in the soul. Disorder only occurs when there is disharmony between the inner and the outer human being. Let us take the case of the philosopher once more.

The soul-life which takes place under the full control of the consciousness shows what is present in the consciousness soul on the one hand and in the intellectual soul on the other. But in the sentient soul the hardly noticed images follow one another: the illustrated work about Paris, the photograph album of Rome. This occurs because the philosopher brings about a split between his sentient soul and sentient body by diverting his attention whilst still relating to the person standing in front of him. The images of the illustrated work on Paris and the Rome photograph album must be sought in the sentient body; the uncontrolled process which was described takes place there. In the consciousness soul the conversation between the two people occurs; and the necessity of being forced to prevent attention from wandering from the conversation in this case causes a split between the sentient body and the sentient soul.

These are only passing states. For the least disturbance of our soul-life occurs when the sentient body alone becomes independent. We can still maintain reason and the inner thread of consciousness which preserves awareness: we are still present, too, beside the compulsive images which appear because of the sentient body which has become independent.

When such a split occurs in respect of the intellectual soul and the ether body, then the situation is a much more difficult one. Then we enter more deeply those states which verge on the pathological. Nevertheless, it is difficult to decide where the healthy state ends and the pathological one begins. An intricate example will make clear how difficult it is to maintain the experiences of the intellectual soul in complete independence when the ether body goes on strike, when it refuses to be merely a tool of our thinking. When the ether body goes independent and resists the intellectual soul it prevents the thought from coming to expression fully, so that the thought becomes stuck half way and cannot be completed. This can happen with the most clever people, so-called. Let us take a grotesque example.

Everyone will smile at and easily recognise the logical absurdity of the statement: it is a logical conclusion that you still possess what you have not lost. You did not lose big ears, therefore you still have big ears. The absurdity arises because the thought is not in accord with the facts. But on exactly the same pattern—that there is a preceding statement “what you have not lost” which make an unjustified assumption which goes unnoticed—the most unbelievable errors can be committed in the most important questions in life where the matter is a little more complicated. Thus there is a philosopher⁴⁴ who greatly emphasised a theory set up by him about the human ego. We have often mentioned here how even in its definition the ego is different from all experiences which we can have. Everyone can call a table “table”, a glass “glass” and a watch “watch”. Only the word “I” cannot be used by anyone else when it describes ourselves. This is indicative of a fundamental difference between the experience of the ego and all other experience. Such things can be observed; or they can be half observed. And they are only half observed when conclusions are drawn such as by the philosopher: “therefore the ego can never become object, therefore the ego can never be observed.” And it seems a clever view when he continues: if the attempt were made to grasp it, the ego would have to be present externally whilst at the same time being present within itself. That would be no different to someone running around a tree and saying if only he runs fast enough he can catch up with himself from behind. Who would not be convinced when the dogma that the ego can never be grasped in itself is backed by such an example! And yet: the whole thing is based on the fact that such a comparison is not valid. For it is based on the assumption that the ego cannot be observed. If the comparison with the tree were to be used, it would be possible to say only: the ego must not be compared with the person running round the tree but at most with a person who winds himself round a tree like a snake; then perhaps the feet could be held with the hands. Thus the ego is something quite different from everything else within our experience. It is a substance which we can grasp as the coincidence of subject and object. This has been hinted at by mystics at all times in the language of symbols, in the image of the snake biting its own tail. Those who used this symbol understood that they were observing themselves, as it were, in the image before them.

This example demonstrates how we advance from the feelings and perceptions of our immediate perception which can become disharmonious only with the sentient body, to those things which affect not only pure feeling, pure perception, but the intellectual or mind soul. Where we have to digest thoughts internally, which is already a much less arbitrary process, a hindrance is caused not only by the images themselves, but there is something which offers quite a different sort of resistance which cannot be recognised by a thinking which fails to pursue its processes rigorously to their conclusion. We had an example how the human being can enmesh himself in a logic whereof he does not notice that it is only his logic and not the logic of the facts. A logic of the facts is only present when we retain mastery over the link between the intellectual soul and the ether body, and thus the mastery over the ether body. Therefore those pathological expressions of our soul-life which are primarily the result of a breakdown in the link between our ideas turn out to be caused by the ether body not being able to serve as a healthy tool for the expressions of our intellectual soul.

But now the question is justified: if an ether body which creates a hindrance for our intellectual soul to unfold, is part of our nature, is there any choice but to say that the causes affecting the soul such that it passes from mere error to mental disorder lie in something over which we have no control? In a certain sense such an example, if it is truly understood, makes us aware of something which has been emphasised here repeatedly and which is considered to be nonsense by many of our contemporaries—even the most enlightened. We observe that our ether body throws obstacles in the way of our intellectual soul, thus not allowing it to finish any train of thought. So instead of admitting here that we are powerless and can go no further, we pass muddled and distorted judgment. Our judgment from the intellectual soul becomes mixed up with the intrusions of our ether body. A peculiar situation: we think that the ether body belongs to the outer human being and then it interferes with the activity of the intellectual soul as if it were on an equal level. How can this be explained?

Purely on a verbal level one can point to “inherited characteristics”, etc. That is done by those who, because of certain fixed patterns of thinking, are unable to reflect logically on matters concerning the soul. But the philosophers who are able to reflect on the soul say: the error, the chaotic confusion which enters the soul in such a case cannot be the result merely of physical heredity. In contrast, a well-known modern philosopher describes our internal processes which go beyond the purely physical with a remarkable phrase. It might be described as a pretty phrase, were we not dealing with a serious subject, when Wundt⁴⁵ says: “This leads us into the perpetual darkness of evolution!” A person used to rigorous thinking will find such a phrase by a world famous philosopher strange. Compare with this the truth of spiritual science which says: soul and spirit can only originate from soul and spirit—a statement on a higher level which we have often seen as comparable with another truth which the great natural scientist Francesco Redi voiced in the 17th century in a different field: living matter can only originate from living matter. Spiritual science not only reveals physical heredity, but shows that the spiritual element is active in everything physical. And in the situation where the contrary effect of our ether body on the intellectual soul becomes too great, it is plausible that something must have formed and prepared our ether body which is similar to our intellectual soul—only it has badly prepared it. If we therefore find such an error in our intellectual soul in the present, and if we are able to maintain our reason, we can correct the error in such a way that it does not penetrate as far as our corporeality. And one must not think that every emotion immediately results in sickness. No one is more rigorous than spiritual science in the view that it is nonsense to ascribe to external influences without a second thought when a person becomes mentally disordered. But on the other hand it must be understood, even if we have no power to change our ether body, that it is saturated and imbued with the same laws of error which exist when a mistake is made, but that we become sick when the error comes to expression in the ether body. Such error cannot normally take effect immediately in our present life between birth and death. This only happens if it becomes repeated and habitual. For it is another matter if we continually compound error upon error between birth and death in a specific case, if we regularly succumb to certain weaknesses of the thinking, feeling and willing and live with them between birth and death. The outer bodily nature can only change a limited amount between birth and death. When we pass through the gate of death the physical body with all the good and bad qualities is destroyed and we take with us in our thinking, feeling and willing everything good and bad which we have created. And in constructing our outer bodily nature in the next existence we transmit into it the errors and the chaos, our weaknesses in thinking, feeling and willing from our present existence.

Therefore, with reference to an ether body which holds us back, an error in our present soul-life cannot immediately take shape in our ether body, but the error which at present is only content if our soul participates in the organisation of our next existence. What appear in our ether body as causes and as certain characteristics will not be traced back to our present existence, but they can certainly be found if we return to an earlier incarnation.

This shows us that we can understand a wide field of mental disorder only if we grope not merely in the secret “perpetual darkness of evolution” but if we go to an earlier existence of the human being. Nevertheless, this truth also must not be taken to extremes; for we must be aware that the human being has within him besides the qualities from an earlier life also those which are inherited, and that certain qualities of our outer human being must be considered as hereditary. It is necessary to distinguish carefully between what the human being carries with him from one existence to the next and his characteristics as descendant of his ancestors.

Now a similar disharmony can arise between our consciousness soul, which forms the basis of our self-consciousness, and our physical body. Then not only do those characteristics appear in our physical body for which we are responsible from earlier incarnations, but also those which can be found in the line of descent. But here, too, the principle is the same. The work of the consciousness soul can find an obstacle in the active laws of the physical body. And when the consciousness soul meets these obstacles then all the things arise which appear so cruelly in certain symptoms of mental disorder. Similarly all the unhappy aspects of a particular organ appear when that organ is particularly prominent in our physical body. When the organs of our physical body work properly together and none of them is more developed than the others, our physical body is a proper instrument for our consciousness soul, just as a healthy eye presents no obstacle to seeing. In this context we can draw attention to a case told by an important scientist of our time. A person had impaired vision in one eye. As a result of this it seemed to him particularly at dusk, as if he saw something of the nature of apparitions. Because this impairment of the eye influenced his vision, he often felt as if someone was standing in his way. Where such an effect by the eye creates an obstacle normal sight is not possible. These partial defects can appear in all different forms.

When the consciousness soul finds an obstacle in the physical body, this is attributable to the special prominence of the one or the other organ. For when all the organs of the physical body are working together normally it causes no resistance to the consciousness soul and we can give expression to our self-consciousness in a regular way. An obstacle is noticed only when an organ gains special prominence, for then resistance is encountered, but if this free intercourse with the outside world is obstructed and we do not notice the obstacle in our consciousness, ideas of megalomania and paranoia appear as symptoms of the actual, more deeply seated sickness.

In thus observing man as a complex being, disharmony and harmony in life can be understood. It was not possible to indicate more than briefly how the various members interact and how spiritual science can bring order and clarification to the wonderful results which are presented in the relevant literature today.

If we understand this we will be able to gain further insights. Insights into the reality of the inner human being and the interaction of the outer and the inner human being from incarnation to incarnation; how in certain failings of the outer human being, in failings of the ether body for example, there appear the consequences of weaknesses and mistakes from earlier stages of existence. But this also shows us that we will not always manage to overcome them by an inner regulated, strong soul-life, if the obstacles are too great. But it is possible in many respects, because if in abnormal soul-life there is only the conflict between outer and inner human being, then we can also understand that it is important to strengthen the inner human being as much as possible. A weak person who does not like to pursue his thinking rigorously to its conclusion, who does not want to define his ideas clearly, who is not intent on developing his feelings in such a way that they are in accord with his experiences, such a person will be able to show only weak opposition to the resistance of the outer human being: and if he bears the seeds of illness within him he will succumb to mental disorder when the time comes. But the situation is different if we can oppose sickness of the outer human being with a strong inner being, because the stronger of the two will win! From this we can see that although we cannot always be assured of victory over our outer nature, we can do much to keep the upper hand over it by the development of a strong, regulated soul-life. And we can see the reason for trying to develop our feelings and emotions and our will in such a manner that we do not feel affected by every minor inconvenience; for trying to expand our thinking to encompass the greater context; for seeking to pursue with our thinking not only the most obvious threads but to pursue them to their most detailed entailments; for being concerned to develop our desires in such a way that we do not want the impossible but are in accord with the circumstances. If we develop a strong soul-life we may still encounter a limit, but we will have done the utmost to make our inner being predominate over all external resistance.

Thus we can see the significance for the human being to develop his soul-life correspondingly. In the present there is little understanding for what is meant by developing the soul-life. It has been mentioned on similar occasions before that much weight is given today to gymnastics, for example, going for walks, training the physical body. I do not want to comment on the principle contained therein; these things can be healthy. But they quite certainly do not lead to good results if only the outer human being is taken into consideration, as if he were a machine, when exercises are done which only aim to strengthen physiologically. In gymnastics such exercises should not be undertaken at all which are characterised by the view that this or that muscle should be strengthened in particular; but we should take care that we experience an inner joy with every exercise, that we fetch the impulse for every exercise from an inner feeling of well-being. The impulses for the exercises should come from the soul. The gym teacher, for example, should be able to put himself in a position emotionally of experiencing how the soul feels one or another sort of well-being when one or another exercise is undertaken. Then we strengthen the soul; otherwise we strengthen only the body, and the soul can remain as weak as ever. Those who know life will find that exercises which are undertaken from this point of view have a health-giving effect and make quite a different contribution to the well-being of the human being than the exercises which are undertaken merely as if the human being were an anatomical machine. The connection between the life of soul and the life of the physical body is only revealed by the exact investigation of spiritual science. Those who believe that the physical can balance spiritual effort are unaware of an essential element. The spiritual scientist knows that he can become extremely tired, for example, when he is required to communicate a truth to another person and then has to listen to the other speak who is not yet able to express himself properly about the subject, who cannot yet form proper images in his thinking—whilst for example he does not become exhausted however much he researches into the spiritual world; that could be continued indefinitely. The reason for this is that when one is listening to someone else one is dealing with physical communication whereby the physical brain is involved, whilst spiritual research still requires the physical organs to some extent on lower levels, but requires them less and less the higher it reaches and therefore becomes correspondingly less exhausting. When the outer human being no longer has to participate exhaustion and tiredness no longer arise. It can be seen that differentiation must be made in spiritual activity, that there are differences whether spiritual activity is given its impulse from the soul itself or whether it is prompted from the outside. That is something which should always be taken into account: in the various stages of the human being's development those events always take place which correspond to the inner impulses.

Let us take an example which has been emphasised before and which can be found in my little work The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.⁴⁶ There it says that the child up to the seventh year of age primarily feels the impulse in all its actions to imitate. Then, between the changing of the teeth and puberty, its development is characterised by what might be called “orientating oneself according to an authority” or acting according to the impression made on us by another person. Let us assume that these two stages of imitation and bowing to authority are ignored. If no account is taken of them the outer body, instead of becoming an instrument of the soul, will develop irregularly and the soul will then no longer have the opportunity in the consecutive periods of human development to affect in the correct way the irregular nature of the outer human being and interact with it. Then, when the human being enters a new stage of development at significant periods in human life, we see that to a certain degree a member of his being may have fallen behind if these rules are not observed. Ignoring this law lies at the basis of schizophrenia, dementia praecox. By ignoring the correct processes in earlier periods dementia praecox can arise as disharmony between the inner and outer human being, a symptom of belated imitation. It is often the case that the disharmony of those things which are cleanly divided by spiritual science is in many cases the cause of abnormality in the soul. Similarly we can see in the appearance of senile dementia towards the end of life the disharmony between inner and outer human being, brought about because the human being did not live in such a manner that harmony could exist between inner and outer man in the period between puberty and the time when the astral body is fully developed.

This shows us that knowledge of the human being can illuminate the nature of error and mental disorder. And even if we find only a superficial link, if a person cannot say that error, in so far as it is part of normal soul-life, can affect our outer nature, it has to be said in contrast that the law according to which the development of a strong logic, a regulated soul-life harmonious in feeling and willing can strengthen us against the obstacles which arise from the outer human being is greatly encouraging. Thus spiritual science gives us the possibility, perhaps not always, but most of the time, of countering the superiority, the supremacy of the outer human being. It is important that when we strengthen and nurture the inner human being we strengthen and nurture it against the predominance of the outer human being. Spiritual science gives us the healing power to do this. It therefore always emphasises the importance of developing ordered thinking which avoids irrelevancies, not to stop with one's thoughts half-way but to pursue them consistently to the end. That is why spiritual science, with its strict demands to order our soul-life in such a manner that it appears internally disciplined and in harmony, is itself a medicine against the predominance of the pathological symptoms of our outward bodily nature. And the human being can be victorious over pathological pre-dispositions when he can envelop bodily weakness, bodily mis-formation with the light of a healthy willing, a healthy feeling and a self-disciplined thinking. That is something which is unpopular today, and yet it is important for an understanding of the present. Thus spiritual science even gives us some consolation, namely that in the spirit, if we truly strengthen it, we continue to have the best remedy for everything which can affect us in life. By means of spiritual science we learn not merely to theorise about the spirit, but we learn to turn it into a healing power within us when we make the effort to continue where philistines like to stop: the half-finished thought. For it is nothing but half-finished thinking when it is said: “Prove what you say about repeated earth lives and so on!” It cannot be proved to the person who refuses to lead his thoughts to their conclusion. Whole truths cannot be proved with half thoughts. They can only be proved to whole thinking, and whole thinking has to be developed by the human being within himself.

If the indications which have been given here are developed further, it will be seen that this is central to the evil of our time: the disbelief in the spirit, But it will also be seen that an indication has been given here where the means lie to transform disbelief into belief, into true strong spirituality. The belief in reason is lacking in large measure in mankind today. Therefore the reasoned objectivity which is necessary to understand the truths of spiritual science is not always present. It is not with ridicule and irony, but with a certain sadness that the lines in Faust about certain people might be applied to our present time.

“If they possessed the philosopher's stone,
The philosopher would not match the stone.”⁴⁷

Reason can understand spiritual science and reasoned understanding of spiritual science can heal the furthest reaches of the bodily nature. That, by the way, is claimed by others than only by spiritual scientists today. This claim has also been made by those who tried to approach the spirit by other paths than modern spiritual science, but such people, too, are little understood in the present. Who would not ridicule Hegel today precisely because he emphasised the existence, the work and the necessity of reason everywhere? He emphasised it in such a manner that he thought of the work of reason in the human being today in the following way: “I imagine this human life as a cross”, and for Hegel the roses on the cross were equivalent to reason in the human being. That is why he prefaces one of his works with the motto: “Reason is the rose on the cross of the present”,⁴⁸ and belief in reason will make the cross victorious. Belief in reason and belief in disciplined thinking, in harmonious feeling and willing will attach the roses to the cross. We have the strength in us to counter what we call mental disorder, at least to a certain degree, when we have belief in harmonious feeling which can be developed, harmonious willing which can be developed and self-disciplined reason which can be developed and which must be developed. If we develop these three, then under all circumstances we will be more strong and triumphant in life. And because Hegel draws together in reason a harmonious feeling, willing and disciplined thinking, a reasoned intellectuality, he makes the statement which can serve as motto for us in developing our soul-life, that for the human being reason should be the rose on the cross of the present.

• 44. The reference is likely to be to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose philosophy of the ego bases on the principle that the true ego, as the founding principle which determines subject and object, can never become object itself.
• 45. Wilhelm Wundt, 1832–1920. Philosopher.
• 46. Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1980.
• 47. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Act 1, Imperial Palace, 11.5063/64.
• 48. Cf. the Introduction to G.W.F. Hegel's Philosophy of Right. (Grundlinien einer Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundriss).

Allow me to begin today's lecture with a personal recollection. As a quite young man, I once had a slight experience of the kind which seem unimportant and yet can yield pleasant memories again and again in later life.

I was attending a course of university lectures on the history of literature.⁴⁹ The lecturer began by considering the character of cultural life in the time of Lessing, with the intention of going on to discuss various literary developments during the later eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth. His opening words were deeply impressive. In order to characterise the chief innovation which appeared in the cultural life of Lessing's time, he said: “Artistic consciousness acquired an aesthetic conscience.” His lecture showed that what he meant by this statement—we need not now ask whether it was justified—was roughly as follows:

All the artistic considerations and intentions connected with the endeavours of Lessing and his contemporaries were imbued with a deeply earnest wish to make something more of art than a mere appendage to life or a mere pleasure among others. Art was to become a necessary element in every form of human existence worthy of the name. To raise art up to the level of a serious human concern, worthy to be heard in the concert of voices which speak of the great and fruitful activities of mankind—such was the aim of the pioneer thinkers of that period. That is what the lecturer wanted to say when he emphasised that an aesthetic conscience had found its way into the artistic and literary life of those times.

Why was this statement important for a soul seeking to grasp the riddles of existence, as reflected in one or another human mind? Because a conception of art was to be ennobled and given expression in a way that left no doubt as to its importance for the whole character and destiny of human life. The serious nature and significance of artistic work were intended to be placed beyond discussion, and it is indeed true that the experiences denoted by the word “conscience” are such that all the situations to which they apply are ennobled. In other words, when “conscience” is spoken of, the human soul recognises that the word refers to a most valuable element in its own life, and that to be without this element would indicate a serious deficiency.

How often has the significance of conscience been brought out by the words, no matter whether they are taken literally or metaphorically: “When conscience speaks in the human soul, it is the voice of God that speaks.” And one could scarcely find anyone, however unprepared to reflect on higher spiritual concerns, who has not formed some idea of what conscience is. Everyone feels vaguely that whatever conscience may be, it is experienced as a voice in the individual's breast which determines with irresistible power what is good and what is bad; what man must do in order to gain his own approval and what he must leave undone if he is not to despise himself. Hence we can say: Conscience appears to every individual as something holy in the human breast, and that to form some kind of opinion about it is relatively easy.

Things are different, however, if we glance briefly at man's history and his spiritual life. Anyone who is trying to look more deeply into a spiritual situation of this kind will surely wish to consult those in whom a knowledge of such matters may be presupposed—the philosophers. But in this case, as in so many others of wide human concern, he will find that the explanations of conscience given by various philosophers are very different, or so it seems, though a more or less obscure kernel is similar in all of them. But that is not the worst of it. If anyone were to take the trouble to inquire what the philosophers of ancient and modern times mean by conscience, he would be met with all sorts of very fine phrases and also by many that are hard to understand, but he would find nothing of which he could say beyond question that it reflected his feeling: that is conscience.

Of course it would lead us too far if I were to give you an anthology of the various explanations of conscience that have been given over the centuries by the philosophical leaders of mankind. But we may note that from about the first third of the Middle Ages and on through mediaeval philosophy, whenever conscience was spoken of, it was always said to be a power in the human soul which was capable of immediately declaring what a man should do and what he should leave undone. However, these mediaeval philosophers say also that underneath this power of the soul there is something else, something of finer quality than conscience itself. A personality often mentioned here, Meister Eckhart,⁵⁰ tells of a tiny spark that underlies conscience; an eternal element in the soul which, if it is heeded, declares with unmistakable power the laws of good and evil.

In modern times, we encounter once more the most varied accounts of conscience, including some which make a peculiar impression, for they clearly fail to recognise the serious nature of the divine inner voice that we call conscience. There are philosophers who say that conscience is something that a man acquires when, by extending continually his experience of life, he learns what is useful, harmful, satisfying and so on for himself. The sum of these experiences gives rise to a judgment which says: “Do this—don't do that.”

There are other philosophers who speak of conscience in terms of the highest praise. One of these is the great German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who pointed above all to the human ego not the transient personal ego but the eternal essence in man—as the fundamental principle of all human thought and being. At the same time, he held that the highest experience for the human ego was the experience of conscience,⁵¹ when a man hears the inward judgment: “This you must do, for it would go against your conscience not to do it.” The majesty and nobility of this judgment, he believed, could not be surpassed. And if Fichte was the philosopher who laid the strongest emphasis on the power and significance of the human ego, it is characteristic of him that he ranked conscience as the ego's most significant impulse.

The further we move on into modern times, and the more materialistic thinking becomes, the more do we find conscience deprived of its majesty—not in the human heart, but in the thinking of philosophers who are more or less imbued with materialism. One example will be enough to illustrate this trend.

In the second half of the 19th century, there lived a philosopher who for nobility of soul, harmonious human feelings and generous breadth of mind must rank with the finest personalities. I mean Bartholomew Carnieri:⁵² he is seldom mentioned now. If you go through his writings, you find that in spite of his fine qualities, he was deeply imbued with the materialistic thinking of his time. What, he asks, are we to make of conscience? Fundamentally, he says, it is no more than the sum of habits and judgments instilled in us during early youth and strengthened by the experience of life. These influences, of which we are no longer fully conscious, are the source of the inner voice which says: “This you must do—this you must not do,”

Thus the origin of conscience is traced back to external influences and habits, and even these are confined to a very narrow range. Some even more materialistically-minded philosophers of the 19th century have gone further still. Paul Ree,⁵³ for example, who at one time had great influence on Nietzsche, wrote on the origin of conscience. His book is interesting as a symptom of the outlook of our times. His ideas—allowing for some inevitable distortion of details in any brief sketch of them—are roughly as follows. Man, says Paul Ree, has developed in respect of all his faculties, and therefore in respect of conscience. Originally he had no trace of what we call conscience. It is gross prejudice to hold that conscience is eternal. A voice telling us what to do and what not to do did not exist originally, according to Ree. But in human nature there was something else which did develop—something we can call an instinct for revenge. This was the most primitive of all impulses. If anyone suffered at the hands of another, the instinct for revenge drove him to pay back the injury in kind. By degrees, as social life became more complicated, the carrying out of vengeance was handed over to the ruling authorities. So people came to believe that any deed which injured another person had by necessity to be followed by something that had previously been called vengeance. Certain deeds which had bad results had to be requited by other deeds. In the course of time, this conviction gave rise to an association of certain feelings with particular actions, or even with the temptation to commit them. The original urge for revenge was forgotten, but a feeling became ingrained in the human soul that a harmful action must be paid for. So now, when a man believes he is hearing an “inner voice”, this is in fact nothing but the voice of vengeance, changed into an inward form. Here we have an extreme example of this kind of interpretation—extreme in the sense that conscience is portrayed as a complete illusion.

On the other hand, we must admit that it is going much too far to assert, as some people do, that conscience has existed as long as human beings have been living on the earth; in other words, that conscience is in some sense eternal. Since mistakes are made both by those who think more spiritually about it, and by those who regard conscience as a pure illusion, it is very difficult to reach any agreement on the subject, although it belongs to our everyday inner life, and indeed to a sacred part of it.

A glance over the philosophers will show that in earlier times even the best of them thought of conscience differently from the way in which we are bound to think of it today. For when we say that conscience is a voice speaking out of a divine impulse in the breast of the simplest man, saying, “This you must do—that you must leave undone” this is somewhat different from the teaching we find in Socrates⁵⁴ and in his successor, Plato.⁵⁵ They both insist that virtue can be learnt. Socrates, indeed, says that if a man forms clear ideas as to what he should and should not do, then gradually, through this knowledge of what virtue is, he can learn to act virtuously.

Now one could easily object, from a modern standpoint, that things would go badly if we had to wait until we had learnt what is right and what is wrong before we could act virtuously. Conscience speaks with elemental power in the human soul and is heard by the individual as saying “This you must do, and that you must leave alone”, long before we learn to form ideas concerning good and evil and thus begin to formulate moral precepts. Moreover, conscience brings a certain tranquillity to the soul on occasions when a man can say to himself: “You have done something you can approve of.” It would be bad—many people might say—if we had to learn a lot about the nature and character of virtue in order to arrive at an agreed estimation of our behaviour. Hence we can say that the philosopher to whom we look up as a martyr of philosophy, whose death crowned and ennobled his philosophical work—I mean Socrates—sets before us a concept of virtue which hardly tallies with our view of conscience today: and even with later Greek thinkers we always find the assertion that perfect virtue is something that can be learnt, a doctrine not in keeping with the primitive, elemental, power of conscience.

How is it, then, that so pre-eminent and powerful a person as Socrates is not aware of the idea of conscience that we have today, although we feel whenever we approach him, as Plato describes him, that the purest morality and the highest degree of virtue speak through his words? The reason is, that the ideas, concepts and inward experiences which feel today as though they were innate, were in fact acquired laboriously by the human soul in the course of time. When we trace the spiritual life of humanity back into the past, we find that our idea of conscience and our feeling for it were not present in the same way in ancient times, and therefore not among the Greeks. Conscience, in fact, was born. But nothing about the birth of conscience can be learnt by the easy methods of external experience and scholarship, as Paul Ree, for example, tried to do. We have to go more deeply into the matter if we are to gain enlightenment for the human soul.

Now our task in these lectures has been precisely to illuminate the constitution of the soul, with the aid of the light that comes from raising the soul to higher levels of knowledge. The whole life of the soul has been described, as it reveals itself to the inner eye of the seer: the eye which does not gain knowledge of the sense-world only, but looks behind the veil of the sense-world into the region where the primary sources, the spiritual foundations of the sense-world are to be found. And it has repeatedly been shown—for example in the lecture, “What is Mysticism?”—that the consciousness of the seer opens the way into deeper regions of the soul, over and above the soul-life we experience in everyday life. We believe that even in ordinary life we come to know something of this deeper level when we look into ourselves and encounter the experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. But it was pointed out also, that in ordinary waking consciousness the soul reveals only the outer aspect of the spiritual. Just as we have to penetrate behind the veil that is spread over the sense-world if we are to discover the underlying causes of these appearances as they are revealed behind everything we see and hear and our brain apprehends, so we must look behind our thinking, feeling and willing, and thus behind our ordinary inner life, if we are to get to know the spiritual background of our own lives.

From these starting-points, we set out to throw light on the life of the human soul in its many interwoven branches. We saw that it must be conceived as made up of three members which must be distinguished but not—please note—treated as quite separate from one another. We named these three members the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, and we saw how the ego is the unifying point which holds the three members together, plays on them as though on the strings of an instrument, causing them to sound together in the most varied ways, harmonious or dissonant. This activity of the ego developed by gradual stages, and we shall understand how our present-day consciousness and soul-life have evolved from primeval times if we glance at what man can become in the future, or even today, if from within the consciousness soul he develops a higher, clairvoyant form of consciousness.

The consciousness soul in its ordinary condition enables us to grasp the external world perceived through our senses. If anyone wishes to penetrate behind the veil of the sense-world, he must raise his soul-life to a higher level. Then he makes the great discovery that something like an awakening of the soul can occur—something comparable to the outcome of a successful operation on a man blind from birth, when a hitherto unknown world of light and colour breaks in upon him. So it is with someone who by appropriate methods raises his soul to a higher level of development. A moment comes when those elements in our environment which we normally ignored, although they are swarming around us all the time, enter into our soul-life as a wealth of beings and activities because we have acquired a new organ of perception for them.

When someone achieves by training, a conscious seership of this kind, his ego is completely present throughout. This means that he moves among spiritual facts and beings, on which our sense-world is based, just as he finds his way among chairs and tables in the physical world: and he now takes up into a higher sphere of soul-life the ego which had led him through his experiences of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul.

Let us now turn back from this clairvoyant consciousness, which is illuminated and set aglow by the ego, to the ordinary life of the soul. The ego is alive in the most varied ways in the three soul-members. If we have a man whose life is given over to the desires, passions and instinctive urges that arise from his sentient soul, we can say that his ego is hardly at all active; it is like a feeble flame in the midst of the surging waves of the sentient soul and has little power against them. In the intellectual soul the ego gains some freedom and independence.

Here man comes to himself and so to some awareness of his ego, for the intellectual soul can develop only in so far as man reflects upon and elaborates, in inner tranquillity, the experiences that have come to him through the sentient soul. The ego becomes more and more radiant and at last achieves full clarity in the consciousness soul. Then a man can say to himself: “I have grasped myself—I have attained real self-consciousness.” This degree of clarity can be activated by the ego only when it has reached the stage of working in the consciousness soul, after progressing from the sentient soul through the intellectual soul.

If, however, a human being can further rise in his ego to clairvoyant consciousness beyond the consciousness soul, comparable to yet higher soul-principles, we can well understand that the seer, looking back over the course of human evolution, should say to us: just as the ego rises in this way to higher states of soul, so did it enter the sentient soul from a subordinate condition. We have seen how the soul-members sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul—are related to the members of his bodily organisation—physical body, etheric and astral or sentient body. Hence you will find it understandable that as spiritual science indicates—the ego, before rising to the sentient soul, was active in the sentient body, and earlier still in the etheric and physical bodies. In those times the ego still guided man from outside. It held sway in the darkness of bodily life; man was not yet able to say “I” regarding himself, to find the central point of his own being within himself. What are we to think of this ego which held sway in the primeval past and built up man's exterior bodily organisation? Are we to regard it as less perfect, compared with the ego we bear within our souls today?

We look on our ego as the real inner focus of our being: it endows us with inner life, and is capable, through schooling, of endless progress in the future. We see in it the epitome of our human nature and the guarantor of our human dignity. Now when we were not yet aware of this ego, while it was working on us from out of the dark spiritual powers of the world, was it then less perfect, by comparison with what it is now? Only a quite abstract way of thinking could say so.

Consider our physical body; we look on it as having been formed out of the spiritual world in the primordial past as a dwelling for the human soul. Only a materialistic mind could believe that this human body had not been born originally from the spirit. Seen merely from an external point of view, the physical body must appear a miracle of perfection. What do all our intellectual ability and technical skill amount to, compared with the wisdom manifest in the structure of the human heart? Or take the engineering technique that goes into the building of bridges, and so forth—what is it compared with the construction of the human thigh-bone, with its wonderful crisscross of support members, as seen through the microscope. It would be sheer boundless arrogance for man to suppose that he has attained in the slightest degree to the wisdom inherent in the formation of the external physical body. And consider our soul-life, taking into account only our instincts, desires and passions—how do they function? Are we not doing all we can to undermine inwardly the wisdom-filled organisation of our body? Indeed, if we consider without prejudice the marvel of our physical organisation, we have to admit that our bodily structure is far wiser than anything we can show in our inner life, although we may hope that our inner life will advance from its present imperfection towards increasing perfection. We can hardly come to any other conclusion, even without clairvoyance, if we simply look impartially at the observable facts.

Is not this wise activity, which has built up the human body as a dwelling-place for the ego, bound to have something in common with the nature of the ego itself? Must we not think of this formative power as having the character of an immeasurably more advanced ego? We must say: Something related to our ego has worked during primordial times at building a structure which the ego could come to inhabit. Anyone who refuses to believe this may imagine something different, but then he must also suppose that an ordinary house, built for human habitation, has not been designed by a human mind but has been put together merely by the action of natural forces. One assumption is as true as the other. Thus we look back to a primordial past where a spiritual power endowed with an ego-nature of unlimited perfection worked upon our bodily sheaths. In those times our own ego was hidden in subconscious depths, thence it worked its way up to its present state of consciousness.

If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother's womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment.

Such was the soul-life of man in primordial times. From out of his dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness he had to develop inwardly in order to come to himself, and in himself to that centre of his being which today is still imperfect but will advance ever more nearly towards perfection in the future, when man with his ego will step forth into the spiritual world.

Now if light is thrown on those primordial times by means of clairvoyance in the way already described, what does the seer tell us concerning the human consciousness of those times when a man had, for example, committed an evil deed? His deed did not present itself to him as something he could inwardly assess. He beheld it, with all its harmfulness and shamefulness, as a ghostly vision confronting his soul. And when a feeling concerning his evil deed arose in his soul, the shamefulness of it came before him as a spiritual reality, so that he was as though surrounded by a vision of the evil he had wrought.

Then, in the course of time, this dreamlike clairvoyance faded and man's ego came increasingly to the fore. In so far as man found this central point of his being within himself, the old clairvoyance was extinguished and self-consciousness established itself more and more clearly. The vision he had previously had of his bad and good deeds was transposed into his inner life, and deeds once clairvoyantly beheld were mirrored in his soul.

Now what sort of forms were beheld in dreamy clairvoyance as the counterpart of man's evil deed? They were pictures whereby the spiritual powers around him showed how he had disturbed and disrupted the cosmic order, and they were intended to have a salutary effect. It was a counteraction by the Gods, who wished to raise him up and, by showing him the effect of his deed, to enable him to eliminate its harmful consequences. This was indeed a terrifying experience for him, but it was fundamentally beneficial, coming as it did from the cosmic background out of which man himself had emerged. When the time came for man to find in himself his ego-centre, the external vision was transferred to his soul in the form of a reflected picture. When the ego first makes its appearance in the sentient soul, it is weak and frail, and man first has to work slowly upon himself in order that his ego may gradually advance towards perfection. Now what would have happened if, when the external clairvoyant vision of the effects of his misdeeds had disappeared, it had not been replaced by an inward counterpart of its beneficial influence? With his still frail ego, he would have been torn to and fro in his sentient soul by his passions, as though in a surging boundless sea. What, then, was it that was transferred at this historic moment from the external world to the inner life of the soul? If it was the great cosmic Spirit that had brought the harmful effects of a man's deed before his clairvoyant consciousness as a healing influence, showing him what he had to make good, so, later on, it was the same cosmic Spirit that powerfully revealed itself in his inner life at a time when his ego was still weak. Having previously spoken to man through a clairvoyant vision, the cosmic Spirit withdrew into man's inner life and imparted to him what had to be said about correcting the distortion caused in the world-order. Man's ego is still weak, and the cosmic Spirit keeps a perpetual, unsleeping watch over it and passes judgment where the ego could not yet judge. Behind the weak ego stands something like a reflection of the powerful cosmic Spirit which had formerly shown to man through clairvoyant vision the consequences of his deeds. And this reflection is now experienced by him as conscience watching over him.

So we see how true it is when conscience is naively described as the voice of God in man. At the same time we see how spiritual science points to the moment when external vision became inward experience and conscience was born.

What I have now been saying can be drawn purely from the spiritual world. No external history is required; the facts I have described are seen by the inward eye. Anyone who can see them will experience them as incontestable truths, but a certain necessity of the times may lead us to ask: Could external history perhaps reveal something that would confirm, in this case, the facts seen by inner vision?

The findings of clairvoyant consciousness can always be tested by external evidence, and there is no need to fear that the evidence will contradict them. That could seem to happen only if the testing were inexact. But we will give one example that can show how external facts confirm the statements here derived from clairvoyant insight.

It is not so very long since the time when the birth of conscience can be seen to occur. If we look back to the fifth and sixth centuries BC, we encounter in ancient Greece the great dramatic poet Aeschylus,⁵⁶ and in his work we find a theme which is especially remarkable for the reason that the same subject was treated by a late Greek poet in a quite different way.

Aeschylus shows us how Agamemnon, on returning from Troy, is killed by his wife, Klytemnestra, when he arrives home. Agamemnon is avenged by his son Orestes, who, acting on the advice of the gods, kills his mother. What, then, is the consequence for Orestes of this deed? Aeschylus shows how the burden of matricide calls forth in Orestes a mode of seeing which was no longer normal in those times. The enormity of his crime caused the old clairvoyance to awake in him, like an inheritance from the past. Orestes could say: “Apollo, the god himself, told me it was a just act for me to avenge my father upon my mother. Everything I have done speaks in my favour. But the blood of my mother is working on!” And in the second part of the Orestean trilogy we are powerfully shown how the old clairvoyance awakens in Orestes and how the avenging goddesses, the Erinyes—or Furies, as they were later called by the Romans—approach.

Orestes sees before him, in dreamlike clairvoyance, the effect of his act of matricide in its external form. Apollo had approved the deed; but there is something higher. Aeschylus wished to indicate that a still higher cosmic ordinance obtains, and this he could do only by making Orestes become clairvoyant at that moment, for he had not yet gone far enough to dramatise what today we call an inner voice. If we study his work, we feel that he was at the stage when something like conscience ought to emerge from the whole content of the human soul, but he never quite reached that point. He confronts Orestes with dreamlike, clairvoyant pictures that have not yet been transformed into conscience. Yet we can see how he is on the verge of recognising conscience. Every word that he gives to Klytemnestra, for example, makes one feel unmistakably that he ought to indicate the idea of conscience in its present-day sense; but he never quite gets that far. In that century, the great poet could only show how bad deeds rose up before the human soul in earlier times.

Now we will pass over Sophocles and come to Euripides,⁵⁷ who described the same situation only a generation later. Scholars have rightly pointed out—though spiritual science alone can show this in its true light—that in Euripides the dream-pictures experienced by Orestes are no more than shadowy images of the inward promptings of conscience—somewhat as in Shakespeare. Here we have palpable evidence of the stages whereby the idea of conscience was taken hold of by the art of poetry. We see how Aeschylus, great poet as he was, cannot yet speak of conscience itself, while his successor, Euripides, does speak of it. With this development in mind, we can see why human thinking in general could work its way only slowly towards a true conception of conscience. The force now active in conscience was active also in ancient times; the pictures showing the effects of a man's deeds rose before his clairvoyant sight. The only difference is that this force became internalised; but before it could be inwardly experienced, the whole process of human development, which led gradually to the concept of conscience, had to take its course.

Thus we see in conscience a faculty which comes to the fore by degrees and has to be acquired by man's own endeavours. Where, then, should we look for this most intense activity of conscience? At that point where the human ego was beginning to make itself known and was still weak, that is something which can be shown in human development. In ancient Greece it had already advanced to the stage of the intellectual soul. But if we look further back to Egypt and Chaldea outer history knows nothing of this, but Plato and Aristotle were clairvoyantly aware of it—we find that even the highest culture of those times was achieved without the presence of an inwardly independent ego. The difference between the knowledge that was nurtured and put to use by the sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea and our modern science is that our science is grasped by the consciousness soul, whereas in pre-Hellenic times it all depended on inspirations from the sentient soul. In ancient Greece the ego progressed from the sentient soul into the intellectual soul. Today we are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul, which means that a real ego-consciousness arises for the first time. Anyone who studies the evolution of mankind, and in particular the transition from eastern to western culture, can see how human progress has been marked by ever-increasing feelings of freedom and independence. Whereas man had formerly felt himself entirely dependent on the Gods and the inspirations that came from them, in the West, culture first came to spring from the inner life.

This is especially evident, for example, in the way Aeschylus strives to bring about a consciousness of the ego in the human soul. We see him standing on the frontier between East and West, with one eye on the East and the other on the West, gathering from the human soul the elements that will come together to form the concept of conscience. He strives to give this new form of conscience a dramatic embodiment, but is not yet quite able to do so. Comparisons are apt to be confusing; we must not only compare, but also distinguish. The point is, that in the West everything was designed to raise the ego from the sentient soul to the consciousness soul. In the East the ego was veiled in obscurity and had no freedom. In the West, by contrast, the ego works its way up into the consciousness soul. If the old dreamlike clairvoyance is extinguished, everything else tends to awaken the ego and to evoke conscience as guardian of the ego as a divine inner voice. Aeschylus was the corner-stone between the worlds of East and West.

In the Eastern World men had retained a living awareness of their origin in the divine cosmic Spirit, and this made it possible for them to gain understanding of the event which took place a few hundred years after endeavours had been made by many—or Aeschylus for example—to find something that spoke as the voice of God within themselves. For this event brought to mankind the impulse which from all spiritual standpoints must be seen as the greatest impulse ever to enter into the evolution of the earth and man—the impulse we call the Christ-Impulse.

It was the Christ-impulse that first made it possible for humanity to realise that God, the Creator of things and of the external sheaths of man, can be recognised in our inward life. Only by understanding the divine humanity of Christ Jesus were men enabled to understand that the voice of God could be heard within the soul. In order that men should be able to find something of the divine nature in their own inner life, it was necessary for Christ to enter into the evolution of humanity as an external historical-event. If the Christ, a Divine Being, had not been present in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, if he had not shown once and for all that God can be discerned in our inner life, because he had once been present in a human body; if he had not appeared as the conqueror of death through the Mystery of Golgotha, men would never have been able to comprehend the indwelling of Divinity in the human soul.

If anyone claims that this indwelling could be discerned even if there had been no historical Christ Jesus, he could equally well say that we should have eyes even if there were no sun. As against this one-sided view of some philosophers that, since without eyes we could not see the light, the origin of light must be traced to the eyes, we must always set Goethe's aphorism: The eye is created by light for light.⁵⁸ If there were no sun to fill space with light, no eyes would ever have developed in the human organism. The eyes are created by light, and without the sun there would be no eyes. No eye is capable of perceiving the sun without having first received from the sun the power to do so. In the same way, there could be no power to grasp and recognise the Christ-nature if the Christ-Impulse had not entered into external history. What the sun out there in the cosmos does for human sight, so the historical Christ-Jesus makes possible what we call the entry of the divine nature into our inner life.

The elements necessary for understanding this were present in the stream of thought that came over from the East; they needed only to be raised to a higher level. It was in the West that souls were ripe to grasp and accept this impulse—the West, where experiences which had belonged to the outer world were transferred to the inner life most intensively, and in the form of conscience watched over a generally weak ego. In this way souls were strengthened, and prepared to hear the voice of conscience now saying within them: The Divinity who appeared in the East to those able to look clairvoyantly into the world—this Divinity now lives in us!

However, what was thus being prepared could not have become conscious experience if the inward Divinity had not spoken in advance in the dawning of conscience. So we see that external understanding for the Divinity of Christ Jesus was born in the East, and the emergence of conscience came to meet it from the West. For example, we find that conscience is more and more often spoken of in the Roman world, at the beginning of the Christian era, and the further westward we go, the clearer is the evidence for the recognised existence of conscience or for its presence in embryonic form.

Thus East and West played into each other's hands. We see the sun of the Christ-nature rising in the East, while in the West the development of conscience is preparing the way for understanding the Christ. Hence the victorious advance of Christianity is towards the West, not the East. In the East we see the spread of a religion which represents the final consequence—though on the highest level—of the eastern outlook: Buddhism takes hold of the eastern world. Christianity takes hold of the western world, because Christianity had first created the organ for receiving it. Here we see Christianity brought into relation with the deepened element in western culture: the concept of conscience embodied in Christianity.

Not through the study of external history, but only through an inward contemplation of the facts, shall we come to knowledge of these developments. What I am saying today will be met with disbelief by many people. But a demand of the times is that we should recognise the spirit in external phenomena. This, however, is possible only if we are at least able initially to discern the spirit where it speaks to us in the form of a clear message. Popular consciousness says: When conscience speaks, it is God speaking in the soul. The highest spiritual consciousness says that when conscience speaks, it is truly the cosmic Spirit speaking. And spiritual science brings out the connection between conscience and the greatest event in the evolution of mankind, the Christ-Event. Hence it is not surprising that conscience has thereby been ennobled and raised to a higher sphere. When we hear that something has been done for reasons of conscience, we feel that conscience is regarded as one of the most important possessions of mankind.

Thus we can see how natural and right it is for the human heart to speak of conscience as “God in man”. And when Goethe says that the highest experience for man is when “God-Nature reveals itself to him”, we must realise that God can reveal himself in the spirit to man only if Nature is seen in the light of its spiritual background. This has been provided for in human evolution, on the one hand by the light of Christ, shining from outside, and on the other by the divine light within us: the light of conscience. Hence a philosopher such as Fichte, who studies human character, is justified in saying that conscience is the highest voice in our inward life. On this account, also, we are aware that our dignity as human beings is inseparable from conscience. We are human beings because we have an ego-consciousness; and the conscience we have at our side is also at the side of our ego. Thus we look on conscience as a most sacred individual possession, inviolable by the external world, whose voice enables us to determine our direction and our goal. When conscience speaks, no other voice may intrude.

So it is that on one side conscience ensures our connection with the primordial power of the world and on the other guarantees the fact that in our inmost self we have something like a drop flowing from the Godhead. And man can know: When conscience speaks in him, it is a God speaking.

• 49. Held by his teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer, 1825–1900. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's remarks in the lecture of 29th October 1914 in Berlin, in: Aus schicksaltragender Zeit, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 64)
• 50. See notes 14 and 13.
• 51. See J.G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 1800, Book 3: Glaube.
• 52. Bartholomew Carnieri, 1821–1909. Cf. his characterisation of conscience in the introduction to Der moderne Mensch. Versuch einer Lebensführung, Stuttgart, 1904.
• 53. Paul Ree, 1849–1901. Die Entstehung des Gewissens, Berlin, 1885.
• 54. Socrates, 470–399 B.C.
• 55. Plato, 427–347 B.C.
• 56. Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C., in his Oresteia trilogy.
• 57. >Euripides, c. 480–406 B.C., deals with this subject in Electra and in Orestes.<
• 58. See note 4.

This last lecture of the winter series will be devoted to that realm in the life of the soul which has been enriched by so many of the greatest treasures that spring from man's inner life. We will consider the nature and significance of art in the evolution of mankind. Since the field is so wide, we will confine ourselves to the art of poetry, and you will understand that we have time to consider only the highest achievements of the human spirit in this realm.

Now someone might say: “The lectures this winter have been concerned with various aspects of the human soul, and their central purpose has been to seek for truth and knowledge in relation to the spiritual world—what have these studies to do with the human activities which strive, above all, to give expression to the element of beauty?” And in our time it would be easy to take the view that everything connected with truth and cognition should be kept far, far apart from the aims of artistic work. A widely prevalent belief today is that science in all its branches must be subject to strict rules of logic and experiment, whereas artistic work follows the spontaneous promptings of the heart and the imagination. Many of our contemporaries, accordingly, would say that truth and beauty have nothing in common. And yet, the great leaders in the realm of artistic creation have always felt that true art should flow from the same deep sources in the being of man as do knowledge and cognition.

To take one example, only, we will turn to Goethe, a seeker both for beauty and for truth. As a young man he strove by all possible means to acquire knowledge of the world and to find answers to the great riddles of existence. Before the time of his journey to Italy, which was to take him to a country enshrining longed-for ideals, he had pursued his search for truth, together with his Weimar friends, by studying, for example, the philosopher Spinoza,⁵⁹ who sought to find a uniform substance in all the phenomena of life. Spinoza's dissertations on the idea of God made a deep impression on Goethe. Together with Merck⁶⁰ and other friends he believed he could hear in Spinoza something like a voice which spoke through all surrounding phenomena and seemed to give intimations concerning the sources of existence—an idea which could appease in some way his Faustian aspirations. But Goethe's soul was too richly endowed for him to gain from a conceptual analysis of Spinoza's works a satisfying picture of truth and knowledge. What he felt about this, and what his heart longed for, will emerge most clearly if we accompany him on his travels in Italy where he beheld great works of art and caught in them an echo of the art of antiquity. In their presence he experienced the feeling he had hoped in vain to draw from the ideas of Spinoza. Thus he wrote to his friends in Weimar: “One thing is certain: the ancient artists had as much knowledge of Nature, and as sure an idea of what can be represented and of how it should be done, as Homer himself. Unfortunately, works of art of the highest order are all too few. But when one contemplates them, one's only desire is to get to know them rightly and then to depart in peace. These supreme works of art have been created by men as the highest products of Nature in accordance with true natural laws. Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.”⁶¹

Goethe believed he could discern that the great artists who had created works of art of this high order had drawn them out of their souls in accordance with the same laws that Nature herself had followed. This can mean only that in Goethe's view of the laws of Nature, which operate in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are raised to a new level and gain new strength in the human soul, so that they come to full expression in the soul's creative powers. Goethe felt that in these works of art the laws of Nature were operative again and thus he wrote to his Weimar friends: “Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” At such moments, Goethe's heart is stirred by the recognition that art in its highest manifestations comes from the same sources as do knowledge and cognition, and we realise how deeply Goethe felt this to be true when he declares: “Beauty is a manifestation of Nature's secret laws, which would otherwise remain forever hidden.”⁶² Thus Goethe sees in art a revelation of Nature's laws, which in its own language confirms the findings of cognition in other fields of investigation. If now we turn from Goethe to a modern personality who also sought to invest art with a mission and to bestow on mankind, through art, something related to the sources of existence—if we turn to Richard Wagner, we find in his writings, where he tries to clarify for himself the nature and significance of artistic creation, many similar indications of the inner relationships between truth and beauty, cognition and art. In writing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he says that these sounds convey something like a revelation from another world something quite different from anything we can grasp in merely rational or logical terms.⁶³

Of these revelations through art, one thing at least can be said with certainty. They act upon the soul with convincing power and permeate our feeling with a conviction of their truth, in face of which all merely rational or logical considerations are powerless.

Again, in writing about symphonic music, Wagner says that something resounds from it as though its instruments were an organ for revealing the feelings that went into the primal act of creation, when chaos was ordered and harmonised, long before any human heart was there to echo those feelings. Thus in the revelations of art Wagner saw a mysterious truth that could stand on an equal footing with knowledge gained by the intellect.

Something else may be added here. When we make acquaintance with great works of art in the sense of spiritual science, we feel that they communicate their own revelation concerning man's search for truth, and the spiritual scientist feels himself inwardly related to this message. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he feels more closely related to it than he does to many of the so-called spiritual revelations that people accept so light-heartedly today.

How is it, then, that truly artistic personalities attribute to art a mission of this kind, while the spiritual scientist feels his heart so strongly drawn to these mysterious revelations of great art? We will approach an answer to this question by bringing together many things that have come before our souls during these winter lectures.

If we are to study the significance and task of art from this point of view, we must not go by human opinions or the quibblings of the intellect. We must consider the development of art in relation to the evolution of man and the world. We will let art itself speak to us of its significance for mankind.

If we wish to trace the beginnings of art, as it first appears among men in the guise of poetry, then according to ordinary ideas we have to go back very far indeed. Here we will go back only as far as the extant documents can take us. We will go back to a figure often regarded as legendary—to Homer, the originator of Greek poetry, whose work has come down to us in the two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Whoever was the author—or authors, for we will not go into that question today—of these two poems, the remarkable thing is that both poems begin on a quite impersonal note:

Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles ...

Sing, O Muse, of much-travelled man ...

are the opening words of the second Homeric poem, the Odyssey. The author thus wishes to indicate that he is indebted to a higher power for his verses, and we need only a little understanding of Homer to realise that for him this higher power was not a symbol but a real, objective Being. If this invocation to the Muse means nothing to modern readers, this is because they no longer have the experiences from which a poem as impersonal as Homer's could derive. And if we are to understand this impersonal element in early Western poetry, we must ask: What preceded it? Whence did it arise?

In speaking of human evolution, we have often emphasised that in the course of millennia the powers of the human soul have changed. In the far-distant past, beyond the reach of external history but open to spiritual-scientific investigation, human souls were endowed with a primitive dreamy clairvoyance. In times before men were so deeply embedded in material existence as they came to be later on, they perceived the spiritual world as a reality all around them. We have pointed out also that the ancient clairvoyance was different from the trained, conscious clairvoyance that can be attained today, for this is bound up with the existence of a firm centre in the life of the soul, whereby a man takes hold of himself as an ego. This ego-feeling, as we now have it after its gradual development through long ages, was not present in the far-distant past. But for this very reason, because man lacked this inner centre, his spiritual senses were open and with his dreamy, ego-less clairvoyance he looked into the spiritual world from which his true inner being had emerged in the primal past. Powerful pictures, like dream-pictures, of the forces behind our physical existence came before his soul. In this spiritual world he saw his gods, he saw the actions and events that were played out among them. And present-day research is quite wrong in supposing that the sagas of the gods, found in various forms in different countries, were the product merely of popular fantasy. If it is thought that in the remote past the human soul functioned just as it does today, except that it was more prone to imagine things, including the imaginary gods of the sagas that is sheer fantasy and it is those who believe it who are imagining things. For people in that remote past, the events described in their mythologies were realities. Myths, sagas, even fairy-tales and legends, were born from a primeval faculty in the human soul. This is connected with the fact that man had not yet acquired the firm central point in his soul which now enables him to live within himself and in possession of himself. In the far past he could not shut himself up in his ego, within the narrow boundaries of his soul, separated from his environment, as he came to do later on. He lived in his environment, feeling that he belonged to it, whereas a modern man feels that he stands apart from it. And just as man today can feel in his bodily organism the inflow and outflow of the physical strength he needs to sustain his life, so primeval man, with his clairvoyant consciousness, was aware of spiritual forces flowing in and out of him, so that he lived in inward reciprocity with the forces of the great world; and he could say: “When something takes place in my soul, when I think, feel or will, I am not a separate being. I am open to forces from the beings who come before my inward sight. By sending their forces into me, they stimulate me to think and feel and will. “That was the experience of man when he was still embedded in the spiritual world. He felt that spiritual powers were active in his thinking, and that when he accomplished anything, divine-spiritual powers had poured into him their willing and their purpose. In those primeval times, man felt himself to be a vessel through which spiritual powers expressed themselves.

Here we are looking back to a period far away in the past, but this period extended, through all sorts of intermediate stages, right up to the time of Homer. It is not difficult to discern how Homer was giving continued expression to the primeval consciousness of mankind: we need only look at some features of the Iliad. Homer describes a great armed struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans, but how does he do this? What did the struggle signify for the Greeks of that time?

Although Homer may not start out from this aspect, there was more in this struggle than the antagonism generated by the passions, desires and ideas which stem from the human ego. Was it merely the personal and tribal emotions of Trojans and Greeks that clashed in this fighting? No! The legend which provides a connecting link between primeval and Homeric consciousness tells how three goddesses, Hera, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite, competed at a festival for the prize of beauty, and how a human connoisseur of beauty, Paris, son of the king of Troy, was appointed to judge the contest. Paris gave the prize to Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife. The woman was Helen, wife of king Menelaus of Sparta. In order to gain possession of Helen, Paris had to abduct her by force. In revenge for this outrage, the Greeks armed themselves for war against the Trojans, whose country lay on the far side of the Aegean sea, and it was there that the struggle was fought out.

Why did human passions flare up in this way, and why did all the events described by Homer's Muse take place? Were they merely physical events in the human world? No. Through the consciousness of the Greeks we see depicted the antagonism of the goddesses behind the strife of men. A Greek of that time could have said: “I cannot find in the physical world the causes which have brought human beings into violent conflict. I must look up to a higher realm, where the gods and their powers are set against one another.” The divine powers, as they were seen at the time in the images which we have just described, were actively involved in human conflicts. Thus we see the first great work of poetic art, Homer's Iliad, growing out of the primeval consciousness of mankind. In Homer we find presented in metrical form, from the standpoint of a later consciousness, an echo of the clairvoyant vision which came naturally to primeval humanity. And it is precisely in this Homeric period that we must look for the first time when clairvoyant consciousness came to an end for the Greek people, and only an echo of it remained.

A primeval man would have said: “I can see my gods battling in the spiritual world, which lies open to my clairvoyant consciousness.” In Homeric times this was no longer possible, but a living memory of it endured. And just as primeval man had felt inspired by the divine worlds wherein he had his being, so the author of the Homeric epics felt the same divine forces holding sway in his soul. Hence he could say: “The Muse that inspires me inwardly is speaking.” Thus the Homeric poems are directly connected with primeval myths, if these are rightly understood. From this point of view, we can see arising in Homer's poetic imagination something like a substitute for the old clairvoyance. The ruling cosmic powers withdrew direct clairvoyant vision from man, and gave him, instead, something that could live similarly in the soul and could endow it with formative power. Poetic imagination is compensation for the loss of ancient clairvoyance.

Now let us recall something else. In the lecture on Conscience we saw that the withdrawal of the old clairvoyance occurred in quite different ways and at different times in various countries. In the East the old clairvoyance persisted up to a relatively late date. Over towards the West, among the peoples of Europe, clairvoyant faculties were less widely present. In the latter peoples, a strong ego-feeling came to the fore while other soul-powers and faculties were still relatively undeveloped. This ego-feeling emerged in the most varied ways in different parts of Europe—differently between North and West, and notably different in the South. In pre-Christian times it developed most intensively in Sicily and Italy. While in the East men remained for a long time without an ego-feeling, in these regions of Europe there were people in whom the ego-feeling was particularly strong because they had lost the old clairvoyance. In the proportion that the spiritual world withdraws externally from man does his inward ego-feeling light up.

Hence there was bound to be a great difference at certain times between the souls of the Asiatic peoples and the souls living in the parts of Europe we are concerned with here. Over there in Asia we see how the cosmic mysteries still rise before the soul in great dream-pictures, and how man can witness the deeds of the gods as they unroll externally before his spiritual eye. And in that, which such a man can relate, we can discern something like a primeval account of the spiritual facts underlying the world. When the old clairvoyance was succeeded in Asia by the substitute for it, imagination, this gave rise especially to visionary symbols in picture form.

Among the Western peoples, in Italy and Sicily, a different faculty, arising from a firmly-grounded ego, produced a kind of excess of strength, an enthusiasm that broke forth from the soul, unaccompanied by any direct spiritual vision but inspired by a longing to reach up to things unseen. Here, therefore, we find no recounting of the deeds of the gods, for these were no longer evident. But when with ardent devotion, expressed in speech and song, the soul aspired to the heights it could only long for, primitive prayer and chant were born, addressed to powers which could not now be seen after the waning of old clairvoyant consciousness.

In Greece, the intermediate country, the two worlds meet. There we find men who are stimulated from both sides. Pictorial vision comes from the East; from the West comes the enthusiasm which inspires devotional hymns to the unseen divine-spiritual powers. This intermingling of the two streams in Greek culture made possible a continuation from Homeric poetry, which we can locate in the 8th or 9th century B.C., to the works of Aeschylus, three or four hundred years later.

Aeschylus comes before us as a personality who was certainly not open to the full power of Eastern vision, the convincing power we find in Homer as an echo of the old clairvoyant vision of the deeds of the gods and their effect on mankind. This echo was always very weak, and in Aeschylus so weak that he came to feel a kind of unbelief in the pictorial visions of the world of the gods that ancient clairvoyance had brought to men. Homer, we find, knew very well that human consciousness had once been open to these visions of the divine-spiritual powers which stand behind the interplay of human passions and emotions in the physical world. Homer, accordingly, does not describe merely a human conflict. Zeus and Apollo intervene where human passions are involved, and their influence is apparent in the course of events. The gods are a reality which the poet brings into his poem.

How different it all is with Aeschylus. The stream of influence from the West, with its emphasis on the human ego and the inward isolation of the human soul, had a particularly strong effect on him. For this reason he was the first dramatist to portray man as acting from out of his ego and beginning to release his consciousness from the inflow of divine powers. In Aeschylus, in place of the gods we find in Homer, the independent man of action appears, though still at an initial stage. As a dramatist, Aeschylus puts this kind of man at the centre of things. The epic had to emerge under the influence of the pictorial imagination that came from the East, while Western influence, with its emphasis on the personal ego, gave rise to drama, wherein the man of action is the central character.

Let us take, for example, Orestes, who is guilty of matricide and as a consequence sees the Furies. Yes, that is still Homer: things do not pass away so quickly. Aeschylus is still aware that the gods were once visible in picture form, but he is very near to giving up that belief. It is characteristic that Apollo, who in Homer acts with full power, incites Orestes to kill his mother, but after this no longer has right on his side. The human ego begins to stir in Orestes, and we are shown that it gains the upper hand. The verdict goes against Apollo, he is repudiated, and we see that his power over Orestes is no longer complete. Aeschylus was thus the right and proper poet to dramatise the figure of Prometheus, the divine hero who titanically opposes the might of the gods and represents the liberation of mankind from them.

Thus we see how the awakening ego-feeling from the West mingles in the soul of Aeschylus with memories of the pictorial imagination of the East, and how from this conjunction drama was born. And it is decidedly interesting to find that tradition wonderfully confirms the findings derived entirely from spiritual-scientific research.

One remarkable tradition partly acquits Aeschylus of the charge that he had betrayed certain secrets of the Mysteries; he replied that he could not have done so, for he had not been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. It certainly never was his intention to present anything derived from temple secrets, from which Homer's poems had originated. In fact, he stood somewhat apart from the Mysteries. On the other hand, the story goes that at Syracuse, in Sicily, he had gained knowledge of secrets connected with the emergence of the human ego. This emergence took a particular form in regions where the Orphic devotees cultivated the older form of ode, the hymn, addressed to the divine-spiritual worlds that could no more be seen but only aspired to. In this way art took a step forward. We see it emerging naturally from ancient truths and finding its way to the human ego. Inasmuch as man, after living predominantly in the outer world, took possession of his own inner life, the figures in the Homeric poems became the dramatic characters of Aeschylus; and so, side by side with the epic, drama arose.

Thus we see primeval truths living on in another form in art, and the achievements of ancient clairvoyance reproduced by poetic imagination. And whatever was preserved from ancient times by art was applied to the human personality, to the ego becoming aware of itself.

Now we will take an immense step forward in time—on to the 13th and 14th centuries of the Christian era. Here we encounter the great mediaeval personality who leads us so impressively to the region which the human ego can reach when, by its own endeavours, it ascends to the divine-spiritual world. We come to Dante, whose Divine Comedy (1472) was read and re-read by Goethe. It affected him so strongly that when an acquaintance sent him a new translation of it, he wrote his thanks to the sender in verse:

Great gratitude is due to him
Who brings us freshly to this book once more,
The book which in a glorious manner makes us cease
All our searchings and complaints.⁶⁴

How did art progress from Aeschylus to Dante? How does Dante bring before us a divine-spiritual world once again? How does Dante lead us through its three stages, Inferno, Purgatory and Heaven—the worlds which lie behind our physical existence?

Here we can see how the fundamental spiritual impulse that guides human evolution has continued to work in the same direction. Aeschylus, quite clearly, is still in touch with spiritual powers. Prometheus is confronted by the gods, Zeus, Hermes and so on, and this applies also to Agamemnon. In all this we can discern an echo of the ancient clairvoyance. With Dante it is quite different. He shows us how, solely through immersing himself in his own soul, developing the forces slumbering there and overcoming all the obstacles to this development, he was able, as he says, in “the middle of life”—which means his thirty-fifth year—to gaze into the spiritual world. Where as men endowed with the old clairvoyance directed their gaze to their spiritual environment, and whereas Aeschylus still reckoned with the old divinities, in Dante we see a poet who goes down into his own soul and remains entirely within his personality and its inner secrets. By pursuing this path of personal development he enters the spiritual world, and is thus able to present it in the powerful pictures we find in the Divine Comedy. Here the soul of Dante is quite alone with his personality; he is not concerned with external revelations. No one can imagine that Dante could have taken over from tradition the findings of the old clairvoyance. Dante relies on the inner development that was possible in the Middle Ages, with the strength of human personality as its only aid; and he brings before us in visionary pictures something often emphasised here—that a man has to master everything that clouds or darkens his clairvoyant sight. Whereas the Greeks still saw realities in the spiritual world, Dante here sees pictures only—pictures of the soul-forces which have to be overcome. Such are those lower forces of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul which tend to hold the ego back from higher stages of development. The good, opposite forces were already indicated by Plato: wisdom for the consciousness soul, self-reliant courage for the intellectual soul, moderation for the sentient-soul. When the ego goes through a development which enlists these good forces, it comes gradually to higher soul experience which lead into the spiritual world; but the hindrances must first be overcome.

Moderation works against intemperance and greed, and Dante shows how this shadow-side of the sentient soul can be met and mastered.

He depicts it as a she-wolf. We are then shown how the shadow-side of the intellectual soul, senseless aggression, depicted as a lion, can be overcome by its corresponding virtue, self-reliant courage. Finally we come to wisdom, the virtue of the consciousness soul. Wisdom which fails to strive towards the heights, but applies itself to the world in the form of mere shrewdness and cunning, is pictured as a lynx. The “lynx-eyes” are not the eyes of wisdom, able to gaze into the spiritual world, but eyes focused only on the world of the senses. After Dante has shown how he guards against the forces which hinder inner development, he describes how he ascends into the world which lies behind physical existence.

In Dante we have a man who relies upon himself, searches within himself, and draws from out of himself the forces which lead into the spiritual world. With him, poetry takes closer hold of the human soul and becomes more intimately related to the human ego. Homer's characters are woven into the doings of the divine-spiritual powers, as indeed Homer felt himself to be, so that he says: “Let the Muse sing the story I have to tell.” Dante, alone with his soul, knows that the forces which will lead him into the spiritual world must be drawn from within himself. We can see how it becomes less and less possible for imagination to depend on external influences. A small fact will show that on this point we are concerned not with mere opinions but with forces deeply rooted in the human soul. Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock⁶⁵ was a deeply religious man and a profounder spirit even than Homer. He wished to write a sacred epic poem, with the conscious intention of doing for modern times what Homer did for antiquity. He sought to revive Homer's manner, but without being untrue to himself. Hence he could not say, “Sing for me, O Muse,” but had to open his Messias with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful man.” Thus we see how progress in artistic creation does indeed occur among men.

Now let us take a further giant stride over several centuries, from Dante to another great poet, Shakespeare. Here again we see a remarkable step forward in the sense of a progression. We are not concerned with criticism of Shakespeare or with setting one poet above another, but solely with facts that point to a necessary, legitimate advance.

What was it about Dante that specially impressed us? He stands there by himself, with his own revelations of the spiritual world, and describes the great experience that came to him from within his own soul. Can you imagine that Dante would have given so effective expression to the truth as he saw it if he had described his visions five or six times over in various ways? Do you not feel that the world into which Dante has transposed himself is such that it can be described once only? That is indeed what Dante did. The world he describes is the world of one man at the moment when he feels himself to be at one with what the spiritual world is for him. Hence we must say: Dante immerses himself in the element of human personality, and in such a way that it remains his own. And he sets himself to traverse this human-personal aspect from all sides.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, creates an abundance of all possible characters—a Lear, Hamlet, Cordelia, Desdemona; but we have no direct perception of anything divine behind these characters, when the spiritual eye beholds them in the physical world, with their purely human qualities and impulses. We look only for what comes directly from their souls in the form of thinking, feeling and willing. They are all distinct individuals, but can we recognise Shakespeare himself in them, in the way that Dante is always Dante when he immerses himself in his own personality? No—Shakespeare has taken another step forward. He penetrates still further into the personal element, but not only into one personality but into a wide variety of personalities. Shakespeare denies himself whenever he describes Lear, Hamlet and so on; he is never tempted into presenting his own ideas, for as Shakespeare he is completely blotted out; he lives entirely in the various characters he creates. The experiences described by Dante are those of one person; Shakespeare shows us impulses arising from the inner ego in the widest diversity of characters. Dante's starting-point is human personality; he remains within it and from there he explores the spiritual world. Shakespeare has gone a step further: he, too, starts from his own personality and slips into the individuals he portrays; he is wholly immersed in them. It is not his own soul-life that he dramatises, but the lives of the characters in the outer world that he presents on the stage, and they are all depicted as independent persons with their own motives and aims.

Thus we can see here, again, how the evolution of art proceeds. Having originated in the remote past, when human consciousness was devoid of ego-feeling, with Dante, art reached the stage of embracing individual man, so that the ego itself became a world. With Shakespeare, it expanded so far that other egos became the poet's world. For this step to be possible, art had to leave the spiritual heights from which it had sprung and descend into the actualities of physical existence. And this is just what we can see happening when we pass on from Dante to Shakespeare. Let us try to compare Dante and Shakespeare from this point of view.

Superficial critics may reproach Dante for being a didactic poet. Anyone who understands Dante and can respond to the whole range and richness of his work will feel that his greatness derives precisely from the fact that all the wisdom and philosophy of the Middle Ages speak from his soul. And for the development of such a soul, endowed with Dante's poetic power, the totality of mediaeval wisdom was a necessary foundation. Its influence worked first on Dante's soul and was again evident, later on, in the expansion of his personality into a world. We cannot properly understand or appreciate Dante's poetic creation unless we are familiar with the heights of mediaeval spiritual life. Only then can we come to appreciate the depths and subtleties of his achievement.

Certainly, Dante took one step downwards. He sought to bring the spiritual down to lower levels, and this he did by writing in the vernacular, not in Latin as some of his predecessors had done. He ascends to the loftiest heights of spiritual life, but descends into the physical world as far as the vernacular of his place and time.

Shakespeare descends still further. The origin of his great poetic characters is nowadays the subject of all sorts of fanciful speculation, but if we are to understand this descent of poetry into the everyday world—still often looked down on by the highly placed—we must bear in mind the following facts.

We must picture a small theatre in what was then a suburb of London, where plays were produced by actors who, except for Shakespeare, would not be rated highly today. Who went to this theatre? The lower orders. It was more fashionable in those days to patronise cockfights and other similar spectacles than to go to this theatre, where people ate and drank and threw eggshells to mark their disapproval and overflowed on to the stage itself, so that the players acted in the midst of their audience. Thus it was before a very low-class London public that these plays were first performed, although many people today fondly imagine that from the first they were acclaimed in the highest circles of cultural life. At best, unmarried sons, who allowed themselves to visit certain obscure resorts in disguise, would go now and then to this theatre, but for respectable people it would have been highly improper. Hence we can see that poetry came down into a realm of the most unsophisticated feelings.

Nothing human was alien to the genius who stood behind Shakespeare's plays and the characters in them. So it happened—in respect even of external details—that art, after having been a narrow stream flowing on high levels, descended into the world of ordinary humanity and broadened into a wide stream running through the midst of everyday life. And anyone who looks more deeply into this will see how necessary it was that a lofty spiritual stream should be brought down to lower levels in order that such vital figures as Shakespeare's highly individual characters should appear.

Now we will move on to times nearer our own—to Goethe. We will try to connect him with his own creation—the figure of Faust, in whom were embodied all his ideals, endeavours and renunciations during the sixty years he worked on his masterpiece. Everything he experienced in his innermost soul in the course of his rich life, while he climbed from stage to stage of knowledge in his search for higher answers to the riddles of the world—all this is merged in the figure of Faust that we encounter today. What sort of figure is he in the context of Goethe's poetic drama?

Of Dante we can say that what he describes is portrayed as the fruit of his own vision. Goethe had no such vision: he makes no claim to having had a special revelation at a particularly solemn time, as Dante does with regard to the Divine Comedy. Everywhere in Faust Goethe shows that he has worked inwardly on what he presents. And whereas the experiences that came to Dante could be described only in his own one-sided way, Goethe's experiences were no less individual but they were translated into the objective character of Faust. Dante gives us his most intimate personal experience; Goethe, too, had personal experiences, but the actions and sufferings of Faust are not those of Goethe's life. They are free poetic transformation of what Goethe had experienced in his own soul. While Dante can be identified with his Divine Comedy, it would take almost a literary historian to identify Goethe with Faust. Faust is an individual character, but we cannot imagine that an array of Faust-like figures could have been created, as numerous as the characters created by Shakespeare. The ego depicted by Goethe in his Faust can be created once only. Besides Hamlet, Shakespeare created Lear, Othello, and so on. Goethe, it is true, also wrote Tasso and Iphigenia, but the difference between them and Faust is obvious. Faust is not Goethe; fundamentally he is every-man. He embodies Goethe's deepest longings, but as a poetic figure his is entirely detached from Goethe's own personality. Dante brings before us the vision of one man, himself; Faust is a character who in a certain sense lives in each one of us. This marks a further advance for poetry up to Goethe.

Shakespeare could create characters so individualised that he immersed himself in them and enabled each one of them to speak with a distinctive voice. Goethe creates in Faust an individualised figure, but Faust is not a single individual; he is every-man. Shakespeare entered into the soul-natures of Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Cordelia and so on. Goethe entered into the highest human element in all men. Hence he creates a representative character relevant to all men. And this character detaches himself from Goethe's personality as a poet, and stands before us as a real objective figure in the outer world.

Here is a further advance of art along the path we have outlined. Starting from the direct spiritual perception of a higher world, art takes hold of man's inner life to an ever-increasing degree. It does so most intimately when—as with Dante—a man is dealing with himself alone. In Shakespeare's plays the ego goes out from this inwardness and enters other souls. With Goethe, the ego goes out and immerses itself in the soul-life of every-man, typified by Faust. And because the ego is able to go out from itself and understand other souls only if it develops its own soul-powers and sinks itself in another's spirituality, so it is in line with the continued advance in artistic creation that Goethe should have been led to depict not only physical acts and experiences in the outer world, but also the spiritual events that everyone can experience if he opens his ego to the spiritual world.

Poetry came from the spiritual world and entered the human ego; with Dante it took hold of the ego at the deepest level of the inner life. With Goethe we see the ego going forth from itself again and finding its way to the spiritual world.

The spiritual experiences of ancient humanity are reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey; and in Goethe's Faust the spiritual world comes forth again and stands before man. That is how we should respond to the great final tableau in Faust, where man, after having descended into the depths, works his way up again by developing his inner forces until the spiritual world stands open to him once more. It is like a chorus of primal tones, but ever-renewed in ever-advancing forms. From the imperishable spiritual world resounds the imagination, bestowed on man as a substitute for spiritual vision and given form in the perishable creations of human genius. Out of the imperishable were born the perishable poetic figures created by Homer and Aeschylus. Once more poetry ascends from the perishable to the imperishable, and in the mystical chorus at the very end of Faust we hear:

Everything transient is but a parable ...⁶⁶

And so, as Goethe shows us, the power of man's spirit ascends from the physical world into the spiritual world again.

We have seen artistic consciousness advance with great strides through the world and in representative poets. Art emerges from the spiritual, its original source of knowledge. Spiritual vision withdraws more and more in proportion as the sense-world commands ever-wider attention, thereby stimulating the development of the ego. Human consciousness follows the course of world evolution and so has to make the journey from the spiritual world to the world of the ego and the senses. If man were to study the world of the senses only through the eyes of external science, he would come to understand it only intellectually in scientific terms. But in place of clairvoyance, when this passes away, he is granted imagination, which creates for him a kind of shadowy reflection of what he can no longer perceive. Imagination has had to follow the same path as man, entering eventually into his self-awareness, as with Dante. But the threads that link humanity to the spiritual world can never break, not even when art descends into the isolation of the human ego. Man takes imagination with him on his way; and when Faust appears, we see the spiritual world created anew out of imagination.

Thus Goethe's Faust stands at the beginning of an epoch during which man is to re-enter the spiritual world where art originated. And so the mission of art, for all those who cannot reach the spiritual world through higher training, is to spin the threads that will link the spirituality of the far-distant past with the spirituality of the future. Art has indeed already advanced so far that it can give a view of the spiritual world in imagination, as in the second part of Faust. Here we have an intimation that man in his evolution is at the point when he must learn to develop the powers which will enable him to re-enter the spiritual world and to gain conscious knowledge of it. Moreover, having led man towards the spiritual world with the aid of imagination, art has prepared the way for spiritual science, which presupposes clear vision of the spiritual world, based on full ego-consciousness. To point the way towards that world—the world that human beings long for, as we have seen in the examples drawn from the realm of art—that is the task of spiritual science, and it has been the task also of this winter's lectures.

Thus we see how great artists can be justified in feeling that reflections of the spiritual world are what they have to give to mankind. And the mission of art is to mediate these revelations during the time when direct revelations of the spiritual world were no longer possible. So Goethe could say of the works of the old artists: “There is necessity, there is God!” They bring to light the hidden laws of nature which would otherwise never be found. And so could Richard Wagner say that in the music of the Ninth Symphony he could hear revelations of another world—a world which a mainly intellectual consciousness can never reach. The great artists have felt that they are bearers of the spirit, the original source of everything human, from the past, through the present, into the future. And so with deep understanding we can agree with words spoken by a poet who felt himself to be an artist: “The dignity of mankind is given into your hands.”⁶⁷

In this way we have tried to describe the nature and mission of art in the course of human evolution, and to show that art is not as separate from man's sense of truth as people today may lightly suppose. On the contrary, Goethe was right when he refused to speak of the idea of truth and the idea of beauty as separate ideas. There is, he said, one idea, that of the necessary workings of the divine-spiritual in the world, and truth and beauty are two revelations of it.

Everywhere among poets and other artists we find agreement with the thought that the spiritual foundations of human existence find utterance in art: or there are artists with deeper feelings who will tell you that art makes it possible for them to believe that their work carries a message to mankind from the spiritual world. And so, even when artists are most personal in expression, they feel that their art is raised to a universal human level, and that in a true sense they speak for humanity when the characters and revelations of their art give effect to the words spoken by Goethe's Mystical Chorus:

Everything transient is but a parable ...

And on the strength of our spiritual-scientific considerations we may add: Art is called upon to transfuse the transient and the perishable with the light of the eternal, the imperishable. That is the mission of art.

• 59. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677. For Goethe's relationship to Spinoza cf. Goethe's description in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part III Book 14.
• 60. Johann Heinrich Merck, 1741–1791. Writer.
• 61. See Italienische Reise, Rome, 6th September 1787.
• 62. See Goethe, “Sprüche in Prosa”, in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, ed. Rudolf Steiner, reprint Dornach 1975, vol. V, p. 495.
• 63. Cf. “Beethoven,” 1870, in vol. XI of Wagner's Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen.
• 64. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zahme Xenien VIII, dated 23rd July 1824.
• 65. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, 1724–1803. He concluded his “Messias” in 1773.
• 66. Concluding lines to Goethe's Faust (Faust II, 1. 12, 104ff.).
• 67. Friedrich von Schiller in the poem “Die Künstler”.

This lecture is also known as Spiritual Science and Language. It appears as lecture 2 of 9 in the lecture series: Metamorphoses of the Soul, Paths of Experience – 2. The original German is included in: Metamorphosen des Seelenlebens. Pfade der Seelen Erlebnisse. Zweiter Teil (#59 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961.)

It is fascinating to study from the point of view of Spiritual Science the different ways in which the being of man expresses itself,—that is to say Spiritual Science in our sense of the term. We can obtain a general survey of human life in its different phases and aspects by studying them as we have done in the course of these lectures.

To-day we shall consider the expression of the spirit of man in speech, and in the next lecture, under the title of ‘Laughter and Weeping,’ an aspect of man’s power of expression which is indeed bound up with speech and yet fundamentally different from it.

The whole being of man, his whole significance and dignity, is bound up with speech. Our innermost life, all our feelings and will-impulses flow out from us, linking us to our fellow-men through speech which enables us to expand and radiate into our environment. On the other hand, those who dare to penetrate into the inner life of some great individuality may feel that human speech is a kind of tyrant that exercises its power over the inner life. We are indeed aware, if we are only willing to admit it, that word and speech can only inadequately express the feelings, the thoughts, and all the intimate and individual colouring of everything that passes through the soul. We also realise that our own native language compels us to a definite kind of thinking. Do we not all realise how dependent our thinking is upon our speech? In more senses than one our concepts attach themselves to words, and an imperfectly developed man may easily mistake the word, or what the word infuses into him, for the concept. This is why so many people are incapable of building up a conceptual world of their own transcending what is imparted by the words current around them. We must surely realise that the character of a whole people speaking a common language is in a certain sense dependent on that language. Anyone who studies the more intimate connections between the characteristics of race and speech knows to what an extent the way a man is able to express the content of his soul in sound reacts upon the strength and weakness of his character, upon his temperament, indeed upon his whole outlook on life. Those who have knowledge will be able to learn a great deal about the character of a people from the configuration of their particular speech or language. Since, however, a language is common to a whole people, the individual is dependent on the community and on its average level. The individual is subject, as it were, to the tyranny and power of the community. But when we realise how our individual spiritual life on the one hand, and the common spiritual life on the other, are expressed in speech, the so-called ‘Mystery of Speech’ assumes great significance.

It is certainly possible to understand something of the life of the soul by observing how a man expresses himself in words. The mystery of speech and its origin and development through the different epochs has always been a problem in certain domains of Science, but it cannot be said that specialists in our age have been very successful in fathoming this mystery. To-day, therefore, we shall try in a somewhat aphoristic manner, to throw light on the development of speech and its connection with the human being, from the point of view of Spiritual Science.

What at first seems so mysterious when we designate an object or a process by a word, is how the particular sound-combination in the word or sentence is related to what comes forth from us, and how it expresses the phenomenon as a word. External Science has made many attempts to bring the most varied experiences together in different combinations, but this mode of observation has been felt to be unsatisfactory. There is one question which is really so simple, and yet so difficult to answer: how was it that man, confronted with something in the external world, produced, as from out of himself, an echo of the particular object or process in a definite sound?

Some people thought this question quite simple. They imagined, for instance, that speech-formation took its start from the fact that man heard some external sound, either produced by animals, or caused by the impact of one object against another, and that he then imitated the sound through the inner faculty of speech, like a child, who, hearing the ‘bow-wow’ of a dog, imitates this sound and calls the dog ‘bow-wow.’ Word-formation of this kind may be called ‘onomatopoeia,’ an imitation of the sound. This kind of imitation was the basis of the original sound and word formation,—at least so it was stated by those who regarded the matter from this particular point of view. The question is of course still unanswered as to how man comes to give names to dumb entities from which no sound proceeds. How does he ascend from the sound uttered by an animal or caused by an occurrence which can be heard, to one which cannot? Max Müller, the famous Philologist, ridiculed this, calling it the ‘bow-wow’ theory, because he realised what an unsatisfactory piece of speculation it was. He advanced another theory in its place which his opponents in turn called ‘mystical,’ though they used the word in an unjustifiable sense. Max Müller really means that every single thing contains something of the nature of sound within itself; everything has sound in a certain sense, not only a glass we let fall, or a bell we strike, but every single thing. Man’s capacity to set up a relationship between his soul and the inner sound-essence of the object calls forth in the soul the power to express this inner sound-essence; the inner essence of the bell is expressed in some way when we ‘feel again’ its tone in the ‘ding-dong.’ Max Müller's opponents ridiculed him in return by calling his the ‘ding-dong’ theory. However many more combinations of this kind we might care to enumerate,—and they have been evolved with great diligence,—we should find that the attempts to characterise in this external way what man causes to resound like an echo from his soul to meet the essence of things, must always be unsatisfactory. We must, in effect, penetrate more deeply into the whole inner being of man.

According to Spiritual Science man is a highly complex being. As he stands before us he has in the first place his physical body, which contains substances which are also found in the mineral world. As a second, higher member he has the etheric, or life body. Then he has the member which is the vehicle of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, instinct, desire and passion,—the astral body. This astral body is, to Spiritual Science, as real a part of man's constitution as anything the eyes can see and the hands touch. The fourth member of the human being has been spoken of as the bearer of the Ego, and man's evolution, at its present stage, consists in working, from his Ego outwards, as it were, at the transformation of the other three members of his being. It has also been indicated that in a far-off future the human Ego will have transformed these three members to such an extent that nothing will remain of what Nature, or the spiritual powers existing in Nature, have made of them.

The astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, of all ebbing and flowing ideas, feelings and perceptions, came into existence in the first place without our co-operation,—that is to say, without the activity of our Ego. The Ego works upon the astral body, purifying and refining it, gaining mastery over its qualities and activities. If the Ego has worked but little on the astral body, man is the slave of his instincts and desires. If, however, the Ego has refined the instincts and desires into virtues, has co-ordinated phantasmal thinking by the guiding threads of logic, a portion of the astral body is transformed. Whereas formerly it was not worked upon by the Ego, it has become a product of the Ego. When the Ego carries out this work consciously,—as it is beginning to do in human evolution to-day,—we call the part of the astral body which has been consciously transformed from out of the Ego, ‘Spirit Self,’ or ‘Manas,’ to use a term of Oriental Philosophy. When the Ego works in a different and more intense way, not only upon the astral body, but also upon the etheric body, we call the part of the etheric body which has been thus transmuted the ‘Life Spirit’ or ‘Budhi’ in Eastern terminology. And finally, although this belongs to the far-off future, when the Ego has become so strong that it transmutes the physical body and regulates its laws,—in such a way that the Ego is everywhere controlling all that lives in the physical body,—we give the name of ‘Spirit Man’ to that part of the physical body thus under the rulership of the Ego; and since this work begins with a regulation of the breathing process, the oriental term is ‘Atman,’ from which the German ‘atmen’ (to breathe) is derived.

In the first place, then, we have man as a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And just as we may speak of three of the members of our being as being products of the past, so may we speak of three other members which as a result of the work of the Ego will gradually unfold in the future. Thus we speak of a sevenfold nature of the human being, adding Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man to physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. But although we regard these three higher principles as belonging to a far-off future of human evolution, it must be said that in a certain sense man is preparing for them even to-day. Man will only begin consciously to transform the physical, etheric and astral bodies by means of the Ego in a distant future, but unconsciously, that is to say, without full consciousness, the dim activity of the Ego has already transformed these three members. A certain result has indeed already been achieved.

Those inner members of man's being mentioned in previous lectures could only have come into existence because the work of the Ego upon the astral body has resulted in the development of the sentient soul as a kind of inner reflection of the sentient body. The sentient body conveys what we call ‘enjoyment’ (Genuss) and this is reflected in the inner soul-being as the desires we ascribe to the soul. (Sentient body and astral body are the same thing so far as man is concerned; without the sentient body there could be no ‘enjoyment.’) Thus astral body, and transformed astral body, or sentient soul, belong together in the same sense as enjoyment and desires. The Ego has also worked on the etheric body in the past. What it has unfolded there has brought about the fact that in his inner being man bears the intellectual, or mind-soul. The intellectual soul, which is also the bearer of the memory, is connected with a subconscious process of transformation of the etheric body proceeding from the Ego. And finally, the Ego has in past ages already worked at the transformation of the physical body in order that man may exist in his present form. The product of this is called the consciousness soul, through which man acquires knowledge of the things of the outer world. In this sense too, therefore, we may speak of the sevenfold human being: the three soul members, sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul have arisen as the result of a preparatory, subconscious. Ego activity. But here the Ego has worked unconsciously or subconsciously, upon its sheaths.

Now we must ask: are not these three members, physical body, etheric body and astral body complicated entities? It is a most marvellous structure, this physical body of man! Closer examination would show that it contains far more than the mere portion which has been elaborated by the Ego into the consciousness soul, and which may be called the physical vehicle of the consciousness soul. Again, the etheric body is much more complicated than the vehicle of the intellectual or mind soul, and the astral body more complicated than the vehicle of the sentient soul. These elements are poor in comparison with what was already in existence before man possessed an Ego. Therefore Spiritual Science teaches us that in a primordial past the first germ of man's physical body was brought into existence by Spiritual Beings. To this was added the etheric body, then the astral body, and finally the Ego. The physical body of man has thus passed through four evolutionary stages. First of all the physical body existed in direct correspondence with the spiritual world, then it was elaborated, permeated and interwoven with the etheric body, and grew more complicated. Then it was permeated by the astral body and grew more complicated still. Then the Ego was added, and only when the Ego had worked on the physical body was a portion transformed into the vehicle of so-called ‘human consciousness,’ the faculty by which man acquires a knowledge of the external world. But this physical body has to do a great deal more than create a knowledge of the external world through the senses and brain. It has to carry out a number of activities lying at the basis of consciousness but taking their course entirely outside the region of the brain. And so it is with the etheric and astral bodies.

When we realise that all around us in the external world is Spirit, that Spirit is at the basis of everything material, etheric, astral, we must say: just as the Ego itself, as a spiritual being works from within outwards while man's evolution proceeds in the three members of his being, so must Spiritual Beings, or spiritual activities, if you will, have worked upon his physical, etheric and astral bodies before the Ego asserted itself and elaborated a further fragment of what had already been prepared. Here we look back to past ages when an activity proceeding from without inwards was exercised upon the astral, etheric and physical bodies, just as now the Ego works from within outwards upon these three members. Thus it must be said that spiritual creation, spiritual activity has been at work on our sheaths, imparting form, movement, shape and so on before the Ego was able to take root therein. We must speak of the existence of spiritual activities in human beings preceding the activity of the Ego. We bear within us spiritual activities which are necessary preliminaries to those of the Ego and which were in operation before the Ego could intervene. Let us then for the moment eliminate all that has been elaborated by the Ego from the three members of our being (sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul) and consider the structure, inner movement and activity of the sheaths of the human being. Before the activity of the Ego, a spiritual activity was exercised upon us. Therefore in Spiritual Science we say that in man as he is to-day we have to do with an individual soul, with a soul permeated by an Ego which makes each single human being into an individuality complete in itself. We say that before man became this complete Ego-being, he was the product of a ‘Group-Soul,’ of a soul essence, just as we speak of Group-Souls to-day in the animal world. The individual soul in the human being is, in the animal kingdom, at the basis of a whole family or species. A whole animal species has one common animal Group-Soul. In man, the Soul is individualised.

Thus before man became an individual soul, another soul worked in the three members of his being. This other soul—which we can only learn to know to-day through Spiritual Science—is the predecessor of our own Ego. This predecessor of the Ego, man's Group- or Species-Soul which gave over to the Ego the three members it had already elaborated, physical body, etheric body, astral body, in order that the Ego might further work upon them,—this Group-Soul similarly transformed, developed and regulated the three bodies from its inner centre. And the last activity which worked upon the human being before the bestowal of the Ego, the last influences immediately preceding the birth of the Ego, are to-day expressed in human speech. If, therefore, we take our start from our life of consciousness, intelligence and feeling, and look back to what has preceded this inner life, we are led to a soul activity as yet unpermeated by the Ego, the result of which is to-day expressed in speech.

Now let us consider this fourfold being of ours, and what lies at its foundation. How is it expressed outwardly in the physical body? The physical body of a plant has a different appearance from that of a man. Why is this so? It is because the plant possesses only physical body and etheric body, whereas in the physical body of man astral body and Ego are working as well. And what is inwardly working there correspondingly forms and transforms the physical. What is it, then, that has worked in man's physical body in such a way that it has become permeated by an etheric or life body?

The system of veins and glands is, in the human being and also in the animal, the outer physical expression of the etheric or life body; that is to say, the etheric body is the architect or moulder of the system of veins and glands. The astral body, again, moulds the nervous system. Therefore it is only correct to speak of a nervous system in the case of beings possessing an astral body.

And what is the expression of the Ego in man? It is the blood system, and, in the human being, the blood which is under the influence of the inner, vital warmth. Everything that the Ego brings about in man, if it is to be moulded into the physical body, proceeds by way of the blood. Therefore it is that blood is such ‘a very peculiar fluid.’ When the Ego has elaborated the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, all that it is able to shape and fashion can only penetrate to the physical body by way of the blood. The blood is the medium for all the activities of astral body and Ego.

Nobody will doubt, even if he only observes human life superficially, that as man works from his Ego in the consciousness soul, intellectual soul and sentient soul, he is also transforming and changing the physical body. The facial expression is surely an elaboration of what is working and living in the inner being. And is there anyone who would not admit that the inner activity of thought, if it lays hold of the whole soul, has a transforming effect on the brain, throughout the course of human life? Our brain adapts itself to our thinking; it is an instrument that moulds itself according to the requirements of our thinking. But, if we observe to what extent man is to-day able to mould his external being artistically from out of his Ego, we shall see that it is indeed very little. We can accomplish very little through the blood by setting it in movement from the “inner warmth.” The Spiritual Beings, whose activity preceded the activity of the Ego could do much more. They had a more effective medium at their disposal, and under their influence, man's form was so moulded that it has become, on the whole, an expression of what these Spiritual Beings made of him. What was the medium in which they worked? It was the air. Just as we work in the inner warmth, making our blood pulsate and thus bringing it to activity within our own form,—so did these Spiritual Beings work with regard to the air. Our true human form is the result of the work of these Beings upon us through the medium of the air.

It may appear strange to say that spiritual activities worked upon man through the air in a far-off past. I have already said that we should not understand our own inner life of soul and spirit if we were to conceive of it merely as so many concepts and ideas, if we did not know that it has been bestowed by the whole external world. Anyone who stated that concepts and ideas arise within man, even though there may be no ideas in the external world, might just as well say that he can obtain water from an empty glass. Our concepts would be so much froth if they were anything else than what is living in the objects outside us and the laws within them. The elements brought to life in the soul are drawn from the world around us. We may say, therefore, that everything around us in the material world is permeated and woven through by Spiritual Beings. However strange it may appear, the air around us is not merely the substance revealed by Chemistry; spiritual beings, spiritual activities are working within it. Through the blood warmth proceeding from the Ego (for that is the essential point), we can to a very small extent mould our physical body. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego performed mighty things in the outer form of our physical body through the medium of the air. That is the important thing.

It is the form of the larynx, and all that is connected with it, that makes us man. This marvellous organ and its relation to the other instruments of speech has been elaborated artistically out of the spiritual element of the air. Goethe said so beautifully in speaking of the eye: “The eye has formed itself from the light, for the light.” To say in the sense of Schopenhauer that “without an eye sensitive to the light, the impression of the light would not exist for us,” is only half a truth. The other half is that we should have no eyes if the light, in a primordial past, had not plastically elaborated the eye from undifferentiated organs. In the light, therefore, we must not merely see the abstract essence described to-day by Physical Science as light; we have to seek in the light the hidden essence that is able to create an eye.

In another sphere, it is the same thing as if we were to say that the air is permeated and ensouled by a Being who at a certain epoch was able to mould in man the highly artistic organ of the larynx and all that is related to it. All the rest of the human form,—down to the smallest details,—has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. Hence, it is speech that raises man above the animal. The Spiritual Being whom we call the “Spirit of the Air,” has indeed worked in and moulded the animal nature, but the activity did not reach the point of development of a speech organism such as is possessed by man. With the exception, for example, of what has been elaborated unconsciously by the Ego in the brain and in the perfecting of the senses,—everything, that is, except the products of Ego activity,—has proceeded from a higher activity preceding that of the human Ego, whose purpose it was to create man's body out of a further elaboration of his organs of speech. There is no time now to explain why the birds, for instance, in spite of their perfection of song, have remained at a stage where their form cannot, be an expression of the organs of speech.

So far, then, as the instruments of speech are concerned, man was already inwardly organised before he arrived at the stage of thinking, feeling and willing as he does to-day. These latter processes are connected with the Ego. We can now understand that the higher Spiritual activities, having created the astral, etheric and physical bodies through the influences of the air, could only so mould the physical body that it ultimately became a kind of appendage of man's instruments of speech. When man had been thus presented with an organ responding to the so-called “Spirit of the Air” (in the same sense as the eye responds to the spiritual essence of the light), his Ego could project into this organ its own functions of intelligence, consciousness and feeling. A threefold subconscious activity,—an activity in the physical, etheric and astral bodies precedes the activity of the Ego. A keystone for the understanding of this is our knowledge that it was due to the “Group-soul,” which has, of course, worked upon the animal also, but imperfectly. This must be taken into consideration in our study of the spiritual activity in the astral body preceding that of the Ego. In such a study, we must eliminate any conception of the Ego itself, but bear in mind all that has been brought about by the Group-Ego from mysterious depths of being. Desire and enjoyment, in an imperfect, chaotic condition, confront each other in the astral body. Desire could become a soul-quality, could be transformed into an inner faculty, because it already had a precursor in the astral body of man.

Similarly, the capacity for the formation of pictures, a symbol-creating faculty, inheres, in the etheric body, confronting outer stimuli. A distinction must be made between this pre-Ego activity of the etheric body and the Ego activity itself. When the Ego is functioning as intellectual soul, it seeks, at the present stage of human development, to present as Truth what is the most faithful image of external objects. Anything that does not correspond to outer objects is said to be ‘untrue.’ The spiritual activities preceding the operations of the Ego did not function in this way; they were more symbolical, picture-like, more or less like a dream. We may dream, for instance, that a shot is fired, and on waking find that a chair beside the bed has fallen down. The outer event and impression (the falling chair) are transformed in the dream into a sense image, the shot. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego “symbolised,” and this is what we ourselves do when we rise to higher spiritual activity through Initiation. At that stage, we try, but with full consciousness, to work our way from the merely abstract outer world into a symbolising, imaginative activity.

These spiritual beings worked yet further on the human physical body, making man into an expression of the correspondence between outer happenings or facts, and imitation. In the child, for instance, we find imitation when the other members of the soul are as yet but little developed. Imitation is a process belonging to the subconscious essence of man's nature. Therefore, early education should be based on imitation, for it exists as a natural impulse in the human being before the Ego begins to regulate the inner activities of soul. The impulse to imitate in presence of outer activities, in the physical body, the symbolising process in the etheric body in response to outer stimuli, and the so-called correspondence between desire and enjoyment in the astral body,—all these things must be thought of as elaborated through the agency of the air. Their plastic, artistic impression has been worked into the larynx and the whole apparatus of speech. The Beings who preceded the Ego, then, formed and moulded man in this threefold sense, and thus the air can come to expression in the human being.

When we study the faculty of speech in the true sense we must ask: is speech the “tone” that we produce? No, it is not. Our Ego sets in movement, and gives form to what has been moulded and incorporated in us through the air. Just as we set the eye in movement in order to receive the light that is working externally (the eye itself is there for the reception of light), so, within ourselves, from out of the Ego, those organs which have been elaborated from the spiritual essence of the air are set in movement; and then we must wait until the spirit of the air itself sounds back to us as the echo of our own “air activity,”—the tone. We do not produce the tone any more than the single parts of a flute produce the tone. We produce from our own being, the activity which the Ego is able to develop by using the organs which have been elaborated from out the spirit of the air. Then it must be left to the spirit of the air to set the air in movement again, by means of the same activity which has produced the organs. Thus the word sounds forth.

Human speech is founded on the threefold correspondence, of which I have spoken. But what is it that must correspond? Upon what has imitation to be based in the physical body? Imitation in the physical body must be based upon the fact that, in the movements of our vocal organs, we imitate the outer activities and objects which we perceive and which make an impression upon us; that we produce the echo of what we have in the first place heard echoing as tone, imitating through the physical body the thing that has made an external impression upon us. The painter imitates a scene which is made up of quite other elements than colour and canvas, light and shade. Just as the painter imitates by manipulating light and shade, so do we imitate what comes to us from outside, by setting our organs in movement, imitatively,—organs which have been elaborated out of the element of the air. What we bring forth in the sound, is therefore an actual imitation of the essential being of things. Our consonants and vowels are nothing but reflections and imitations of impressions from outside.

In the etheric body, we have a picture-forming, symbolising activity. Hence we can understand that although the earliest beginnings of our speech arose through imitation, a development took place in that the process tore itself loose, as it were, from the external impressions, and was then further elaborated. In symbolism,—as in the dream,—the etheric body elaborates something that no longer resembles the outer impressions, and the continued operation of the sound, consists in this. First of all, the etheric body works upon something that is mere imitation; this mere imitation is transformed by it, and becomes an independent process. So that what we have inwardly elaborated, corresponds only in a symbolical sense, as sense-imagery, to the outer impressions. Our activity is no longer merely imitative.

Finally, there is a third element,—desire, emotion, everything that lives inwardly. This expresses itself in the astral body, and works in such a way, that it gives further form to the tone. These inner experiences stream from within outwards into the tone. Sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, desire, wish,—all these things flow into it, and impart to it a subjective element. First there is the process of mere imitation. This is further developed as speech symbolism in the tone- or word-picture that has become an independent entity, and this is now again transformed by being permeated with man's inner experiences of sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, horror, fright and so forth. It must always be an outer correspondence that first wrests itself from the soul, in the tone. But when the soul expresses its experiences, and allows them to sound forth, as it were, it has first to seek for the corresponding outer experience. The third element, then, where pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, horror and so on, express themselves inwardly, psychically, in the tone, has first to seek for its correspondence. In imitation there is an after-copy of the external impression; the inner tone-picture, the symbol that has arisen, is the next development; but what man allows to sound forth, merely from inner joy, pain, and so on, would only be a radiation or emanation to which nothing could correspond.

When children learn to speak, we can continually observe the correspondence between outer being and inner experience. The child begins to translate something it feels into sound. When it cries “Mamma,” “Papa,” this is nothing but an inner transfusion of emotion into sound, the externalisation of an inward element. When the child expresses itself thus, its mother comes to it and the child notices that an outer occurrence corresponds to the expression of joy poured into the sound “Mamma.” Naturally, the child does not ask how it happens that in this case its mother comes to it. The inner experience of joy, or pain, associates itself with the outer impression. This is the third way in which speech operates.

It may therefore be said that speech has arisen just as much from without, inwards, through imitation, as through the association of external reality with the expression of the inner being. What has led to the formation of the words “Mamma,” “Papa,” from the expression of the inner being, which feels satisfaction when the mother comes, occurs in innumerable cases. Wherever the human being perceives that something happens as the result of an inner utterance, the expression of the inner being unites itself with the external fact.

All this takes place without the co-operation of the Ego. The Ego only later takes over this activity. Thus we can see how an activity, preceding that of the Ego, worked at the configuration which lies at the basis of man's faculty of expression in speech. And because the Ego makes its entrance after the foundations for speech have already been created, speech, in turn, accommodates itself to the nature of the Ego. As a result, utterances corresponding to the sentient body are permeated with the sentient soul; the pictures and symbols corresponding to the etheric body are permeated with the intellectual soul. Man pours into the sound what he experiences in the intellectual soul, and this was at first, mere imitation. Thus, do those elements of our speech, which are reproductions of inner experiences of the soul, come gradually into existence.

In order, therefore, to understand the essential nature of speech, we must realise that there lives within us, something that was active before the Ego, and any of its activities were there; into this, the Ego afterwards poured what it is able to elaborate. We must not demand that speech shall exactly correspond to what originates in the Ego, to all the spirituality and intimacies of our individual being. Speech can never be the direct expression of the Ego. The activity of the spirit of speech, is of a symbolical nature in the etheric body, imitative in the physical body. All this in conjunction with what is elaborated by the spirit of speech, from out the sentient soul,—for it projects the inner experiences from that domain, in such a way that we have in the sound an emanation of the inner life,—justifies us in saying that speech has not been elaborated by the methods of the conscious Ego, as we know it to-day. The development of speech, is indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present, any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech only reproduces the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit, in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active. This is a somewhat figurative way of speaking, but it expresses the truth. It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being, as a work of art. By analogy, speech must be conceived of as a work of art, but we must not forget, that each work of art can only be understood within the scope of that particular art. Speech itself, therefore, must necessarily impose certain limits upon us. If this were taken into consideration, a pedantic effort, like Fritz Mauthner's ‘Critique of Speech,’ would have been impossible from the very outset. In that work, the critique of speech is built upon entirely false premises. When we examine human languages, says Mauthner, we find that they by no means, correctly reproduce the objective reality of things. Yes, but are they intended to do so? Is there any possibility of their doing so? No; no more than it is possible for the picture to reproduce external reality by the colours, lights and shades, on the canvas. The spirit of speech underlying this activity of man, must be conceived in an artistic sense.

It has only been possible to speak of these things in bare outline. But when we know that an Artist, who moulds speech, is at work in humanity, we shall understand that however different the single languages may be, artistic power has been at work in them all. When this ‘spirit of speech,’ as we will now call the being working through the air, has manifested at a comparatively low stage in man, its action has been like that of the atomistic spirit, which would build up everything out of the single particles. It is then possible to build up a language where a whole sentence is composed of single sound-pictures.

When in the Chinese language, for instance, we find the sounds ‘Shi’ and ‘King,’ we have two ‘atoms’ of speech formation, the one syllable ‘Shi,’ or song, and ‘King,’ book. Putting the two sound-pictures together—‘Shi-King,’ we should have the German ‘Liederbuch’ (English, Song-Book). This ‘atomising’ process results in something that is conceived of as one whole, ‘Song-Book.’ That is a small example of how the Chinese language gives form to concepts and ideas.

If we elaborate what has been said to-day, we can understand how to study the spirit of so marvelously constructed a language as the Semitic, for instance. The foundation of the Semitic language lies in certain tone-pictures, consisting really, only of consonants. Into these tone-pictures, vowels are inserted. If, for the mere sake of example we take the consonants q—t—l, and insert an ‘ a ’ and again ‘ a ’, we obtain the word ‘qatal’ (German, töten, to kill), whereas the word consisting of consonants only is the mere imitation of an external sound impression.

This is a remarkable permeation, for ‘qatal,’ to kill, has come into existence as a sound picture, through the fact that the outer happening or event has been imitated by the organs of speech; that is the original sound picture. The soul elaborates this, by adding something that can only be an inner experience. The sound picture is further developed and the killing referred to a subject. Fundamentally speaking, the whole Semitic language has been built up in this way. The working together of the different elements of speech-formation is expressed in the whole construction of the Semitic language, in the symbolising element that is pre-eminently active. The activity of the spirit of speech in the etheric body is revealed in the characteristics of the Semitic language, where all the single, imitated sound-pictures are elaborated and transformed into sense images by the insertion of vowels. All words in the Semitic language are fundamentally so formed, that they are related to the external world, as sense images.

In contrast to this, the elements in the Indo-Germanic languages are stimulated more by the inner expression of the astral body, of the inner being. The astral body is already bound up with consciousness. When man confronts the outer world, he distinguishes himself from it. When he confronts the outer world, from the point of view of the etheric body, he mingles, and is one with it. Only when objects are reflected in the consciousness, does he distinguish himself from them. This activity of the astral body, with its wholly inward experience, is wonderfully expressed in the Indo-Germanic languages—in contrast to the Semitic—in that they include the verb ‘to be,’—the affirmation of what is there without our co-operation. This is possible because man distinguishes himself from what causes the outer impression. If, therefore, a Semitic language wants to express ‘God is good,’ it is not directly possible. The word ‘is’, which expresses existence, cannot be rendered, because it is derived from the antithesis of astral body, and external world. The etheric body, simply presents things. Therefore, in the Semitic language, we should have to say ‘God the Good.’ The confronting of subject and object is not expressed. In these Indo-Germanic languages there is differentiation from the outer world; they contain the element of a tapestry of perceptions spread out over the external world. These in turn, react on the human being, strengthening and giving support to the quality of ‘inwardness,’ that is to say, all that may be spoken of as the predisposition to build up strong individuality, a strong Ego.

It may seem to many of you that I have only been able to give unsatisfactory indications, but it would be necessary to speak for a fortnight if a detailed exposition of speech were to be given. Only those who have heard many such lectures, and have entered into the spirit of them, will realise that a stimulus such as has been given to-day is not without justification.

The only intention has been to show that it is possible to acquire a conception of speech and language in the sense of Spiritual Science, and this leads us to realise that speech can only be understood with the artistic sense which must first have been developed. All learning will be shipwrecked if it is not willing to recreate what the ‘artist of speech’ has moulded in man before the Ego was able to work within him. Only the artistic sense can understand the mysteries of speech; the artistic sense alone can recreate. Learned abstractions can never make a work of art intelligible. Only those ideas which are able fruitfully to recreate what the artist has expressed with other media,—colour, tone, and so on,—can shed light on a work of art. Artistic feeling alone can understand the artist; artists of speech alone can understand the creative Spiritual element in the origin of speech. This is one thing that Spiritual Science has to accomplish with regard to the domain of speech.

The other thing has its bearing in practical life itself. When we understand how speech has proceeded from an inner, prehuman artist, we shall also realise that when we want to speak or express through speech, something that claims to be authoritative, this artistic sense must be allowed to come into play. There is not much realisation of this in our modern age, when there is so little living feeling for speech. To-day, if a man can speak at all, he imagines that he is at liberty to express everything. What should be realised is that we must recreate in the soul a direct connection between what we wish to express in speech, and how we express it. The artist of speech, ‘in all domains’ must be reawakened within us. To-day, people are satisfied with any form that is given to what they want to say. How many people realise that the artistic feeling for speech and language is necessary in every description or thesis? This, however, is absolutely essential in the domain of Spiritual Science. Examine any genuine writings in the sphere of Spiritual Science and you will find that a true Spiritual Scientist has tried to mould each sentence artistically; he does not place a verb arbitrarily at the beginning or end. You will find that every sentence is a ‘birth ‘ because it must be experienced, not merely as thought, but inwardly in the soul, as actual form. If you follow the coherence of what is written, you will find that in three consecutive sentences, the middle one is not merely an appendage of the first, and the third of the second. The third sentence is already there in germ, before the second is built up, because the force of the middle sentence must depend on what has remained of the force in the first, and this must in turn pass over to the third. In Spiritual Science, one cannot create without the artistic feeling for language. Nothing else is of any use. The essential point is to free ourselves from being slavishly chained to the words, and this cannot happen if we imagine that any word can express a thought, for our speech formation is then already at fault. Words which are coined wholly for the world of sense, can never adequately express super-sensible facts. Those who ask, ‘how can one describe the etheric or astral body concretely by a word,’ have understood nothing at all of these things. Only that man has understood who says to himself, ‘I will experience what the etheric body really is from the one aspect before I allow myself to write a single page about it, and I will realise that it is a question of artistic imagery. Then I will describe it from the other three aspects.’ In such a case, we have the matter presented from four different aspects, so that the presentations given through language are really artistic imagery. If this is not realised, we shall have nothing but abstractions and an emaciated repetition of what is already known. Hence, development in Spiritual Science will always be bound up with a development of an inner understanding of the plastic forces of speech. In this sense Spiritual Science will work fruitfully upon our present atrocious style of speech which reveals no indication of the nature of artistic power. If it were otherwise, so many people who can really hardly speak or write, would not rush into literary activity. People have long ago lost the realisation that prose writing, for instance, is a much higher activity than writing verse, only, of course, the prose that is written to-day is of a much lower order.

Spiritual Science is there to impart, in every domain, the stimulus connected with the deepest spheres of human life. In this sense, Spiritual Science will fulfil the dreams of the greatest men. It will be able to conquer the super-sensible worlds through thought, and so to pour out the thoughts into sound pictures that speech can again become an instrument for communicating the vision of the soul in super-sensible worlds. Then Spiritual Science will fulfil, in ever-increasing measure, a saying relating to this important region of man's inner being: ‘Immeasurably deep is thought, and its winged instrument is the word.’

Medieval mysticism prepared the way for spiritual science; prayer prepared for medieval mysticism. Today the essence of prayer has been misunderstood. Prayer is intended to produce the divine spark, the special life of the soul. For this, we must understand both the soul and the soul in relation to the future set before us by world wisdom.

In my recent lecture on mysticism I spoke of the particular form of mystic absorption that appeared in the Middle Ages between the time of Meister Eckhart and that of Angelus Silesius. This type of mysticism is distinguished by the fact that the mystic seeks to become free of all the experiences aroused in his soul by the external world. He seeks to acquire the feeling that proves to him that, even when everything of the everyday world is removed from his soul and it withdraws into itself, a world of its own still remains within it. This world always exists but is outshone by the experiences that work so powerfully on man from without. Thus, it generally appears as a light so faint that most men do not even notice it. The mystic usually calls it “the spark.” Yet, he feels sure that it can be fanned to a mighty flame that will illumine the source and foundation of existence leading man along the path of his soul to the knowledge of his origin. This may, indeed, be called “knowledge of God.”

In the same lecture we saw how medieval mystics held that this spark, constituted as it is at the moment, must grow by itself. In contrast, we pointed out that modern spiritual research calls for a conscious and controlled development of these inner soul forces, so that they can rise to higher forms of knowledge, designated the imaginative, the inspirational and the intuitive. This medieval absorption is thus the beginning of true higher spiritual research that does indeed seek the spirit through the development of the inner being but, through the method of approach, is led beyond it to the source and foundation of the existence of all facts and phenomena, and of our own souls as well. Mysticism, therefore, appeared as a sort of first step to true spiritual investigation. If we have the ability to sink ourselves in the fervor of a Meister Eckhart, to recognize what an immeasurable force of spiritual knowledge it brought to Johannes Tauler, to see how deeply Valentin Weigel or Jacob Boehme were initiated into the secrets of existence by all that they attained through such absorption even though they passed beyond it, or to understand what an Angelus Silesius became through its means, how he was enabled not only to gain an illuminating insight into the great laws of spiritual order but also to utter with glowing rapturous beauty all sorts of sayings about world secrets, we shall then be able to realize the depth and force of this medieval mysticism and to see what an enormous help it can be to anyone who wants to tread the path of spiritual investigation.

Medieval mysticism thus appears to us, particularly as the result of that lecture, as a great and wonderful preparatory school for spiritual research. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? After all, our own object is simply to develop the spark of which the mystics spoke through its own inner forces. They believed that they might surrender themselves in the peace of their souls to the little glimmering spark, so that it might begin to burn ever more brilliantly of itself. Spiritual science, however, is convinced that, for the growth of the spark, we must use the capacities and forces that are placed under our control by the wisdom of the world.

This mystical attitude, then, is a good preparation and guide for spiritual science, and the soul activity that may in the true sense be called prayer is a preparation for this medieval absorption. Just as the mystic is enabled to attain a state of absorption because he has, even though unconsciously, trained his soul to have the right temper for such mysticism, so if we want to work our way through to this absorption, treading a path that shall end there, we shall find a preparation in true prayer.

In the development of the last centuries, even from a spiritual aspect, the essence of prayer has been misunderstood in many ways by various spiritual currents or thought. Thus, it will be difficult for us to get a true understanding of it. If we remember, however, that the last centuries have been associated particularly with the appearance of egoistic currents of spiritual thought that have laid hold of all sorts of people, we shall not be surprised to find that prayer has been dragged down among the egoistic wishes and desires of men. In fact, prayer can hardly be more misunderstood than when it is permeated with some form of egoism. In this study we shall try to consider prayer entirely and without prejudice from the point of view of spiritual science.

To get some preliminary understanding of prayer we might say that, while the mystic assumes the existence in his soul of some spark that his mystical absorption can brighten and illuminate, prayer is intended to produce that spark and special life of the soul. Whatever leads to prayer displays its efficacy just in this stirring of the soul, so that, if it lives there, even though hidden, we either gradually discover the spark, or else we kindle it. To study the need for, and the essence of, prayer, we shall have to enter on a description of soul depths of which the words of Heraclitus are only too true: “You can never fathom the boundaries of the soul even though you tread every path, so all-embracing is it.” Thus, even if in prayer we seek only for the secrets of the soul, it is true that these inmost feelings that are stirred in prayer teach even the simplest of us something of the infinite expanses of soul life.

We must comprehend this soul as it lives in us and carries us forward in life somewhat as follows. This soul that is in process of living evolution does not merely come from the past and progress into the future, but at every moment of its life it carries within itself something of the past and, indeed, also of the future. The actual moment in which we are living is penetrated by both the effects of the past and the effects that come from the future. Anyone who can see deeply into the life of the soul will feel that there are two streams continually meeting in it, one rising from the past, the other from the future.

Possibly in other spheres of life it might seem mere folly to talk of the approach of the events of the future. It is, after all, easy to say that the events of the future do not yet exist, thus preventing us from saying that what will happen tomorrow approaches us. But it is possible to say that what happened in the past stretches its effects into the present—a standpoint that is easy enough to establish. Who would dispute that our lives today are the result of our lives yesterday, or that we are today under the influence of our activity or idleness of yesterday or the day before? No one will deny the penetration of the present by the past. Yet, we ought no more to deny the reality of the future since we can see in the soul the reality of such intrusion of future events before they happen. There is, for example, such a thing as fear or anxiety of something that is to happen tomorrow. Is that not a sort of feeling or perception that we direct to an as yet unknown future? Every moment the soul experiences fear or anxiety it shows by the reality of its feelings that it reckons not only with the effects of the past but also that it vividly allows for what is coming to it from the future. These are, of course, trivial indications. They will show, however, that even a casual observation of the soul contradicts the logical abstractions that proclaim the future can have no effect because it does not exist. This is proved in living reality when we study immediate soul life.

In our souls, then, the past and the future unite and produce there, as everyone who observes himself would admit, a sort of whirlpool comparable to the confluence of two streams. Observation of what lives in our souls from the past shows that they come into being under the impression of our experiences of the past. The way in which we have used those past experiences has made us what we are, and we bear within us the legacy of our past doing, feeling and thinking. We are what we have become. If we look back from today's standpoint to our past experiences, particularly those in which we were ourselves concerned in their actual happening and in the judgment of them, if we allow our memory to play over the past, we shall be driven to a judgment of ourselves. We shall realize that today we have attained a certain quality of character. With that as our basis we shall find we are not in agreement with a good deal that happened in our pasts because we have acquired the capacity to be opposed to, even ashamed of, some past actions.

If we thus measure our pasts against the present, we shall come to the conviction that there is something within us that is far richer, far more significant than what we have made of ourselves by our will, consciousness and individual forces. If there were not something stretching beyond what we have made of ourselves, we should be unable to reproach ourselves or even to know ourselves. There must, then, be something within us greater than all that we have employed to form ourselves from the past. If we allow such a judgment to be transformed into a feeling, we shall be able to observe what is known and visible to us in our past deeds and experiences. This will lie as clearly before us as memory can make it. Then we shall be able to compare this clear vision with our souls, and we shall see there something bigger seeking to work itself out, urging us to set ourselves face to face with ourselves and to judge ourselves from the standpoint of the present. In short, we shall feel something projecting beyond ourselves when we observe the stream flowing into the soul from the past. This sense of something greater is the first glimmer of the inner feeling of God within us, a feeling that there is something within us that is greater than our own will. So we are enabled to see something leading beyond our limited egos to a divine spiritual ego. Such is the impression of an observation of the past that has been transformed into feeling and perception.

What is the message, then, of what we may call the stream of the future, when we transform it into feeling and perception? This speaks even more emphatically and definitely to us. In looking back over the past, our feelings assert themselves in the form of a judgment of rejection, of regret or shame, but only after the event. In relation to the future, however, we deal at once with the feelings of fear and anxiety, hope and joy, but the actual events to which these feelings refer are not yet existent. We cannot see through to them and it is thus easier in this case to transform the idea into a feeling, something the soul does of itself. As it can, in relation to the future, give no more than the feeling of reality, these feelings exist as something born from an unknown stream of which we know only that it may have different effects and bring different hopes. If we can transform into a right feeling what comes so surely to us from the lap of the future, and if we experience its course into our souls and the way in which our own perceptions meet it, we shall realize how our souls are always being kindled anew by the experiences approaching from the future. Here, above all, we feel how our souls can become richer and more comprehensive. Even now in the present we can know that in the future our souls will have an infinitely richer and mightier content. We feel ourselves akin to the future. We must feel it. We must feel our souls to be equal to everything the future can give.

Such an observation of the streaming together of the future and the past into the present will show us how the life of the soul grows beyond itself. When, in looking back over the past, the soul observes the important things that play on it and of which it does not feel itself to be equal, we shall understand how it can unfold a basic attitude and feeling in relation to the outcome of the past. When the soul, whether in judgment or in shame and regret, feels something great flow into itself out of the stream of the past, it creates within itself what we may call a devotion toward the divine. This devotion toward the divine that looks down upon us from the past and that we can imagine as something acting upon us, although our consciousness cannot take it in, is produced by one of two forms of prayer that lead to an intimacy with God. If the soul surrenders itself in inmost calm to these feelings about the past, it will begin to wish that the mightier thing it left unused and that has not permeated its ego may become present in it. The soul will know that if it were possessed of this greatness, it would be different, but the divine did not belong fully to its inner life and that is why it has failed so to form itself that it can approve of all that it is. When the soul experiences this, it can overcome the feeling by asking itself clearly how it can make truly part of itself what has lived unconsciously in all its actions and experiences, how it can draw into itself this unknown that its ego has failed to grasp. When the soul holds this attitude, either in feeling or in word and idea, we have the prayer to the past and thus seek to approach the divine through one of the ways of devotion.

Another attitude is held toward the divine gleam shining through the approaches of the future. To distinguish it from the one with which we have just been dealing, let us ask once again what it is that leads to prayer as regards the past. It is that we have remained imperfect even though we can feel something divine shining into us. We have not developed and unfolded all the capacities and forces that might have flowed to us, and we feel all the defects that make us less than the divine shining into us. What is it, then, coming to us from the future that makes us defective in similar fashion and restricts our ascent to the spiritual?

We have only to remember that feelings and sensations, fear and anxiety of the unknown future, gnaw at our souls. Is there anything that can pour some certainty about the future into our souls? It is what we may call the feeling of devoted acceptance of what enters our souls from the hidden future, and it can only work properly if it arises as an attitude of prayer. Let us avoid misunderstanding. We are not praising what here or there is considered to be acceptance, but a definite form, an acceptance of what the future can bring forth. If we look to the future with fear and anxiety, we strangle our development and hamper the free unfolding of our soul forces. Nothing so obstructs this development as anxiety about what may come to the soul from the future. Only actual experience, however, can judge the results of the right feeling of acceptance of the future. What does such devoted acceptance mean?

In its ideal form it would be the sort of soul attitude that would assure us that no matter what might come, no matter what the next hour or day might bring, were it unknown to us, we could not alter it by fear or anxiety. We should wait for it, therefore, in complete inner peace and utter tranquillity.

This experience, resulting from devoted acceptance of future events, means that anyone who can thus calmly and quietly meet the future and can yet prevent his energy and activity from suffering in any way, is able to develop his soul forces most intensively and freely. It is as if hindrance after hindrance falls away as his soul is gradually pervaded by this feeling of acceptance of the events that approach from the future.

This feeling, however, cannot be produced in our souls by some edict or arbitrary decision lacking foundation. It is the result of this second form of prayer that is directed to the future and the course of events, pervaded by wisdom, within it. To give ourselves up to the divine wisdom of events, to be certain in our thoughts, feelings and impulses that what will be must be and that it will have its good effects somewhere, to call forth this feeling in the soul and to live it in our words and ideas is the second form of prayer, the prayer of devoted acceptance.

It is from these feelings that we must acquire the impulses to what is called prayer. The soul possesses the urge, and fundamentally it attains the attitude of prayer when it raises itself even only a little above the immediate present. The attitude of prayer, we might say, is the upward gaze of the soul from the transitory present into the eternal that embraces past, present and future. Because to live looking upward from the present is so essential, Goethe has Faust speak these great and significant lines to Mephistopheles:

Were I to say the pleasing present should remain,
And that is what I truly meant ...

This is, if ever I could be satisfied with living merely for the moment,

Then you may throw me into chains,
And I will gladly seal my doom.

We might say, then, that it is the attitude of prayer for which Faust begs in order to escape the fetters of his companion.

Prayer leads to the observation of the limited ego that has worked from the past into the present. Upon examination, we see how much more there is in us than we have put to actual use. It also leads us to the study of the future, showing how much more can flow from the future into the ego than it has comprehended in the present. Every prayer must coincide with one of these attitudes. If we take this to be the spirit of prayer, and prayer as the expression of this spirit, we shall find in every prayer the force to lead us beyond ourselves. Prayer that is born in this way is nothing else than the kindling of the power that seeks to pass beyond what our ego is at the moment. As soon as the ego is seized by this striving, it already has this power of development. When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used, our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power. When we have reached this knowledge by our own feelings and perception, prayer becomes the source of further development. It is thus one of the means of developing the ego.

When we live in anxiety over what the future may bring, still lacking that submissiveness that prayer can give when it is directed to our future destiny, we can do something similar. By means of prayer we realize that the future is set before us by world wisdom. If we surrender ourselves to this feeling, we produce something quite different than we do when we meet coming events with fear and anxiety. These only restrict our development, pushing back from our souls what the future can give us. If, however, we meet the future with submissiveness and devotion, we draw near to it in fruitful hope and make it possible for it to enter our souls. Thus, submission, which seems to make us small, is a powerful force carrying us forward toward the future, enriching our souls and bringing our development to a higher level.

So we see prayer as an active force within us. We can also see in it a cause drawing with it as immediate effects the growth and evolution of our egos. We need not expect external results. We know that by prayer we have put within our souls what we may call a force of warmth and light—light because we free the soul in regard to what is coming to us from the future and prepare it to assimilate what the obscure future may bring; warmth because it helps to realize that even though in the past we have failed to bring the divine within us to full development, we have now permeated our feelings and sensations with it so that it can really work within us. The attitude of prayer that we attain from our feeling of the past produces the inner warmth of soul of which all those speak who can understand prayer in its true being. The effect of light appears in those who know the feeling of submission in prayer.

With this view of prayer we shall not be surprised that, in devotion to prayer, the greatest mystics found the best training for what they were seeking in mystic contemplation. They guided their souls by means of prayer to the point where they were able to ignite the spark previously mentioned. It is just the study of the past that can give us the deep intimacy that comes over us in true prayer. Experience and living in the external world really estrange us from ourselves, just as in the past they prevented the unknown and more powerful ego from coming to the surface. We are given over to external impressions, wasting our energies in the variety of external life, thereby upsetting our composure. It is this that prevented the higher and stronger divine force from unfolding in us. Now, when we unfold it in such deep intimacy with God, we no longer feel ourselves given over to the dissipating effects of the external world. Rather are we filled with that wonderful and ineffable warmth, as with an inner blessedness, that we really may call divine. It is the heat in the cosmos that appears in higher beings as physical inner warmth and it originally created the higher beings; the lower beings, of course, have the same body temperature as their surroundings. As this physical heat interiorizes a being, so the psychic warmth, born of prayer, can make a soul that is losing itself in externalities collect itself in inwardness. In prayer we are warmed in the feeling of God. We not only feel warmth but we find ourselves intimately within ourselves.

When we approach the external world, however, we always find it confused with what has been called “the dark lap of the future.” Upon close observation we always find that there is a germ of the future in whatever we touch of the outer world. We are continually thrust back when we still feel fear of what may befall us, and the world is like a veil before us. If we develop this feeling of submission in regard to all that may come to us from the future, we shall find that we meet everything in the external world with the same certainty and hope. This we have gained from our submissiveness. We know that in everything it is the wisdom of the world that shines before us. As a rule, in everything that comes to meet us, we see a darkness that passes into our feelings. Through our submission, however, we now see how the feeling arises in us that all the wisdom of the world shines through what we long for and desire as the highest. Thus, it is hope for illumination of the entire world that comes to us in the devotions of prayer. When darkness encloses us within ourselves and narrowness and confusion surround us even in the physical, when we stand in the gloom and black of night, we feel when morning comes and we meet the light as though set beyond ourselves. Yet this is not in such a way that we should lose ourselves, but as though we could transfer into the real world all our soul's truest longing and highest aims. Surrender to the world, estranging us from ourselves, is overcome by the warmth of prayer uniting us with ourselves. Then, too, the warmth of prayer becomes a light. We pass beyond ourselves and know that when now we unite with and behold the outer world, we are no longer disturbed and estranged by it. What is best in our souls flows from it and we are united with what radiates toward us from the external world.

These two types of prayer can be better comprehended in pictures than in ideas. Consider, for instance, the Old Testament story of Jacob and the bitter nocturnal struggle that seared his soul. It is as if we ourselves were given over to the manifoldness of the world in which our souls at first were lost and could not find themselves. When the striving to find ourselves begins, the struggle between the lower and higher egos follows. Feelings surge up and down, but we can work our way through this turmoil by prayer. As illustrated in the story of Jacob, the moment finally will come when, as the morning sun shines upon us, the inner struggle of our souls during the night is leveled out in harmony. That is really the effect of prayer in the human soul.

To think of prayer in this way is to be free of all superstition. It brings out the best in us and works within us immediately as a force. Prayer in this light is preliminary to mysticism, just as mystic contemplation is itself preliminary to what we know as spiritual investigation. From this discussion it should now be clear that, as has so often been emphasized, we continually err if we think we can find the divine, or God, in ourselves by mystic thought. This has been a common mistake of many mystics, and even of ordinary Christians in the Middle Ages, because at that period the attitude to prayer began to be permeated with an egoism that impels the soul to concentration on an ever-increasing inner perfection. It is fundamentally an echo of such an egoistic desire for inner perfection that impels a misguided theosophy today to assert that, if we will only turn aside from everything external, we can find God within ourselves.

We have seen that there are two types of prayer, one leading to an inner warmth, the other leading through a feeling of submission out again into the world to illumination and true knowledge. When we think of prayer in this way, we soon see that the knowledge acquired through ordinary intelligence is unfruitful compared to this other knowledge. When we come to realize the attitude of prayer, we become aware of the soul's withdrawal into itself, thus releasing it from the multiple world in which it has been dissipated. It gathers itself together and lives enclosed in itself, a complete self-being living above the momentary and what comes to it from the past and future.

When we know this feeling, when our environment becomes breathless and silent, when only our finest thoughts and feelings hold the soul together, when perhaps even these vanish and only a basic feeling remains directed toward the God who proclaims himself from the past, and toward the God from the future, when we know this and have learned to live in this feeling, then we realize that there are moments when the soul sees that it has turned away from, and disregards, all the cleverness it created by its own thinking. What it brought into being by its thinking and feelings, the ideals to which it had been educated and grasped in its will have all been swept away. It was given over to its highest thoughts and feelings, but even these were swept away, leaving only that last basic feeling. When we have come to feel this, we know that in the same way that the wonders of nature meet us when we look upon them with cleansed and purified eyes, these new feelings of which we were hitherto unaware shine into the soul. Impulses of will and ideals formerly strange to us rise up in it, germinating fruitful seeds.

In its best sense, then, prayer can give us wisdom that we are not yet capable of acquiring by ourselves. It can give us the possibility of feeling and thinking that we cannot attain by ourselves. If we go further, it can give us a strength of will that we have previously been unable to muster. In order to feel this, it must be called up by the greatest thoughts, the most splendid ideas and impulses living in the soul. Here we must refer again to the prayers that have originated in most solemn moments and that have been handed down to us from time immemorial.

In my pamphlet on the Lord's Prayer you will find an account showing that its seven petitions embrace all the wisdom of the world. It is no real objection to tell me that there it is said that these seven petitions can only be understood by those who know the deeper sources of the universe and that simple people have no real comprehension of their depth. This is not so. In order, however, that the Lord's Prayer should have come into existence, it was necessary that the all-embracing wisdom of the world should be set down in words that may indeed be said to express the deepest secrets of man and the world. Since this is what is contained in this prayer, it works through the words even if we are far from understanding the secrets. This can be understood when we rise to the higher stages to which prayer and mysticism are the prelude. Prayer prepares us for mysticism, mysticism for meditation and concentration, and from that point on we are directed to the real work of spiritual research.

Nor is it an objection to say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect. That simply is not the case. Who understands the wisdom of a flower? Yet, we can take pleasure in it. Even though we do not penetrate all its wisdom, nevertheless the soul delights in its contemplation. Wisdom was necessary that the flower might come into being, but it is not necessary to be aware of such wisdom to take delight in the flower. For a prayer to come into existence, the wisdom of the world is necessary. That it should possess warmth and light for the soul is just as possible without understanding its wisdom as it is in the case of the flower. If a prayer did not owe its existence to such wisdom, however, it could not produce such an effect. The mere effect of a prayer shows us its depth.

If one's soul is really to develop under the influence of such a vital quality within it, it makes no difference what one's stage of development may be. A true prayer can give everyone something. Even the simplest person, who knows nothing more than the mere prayer, can still feel its effect, which calls forth the power to raise him ever higher. But whatever height we may have achieved, we are never finished with a prayer. Our souls can always be raised higher. The Lord's Prayer can be simply repeated, yet it can also call forth a mystical frame of mind and even be the subject of meditation and concentration. This is also true of other prayers.

Since the Middle Ages, however, a sort of egoism has occurred that makes prayer and the attitude of prayer impure. If we use prayer in order to become more perfect in ourselves, to descend into ourselves, as was the case with the medieval Christians and perhaps still is today—if we do not look out into the external world with the illumination we have received, then prayer can only estrange and isolate us from the world. This has happened with many of those who have used prayer as false and seclusive asceticism. They have wanted perfection, not only as the rose, which adorns itself that the garden may be fair, is perfect, but for their own sakes that they might find blessedness in their souls. When we seek God in our souls and then do not pass to the other world the power we have thus won, we find that we are in a sense punished. Thus you will find in the writings of many authors who have known only the type of prayer in which inner warmth is to be found—even in the work of Miguel Molinos—remarkable descriptions of all sorts of passions and impulses, fights, temptations and wild desires that the soul has to experience if it seeks perfection by inner prayer and complete surrender to what it understands to be God. If we approach the spiritual world by seeking God one-sidedly, if we only unfold that feeling for prayer that leads to inner warmth and excludes illumination, this neglected other side takes its revenge on us.

If I look to the past only with feelings of regret and shame, realizing that there is something great in me that I have never allowed full play, thus failing to fill myself with this greatness so that I may become perfect, then, even so, to a certain extent a feeling of perfection does still arise. But the imperfection remaining in the soul becomes a counterforce that assails us with greater vigor in the form of temptation and passion. But as soon as the soul that has found itself in inner warmth and intimacy seeks for God wherever he is revealed and thus strives for illumination, it immediately comes out of itself and escapes the narrow selfish ego. The wild temptations sink down in calm and peace. This is why it is so harmful to allow an egoistic impulse to be mixed up in prayer or mystical contemplation or meditation. If we want to find God only to keep him in our souls, we exhibit an unsound egoism that maintains itself even into our soul's highest reaches. For this, we shall be punished. Healing is to be found only when, having found God in ourselves, we pour out unselfishly into the world in thoughts, feelings and actions what we have won.

We are often told today, particularly in the ideas of a falsely understood theosophy, and we cannot be careful enough of this, that we cannot find God in the external world because he lives within us. We have only to look within ourselves in the right way and we shall find God. I have even heard someone say in flattery of his audience that we need not learn or experience anything of the great secrets of the world. If only we would look within ourselves, we would find God.

But something must be added to this before we can reach the truth. To this, which may be true enough if it is kept within proper limits, a medieval thinker gave a true answer. Let us remember that it is not untruths that are most harmful. The soul will soon uncover what is false. Most harmful are those things that are true from one aspect but when applied on false assumptions produce grave falsehoods. It is true that in a sense we seek God in ourselves. Because it is true, it is the more harmful if it is not kept within its proper limits.

This medieval thinker said, “Who would seek everywhere in the external world for a tool he needed when he knows it to be at home? He would be a fool to do so. Equally is he a fool who seeks the instrument for the knowledge of God in the outer world when it lies at home within his soul.”

Bear in mind that he uses the words tool and instrument. It is not God we seek in the soul. He is sought by an instrument that we shall not find in the external world. It is found in the soul in prayer and genuine mystical absorption, and beyond that by meditation and concentration. We must approach the kingdoms of the world with this instrument, and then we shall find God everywhere. If we have acquired the instrument, he reveals himself in all worldly realms and at all stages of being. Thus, we find the instrument in ourselves but we find God everywhere.

Such observations of prayer are not popular today. Nowadays we are asked how on earth any of our prayers could alter the course of the world, which after all is guided by laws of necessity that cannot be altered. When we want to locate a force, however, we should look for it where it really is. Today we have sought the power of prayer in the soul and have found it to exist there, thus enabling the soul to progress. If we know that it is the spirit that works in the world, not an imagined, abstract spirit but a real, perceptible spirit, and that the soul belongs to the realm of the spirit, we shall also know that material forces are not the only forces working actively in accordance with external laws of necessity. Spiritual beings also are at work in the world even though the effects of these forces and beings are not visible externally to the eye or outwardly available to knowledge. If we strengthen our spiritual lives by prayer, we need only wait for the effects. They will certainly appear. No one, however, will seek the working of spirit in the external world who has not first recognized the force of prayer to be a reality.

When once we have admitted this fact, the following experiment will give evidence to support it. Consider a period often years during which we have scorned prayer, and another period often years when we have recognized its force. Compare the two periods. We shall soon see how the course of our lives was altered under the influence of the forces that poured into the soul with prayer. Forces become visible in their working, but it is easy to deny them when we shut our eyes to their effects. Who can deny the force of prayer if he has never let its force be effective within him? Do we believe we can know the Light if we have never developed or approached it? A force that is to work in and through the soul can only be discovered by its use.

The further effects of prayer, I am willing enough to admit, cannot yet be discussed today, however unbiased the discussion might be. Thus, to understand that a community prayer in which the forces rising from a praying community flow together, has an enhanced spiritual force and therefore an intensified effect on reality, cannot be easily accepted by the ordinary consciousness of today. So we must remain content with what we have discussed as the inner being of prayer. Indeed, it is sufficient since, if we have some understanding of it, we shall rise above many of the possible objections that are so easily raised against it.

We are told, for instance, that if we compare an active man who uses his powers to help his fellow men with one who withdraws meditatively into himself and works on the forces of his soul in prayer, then idleness is the only word that can truly apply to the one who meditates. You will excuse me if on the basis of spiritual science I tell you there is another point of view. I will speak bluntly, but there is good reason for it. Anyone who knows the interrelations of modern life will maintain that many journalists would do others a better service if they were to pray and work for the perfection of their souls. Would that there were people who were convinced that it would be better to pray than to write newspaper articles. This attitude is equally applicable to many other intellectual occupations today.

Further, we shall never understand the life of man in its entirety without the force that lives in prayer and that becomes particularly clear when we look at certain departments of higher spiritual activity. For instance, is it not clear that prayer, when considered not in a one-sided egoistic sense but in the broad sense in which we have discussed it today, takes its place as an element of art? Art, of course, also expresses the opposite attitude in comedy through the humorous feeling with which it rises above what it depicts, but there is in the ode and hymn, for example, a feeling of prayer. In painting we have what might be called a “painted prayer,” and surely in a massive, majestic cathedral a prayer in stone towers heavenward.

We need only to feel these things in relation to the whole of life in order to see that prayer, looked at in the right way, can lead us from the transitory finite of this world to the infinite. This was felt especially by those such as Angelus Silesius whom I have previously mentioned who passed from prayer to mysticism. He felt that he owed the inner truth and glorious beauty, the warm intimacy and brilliant clearness of his mystical thought, shown for instance in The Cherubinean Wanderer, to the training of prayer that had worked so powerfully on his soul. In fact, following this prelude of prayer, it is the feeling of eternity that streams through and illuminates all such mysticism. Everyone who prays has an idea of this, when in prayer he comes to true inner peace and intimacy and thence again to liberation from himself. It is something that teaches us to look from the passing moment to eternity, embracing in our souls the past, present and future. Whether we know it or not, whenever we turn in prayer to those sides of life where we seek God, the feelings, thoughts, and impressions accompanying us are permeated by a sense of eternity. It dwells consciously or unconsciously in every true prayer like some divine sweetness and aroma. It lives in the following lines of Angelus Silesius, which form a fitting conclusion to our discussion.

When I leave time,
I myself am eternity.
Then I am one with God
And God is one with me.