The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To turn our minds to thoughts connected with the Whitsun festival seems to me less appropriate during these grave days¹ than would have been the case in earlier years. For mankind is passing through fateful ordeals and at such times it is not really fitting to call up feelings of inner warmth and exhilaration. If our feelings are right and true we can never for a single moment forget the suffering that is now so universal, and in a certain sense it is actually selfish to wish to forget it in order to give ourselves up to thoughts that warm and uplift the soul. It will therefore be more fitting to-day to speak of certain matters bearing on the needs of the age, for our recent studies have shown very clearly that many of the reasons for the sufferings of the present time lie in the prevailing attitude to the spiritual, and that it is vitally urgent to work for the development of the human soul in order that mankind may go forward to better days. Nevertheless I want at least to start with thoughts which will bring home to us the meaning of a festival such as Whitsun.

There are three festivals of main importance in the course of the year: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun. Everyone who has not become indifferent, as is the case with the majority of our contemporaries, to the significance of such festivals in the evolution of the world and of humanity will at once perceive the contrasts between these three festivals, for the difference in the kind of experiences associated with each is expressed in their outer symbolism. Christmas is a festival connected above all with the joys of childhood, a festival in which a part is usually, if not always, played by the Christmas Tree brought into the house from snow-clad nature outside. Our thought also turns to the Christmas Plays so often performed among us and which for centuries have brought uplift to the simplest human hearts at this season by reminding them of the great and unique event in earth-evolution when Jesus of Nazareth, or, to be quite exact, Jesus who came from Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. The festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a festival connected with a world of feeling engendered by the Gospel of St. Luke, by those parts of the Gospel which make the most general appeal to simple hearts and are the easiest to understand. It is therefore a festival of universal humanity, intelligible, to a certain extent at least, even to the child and to men who have preserved a childlike quality of heart and mind. Yet it brings to such childlike hearts something great and mighty which then becomes part of their consciousness.

The Easter festival, although it is celebrated during the season when nature is waking to life, leads our minds to the portal of death. By contrast with the tenderness and universal appeal of the Christmas festival, the festival of Easter contains something infinitely sublime. If human souls are able to celebrate the Easter festival truly, they cannot fail to be aware of its transcendent majesty. It brings the sublime conception of the Divine Being who descended into a human body and passed through death. The whole riddle of death and the preservation in death itself of the eternal life of the soul—this is the great vista presented by the Easter festival.

These times of festival can be experienced in their depths only when we recall many things made real to us by Spiritual Science. Think only of how closely connected with all the festivals celebrated in the world in commemoration of the births of saviours are the thoughts arising from the Christmas festival. We are reminded, for example, of the Mithras festival celebrating the birth of Mithras in a cave. All these things are evidence of an intimate connection with nature. That Christmas is a festival linked with nature is symbolised in the Christmas Tree, and the birth, too, leads our minds to the workings and powers of nature. But because the birth of which Spiritual Science has so many things to say is that of Jesus of Nazareth, it is a birth fraught with infinite significance. And remembering that the Spirit of the earth wakens in winter, is most active during the season when outer nature appears to lie sleeping in a mantle of ice and snow, we can feel that the Christmas festival leads us into elemental nature herself, and that the lighting of the Christmas candles is a symbol of how the Spirit is awakening in the wintry darkness of nature.

If we would relate the Christmas festival to the life and being of man, we can do so by remembering that man is also connected with nature when he has separated from her spiritually, as he does in sleep, when in his ego and astral body he has gone into the spiritual world. His etheric body remains bound, supersensibly, to the physical body, and represents the part of man's being which belongs to elemental nature, to that elemental nature which wakens to life within the earth when the earth is shrouded in the ice of winter. It is far more than an analogy, indeed it is a profound truth to say that in addition to everything else, the Christmas festival is a token that man has in his being an etheric, elemental principle, an etheric body through which he is linked with elemental nature.

If you think, now, of all that has been said in the course of many years about the gradual darkening and decline of man's forces, you will realise how closely all the forces in the human astral body are connected with the death-bringing processes. The fact that we have to develop the astral body during our life, and that in the astral body we have to receive the spiritual, means that, in doing so, we bring the seeds of death into our being. It is quite incorrect to believe that death is connected with life in an external sense only, for the connection is most inward and fundamental. Our life is as it is only because we are able to die in the way we do. But this is bound up with the whole development of man's astral body. Again it is more than an analogy when we say: The Easter festival is a symbol for everything that has to do with the astral nature of man, with that principle of his being which, whenever he sleeps, leaves the physical body together with him and enters the spiritual world whence descended that Divine-Spiritual Being Who in Jesus of Nazareth actually passed through death. If one were speaking in an age more alive to the spiritual than is our own, what I have just said would be recognised as reality, whereas in our days it is taken merely as symbolism. It would then be realised that the purpose of instituting the Christmas and Easter festivals was to provide man with tokens of remembrance that he is connected with spiritual nature, with that nature that brings death to the physical, and to provide him with tokens reminding him that in his etheric body and astral body he is himself a bearer of the spiritual.—In our days these things have been forgotten. They will come to light again when humanity has the will to acquire understanding of spiritual truths such as these.

But now, besides the etheric body and the astral body, we bear within us as that which is supremely spiritual, our Ego. We know something of the complex nature of the Ego. We know especially that it is the Ego which passes from incarnation to incarnation, that the inner forces of the Ego build themselves up and shape themselves to that form which we carry forward into our being in each new incarnation. In the Ego we rise again from death to prepare for a new incarnation. It is by virtue of the Ego that we are individuals. If we can say that the etheric body represents in a certain sense that which is akin to birth and is connected with the elemental forces of nature, that the astral body symbolises the death-bringing principle that is connected with the higher spirituality, so we can say that the Ego represents our continual rising again in the spirit, our resurrection into the spiritual realm which is neither nature nor the world of stars, but pervades them all. And just as the Christmas festival can be connected with the etheric body and the Easter festival with the astral body, so the Whitsun festival can be connected with the Ego. This is the festival which, representing the immortality of the Ego, is a token of the fact that we, as men, do not share only in the universal life of nature, do not merely undergo death, but that we are individual immortal beings, rising ever and again from death.

And how beautifully this comes to expression when the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought are carried further! The Christmas festival is directly connected with earthly happenings, with the winter solstice, the time when the earth is shrouded in deepest darkness. In celebrating the Christmas festival we follow as it were the law by which earth-existence itself is governed; when the nights are longest and the days shortest, when the earth is frost-bound, we withdraw into ourselves and seek for the spiritual that is now alive within the earth. The Christmas festival is linked with the Spirit of the earth; it reminds us ever and again that we belong to the earth, that the Spirit had perforce to come down from cosmic heights and take earthly form in order to be a child of earth among the children of earth.

The Easter festival has a different setting. You know well that Easter is determined by the relation of the sun to the moon on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, the first full moon after the 21st March. The Easter festival, therefore, is fixed according to the relative position of the sun to the moon. In a wonderful way, then, the Christmas festival is linked with the earth, and the Easter festival with the cosmos. At Christmas we are reminded of what is most holy in the earth, at Easter of what is most holy in the heavens. But the thought underlying the Christian festival of Whitsun is associated in a most beautiful way with what is even above the stars—the universal, spiritual, cosmic fire which individualises and in the fiery tongues descends upon the Apostles. It is the fire that is neither heavenly alone nor earthly alone; it is the all-pervading fire which individualises and passes into each single human being. In very truth the Whitsun festival is linked with the whole universe. Just as the Christmas festival is connected with the earth and the Easter festival with the stars, so is the Whitsun festival directly connected with man, with individual man, inasmuch as he receives the spark of spiritual life out of the whole universe. What is bestowed upon mankind in general through the descent to the earth of the Being who was both God and Man, is made ready for every individual human being in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. These fiery tongues represent what lives alike in man, in the stars, in the world.

And so for those who are seeking for the spiritual, this festival of Whitsun has a meaning and content of special profundity, calling ever and again for perpetual renewal of the spiritual quest.

In our days it is necessary that these thoughts of the festival should be taken in a deeper sense than at other times. For how we shall emerge from the grievous events of this age will depend very largely upon how deeply men are able to experience these thoughts. That souls will have themselves to work their way out of the present catastrophic conditions is already beginning to be realised here and there. And those who have come to Spiritual Science should feel with even greater intensity the need of the age for new strength to be infused into the spiritual life, the need to surmount materialism. This victory over materialism will only be possible if men have the will to kindle the spiritual world into living activity within them, to celebrate the Whitsun festival inwardly and with true earnestness.

• 1. Berlin, 1916.

You will remember that I have spoken of the meaning of the Christmas Festival in its connection with the evolution of races, or, better said, the epochs of civilisation, and indeed the significance of the Festival lies in this very connection both in respect of the past and of the future.

I want to speak to-day about a Festival to which in modern times less importance is attached than to the Christmas Festival itself, namely, the Festival of the Three Kings, of the Magi who came from the East to greet the newly born Jesus. This Festival of the Epiphany (celebrated on the 6th of January) will assume greater and greater significance when its symbolism is understood.

It will be obvious to you that very profound symbolism is contained in the Festival of the Three Magi from the East. Until the 15th century, this symbolism was kept very secret and no definite indications were available. But since that century some light has been thrown on the Festival of the Magi by exoteric presentations. One of the Three Kings—Caspar—is portrayed as a Moor, an inhabitant of Africa; one as a white man, a European—Melchior; and one—Balthasar—as an Asiatic; the colour of his skin is that of an inhabitant of India. They bring Myrrh, Gold and Frankincense as offerings to the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

These three offerings are full of meaning and in keeping with the whole symbolism of the Festival celebrated on the 6th of January. Exoterically, the date itself throws some light; esoterically, the Festival is pregnant with meaning. The 6th of January is the same date as that on which, in ancient Egypt, the Festival of Osiris was celebrated, the Festival of the re-finding of Osiris. As you know, Osiris was overcome by his enemy Typhon: Isis seeks and eventually finds him. This re-finding of Osiris, the Son of God, is represented in the Festival of the 6th of January. The Festival of the Three Kings is the same Festival, but in its Christian form. This Festival was also celebrated among the Assyrians, the Armenians and the Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a Festival connected with a kind of universal baptism—a rebirth from out of the water. This in itself points to the connection with the re-finding of Osiris.

What does the disappearance of Osiris signify? It signifies the transition from the epoch before the middle of the Lemurian race to the epoch after the middle of that race. Before the middle of the Lemurian race, no human being was endowed with Manas. It was not until the middle of the race that Manas came down as a fertile seed into men. Manas (Spirit-Self) was now disseminated among men and in each single individual a grave was created for Manas—for the dismembered Osiris. The Divine Manas was disseminated and thereafter dwelt in men. In the Egyptian Mystery-language, the bodies of men were called the ‘graves of Osiris’ Manas was fettered until it was freed by the new revelation of Love.

What is the new revelation, the new manifestation of Love? The descent of Manas somewhere around the middle of the Lemurian epoch, was accompanied by the penetration into mankind of the principle of desire, or passion. Before that time there had been no desire-principle in the real sense. The animals of the preceding epochs were cold-blooded; even man himself at that time, had no warm blood. In the Old Moon period and, correspondingly, in the Third Earth-Round, men may be likened to fishes, in the sense that their own warmth and the warmth of their environment were equal in degree. Of this epoch the Bible says: ‘The Spirit of God brooded over the waters.’ The principle of Love was not within the beings, but outside, manifesting as earthly Kama (that is to say, earthly passion or desire). Kama is egotistic love. The first bringer of Love free of all egoism is Christ Who appeared in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Who are the Magi? They represent the Initiates of the three preceding races or epochs of culture, the Initiates of mankind up to the time of the coming of Christ, the Bringer of the Love that is free of egoism—the resurrected Osiris. The Initiates—and so too the Three Magi—were endowed with Manas. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh as their offerings. And why are their skins of three colours: white, yellow and black? One is European—his skin is white; one is Indian—his skin is yellow; one is African—his skin is black. This indicates the connection with the so-called Root Races. The remaining survivors of the Lemurian race are black; those of the Atlantean race are yellow; and the representatives of the Fifth Root Race, the Post-Atlantean or Aryan race, are white.

Thus the Three Kings or Magi are representatives of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and the Aryans. They bring the three offerings. The European (Melchior) brings gold, the symbol of wisdom, of intelligence which comes to expression paramountly in the Fifth Root Race. The offering of the Initiate representing the Fourth Root Race (Balthasar) is frankincense, connected with what was intrinsically characteristic of the Atlanteans. They were united more directly with the Godhead, a union which took effect as a suggestive influence, a kind of universal hypnosis. This union with the Godhead is betokened by the offering. Feeling must be sublimated in order that God may fertilise it. This is expressed symbolically by the frankincense, which is the universal symbol for an offering that has something to do with Intuition.

In the language of esotericism, myrrh is the symbol of dying, of death. What is the meaning of dying and of resurrection, as exemplified in the resurrected Osiris? I refer you here to words of Goethe: “So long as thou hast it not, this dying and becoming, thou'rt but a dull guest on the dark earth.” Jacob Boehme expresses the same thought in the words: “He who dies not ere he dies, perishes when he dies.” Myrrh is the symbol of the dying of the lower life and the resurrection of the higher life. It is offered by the Initiate representing the Third Root Race (Lemurian). A deep meaning lies in this. Jesus of Nazareth is a very highly developed individuality. In the thirtieth year of his life he gives up his own life to the descending Christ, the descending Logos. All this the Magi foresaw. The great sacrifice made by Jesus of Nazareth is that he gave up his ‘ I ’ to make way for the Second Logos. There is a definite reason for this sacrifice. Not until the Sixth Root Race will it become possible, and then only gradually, for the human body to receive into itself the Christ Principle from childhood onwards. Only then, in the Sixth Root Race, will mankind have reached such maturity that the body will not need years of preparation but will be able from the beginning, to receive the Christ Principle. In the fourth sub-race of the Fifth Root Race it was necessary for a body to be prepared for thirty years. (In the Northern regions we find something similar, in that the personality of Sig was so prepared that he could place his body at the disposal of a higher Being, and, in fact, did so). In the Sixth Root Race it will be possible for a man to place his body at the disposal of a sublime Being, as did Jesus of Nazareth when Christianity was founded. At the time of the founding of Christianity it was still necessary for an advanced individuality to sacrifice his own ‘ I ’ and send it into the astral realm, in order that the Logos might dwell in the body. This is an act upon which light is shed by the last words on the Cross. What other meaning could these words contain: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” These words give expression to the mystical fact then consummated. At the moment of Christ's death, the Divine Being had departed from the body, and it is the body of Jesus of Nazareth that utters these words—a body so highly developed that it could voice the reality. And so these words give expression to an event of untold significance. All this is represented by the myrrh. Myrrh is the symbol of sacrifice, of death, the sacrifice of the earthly in order that the Higher may come to life. In the middle of the Lemurian epoch, Osiris came to his grave; Manas drew into human beings. Men were educated under the guidance of the Initiates until the principle of Love (Budhi) could shine forth in Christ Jesus. Budhi is the heavenly Love. The lower, sexual principle is ennobled through the Christ Love. Kama is purified in the fire of the Divine Love.

Melchior is the representative of the principle of wisdom, of intelligence—the task of the Fifth Root Race. This is symbolised by his offering—gold.

The principle of sacramental offering is represented by the frankincense. This offering symbolises the principle that was dominant in the Fourth Root Race, the Atlantean. The task of Christianity is fulfilled in the Sixth Root Race, when material existence will be fraught with sacramentalism and sacramental deeds. Sacraments have very largely lost their meaning to-day; the feeling of their significance has disappeared. But this feeling will be kindled to life again when the higher man is born. It is this that is symbolised by the frankincense.

In the Lemurian Race, Osiris meets his death, in the Sixth Root Race, Osiris is resurrected.

Thus the offerings made by the Three Kings indicate the connection of the Festival with the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Root Races. By what are the Three Holy Kings guided, and whither are they led? They are guided by a Star to a grotto, a cave in Bethlehem. This is something that can be understood only by one who has knowledge of the so-called lower, or astral mysteries. To be led by a Star means nothing else than to see the soul itself as a Star. But when is the soul seen as a Star? When a man can behold the soul as a radiant aura. But what kind of aura is so radiant that it can be a guide? There is the aura that glimmers with only a feeble light; such an aura cannot guide. There is a higher aura, that of the intelligence, which has, it is true, a flowing, up-surging light, but is not yet able to guide. But the bright aura, aglow with Budhi, is in very truth a Star, is a radiant guide. In Christ, the Star of Budhi lights up—the Star which accompanies the evolution of mankind. The Light that shines before the Magi is the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines before the Magi and over the cave in Bethlehem.

The grotto or cave is the body wherein dwells the soul. The seer beholds the body from within. In astral vision, everything is reversed—for example, 365 instead of 563. The human body is seen as a cave, a hollow. In the body of Jesus shines the Christ Star, the soul of Christ. This must be conceived as a reality, taking place in the astral world. It is an enactment of the Lesser Mysteries. There, in very truth, the Christ Soul shines as an auric Star, and it is by this Star that the Initiates of the three Root Races are led to Jesus in Bethlehem.

The Festival of the Three Kings is celebrated every year on the 6th of January, and its significance will steadily increase. Men will understand more and more what a Magi is, and what the great Magi, the Masters, are. And then understanding of Christianity will lead to understanding of spiritual science.

How many people are there to-day who, as they walk through the streets at this season and see all the preparations made for the Christmas Festival, have any clear or profound idea of what it means? How seldom do we find evidence of any clear ideas of this Festival, and even when they exist, how far removed they are from the intentions of those who once inaugurated the great Festivals as tokens of what is eternal and imperishable in the world! A glance at the ‘Christmas Reflections’ as they are called, in the newspapers, is quite sufficient proof of this. Surely there can be nothing more dreary and at the same time more estranged from the subject than the thoughts sent out into the world on printed pages in this way.

To-day we shall try to bring before our minds a kind of summary of the knowledge revealed to us by Spiritual Science. I do not, of course, mean any kind of pedantic summary; I mean a gathering-together of all that the Christmas Festival can bring home to our hearts if we regard Spiritual Science not as a dull, grey theory, not as an outer confession, not as a philosophy, but as a real and vital stream of life pulsating through and through us.

The man of to-day confronts Nature around him as a stranger. He is far more of a stranger to Nature than he thinks, far more even than he was in the time of Goethe. Is there anyone who still feels the depth of words spoken by Goethe at the beginning of the Weimar period of his life? He addressed a Hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with all her mysterious powers:

“Nature!—we are surrounded and embraced by her; we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us unasked and unwarned into the gyrations of her dance and whirls us away until we fall exhausted from her arms ... All men are within her and she in all men ... We are obedient to her laws even when we would fain oppose them ... She (Nature) is all in all. She alone praises and she alone punishes—herself, Let her do with me what she will; she will not cherish hatred for her created work. It was not I who spoke of her, Nay, it was she who spoke it all, true and false. Hers is the blame for all things, hers is the credit ...”

Verily, we are all Nature's children. And when we think we are least of all obedient to her, it may be that just then we are acting most strictly in accordance with the great laws which pervade the realm of Nature and stream into our own being. Again, there are so few who really feel the depth of other pregnant words of Goethe in which he tries to express the feeling of communion with the hidden forces common to Nature and to the human being. I refer to that passage in Faust where Goethe addresses Nature, not as the dead, lifeless being conceived of by materialistic thinkers of to-day, but as a living Spirit:

“Spirit sublime, Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to endure it. Thou
Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend.

The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.
And when the storm in forests roars and grinds,
The giant firs, in falling, neighbour bough
And neighbour trunks with crushing weight bear down,
And falling, fill the hills with hollow thunders,—
Then to the cave secure thou leadest me,
Then show'st me mine own self, and in my breast
The deep, mysterious miracles unfold.”

Translation by BAYARD TAYLOR

This was the mood of soul which Goethe's knowledge and feeling for Nature awakened in him and these words were an attempt to bring to life again a mood which filled men's hearts in an age when wisdom itself was still organically united by living ties to Nature. And it was as tokens of this ‘feeling at one’ with Nature and the universe that the great Festivals were inaugurated.

The Festivals have become abstractions, matters of indifference to modern people. The word as a medium of strife and blasphemy often means more than the Word conceived as the power by which the world itself was created. Yet the alphabetical word ought to be the representative, the symbol of the Word Creative in Nature around us, in the great universe and within us too when self-knowledge awakens, and of which all mankind can be made conscious by those who truly understand the course of Nature. It was for this that the Festivals were instituted and with the knowledge we have gleaned from Spiritual Science we will try to understand what it was that the wise men of old set out to express in the Christmas Festival.

Christmas is not a Festival of Christendom only. In ancient Egypt, in the regions we ourselves inhabit, and in Asia thousands and thousands of years before the Christian era we find that a Festival was celebrated on the days now dedicated to the celebration of the birth of Christ.

Now what was the character of this Festival which since time immemorial has been celebrated all over the world on the same days of the year? Wonderful Fire Festivals in the northern and central regions of Europe in ancient times were celebrated among the Celts in Scandinavia, Scotland and England by their priests, the Druids. What were they celebrating? They were celebrating the time when winter draws to its close and spring begins. It is quite true that Christmas falls while it is still winter, but Nature is already heralding a victory which can be a token of hope in anticipation of the victory that will come in spring—a token of confidence, of hope, of faith—to use words which are connected in nearly every language with the Festival of Christmas. There is confidence that the Sun, again in the ascendant, will be victorious over the opposing powers of Nature. The days draw in and draw in, and this shortening of the days seems to us to be an expression of the dying, or rather of the falling asleep of the Nature-forces. The days grow shorter and shorter up to the time when we celebrate the Christmas Festival and when our forefathers also celebrated it, in another form. Then the days begin to draw out again and the light of the Sun celebrates its victory over the darkness. In our age of materialistic thinking this is an event to which we no longer give much consideration.

In olden times it seemed to men in whom living feeling was united with wisdom, to be an expression of an experience of the Godhead Himself, the Godhead by Whom their lives were guided. The solstice was a personal experience of a higher being—as personal an experience as when some momentous event forces a man to come to a vital decision. And it was even more than this. The waxing and waning of the days was not only an expression of an event in the life of a higher Being, but a token of something greater still, of something momentous and unique.

This brings us to the true meaning of Christmas as a Festival of the very highest order in cosmic and human life. In the days when genuine occult teaching was not disowned as it is today by materialistic thought but was the very wellspring of the life of the peoples, the Christmas Festival was a kind of memorial, a token of remembrance of a great happening on the Earth. At the hour of midnight the priests gathered around them their truest disciples, those who were the teachers of the people, and spoke to them of a great Mystery. (I am not telling you anything that has been cleverly thought out or discovered by a process of abstract deduction but was actually experienced in the Mysteries, in the secret Sanctuaries of those remote times). This Mystery was connected with the victory of the Sun over the darkness. There was a time on the Earth when the light triumphed over the darkness. And it happened thus: in that epoch, all physical, all bodily life on Earth had reached the stage of animality only. The highest kingdom upon the Earth had only reached a stage at which it was preparing to receive something higher. And then there came that great moment in evolution when the immortal, imperishable soul of man descended. Life had so far developed that the human body was able to receive into itself the imperishable soul. These ancestors of the human race stood higher in the scale of evolution than modern scientists believe, but the higher part of their being, the divine ‘spark’ was not yet within them. The divine spark descended from a higher planetary sphere to our Earth which was now to become the scene of its activity, the dwelling-place of the soul which henceforward can never be lost to us.

We call these remote ancestors of humanity the Lemurian race. Then came the Atlantean race and the Atlantean race was followed by our own—the Aryan race. Into the bodies of the Lemurian race the human soul descended. This descent of the divine ‘Sons of the Spirit,’ this great moment in the evolution of mankind was celebrated by the sages of all times as the victory of the light over the darkness. Since then the human soul has been working in the body and bringing it to higher stages of development but not at all in the way that materialistic science imagines. At the time when the human soul was quickened by the Spirit, something happened in the universe, something that is one of the most decisive events in the evolution of mankind.

In those remote ages—and this is contrary to what modern science teaches—certain constellation of Earth, Moon and Sun was in existence. It was not until then that the Sun assumed the significance it now has in the process of man's growth and life upon the Earth and of the other creatures belonging to the Earth—the plants and animals. Before that time, the beings on Earth were adapted to the conditions then obtaining upon the planetary body. Only those who are able to form a clear idea of the process of the development of the Earth and of mankind will understand the connection of Sun, Moon and Earth with the human being as he lives upon the Earth. There was a time when the Earth was still united with Sun and Moon, when Sun, Moon and Earth were still one body, The beings who dwelt upon this planet were different in appearance from those who inhabit the Earth to-day; they lived in forms which were suited to the conditions of existence as they were on the planetary body consisting of Sun, Moon and Earth.

The form and essential being of everything that lives upon our Earth is determined by the fact that first the Sun and then, later, the Moon separated from the Earth. The forces and influences of these two heavenly bodies henceforward played down upon the Earth from outside. This is the basis of the mysterious connection of the Spirit of man with the Spirit of the universe, with the Logos in Whom Sun, Moon and Earth are all contained. In this Logos we live and move and have our being. Just as the Earth was born from a planetary body in which the Sun and Moon were also contained, so is man born of a Spirit, of a Soul which belongs alike to Sun, Moon and Earth. And so when a man looks up to the Sun, or to the Moon, he should not only see external bodies in the heavens, but in Sun, Moon and Earth he should see the bodies of Spiritual Beings.

This truth is utterly lost to the materialism of the age. Those who do not see in Sun and Moon the bodies of Spiritual Beings cannot recognise the human body as the body of the Spirit. Just as truly as the heavenly bodies are the bodies of Spiritual Beings, so is the human body the bearer of the Spirit. And man is connected with these Spiritual Beings. Just as his body is separate from the forces of the Sun and Moon and yet contains forces which are active in the Sun and Moon, so the same spirituality which reigns in Sun and Moon is contained within his soul. Man has evolved on Earth into the being he is, and he is dependent upon the Sun as the heavenly body from which the Earth receives her light.

And so in days of old, our forefathers felt themselves to be spiritual children of the great universe and they said: “We have become men through the Sun Spirit, through the Sun Spirit from Whom the Spirit within us proceeded. The victory of the Sun over the darkness commemorates the victory of the Sun when it shone down upon the Earth for the first time. The immortal soul has been victorious over the forces of the animal nature.” It was verily a victory of the Sun when, long, long ago, the immortal soul entered into the physical body and penetrated into the dark world of desires, impulses and passions. Darkness preceded the victory of the Sun and this darkness had followed a previous Sun Age. So it is with the human soul. The soul proceeds from the Divine but it must sink for a time into the darkness, in order, out of this darkness, to build up the vehicle for the human soul. By slow degrees the human soul itself built up the lower nature of man in order then to take up its abode in the dwelling-place of its own construction. You have a correct simile for the entry of the immortal soul of man into the human body if you imagine an architect devoting all his powers to the building of a house in which he then lives. But in those remote ages the soul could only work unconsciously on its dwelling-place. The descent is expressed by the darkness; the awakening to consciousness, the lighting-up of the conscious human soul is expressed in this simile as a victory of the Sun. And so to those who were still aware of man's living connection with the universe, the victory of the Sun signified the great moment when they had received the impulse which was all-essential for their earthly existence. And this great moment was perpetuated in the Christmas Festival.

And now try to think of the course of human life in connection with the harmony of the universe. Man seems to become more and more akin to the great rhythms of Nature. If we think of all that encompasses the life of the soul, of the course of the Sun and everything that is connected with it, we are struck by something that closely concerns us, namely, the rhythm and the marvellous harmony in contrast to the chaos and lack of harmony in the human soul. We all know how rhythmically and with what regularity the Sun appears and disappears. And we can picture what a stupendous upheaval there would be in the universe if for a fraction of a second only the Sun were to be diverted from its course. It is only because of this inviolable harmony in the course of the Sun that our universe can exist at all, and it is upon this harmony that the rhythmic life-process of all beings depends. Think of the annual course of the Sun.—Picture to yourselves that it is the Sun which charms forth the plants in spring time and then think how difficult it is to make the violet or some other plant flower out of due season. Seed-time and harvest, everything, even the very life of animals is dependent upon the rhythmic course of the Sun. And in the being of man himself everything that is not connected with his feelings, his desires and his passions, or with his ordinary thinking, is rhythmic and harmonious. Think of the pulse, of the process of digestion and you will feel the mighty rhythm and marvel at the wisdom implicit in the whole of Nature. Compare with this the irregularity, the chaos of man's passions and desires, especially of his ideas and thoughts. Think of the regularity of your pulse, your breathing, and then of the irregularity, the erratic nature of your thinking, feeling and willing. With what wisdom the powers of life are governed where the prevailing rhythmic forces meet the challenge of the chaotic! And how greatly the rhythms of the human body are outraged by man's passions and cravings! Those who have studied anatomy know how marvellously the heart is constructed and regulated and how wonderfully it is able to stand the strain put upon it by the drinking of tea, coffee and spirits.

There is wisdom in every part of the divine, rhythmic Nature to which our forefathers looked up with such veneration and the very soul of which is the Sun with its regular, rhythmic course. And as the wise men of old looked upwards to the Sun, they said to their disciples: ‘Thou art the image of what the soul born within thee has yet to become and what it will become.’ The divine cosmic Order was revealed in all its glory to the sages of old. And again, in the Christian religion we have the ‘Gloria in excelsis.’ The meaning of ‘gloria’ is revelation, not ‘glory’ in the sense of ‘honour.’ Therefore we should not say: ‘Glory (honour) to God in the highest,’ but rather: ‘To-day is the revelation of the Divine in the heavens!’ The birth of the Redeemer makes us aware of the ‘Glory’ streaming through the wide universe.

In earlier times this cosmic harmony was placed as a great Ideal before those who were to be leaders among their fellow-men. Therefore in all ages and wherever there was consciousness of these things, men spoke of Sun Heroes. In the temples and sanctuaries of the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. I will speak of them as they were known in ancient Persia.

The first stage is attained when a man's ordinary feeling and thinking is raised to a higher level, where knowledge of the Spirit is attained. Such a man received the name of ‘Raven.’ It is the ‘Ravens’ who inform the Initiates in the temples what is happening in the world outside. When medieval poetic wisdom desired to depict in the person of a great Ruler an Initiate who amid the treasures of wisdom contained in the Earth must await the great moment when newly revealed depths of Christianity rejuvenate mankind—when this poetic wisdom of the Middle Ages created the figure of Barbarossa, ravens were his heralds. The Old Testament, too, speaks of the ravens in the story of Elijah.

Those who had reached the second stage of Initiation were known as ‘Occultists’; at the third stage they were ‘Warriors,’ at the fourth, ‘Lions.’ At the fifth stage of Initiation a man was called by the name of his own people: he was a ‘Persian,’ ‘Indian,’ or whatever it might be. For that man alone who had reached the fifth degree of Initiation was regarded as a true representative of his people. At the sixth stage a man was a ‘Sun Hero’ or one who ‘runs in the paths of the Sun.’ And at the seventh stage he was a ‘Father.’

Why was an Initiate of the sixth degree known as a Sun Hero? To reach this level on the ladder of spiritual knowledge a man must have developed an inner life in harmony with the divine rhythms pulsating through the cosmos. His life of feeling and of thinking must have rid itself of chaos, of all disharmony, and his inner life of soul must beat in perfect accord with the rhythm of the Sun in the heavens. Such was the demand made upon men at the sixth degree of Initiation. They were looked upon as holy men, as Ideals, and it was said that if a Sun Hero were to deviate from the divine path of this spiritual harmony, it would be as great a calamity as if the Sun were to deviate from its course. A man whose spiritual life had found a path as sure as that of the Sun in the heavens was called a ‘Sun Hero,’ and there were Sun Heroes among all the peoples.

Our scholars know remarkably little about these things. They are aware that Sun myths are connected with the lives of all the great Founders of religions, but what they do not know is that at the Initiation Ceremony it was the custom for the leading figures to be made into Sun Heroes. It is not really so surprising that materialistic research should rediscover these things. Sun myths have been sought for and found in connection with Buddha and with the Christ.

The Sun-Soul was the great example for the way in which a man's life must be ordered. How did the ancients conceive of the soul of a Sun Hero who had reached this inner harmony? They pictured to themselves that no longer did a single individual human soul live within him, but that forces of the cosmic Soul were streaming into him. This cosmic Soul was known in Greece as Chrestos, in the sublime wisdom of the East as Budhi. When a man no longer feels himself a single being, as the bearer of an individual soul, but experiences something of the universal Soul, he has created within himself an image of the union of the Sun-Soul with the human body and he has attained something of the very greatest significance in the evolution of mankind.

If we think of these men with all their nobility of soul, we shall be able to some extent to visualise the future of the human race and the relation of the future to the ideal of mankind generally. As humanity is to-day, decisions are arrived at by individuals who amid quarrelling and strife finally reach a measure of unity in majority-resolutions. When such resolutions are still regarded as the ideal, this is evidence that men have not realised what truth really is. Where in us does truth exist? Truth lives in that realm of our being where we think logically. It would be nonsense to decide by a majority vote that 2 x 2 = 4, or that 3 x 4 = 12. When man has once realised what is true, millions may come and tell him it is not so, that it is this or it is that, but he will still have his own inner certainty.

We have reached this point in the realm of scientific thinking, of thinking upon which human passions, impulses and instincts no longer impinge. Wherever passions and instincts mingle with thinking, men still find themselves involved in strife and dispute, in wild confusion, for the life of instincts and impulses is itself a seething chaos. When, however, impulses, instincts and passions have been purged and transmuted into what is known as Budhi or Chrestos, when they have developed to the level at which logical, dispassionate thinking stands to-day, then the ideal of the ancient wisdom, the ideal of Christianity, the ideal of Anthroposophy will be realised. It will then be as unnecessary to vote about what is held to be good, ideal and right as it is to vote about what has been recognised as logically right or logically wrong.

This ideal can stand before the soul of every human being and then he has before him the ideal of the Sun Hero, the ideal to which every aspirant at the sixth stage of Initiation has attained. The German Mystics of the Middle Ages felt this and expressed it in the word ‘Vergöttung’—deification. This word existed in all the wisdom-religions, What does it signify? Let me try to express it in the following way.—There was a time when those whom we look upon to-day as the ruling Spirits of the universe also passed through a stage at which mankind as a whole now stands -the stage of chaos. These ruling Spirits have wrestled through to the divine heights from which their forces stream through the harmonies of the universe. The regularity with which the Sun moves through the seasons, the regularity manifested in the growth of plants and in the life of animals—this regularity was once chaos. Harmony has been attained at the cost of great travail. Humanity stands to-day within the same kind of chaos but out of the chaos there will arise a harmony modelled in the likeness of the harmony in the universe.

When this thought takes root in our souls, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as living insight, then we shall understand what Christmas signifies in the light of anthroposophical teaching. If the glory, the revelation of the divine harmony in the heavenly heights is a real experience within us, and if we know that this harmony will one day resound from our own souls, then we can also feel what will be brought about in humanity itself by this harmony: peace among men of good-will. These are the two thoughts or, better, the two feelings which arise at Christmastide. When with this great vista of the divine ordering of the world, of the revelation, the glory of the heavens, we think of the future lying before mankind, we have a premonition even now of that harmony which in the future will reign in those who know that the more abundantly the harmony of the Cosmos fills the soul, the more peace and concord there will be upon the Earth. The great ideal of Peace stands there before us when at Christmas we contemplate the course of the Sun. And when we think about the victory of the Sun over the darkness during these days of Festival there is born in us an unshakable conviction which makes our own evolving soul akin to the harmony of the cosmos—light over the darkness had always been commemorated.¹ And so Christianity is in harmony with all the great world-religions. When the Christmas bells ring out, they are a reminder to us that this Festival was celebrated all over the world, wherever human beings knew what it signified, wherever they understood the great truth that the soul of man is involved in a process of development and progress on this Earth, wherever in the truest sense man strove to reach self-knowledge.

We have been speaking to-day, not of an undefined, abstract feeling for Nature but of a feeling that is full of life and spirituality. And if we think of what has been said in connection with Goethe's words: “Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by thee ...” it is quite obvious that we are not speaking here in any materialistic sense, but that we see in Nature the outward expression, the countenance of the Divine Spirit of the Cosmos. Just as the physical is born out of the physical, so are the soul and the Spirit born out of the Divine Soul and the Divine Spirit. The body is connected with purely material forces and the soul and Spirit with forces akin to their own nature. The great Festivals exist as tokens that these things must be understood in their connection with the whole universe; our powers of thinking must be used in such a way that we realise our oneness with the whole universe. When this insight lives within us, the Festivals will change their present character and become living realities in our hearts and souls. They will be points of focus in the year uniting us with the all-pervading Spirit of the universe.

Throughout the year we fulfil the common tasks and duties of daily life, and at these times of Festival we turn our attention to the links which bind us with eternity. And although daily life is fraught with many a struggle, at these times a feeling awakens within us that above all the strife and turmoil there is peace and harmony.

Festivals are the commemoration of great Ideals, and Christmas is the birth feast of the very greatest Ideal before mankind, of that Ideal which man must strain every nerve to attain if he is to fulfil his mission. The birth festival of all that man can feel, perceive and will—such is Christmas when it is truly understood.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to stimulate a true and deep understanding of the Christmas Festival. We do not want to promulgate a dogma or a doctrine, or a philosophy. Our aim is that everything we say and teach, everything that is contained in our writings, in our science, shall pass over into life itself.

When in all that pertains to his daily life man applies spiritual wisdom, life will be filled with it and from all pulpits, far and wide, godlike wisdom, the living wisdom of the Spirit will resound in the words that are spoken to the ‘faithful.’ It will then be unnecessary to utter the actual words ‘Spiritual Science’ at all. When in Courts of Law the deeds of human beings are viewed with the eyes of spiritual perception, when at the bed of sickness the doctor spiritually perceives and spiritually heals, when in the schools the teacher brings spiritual knowledge to the growing child, when in the very streets men think and feel and act spiritually, then we shall have reached our Ideal, for Spiritual Science will have become common knowledge. Then too there will be a spiritual understanding of the great turning-points of the year and the everyday experiences of man will be truly linked with the spiritual world. The Immortal and the Eternal, the spiritual Sun will flood the soul with light at the great Festivals which will remind man of the divine Self within him. The divine Self, in essence like the Sun, and radiant with light, will prevail over darkness and chaos and will give to his soul a peace by which all the strife, all the war and all the discord in the world will be quelled.

• 1. We cannot here enter into the details of the wisdom-teachings of Christianity itself which will form the subject of a later lecture. But this much shall be said to-day: that nothing could be more correct than to place at this time the Birth Festival of that divine Individuality Who is to the Christian a guarantee and an assurance that his divine soul will ultimately prevail over the darkness in the outer world.

THE Festival of Christmas which we shall soon be celebrating acquires new life when a deeper, more spiritual conception of the world is brought to bear upon it. In a spiritual sense the Christmas Festival is a Festival of the Sun, and as such we shall think of it to-day. To begin with, let us listen to the beautiful apostrophe to the sun which Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust:—

Life's pulses newly-quickened now awaken,
Softly to greet the ethereal twilight leaping;
Thou Earth through this night too hast stood unshaken,
And at my feet fresh breathest from thy sleeping.
Thou girdest me about with gladness, priming
My soul to stern resolve and strenuous keeping,
Onward to strive, to highest life still climbing.—
Unfolded lies the world in twilight-shimmer;
With thousand throated song the woods are chiming;
The dales, where through the mist-wreaths wind, lie dimmer,
Yet heavenly radiance plumbs the deeps unnumbered,
And bough and twig, new-quickened, bud and glimmer
Forth from the fragrant depths where sunk they slumbered,
Whilst hue on hue against the gloom still heightens,
Where bloom and blade with quivering pearls are cumbered.
A very Paradise about me lightens!

Look up!—The giant peaks that rise supernal
Herald the solemn hour; for them first brightens
The early radiance of the light eternal,
Upon us valley-dwellers later showered.

Now are the green-sunk, Alpine meadows vernal
With radiance new and new distinctness dowered,
And stepwise downward hath the splendour thriven.
He sallies forth, and I mine overpowered
And aching eyes to turn away am driven.

Thus when a yearning hope, from fear and wonder
Up to the highest wish in trust hath striven,
The portals of fulfilment yawn asunder.
Then bursts from yonder depths whose days ne'er dwindle
Excess of flame—we stand as smit with thunder.
The torch of life it was we sought to kindle,
A sea of fire-and what a fire!—hath penned us.
Is't Love? Is't Hate? that yonder glowing spindle
In bliss and bale alternating tremendous
About us twines, till we the dazed beholders
To veil our gaze in Earth's fresh mantle wend us.

Nay then, the sun shall bide behind my shoulders!
The cataract, that through the gorge doth thunder,
I'll watch with growing rapture, 'mid the boulders
From plunge to plunge down-rolling, rent asunder
In thousand thousand streams, aloft that shower
Foam upon hissing foam, the depths from under.
Yet blossoms from this storm a radiant flower;
The painted rainbow bends its changeful being,
Now lost in air, now limned with clearest power,
Shedding this fragrant coolness round us fleeing.
Its rays an image of man's efforts render;
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour.

(Translation by Latham)

Goethe lets these words be spoken by Faust, the representative of humanity, as he gazes at the radiant morning sun. But the Festival of which we are now to speak has to do with a Sun belonging to a far deeper realm of being than the sun which rises anew every morning. And it is this deeper Sun that will be the guiding moth in our thoughts to-day.

And now we will listen to words in which the deepest import of the Christmas Mystery is mirrored. In all ages these words resounded in the ears of those who were pupils of the Mysteries—before they were allowed to participate in the Mysteries themselves:—

Die Sonne schaue
Um mitternächtige Stunde.
Mit Steinen baue
Im lebenlose Grunde.
So finde im Niedergang
Und in des Todes Nacht
Der Schöpfung neuen Anfang,
Des Morgens junge Macht.

Die Höhen lass offenbaren
Der Götter ewiges Wort,
Die Tiefen sollen bewahren
Den friedensvollen Hort.
Im Dunkel lebend
Erschaffe eine Sonne.
Im Stoffe webend
Erkenne Geisteswonne.

Behold the Sun
At tire midnight hour;
Build with stones in the lifeless ground,
Thus in decay and in the night of Death
Find the Creation's new beginning,
Young morning's strength;
Glory in the heights the eternal Word of Gods;
Shelter in the depths the Powers of Peace.
In darkness dwelling, create a Sun.
In matter weaving, know the joy of Spirit!

Many to whom the Christmas Tree with its candles is a familiar sight to-day, believe that it is a very ancient institution—but this is not the case. The Christmas Tree is a very recent European custom, dating no further back than about a hundred years or so. Although, however, the Christmas Tree is a recent custom, the Christmas Festival is very ancient. It was celebrated in the earliest Mysteries of all religions, not as a festival of the outer sun but as one which awakens in men an inkling of the very wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated every year by the highest Initiates in the Mysteries, at the time of the year when the sun sends least power to the earth, bestows least warmth. But it was also celebrated by those who might not yet participate in the whole festival, who might witness only the outer, pictorial expression of the highest Mysteries. This imagery has been preserved through the ages, varying in form according to the several creeds.

The Christmas Festival is the Festival of the Holy Night, celebrated in the Mysteries by those who were ready for the awakening of the higher Self within them, or, as we should say in our time, those who have brought the Christ to birth within them.

Only those who have no inkling of the fact that as well as the chemical and physical forces, spiritual forces are also at work and that the workings of both kinds of forces take effect at definite times and seasons in cosmic life, can imagine that the moment of the awakening of the higher Self in man is of no importance. In the Greater Mysteries man beheld the forces working through all existence; he saw the world around him filled with spirit, with spiritual Beings; he beheld the world of spirit around him, radiant with light and colour. There can be no more sublime experience than this and in due time it will come to everyone. Although for some it may be only after many incarnations, nevertheless the moment will come for all men when Christ will be resurrected within them and new vision, new hearing will awaken. In preparation for the awakening, the pupils in the Mysteries were first taught of the cosmic significance of this awakening and only then was the sacred Act itself performed. It took place at the time when darkness on the earth is greatest, when the external sun gives out least light and warmth—at Christmas time—because those who are cognisant of the spiritual facts know that at this time of the year, forces that are favourable for such an awakening stream through cosmic space. During his preparation the pupil was told that one who would be a true knower must have knowledge not only of what has been happening on the earth for thousands and thousands of years but must also be able to survey the whole course of the evolution of humanity, realising that the great festivals have their own, essential place within that evolution and must be dedicated to contemplation of the eternal truths. The pupil's gaze was directed to the time when our earth was not as it is now, when there was no sun, no moon out yonder in the heavens, but both were still united with the earth, when earth, sun and moon formed one body. Even then man was already in existence, but he had no body; he was still a spiritual being. No sunlight fell from outside upon these spiritual beings, for the sunlight was within the earth itself. This was not the sunlight that shines from outside upon objects and beings to-day, but it was inner sunlight that glowed within all beings of the earth. Then came the time when the sun separated from the earth, when its light shone down upon the earth from the universe outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth and inner darkness came upon man. This was the beginning of his evolution towards that future when the inner light will again be radiant within him. Man must learn to know the things of the earth with his outer senses; he evolves to the stage where the higher Man, Spirit-Man, again glows and shines within him. From light, through darkness, to light—such is the path of the evolution of mankind.

The pupils of the Mysteries were prepared by these constantly inculcated teachings. Then they were led to the actual awakening. This was the moment when, as chosen ones, they experienced the spiritual Light within them; their eyes of spirit were opened. This sacred moment came when the outer light was weakest, when the outer sun was shining with least strength. On that day the pupils were called together and the inner Light revealed itself to them. To those who were not yet ready to participate in this sacred enactment, it was presented as a picture which made them realise: For you too the great moment will come; to-day you see a picture only; later on, what you now see as a picture will be an actual experience. Thus it was in the lesser Mysteries. Pictures were presented of what the candidate for initiation was subsequently to experience as reality. To-day we shall hear of the enactments in the lesser Mysteries. Everywhere it was the same: in the Egyptian Mysteries, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the Mysteries of Asia Minor, of Babylon and Chaldea, as well as in the Mithras-cult and in the Indian Mysteries of Brahman. Everywhere the same experiences were undergone by the pupils of these Mysteries at the midnight hour of the Holy Night.

Early on the previous evening the pupils gathered together. In quiet contemplation they were to be made aware of the meaning and import of this momentous happening. Silently and in darkness they sat together. When the midnight hour drew near they had been for long hours in the darkened chamber, steeped in the contemplation of eternal truths. Then, towards midnight, mysterious tones, now louder, now gentler, resounded through the space around them. Hearing these tones, the pupils knew: This is the Music of the Spheres. Then a faint light began to glimmer from an illumined disc. Those who gazed at it knew that this disc represented the earth. The illumined disc became darker and darker—until finally it was quite black. At the same time the surrounding space grew brighter. Again the pupils knew: the black disc represents the earth; the sun, which otherwise radiates light to the earth, is hidden; the earth can see the sun no longer. Then, ring upon ring, rainbow colours appeared around the earth-disc and those who saw it knew: This is the radiant Iris. At midnight, in the place of the black earth-disc, a violet-reddish orb gradually became visible, on which a word was inscribed, varying according to the peoples whose members were permitted to experience this Mystery. With us, the word would be Christos. Those who gazed at it knew: It is the sun which appears at the midnight hour, when the world around lies at rest in deep darkness. The pupils were now told that they had experienced what was known in the Mysteries as "seeing the sun at midnight."

He who is truly initiated experiences the sun at midnight, for in him the material is obliterated: the sun of the Spirit alone lives within him, dispelling with its light the darkness of matter. The most holy of all moments in the evolution of man is that in which he experiences the truth that he lives in eternal light, freed from the darkness. In the Mysteries, this moment was represented pictorially, year by year, at the midnight hour of the Holy Night. The picture imaged forth the truth that as well as the physical sun there is a Spiritual Sun which, like the physical sun, must be born out of the darkness. In order that the pupils might realise this even more intensely, after they had experienced the rising of the spiritual Sun, of the Christos, they were taken into a cave in which there seemed to be nothing but stone, nothing but dead, lifeless matter. But springing out of the stones they saw ears of corn as tokens of life, indicating symbolically that out of apparent death, life arises, that life is born from the dead stone. Then it was said to them: Just as from this day onwards the power of the sun awakens anew after it seemed to have died, so does new life forever spring from the dying.

The same truth is indicated in the Gospel of St. John in the words: "He must increase, but I must decrease!" John, the herald of the coming Christ, of the spiritual Light, he whose festival day in the course of the year falls at midsummer—this John must ‘decrease’ and in this decreasing there grows the power of the coming spiritual Light, increasing in strength in the measure in which John ‘decreases.’ Thus is the new life, prepared in the seed-grain which must wither and decay in order that the new plant may come into being. The pupils of the Mysteries were to realise that within death, life is resting, that out of the decaying and the dying the new flowers and fruits of spring arise in splendour, that the earth teems with the powers of birth. They were to learn that at this point of time something is happening in the innermost being of the earth: the overcoming of death by life, by the life that is present in death. This was portrayed to them in the picture of the Light gradually conquering the darkness; this is what they experienced as they saw the Light beginning to shine in the darkness. In the rocky cave they beheld the Light that rays forth in strength and glory from what is seemingly dead. Thus were the pupils led on to believe in the power of life, in what may be called man's highest Ideal. Thus did they learn to look upwards to this supreme Ideal of humanity, to the time when the earth shall have completed its evolution, when the Light will shine forth in all mankind. The physical earth itself will then fall into dust, but the spiritual essence will remain with all human beings who have been made inwardly radiant by the spiritual Light. And the earth and humanity will then waken into a higher existence, into a new phase of existence.

When Christianity came into being it bore this Ideal within it. Man felt that the Christos would arise in him as the representative of the spiritual re-birth, as the great Ideal of all humanity and moreover that the birth takes place in the Holy Night, at the time when the darkness is greatest, as a sign and token that out of the darkness of matter a higher Man can be born in the human soul.

Before men spoke of the Christos, they spoke in the ancient Mysteries of a ‘Sun Hero’ who embodied the same Ideal which, in Christianity, was embodied in the Christos. Just as the sun completes its orbit in the course of the year, as its warmth seems to withdraw from the earth and then again streams forth, as in its seeming death it holds life and pours it forth anew, so it was with the Sun Hero, who through the power of his spiritual life had gained the victory over death, night and darkness. In the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. First, the degree of the Ravens who might approach only as far as the portal of the temple of Initiation. They were the channels between the outer world of material life and the inner world of the spiritual life; they did not belong entirely to the material world but neither, as yet, to the spiritual world. We find these ‘Ravens’ again and again; everywhere they are the messengers who pass hither and thither between the two worlds, bringing tidings. We find them too, in our German sagas and myths: the Ravens of Wotan, the Ravens who fly around the Kyffhäuser. At the second degree the disciple was led from the portal into the interior of the temple. There he was made ready for the third degree, the degree of the Warrior who went out to make known before the world the occult truths imparted to him in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the Lion, was reached by one whose consciousness was no longer confined within the bounds of individuality, but extended over a whole tribal stock. For this reason Christ was called "the Lion of the stem of David." To the fifth degree belonged a man whose still wider consciousness embraced a whole people. He was an Initiate of the fifth degree. He no longer bore a name of his own but was called by the name of his people. Thus men spoke of the ‘Persian,’ of the ‘Israelite.’ We understand now why Nathaniel was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of Initiation. The sixth degree was that of the Sun Hero. We must understand the meaning of this appellation. Then we shall realise what awe and reverence surged through the soul of a pupil of the Mysteries who knew of the existence of a Sun Hero. He was able in the Holy Night to participate in the festival of the birth of a Sun Hero.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course: the stars, as well as the sun, follow a regular rhythm. Were the sun to abandon this rhythm even for a moment, an upheaval of untold magnitude would take place in the universe. Rhythm holds sway in the whole of nature, up to the level of man. Then, and only then is there a change. The rhythm which through the course of the year holds sway in the forces of growth, of propagation and so forth, ceases when we come to man. For man is to have his roots in freedom; and the more highly civilised he is, the more does this rhythm decline. As the light disappears at Christmas-time, so has rhythm apparently departed from the life of man: chaos prevails. But man must give birth again to rhythm out of his innermost being, his own initiative. By the exercise of his own will he must so order his life that it flows in rhythm, immutable and sure; his life must take its course with the regularity of the sun. Just as a change of the sun's orbit is inconceivable, it is equally inconceivable that the rhythm of such a life can be broken. The Sun Hero was regarded as the embodiment of this inalterable rhythm; through the power of the higher Man within him, he was able to direct the rhythm of the course of his own life. And this Sun Hero, this higher Man, was born in the Holy Night. In this sense, Christ Jesus is a Sun Hero and was conceived as such in the first centuries of Christendom. Hence the festival of His birth was instituted at the time of the year when, since ancient days, the festival of the birth of the Sun Hero had been celebrated. Hence, too, all that was associated with the history of the life of Christ Jesus; the Mass at midnight celebrated by the early Christians in the depths of caves was in remembrance of the festival of the sun. In this Mass an ocean of light streamed forth at midnight out of the darkness as a remembrance of the rising of the spiritual Sun in the Mysteries. Hence the birth of Christ in the cave—again a remembrance of the cave of rock out of which life was born—life symbolised by the ears of corn. As earthly life was born out of the dead stone, so out of the depths was born the Highest—Christ Jesus. Associated with the festival of His nativity was the legend of the three Priest-Sages, the Three Kings. They bring to the Child: gold, the symbol of the outer, wisdom-filled man; myrrh, the symbol of the victory of life over death; and frankincense the symbol of the cosmic ether in which the Spirit lives.

And so in the whole content of the Christmas Festival we feel something echoing from primeval ages. It has come over to us in the imagery belonging to Christianity. The symbols of Christianity are reflections of the most ancient symbols used by man. The lighted Christmas Tree is one of them. For us it is a symbol of the Tree of Paradise, representing all-embracing material nature. Spiritual Nature is represented by the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

There is a legend which gives expression to the true meaning of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Seth stands before the Gate of Paradise, craving entry. The Cherubim guarding the entrance with a fiery sword, allow him to pass. This is a sign of Initiation. In Paradise, Seth finds the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge firmly intertwined. The Archangel Michael who stands in the presence of God, allows him to take three grains of seed from this intertwined Tree. The Tree stands there as a prophetic indication of the future of mankind. When the whole of mankind has attained Initiation and found knowledge, then only the Tree of Life will remain, there will be no more death. But in the meantime only he who is an Initiate may take from this Tree the three grains of seed -the three seeds which symbolise the three higher members of man's being. When Adam died, Seth placed these three grains of seed in his mouth and out of them grew a flaming bush. From the wood cut from this bush, new sprouts, new leaves burst ever and again. But within the flaming ring around the bush there was written: "I am He who was, who is, who is to be"—in other words, that which passes through all incarnations, the power of ever-evolving man who descends out of the light into the darkness and out of the darkness ascends into the light.

The staff with which Moses performed his miracles is cut from the wood of the bush; the door of Solomon's Temple is made of it; the wood is carried to the waters of the pool of Bethesda and from it the pool receives the healing properties of which we are told. And from this same wood the Cross of Christ Jesus is made, the wood of the Cross which is a symbol of life that passes into death and yet has within it the power to bring forth new life. The great symbol of worlds stands before us here: Life the conqueror of Death. The wood of this Cross has grown out of the three grains of seed of the Tree of Paradise.

The Rose Cross is also a symbol of the death of the lower nature and the resurrection of the higher. Goethe expressed the same thought in the words:

"As long as thou best it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou'rt but a dreary guest
Upon the dark earth."

The Tree of Paradise and the wood of the Cross are connected in a most wonderful way. Even though the Cross is always an Easter symbol, it deepens our conception of the Christmas Mystery too. We feel how in this night of Christ's Nativity, new, upwelling life streams towards us, This thought is indicated in the fresh roses adorning this Tree; they say to us: the Tree of the Holy Night has not yet become the wood of the Cross but the power to become that wood is beginning to arise in it. The Roses, growing out of the green, are a symbol of the Eternal which springs from the Temporal.

The square is the symbol of the fourfold nature of man; physical body, ether-body, astral body and ego.

The triangle is the symbol for Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man.

Above the triangle is the symbol for Tarok. Those who were initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries knew how to interpret this sign. They knew too, how to read the Book of Thoth, consisting of 78 leaves on which were inscribed all happenings in the world from the beginning to the end, from Alpha to Omega and which could be read if the signs were rightly put together. These pictures gave expression to the life that dies and then springs again to new life. Whoever could combine the right numbers with the right pictures, were able to read the Book. This wisdom of numbers and of pictures had been taught from time immemorial. In the Middle Ages it was still in the fore ground although little of it survives to-day.

Above this symbol is the Tao—the sign that is a reminder of the conception of the Divine held by our early forefathers; it comes from the word: TAO. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were scenes of human civilisation, these early forefathers of ours lived on the continent of Atlantis which was finally submerged by mighty floods. In the Germanic sagas of Nifelheim or Nebelheim, the memory of Atlantis still lives. For Atlantis was not surrounded by pure air. Vast cloud-masses moved over the land, like those to be seen to-day clustering around the peaks of high mountains. The sun and moon did not shine clearly in the heavens—they were surrounded by rainbows—by the sacred Iris. At that time man understood the language of nature. To-day he no longer understands what speaks to him in the rippling of waves, in the noise of winds, in the rustling of leaves, in the rolling of thunder—but in old Atlantis he understood it. He felt it all as a reality. And within these voices of clouds and waters and leaves and winds a sound rang forth: TAO—That am I. The man of Atlantis heard and understood it, feeling that Tao pervaded the whole universe.

Finally, the cosmic symbol of Man is the pentagram, hanging at the top of the tree. Of the deepest meaning of the pentagram we may not now speak. But it is the star of humanity, of evolving humanity; it is the star that all wise men follow, as did the Priest-Sages of old. It symbolises the very essence and meaning of earth-existence. It comes to birth in the Holy Night because the greatest Light shines forth from the deepest Darkness. Man is living on towards a state where the Light is to be born in him, where words full of significance will be replaced by others equally significant, where it will no longer be said: ‘The Darkness comprehendeth not the Light,’ but when the truth will ring out from cosmic space: The Darkness gives way before the Light that shines in the Star of Humanity—and now the Darkness comprehendeth the Light!

This should resound and the spiritual Light ray forth from the Christmas Festival. We will celebrate this Christmas Festival as the Festival of the supreme Ideal of mankind, for then it will bring to birth in our souls the joyful confidence: I too shall experience the birth of the higher Man within me! In me too the birth of the Saviour, the birth of the Christos will take place!

Positions of the symbols on the Christmas Tree

The basis of our consideration today may seem a weird arrangement to somebody: on one side Tolstoy, on the other side Carnegie, two personalities about whom probably some say, more different, more opposite persons one can hardly find. On one side, the solver of riddles of the highest social and spiritual problems searching from the depths of spiritual life—Tolstoy; and on the other side the steel tycoon, the rich man, the man about whom one knows literally hardly more than that he thought about how the accumulated wealth is to be used best of all—Carnegie. Then again the arrangement of both persons with spiritual science or anthroposophy.

Indeed, with Tolstoy nobody probably doubts that one can illumine the depths of his soul with the light of spiritual science. However, with Carnegie some probably say, what has this man to do generally with spiritual science, this man of the only practical, business work?—Spiritual science would be the grey theory, the unrealistic and life-hostile worldview as one regards it is so often, if it does not care a little about the issues of practical life, as one believes sometimes. Therefore, it could appear weird that just such a man of practical life is adduced to illustrate certain issues. If one has understood that this spiritual science is something that can flow into all single fields, yes, into the most mundane fields of practical life, then one does not consider it as something surprising that also this personality is adduced to illustrate something that should be just illustrated within spiritual science. Secondly—to speak in the sense of Emerson—we have two representative personalities of our time before ourselves. The one like the other expresses the whole striving on the one side, the work on the other side typically, as they prevail in our time. Just the opposite of the whole development of personality and soul is so characteristic with these both men on one side for the variety of life and work in our time, on the other side, nevertheless, again for the basic nerve, the real goals of our present.

We have, on one side, Tolstoy who has grown out of a distinguished class, of wealth and abundance, of a life sphere in which everything is included that external life can offer as comfort and convenience. He is a human being whom his soul development has brought almost to proclaim the worthlessness of all he got with birth, not only to himself, but also to the whole humankind like a Gospel. We have the American steel tycoon on the other side, a personality that has grown out of hardship and misery, grown out of a life sphere where nothing at all exists of that which external life can offer as convenience and comfort. A person who had to earn dollar by dollar and who ascended to the biggest wealth, who got around in the course of his soul development to regarding this accumulation of wealth as something absolutely normal for the present and to thinking only about it how this accumulated wealth is to be used to the welfare and happiness of humankind. What Tolstoy never desired when he had reached the summit of his soul development he had it abundantly in the beginning of his life. The external goods of life that Carnegie had abundantly acquired last were refused to him in the beginning of his life. This is the expression of their natures, even if in exterior way, however, the characteristic of both personalities to a certain extent at the same time. What can take action with a person in our time, what one can reflect of these external processes in and around the personality shows us with both what prevails in our present in the undergrounds of the social and mental existence generally. We see Tolstoy, as said, born out of a sphere of life in which everything existed that one can call comfort, wealth, and refinement of life. Of course, we can deal only quite cursorily with his life, because today it concerns of characterising our time in these representative personalities and of recognising their needs in a certain way.

In 1828, Leo Tolstoy is born in a family of Russian counts about which he himself says that the family immigrated originally from Germany. Then we see Tolstoy losing certain higher goods of life. Hardly he is one and a half years old, he loses the mother, the father in the ninth year. Then he grows up under the care of a relative who is, so to speak, the embodied love, and from her spiritual condition, the marvellous soul condition had to flow in his soul like by itself. However, on the other side, another relative who wants to build up him out of the viewpoints of her circles, out of the conditions of time as they formed in certain circles influences him. She is a person who is completely merged in the outward world activity which later became very odious to Tolstoy and against which he fought so hard. We see this personality striving from the outset to make Tolstoy a person “comme il faut,” a person who could treat his farmers in such a way, as it was necessary in those days, who should receive title, rank, dignity, and medals and should play a suitable role in the society.

Then we see Tolstoy coming to the university; he is a bad student as he absolutely thinks that everything that the professors say at the University of Kazan is nothing worth knowing. Only oriental languages can occupy him. In all other matters, he was not interested. Against it the comparison of a certain chapter of the code of Catherine the Great (1729–1796) with The Spirit of the Laws (1748) by Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat, Baron de M., 1689–1755) attracted him. Then he tries repeatedly to manage his estate, and we see him almost getting around to diving head first into the life of luxury of a man of his circles, diving head first into all possible vices and vanities of life. We see him becoming a gambler, gambling big sums away. However, he has hours within this life over and over again when his own activities disgust him, actually. We see him meeting peers as well as men of letters and leading a life, which he calls a worthless, even perishable one at moments of reflection. However, we also see—and this is important to him who looks with pleasure at the development of the soul where this development manifests in especially typical signs—particular peculiarities appearing with him in the development of his soul which can disclose us already in the earliest youth what is, actually, in this soul.

Thus, it is of immense significance, what a deep impression a certain event makes on Tolstoy at the age of eleven years. A friendly boy once told him that one has made an important discovery, a new invention. One has found—and a teacher has spoken in particular of the fact—that there is no God that this God is only an empty invention of many human beings, an empty picture of thought. Everything that one can know about the impression that this boy's experience made on Tolstoy shows already how he absorbed it that in him a soul struggled striving for the highest summits of human existence.

However, this soul was weird in other ways as well. Those people who like to state outer appearances and do not pay attention to that in the soul, which emerges from the centre as the actual individual through all outer obstacles, they ignore and do not pay attention to anything in such youth experiences that has different effects on the one soul and on the other one. In particular, one has to pay attention if a soul shows a disposition in the earliest youth that one could pronounce with the nice sentence of Goethe in the second part of his Faust: “I love the man who wants what cannot be.” This sentence says a lot. A soul, which desires, so to speak, something that is obvious foolishness to the philistine view, such a soul, if it appears in its first youth as such, shows the width of the scope of view just by such peculiarities. Thus, one must not ignore it, if Tolstoy tells such things in one of his first writings, in which he gives reflections of his own development.

We are not allowed to ignore when he says there things, which were absolutely valid for him, for example, when he shaved off his eyebrows and defaced his not very extensive beauty in such a way for a while. This is something that one can regard as a big outlandishness. However, if one thinks about it, it becomes an indication. Another example is that the boy imagines that the human being can fly if he presses the arms against the knees rather stiffly. If he did this, he would be able to fly, he thinks. He goes up once in the second floor and jumps out of the window, retaining the heels. He is saved like by a miracle and carries off nothing but a little concussion, which compensates one another by an 18-hour sleep again. He proved for his surroundings with it to be a strange boy. However, someone who wants to observe the soul and knows what it means to go out in his soul in the earliest youth from the track, which is predetermined on the left and on the right, does not disregard features in the life of a young person. Thus, this soul seems to be great and to have many talents from the start. Hence, we can understand that he was fulfilled with a certain disgust of himself when he was tired of the debaucheries of life, which were due to his social rank, in particular after a gamble affair.

When he goes then to the Caucasus, we can understand that there his soul becomes fond of the simple Cossacks, of those people whom he gets to know and recognises that they have, actually, quite different souls than all those people whom he had got to know up to now basically. All the principles of his peers appeared to him so unnatural. Everything that he had believed up to now seemed to him so strange, so separated from the original source of existence. However, the human beings, whom he got to know now, were people whose souls had grown together with the sources of nature like the tree by the roots with the sources of nature, like the flower with the liquid of the ground. It impressed him enormously that they were grown together with nature, that they had not become foreign to the sources of existence, that they were beyond good and evil in their circles.

In 1854, when he became a soldier, full of zest for action, to take part in the Crimean War, we see him with the most intensive devotion studying the whole soul life of the simple soldier. However, we see now a more specified feeling taking place in Tolstoy's soul, we see him being deeply moved by the naturalness of the simple human being on the one side, on the other side, also by the misery, poverty, the tortures, and depression of the simple human being. We see how he is fulfilled with love and desire to help, and that the highest ideals of human happiness, human welfare, and progress flash as shades in his mind, how he realises completely on the other side that the natural human beings cannot understand his ideals. This causes a conflict in his soul, something that does not allow him to penetrate to the basic core of his being.

Thus, he is thrown back repeatedly from that life he leads and in which he is thrown just with the Danube army from one extreme to the other. A superior says, he is a golden human being whom one can never forget again. He works like a soul that pours out goodness only and, on the other hand, has the ability to amuse the others in the most difficult situations. Everything is different if he is there. If he is not there, everybody hangs his head. If he has plunged into life, he comes back with a terrible remorse, with awful regret to the camp. Between such moods, this great soul was thrown back and forth. From these moods and experiences those views and pictorial descriptions of his literary career come, which caused, for example, the most accepting review even from Turgenev (Ivan T., 1818–1883, Russian author), and which have found recognition everywhere. However, we see at the same time how in a certain way beside the real centre, the centre of his soul, always he looks at the big strength, at the basic spring of life, how he struggles for the concepts of truth and human progress. However, he cannot help saying at a being together with Turgenev: you all do not have, actually, what one calls conviction. You talk, actually, only to hide your conviction.

One can say, life made his soul feel low, bringing it into heavy, bitter conflicts. Indeed, something most serious should yet come. At the end of the fifties, one of his brothers fell ill and died. Tolstoy had often seen death in war, had often looked at dying human beings, but he had not yet realised the problem of life to such extent as at the sight of the beloved dying brother. Tolstoy was not so fulfilled at that time with philosophical or religious contents that these contents could have supported him. He was in such a basic mood that expressed itself towards death possibly in such a way that he said, I am incapable to give life a goal. I see life decreasing, I see it running in my peers worthlessly; they do things which are not worth to be done. If one strings up an event to the other and forms ever so long rows, nothing valuable results.—At that time, he could also not see any contents and life goal in the fact that the lower social classes were in distress and misery.

He said to himself at that time, such a life whose sense one searches in vain is finished by the futility of death and if the life of everybody and any animal ends in the futility of death, who is generally able to speak about the meaning of life? Sometimes, Tolstoy had already set himself the goal to strive for perfection of his soul, to search contents for the soul. He had not advanced so far that any contents of life could be roused in the soul even from the spirit. Therefore, the sight of death had put the riddle of life in such horrible figure before his spiritual eye.

We see him travelling in Europe just in the same time. We see him visiting the most interesting cities of Europe—in France, Italy, Germany. We see him getting to know some valuable persons. He gets to know Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860, German philosopher) personally shortly before his death, he gets to know Liszt (1811–1882, Austrian-Hungarian composer) and still some others, some luminaries of science and art. He gets to know something of the social life, gets to know the court life at Weimar. Everything was accessible to him; however, he looks at everything with eyes from which the attitude looks that has just been characterised. From all that he had gained only one: as well as it is at home, in the circles, which he has grown out of, it is also in Western Europe.

Now a goal faces him in particular. He wanted to found a kind of model school, and he founded it in his hometown where every pupil should learn after his talents where it should not be a stencil. We cannot get involved with the description of the pedagogic principles, which one used there. However, this must be stressed that he had an ideal of education in mind, which should meet the individuality of the child.

We see a kind of interregnum taking place, where in certain way the stormy soul experiences a kind of standstill, that soul in which the problems and the questions followed in rapid succession, into which the sensations and emotions have flowed in contradicting way. A calmer life prevails in it. This time begins with the marriage in the sixties. It was the time from which the great novels come in which he gave the comprising tremendous pictures of the social life of the present and the previous time: War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1873–1877). So much has flowed in from that which he had learnt onto these works.

Thus, he lived until the seventies of the last century. Then comes a time of his life where he faces a crucial decision where all qualms, doubts, and problems come to life again which prevailed once like from dark spiritual depths.

A comparison, a picture that he forms is rather typical of what his soul experienced. One needs to visualise this picture only and to know that it means quite another matter to a soul like Tolstoy's soul, as for another soul that is much more superficial. You need to visualise this picture only, and you can deeply look into the mind of Tolstoy. He compares his own life to an Eastern fable, which he tells possibly in such a way:

There is a man, pursued by a beast. He flees, finds a dried out well and plunges into it to escape from the beast. He holds fast onto the branches, which have grown out on the sides of the well wall. In this way, he thinks he is protected against the pursuing monster. However, in the depth, he sees a dragon, and he has the feeling, he must be devoured by it if he gets tired only a little or if the branch breaks, onto which he holds fast. There he also sees on the leaves of the shrub some drops of honey from which he could feed himself. Nevertheless, at the same time he also sees mice gnawing away at the roots of the shrub onto which he holds fast.

Two things to which Tolstoy adhered were family love and art. For the rest, he considered life in such a way that all tantalising worries of life pursue him. He escapes one and is welcomed by the other monster. Then one sees mice gnawing away the few things that one still.—One must take the picture deeply enough to see what goes forward in such a soul, what is shown there and what Tolstoy experienced in all thinking, feeling and willing in the most extensive way. The branches still pleased him. However, he also found various things, which had to gnaw away at the delight in them. If the whole life is in such a way, that one cannot find sense in it, that one looks for the meaning of life in vain, what does it mean to have a family, to build up descendants to whom one transfers the same futility? This was also something he had in mind. And art? If life is worthless, what about art, the mirror of life? Can art be valuable if it only is able to reflect that in which one looks for sense in vain?

That just stood before his soul and burnt in him after an interregnum again. Where he looked around with all those who tried to fathom the meaning of life in great philosophies and in the most various worldviews, he nowhere found anything that could satisfy his searching. Recently it was in such a way that he turned his look to those people who were originally connected with the springs of life according to his opinion. These human beings had preserved a natural sense, a natural piety. He said to himself, the scholar who lives like me, who overestimates his reason finds nothing in all researching that could interpret the meaning of life to him. If I look at the usual human being who unites there in sects: he knows, why he lives, he knows the meaning of life. How does he know this, and how does he know the meaning of life? Because he experiences the sensation in himself, there is a will, the everlasting divine will as I call it. What lives in me devotes itself to the divine will. What I do from morning to evening is a part of the divine will. If I move the hands, I move them in the will of the divine. Without being brought by reason to abstractions, the hands move.—That faced him so peculiarly, that grasped him so intensely: if the human is deeply grasped in the soul. He said to himself, there are human beings who can answer the question of the meaning of life to themselves that they can use.

It is even magnificent how he contrasts these simple human beings with those who he got to know in his surroundings. Everything is thought out of the monumental of the paradigms. He says, I got to know people who did not understand to give life any meaning. They lived by force of habit, although they could gain no meaning of life, but I got to know those who committed suicide, because they could not find any meaning of life.—Tolstoy himself was before it.

Thus, he studied that category of human beings about whom he had to say to himself, it could not be talk of a meaning of life and of a life with a meaning. However, the human being, who is still connected with the sources of nature, whose soul is connected with the divine forces as the plant with the forces of life, can answer to the question: why do I live?—Therefore, Tolstoy came so far to search for a community with those simple human beings in the religious life. He became religious in certain way, although the outer forms made a repellent impression on him. He went to the Communion again. Now it was something in him that one can explain in such a way: he strove with all fibers of his soul to find and to feel a goal. Nevertheless, again his thinking and feeling impeded him everywhere in certain way. He was able to pray together with these human beings, who were believers in the naive sense and answered to the question of the meaning of life to themselves.

He could pray—and this is tremendously typical—up to the point of a uniform way of feeling. However, he was not able to go further when they prayed: we confess ourselves to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.—This made no sense to him. It is generally typical that he was able to come up to a certain point, looking for a religious life, which was based on brotherly feelings. This life in devoutness should produce a unity of feelings, unity of thoughts. However, he could not rise to the positive contents, the knowledge of the spirit, to the spiritual view, which gives reality. The traditional dogmatics meant nothing to him. He could not connect any sense with the words, which are given in the Trinity.

Thus, he came, while all these things flocked together, to the mature period of his life, to the period in which he tried to delve completely into that which he could call true, real Christianity. He strove in such a way, as if he had wanted to comprise, to penetrate the liveliness of Christ's soul with his own soul. With this spirit of Christ's soul, he wanted to penetrate himself. A worldview should arise from it, and from this something like a transformation of all present life should result which he subjected to harsh criticism. Because he believes now to feel in his soul, what Christ had thought and felt, he feels strong enough to issue a challenge to all ways of life, to all ways of feeling and thinking of the present. He criticised harshly that out of which he has grown and which he could see in the farther environment of his time. He feels strong enough to put up the demand, on the other side, to let the spirit of Christ prevail and to get out a renewal of all human life out of the spirit of Christ. With it, we have characterised, so to speak, his maturing soul and have seen this soul having grown out of that which many of our contemporaries call the summits of life. We have seen this soul getting around to harshly criticise the summits of life, and to putting as its next goal the renewal of the spirit of Christ which it finds strange to everything that lives presently, in the renewal of Christ's life which it nowhere finds in reality. Therefore, in certain sense, Tolstoy says no to the present and affirms what he calls the spirit of Christ, which he could not find in the present but only in the first times of Christianity. He had to go back to the historical sources, which came up to him. There we have a representative of our present who has grown out of the present, saying no to this present.

Now we have a look at the other man, who affirms most intensely, what Tolstoy denies most intensely, who reaches the same formula but applies it quite differently. There we see Carnegie, the Scotsman, growing out of that dividing line of modern times which we can characterise by the fact that trade, large-scale industry and the like sweep away the small trade from the social order. We really see Carnegie growing out of that dividing line of modern life, which a newer poet so nicely characterised with the words (poem by Heinrich von Reder, 1824–1909, Bavarian officer, poet, and painter):

Gone to rack on a mule track

a smithy stands in woodland solitude;

no longer does the hammer blow

accompanied by merry songs.

Not far away the buildings rise

where sooted blacksmiths

are working so hard.

With the steam mill's nails

the coffin is closed,

it carries the nail-smith

impoverished to grave.

One needs to wake only such a mood, and one illuminates brightly that dividing line in the cultural development of modern times, which has become so important to life. Carnegie's father was a weaver who had a good living at first. He worked for a factory. This went well up to the time when the large-scale industry flooded everything. Now we see the last day approaching, when Carnegie's father can still deliver the produced to the trader. Then poverty and misery enter in the weaver's family. The father does no longer see any possibility to make a living in Scotland. He decides to emigrate to America, so that both sons do not live in misery and die.

The father finds work in a cotton factory, and the boy is employed as a bobbin boy in his twelfth year. He has to perform hard work. However, there is after one week of hard, heavy work a happy day for the 12-year-old boy. He gets his first wage: 1 dollar and 20 cents. Never again—so says Carnegie—he has taken up any income with such delighted soul as this dollar and twenty cents. Nothing made more joy to him later, although many millions went through his fingers. We see the representative of practical pursuit in our present that grows out of distress and misery that is natured in such a way to immerse himself in the present, as it is, and to become the self-made man in it. He struggles. He gains his dollar every week.

Then somebody employs him in another factory with a better wage. Here he has to work even more, he must stand in the basement and has to heat and maintain a small steam engine with big heat. He feels that as a responsible post. The fear to turn the tap of the engine wrongly what could lead to an accident for the whole factory is dreadful to him. He often catches himself sitting in his bed at night and dreaming of the tap the whole night which he turned taking care of turning it in the right direction.

Then we see him employed as a telegraph messenger in Pittsburgh after some time. There he is already highly happy with the small wage of the telegraph messenger. He has to work at a place where also books are which he had hardly seen before. Sometimes he also has newspapers to read. He has now only one worry: telegraph messengers are not to be needed in the city if they are not able to know all addresses of the companies by heart, which receive telegrams. He really manages to know the names and addresses of the Pittsburgh companies. He also already develops a certain independence. His consciousness is paired exceptionally with cleverness. He goes now a little earlier to the telegraph office, and there he learns to telegraph by own practicing. Thus, he can aim at the ideal that any telegraph messenger is allowed to have in a young, ambitious community: to become a telegraph operator once. He even succeeds in a special trick. When one morning the telegraph operator was not there, a death message comes in. He takes up the telegram and carries it to the newspaper to which it was determined. There are connections where one regards such an action, even if it succeeds, not as favourable. However, Carnegie thereby climbed up to the telegraph operator.

Now something else presented itself to him. A man who dealt with railways recognises the talents of the young man and one day he makes the following proposal to him. He said to him, he should take over railway stocks of 500 dollars that had just become available. He can win a lot if he pursues these matters. Carnegie tells now—it is delightful how he tells this—how he raised 500 dollars really by the care and love of his mother, and how he bought his stocks. When he got the first revenue, the first payment of more than five dollars, he went with his fellows out to the wood. They looked at the payment and thought and learnt to recognise that there is something else than to be paid for work, something that makes money from money. That aroused big viewpoints in Carnegie's life. With it, he grew into the characteristic of our time.

Thus, we see him immediately understanding when another proposal is made. It is typical how he grasps with complete presence of mind what appears before his soul for the first time. An inventive head shows him the model of the first sleeping car. Straight away, he recognises that there is something tremendously fertile in it, so that he takes part in it. He emphasises now again by what this consciousness, actually, grew. He did not have enough money to take part in suitable way in the enterprise of the first sleeping car society of the world. However, his ingenious head caused that he got money already from a bank: he issued his first bill of exchange. This is nothing particular, he says, but this is something particular that he finds a banker who accepts this bill of exchange. This was the case.

Now he needed to develop this only to become completely the man of the present. Hence, we have not to be surprised that he became a steel tycoon when he got the idea to replace the many wooden bridges with iron and steel bridges, that he became the man who set the tone in the steel industry and acquired the countless riches. Thus, we really see the type of the human being in him who grows into the present, the present, which unfolds the most exterior life. He grows into the most outward of appearance. However, he grows into it by his own strength, by his abilities. He becomes the extensively rich person out of distress and misery, while he himself really acquired everything from the first dollar on. He is a pensive person who associates this whole impulse of his life with the progress and life of whole humanity.

Thus, we see another strange Gospel growing out of his way of thinking, a Gospel that follows Christ. However, Carnegie immediately says at the beginning of his Gospel, it is a Gospel of wealth (essay Wealth or Gospel of Wealth, 1889). That is why his book shows how wealth is applied best of all to the welfare and to the progress of humanity. He opposes Tolstoy immediately about whom he says: he is a person who takes Christ in such a way as it is not suitable at all to our time, who regards him as a strange being of old past. One must understand Christ in such a way that one transfers Him to the present life.—Carnegie is a person who affirms the whole life of the present completely. He says: if we look back at the times when the human being were more alike than today, they were still less divided into those who had to assign a job and those who have to take a job, and if we compare the times, we see how primitive the single cultures were in those days. The king was not able in that old time to satisfy his needs in such a way as today the poorest person can satisfy them now. What happened had to happen. That is why it is right that one distributes the goods in such a way.

Carnegie establishes a strange doctrine of the distribution or application of wealth. Above all, we find with him that ideas of the purely personal efficiency, of the nature of the efficiency of the human being originate in his soul who has worked his way in life up to that which he becomes in the end. At first Carnegie sees outward goods only, then also that the human being must be efficient, externally efficient. Someone has to apply his efficiency not only to acquire wealth but also to manage it in the service of humanity.

Carnegie intensely draws the attention to the fact that quite new principles would have to enter, so to speak, in the social construction of humanity if welfare and progress should originate from the new progress and the distribution of goods. He says, we have institutions of former time that make it possible that by inheritance from the father to the son and the grandchildren goods, rank, title and dignities go over. In the life of the old time, this was possible.—He regards it as right that one can substitute with routine what the personal efficiency does not give: rank, title, dignities.

Nevertheless, he is convinced by that life he has experienced that it requires personal, individual efficiency. He points to the fact that one had ascertained that five of seven insolvent houses became insolvent, because they demised to the sons. Rank, title, and dignities devolved from the fathers upon the sons, however, never business acumen. In those parts of modern life, where commercial principles prevail, they should not be transmitted simply from the testator to the descendants. It is much more important that someone builds up a personally efficient man, than to bequeath his wealth to his children. That is why Carnegie concludes in the absurd sentence: someone has to make sure that he applies the accumulated wealth to such institutions and foundations by which the human beings are promoted to the largest extent.—The sentence with which he formulates this, which can appear grotesque, which originates, however, from Carnegie's whole way of thinking is this: “Who dies rich dies dishonourably.” One could say in certain sense, this sentence of the steel tycoon sounds even more revolutionary than many a sentence of Tolstoy.

”He who dies rich dies dishonourably” means: someone dies dishonourably who does not apply the accumulated goods to endowments by which the human beings can learn something, can get the possibility to do further studies. If he makes many human beings efficient with his wealth during his life and does not hand it down to descendants, who can use it their way lacking any talent and only to their personal well-being, he dies not dishonourably.

Thus, we see with Carnegie a very strange principle appearing. We see that he affirms the present social life and activity, that he gains, however, a new principle from it: the fact that the human being has to advocate not only the use of wealth, but also its management, as a manager of the goods in the service of humanity. This man does not at all believe that anything can devolve from the parents upon their descendants. Even if he knows the outward life only, he realises, nevertheless, that inside of the human being the forces have to originate which make the human being efficient to do his work in life.

We see these two representatives of our present: that who harshly criticizes what has developed bit by bit and who wants to lead the soul to higher fields out of the spirit. On the other side, we see a man who takes the material life as it comes, and who is pointed to the fact that within the human being the spring of work and of the health of life is to be found. Nevertheless, one may find something just in this teaching of Carnegie that allows me to remark the following. If anybody does not look thoughtlessly and pointlessly at this soul life, but looks at the forces pouring out of the souls bit by bit, does look at the individual, and is clear in his mind absolutely that it is not handed down,—what has one then to look at? One has to look at the real origin, at that which comes from other sources. One finds if one comes to the sources of the present talents and abilities that these are caused in former lives. By the principle of reincarnation and of spiritual causing, karma, one finds the possibility to process such a principle meditatively that it has forced the practical life upon a practical person.

Nobody can hope that from a mere externalisation of life anything could come that the soul satisfies, can bring the civilisation to the highest summits. Never can one hope that on those roads anything else would come than a distribution of wealth salutary in the external sense. The soul would become deserted, it would overexert its forces, but it would find nothing in itself if it could not penetrate to the sources of the spirit, which are beyond the external material life. While the soul is rejected by a material approach to life, it must find the spring, which can flow only from a spiritual approach to life. With such a life praxis, as Carnegie has it, that deepening and spiritualisation coming from spiritual science have to combine, so that the souls do not become deserted. On the one side, Carnegie demands that from the single soul, which makes it fit for the external life, on the other side, Tolstoy wants to give the single soul what it can find from the deep well of the spiritual being.

As well as Carnegie grasps the being of the present with sure look from the material life, we find Tolstoy on the other side with sure look grasping the characteristic of the soul. Up to a certain limiting point, we see Tolstoy coming who affects us, indeed, strangely if we compare everything that lives in Tolstoy's worldview to that which faces us in particular in the West-European civilisation.

One can examine work by work of Tolstoy and one sees one fact emerging above all. The matters, which one has gathered here in the West with an immense expenditure of philosophical reflection, academic pondering, and moving conclusions from pillars to post, appear to Tolstoy in such a way that they occur in five to six lines like flashes of thought and become conviction to that who can understand such a thing. Tolstoy shows, for example, how we have to find something in the human soul that is of divine nature that can visualise the divine in the world if it lights up in us. Tolstoy says there, around me, the academic naturalists live; they investigate what is real outdoors in the material, in the so-called objective existence. They search the divine primal ground of existence. Then such people try to compose the human being from all principles, substances, atoms et cetera that they search spread out outdoors in the space. Then in the end, they try to understand what the human being is, while they believe to have to combine all external science to find the primal ground of life. Such human beings, he says, appear to me like human beings who have trees and plants of the living nature round themselves. They say, this does not interest me. But there is a wood far away, I hardly see it; I want to investigate and describe this wood, then I also understand the trees and the plants which are around me, and I am able to describe them.—People appear to me that way who investigate the being of the animals with their instruments to get to know the nature of the human being. They have it in themselves; they only need to see what is in close proximity. However, they do not do this. They search the faraway trees, and they try to understand what they cannot see, the atoms. However, they do not see the human being.

This way of thinking is so monumental that it is more valuable than dozens of insights and theories that are written out of old cultures. This is typical for the whole thinking of Tolstoy. To such things, he came, and in such things, one must look. To the West European this is extremely unsatisfactory; only by a devious route via Kant he gets around to it. With the assurance of his soul, Tolstoy is driven to pronounce what is not proved, but is true, what is recognised by immediate view and of which one knows if it is pronounced that it is true. His work On Life (1887) shows this monumental original springing of the deepest truth like from the spring of life, which he searched. His last writings just show this and what is in such a way that it can shine like an aurora to a rising future.

Therefore, we have to say, the less we are inclined to take Tolstoy dogmatically, the more we are inclined to take up the gold nuggets of a primitive paradigmatic thinking, the more he becomes fertile. Of course, those who accept a personality only in such a way that they swear on their dogmas, who cannot allow to be fertilised by it, they do not have a lot from him. Something does not agree with them. However, someone who can allow to be fertilised by a great personality may receive a lot from Tolstoy. We see truth working in him, paradigmatically, and that this truth flows with strong forces onto his personal life. How does it flow in there? It is rather interesting to see that different views live in his family and tolerate each other. How was he able, however, to introduce his principles in the everyday life? By working, and not only with principles. Thereby he becomes a true pioneer of something that only must sprout in future. On the other side, Tolstoy is also a child of his time, even though he is a pioneer of the future.

Perhaps, one can nowhere feel more impressively how he puts himself in the present than in that strange picture of the year 1848, when he was twenty years old. One looks only at the face of the 20-year-old, which expresses energy and willpower, also reticence at the same time. However, the spirited twinkle in the eyes reveals something that faces the riddles of life quizzically. He is volcanic inside but not able to cause the volcano to erupt. Indeed, we see mysterious depths of the soul expressing themselves in his physiognomy, and we get the expression of the fact that something tremendous lives in him but that he cannot yet express it completely in this hereditary organism.

It is also that way with the variety of the forces which live in Tolstoy, and which could not be expressed so really. It is in such a way, as if they are expressed as caricatures, distorted in certain respect. One has also to recognise the character in him that is sometimes distorted grotesquely. Hence, it is quite wonderful if he is able to point to that which one calls something transient with the human beings normally: look at the human body. How often its substances have been exchanged! Nothing material is there that was there in the ten-year-old boy. Compare the usual consciousness to the image life of the fifty years old man: it has become completely different, until the soul structure. We cannot call it permanent, but everywhere we find the centre in it, which we may imagine possibly in the following way. The objects of the outside world are there. There is this, there is that, there a third one. Two human beings face the objects. The eyes see the same things, but they are to the one this way, to the other that way. The one says, I like this; the other says: I do not like this.—If in the outside world everything is the same, and if the one soul says, I like it, and the other says, I do not like it, if the way of life is different, a centre is there that is different from all appearance that remains constant, in spite of all change of consciousness and body. Something is there that was there before birth and is there after birth, my particular ego. This my particular ego has not begun with birth. It is not the point that anybody positions himself with the west-European habits to such a remark, but it matters that one has the sensation: one can do such a remark. Therein the greatness of the soul appears. It becomes apparent that the soul lives and how it lives. Immortality is guaranteed therein.

Tolstoy just approaches the border of that which we get to know as the innermost being of the soul by spiritual-scientific deepening. He is wedged by the world against which he himself fights so much and cannot penetrate to true cognition of that which is there before birth, and of that which comes after death. He does not come to the teaching of reincarnation and karma. Just as little, he gets to the inner impulse of the soul like Carnegie who almost demands it. Therefore, we see whether now a human being is in contradiction to everything that lives and works in the present or whether someone complies with all life forms of the present: he is led to the gates of the anthroposophic approach to life. Tolstoy would be able to find the way to Carnegie, Carnegie never to Tolstoy.

With this talk, I wanted to show that a worldview and an approach to life could be given which introduces into the immediate life praxis, which can transfer the newfound to the known, to the performed. Moreover, we see if we familiarise ourselves deeper and deeper with spiritual science that it brings that to the human beings of the one and the other view which, in the end, Tolstoy has found his way and Carnegie has found his way: a satisfying life. However, it does not depend on it that the immediate viewfinder finds the satisfactory life, and that those who search with him can find it. What Tolstoy and Carnegie have found for themselves as adequate, this can be found for all human beings only impersonally and spiritually if true spiritual knowledge of that is found which goes from life to life, which carries the guaranty of eternity in itself.

The anthroposophic spiritual science that is represented here—of course, always only piecemeal—is regarded by a lot of people who do not know or do not want to know it as a field of daydreamers and of such human beings who, as one says so easily, are not in the real, in the practical life. Indeed, someone who wants to inform himself cursorily with this or that brochure or with a single talk about the contents and the goal of spiritual science can easily get to such a judgment. That applies, in particular if he—like many others—is less willing on penetrating into the real spiritual fields or if he has all prejudices and suggestions which arise from our civilisation so numerously against such a field of research. Moreover, it is not so seldom today that the bad will is added, no matter whether consciously or unconsciously, then the judgement is ready: oh, this spiritual science deals with matters which the practical human being who wants to stand firmly with both feet on the ground of life should not care about!

However, spiritual science feels intimately related with the most practical fields of life, and where it is appropriately pursued, it places the greatest value on the fact that thinking, the most certain guide, experiences a practical development with the real practical life. Because firstly spiritual science should not be anything that hovers unworldly and otherworldly anywhere in the cloud-cuckoo-land and wants to deduct the human being from the usual everyday life. However, it should be something that can serve our life with all that we think, act, and feel at every moment. Secondly, spiritual science is in a certain sense a preparation of our soul for those levels of knowledge, by which the human being himself penetrates into the higher worlds. One often stresses that spiritual science has a value not only for the human being who already has open eyes to penetrate in the spiritual world, but that the healthy human mind, the unclouded reason and power of judgement are able to understand what the spiritual researcher knows about the higher worlds. For the acceptance of his communications has an infinite value for the human being, long before he himself can penetrate into the spiritual fields. One can say, spiritual science is for everybody a preparation to develop the higher organs of knowledge bit by bit slumbering in the soul by which the spiritual worlds become discernible to us.

We have already spoken partly; we will have still to speak partly about the different methods and performances, which the human being has to carry out in order to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. However, there is always an unconditional requirement: who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, who wants to apply the methods exactly given by spiritual research, so that the spiritual senses are opened to him, that should never ever venture this way to the higher fields of life without standing on the ground of a healthy, a practically qualified thinking. This healthy thinking is the guide, the true leitmotif, in order to reach the spiritual worlds. Someone reaches them best of all using the methods of spiritual science who does not disdain to educate himself strictly to a thinking bound to reality and its principles. Indeed, if one speaks about the real practical thinking, one easily is contrary to practice, and probably practice of thinking in our world. One has only to remind of something that I have already often suggested here in order to characterise this. Many a person attributes practice to himself in our world. What is, however, practice about which today the so-called practical human beings talk? There is somebody apprenticed to a master. There he learns all those performances and measures which were carried out for decades, maybe since centuries and which are strictly compulsory. He appropriates that all, and the less he thinks, the less he forms an independent, free judgement, the more he goes beaten tracks, the more the world considers him as practical, in particular those consider him who are active in this field. One calls this often impractical what differs only in the least sense from anything that one practises since long time. Maintaining such a practice is mostly not bound to reason, but only to force. Someone who has any position in life and has to carry out things in a way, which appears to be correct for him, insists that every other who is active in this field must do this just as he does it. If he has the power, he pushes everybody out who wants to go forward differently.

Life praxis consists of such conditions in many cases. Then the right also results, as for example in the case where a big progress should be implemented: The first German railway should be built from Fürth to Nuremberg. One consulted an eminently practical board, the Bavarian Medical Council, whether generally this railway should be built. One can read this judgement, even today. It reads, one should build no railway because the driving would ruin the nerves. However, if one wanted to build railways, one should fence them on the left and on the right with high wooden walls, so that passing persons would not get concussions. This is a judgement of practitioners. Whether one would consider these practitioners as practitioners even today, this is the question. Probably not.

Another example, which can show us whether progress originates from those who call themselves practitioners or from other people: you find it certainly very practical that one has no longer to go to the post office with any letter where the postage has then to be determined according to distance and weight. Only during the forties of the nineteenth century, the uniform letter postage was introduced in England. However, not a practitioner of the postal system invented it, but such a practitioner said when the matter should be decided in the parliament, firstly he did not believe that such an advantage arose, as Hill (Sir Rowland Hill, 1795–1879) calculated, and secondly the post-office building had to be extended. He could not imagine that the post-office building has to comply with the postal traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office building. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, a practitioner said, namely that who let two stagecoaches go to Potsdam for many years: if people wanted to throw their money out of the window, one could build the railway. Because this practice of the so-called practitioners is so impractical, if the big issues of life are considered, one can become contrary to these practitioners if one speaks about the practical development of thinking. Something presents to the impartial observer in all fields of life that can show how it is with the real life praxis.

Once I experienced a quite vivid example, what practical thinking can prevent. A friend of my study time came once excitedly with red head to me. He said, he must immediately go to the professor and inform him that he has made a great invention. Then he came back and said, he could speak the expert only in one hour, and then he explained his invention to me. It was a device, which set a machine in motion expending a very small quantity of steam power only once supplied, and then this machine perpetually performed an immense work. My friend himself was surprised that he was so clever to make such an invention, which exceeded everything and made good economic sense. I said to him, he should trace back the matter to a simple thought. I said, “Imagine, you stand in a railroad carriage and you try to push against the walls of the carriage in order to move it. If you succeed in moving the carriage standing and pushing in it, your engine is good, because it is based on the same principle.”

At that time, I realised that a main obstacle of all practical thinking can be called with a technical term: one is a “carriage pusher from within!” This fits the thinking of many people; they are “carriage pushers from within.” What does that mean? That one is only able to survey a certain narrow field and to apply to this field what one has learned to this field. However, one is also forced to stop within this field and cannot see at all that everything changes substantially, as soon as one exits from the “carriage.”

This is one of the principles, which one has to follow above all with a practical development of thinking: that every human being who is active in any field must try to connect it with adjacent fields regardless of his own activity. Otherwise, it is impossible that he gets to a practical thinking. For this is a peculiarity which is connected with a certain internal sluggishness that the human thinking likes to be encapsulated and forgets what is outdoors, even if it is palpable.

I have recently stated in other connections that one wants to prove the Kant-Laplace theory: Once the universal nebula was there. This started rotating by any cause; the single planets of the solar system separated bit by bit and received the movement, which they have still today. One makes this very clear in a school experiment, the so-called Plateau (Joseph P., 1801–1883, Belgian physicist) experiment: one gives an oil drop in a vessel with water. Then one cuts out a disc of cardboard as the equator. One lays this under the oil globule. Then one pierces it with a needle, rotates the needle—and small oil globules separate in the equator area like planets, and they move around the big globule. One has committed something very impractical in intellectual respect: the experimenter has forgotten himself what is sometimes rather good; he has forgotten that he himself has turned the thing. For one is not allowed to forget the most important of the matter. If one wants to explain an experiment, one has to invoke all things in the field to which it comes down; these are the essentials.

The first that must exist with that who wants to experience a practical development of thinking is that he confides in reality, in the reality of thoughts. What does this mean? You cannot scoop water from a glass without water. You cannot take out thoughts from a world without thoughts. It is absurd if one believes that the whole sum of our thoughts and mental pictures exists only in us. If anybody disassembles a clock and reflects the principles of its construction, then he must suppose that the watchmaker has joined the parts of the clock first according to these principles. Nobody should believe that one could find any thought from a world, which is not created and formed according to thoughts. All that we learn about nature and its events is nothing else than what must be put first into this nature and its events. It is no thought in our soul, which has not been outdoors in the world first. Aristotle said more correctly than some modern people did: what the human being finds in his thinking last exists in the world outdoors first.

However, if anybody has this confidence in the thoughts, which are contained in the world, then he sees very easily that he has to educate himself at first to a thinking full of interest in the world. He has to educate himself to that great, beautiful ideal of thinking as it distinguished Goethe: the concrete thinking, that thinking which isolates itself as little as possible from the things, that sticks to the things as intensely as possible. Heinroth (Johann Christian August H., 1773–1843, physician, formed the term “psychosomatics”), the psychologist, used a sentence concerning Goethe that his thinking is a concrete one, where the thoughts express nothing else than what is included in the things themselves and that in the things nothing else is searched than the real creative thought. If anyone has this confidence, this faith in the reality of thoughts, he easily realises that he can educate himself in harmony with the environment, in harmony with reality to a practical, healthy thinking not receding from the things.

One has to take into consideration three ways if the human being really wants to take on an education to practical thinking: firstly, the human being must and should develop an interest in the surrounding reality, interest concerning facts and objects. Interest in the environment, this is the magic word for the education of thought. Secondly, desire and love of that which we do. Thirdly, the satisfaction of that which we reflect. Who understands these three things: interest in the environment, desire, and love in the activities and the satisfaction of contemplation soon finds that these are the main demands of a practical development of thinking. Indeed, the interest in our environment depends on matters that we discuss with the next talks when we speak about the invisible members of the human nature and about the temperaments.

The biggest enemy of thinking is often thinking itself. If anybody thinks that only he himself can think and the things would not have any thought in themselves, he is hostile, actually, to the practice of thinking. Imagine that a person would have formed some narrow mental pictures of the human being, would have made a few stereotyped schematic concepts of the human being. Now any human being faces him who has roughly the qualities, which fit his pattern. Then he is ready with his judgement and does not believe that this human being can tell him anything particular. If we approach anything that surrounds us with the feeling that any fact can tell us something particular, that we are not entitled at all to let judge something else about the things than the things themselves, then we soon notice which fruits such concrete sense bears. The confidence that the things can tell us much more than we are able to say about the things is again such a magic ideal of the practice of thinking. The things themselves should be the educators of our thinking, the facts themselves.

Imagine once that a person brings himself to use the following two important means of education for his practical development of thinking: he opposes himself with any fact, for example, that somebody has done a walk to this or that place just today. He experiences that at first. Now the person concerned wants to educate his thinking. There it is good if he says to himself, I have experienced this and that, now I want to contemplate how the today's event was caused yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on. I go back and try to form a view from that which goes forward to that which could have been. If I have selected such an event and the cause of it after my intellectual imagination, then I can investigate whether the real cause complies with my thoughts. I have something very important from such compliance or non-compliance. If my thoughts comply with that which I can know as the cause, then it is good. In most cases, this will not be the case. Then one investigates in what one was deceived and tries to compare the wrong thoughts with the right course of the events. If one does this repeatedly, one notices that one no longer makes mistakes after a shorter or longer time, but that one can liberate such a thought from a fact, which corresponds, to the objective course of the events.

Alternatively, one does the following: again, someone takes an event and tries to construct in thoughts what can result tomorrow or in some hours from this event. Now he waits quietly whether that happens which he has thought himself. In the beginning, he experiences that this is not right which he has thought. However, if he continues this, he sees thinking immersing itself in the facts that it does not form any mental pictures for itself, but that the thoughts proceed as the things proceed. This is the development of the factual sense. If he even forbids to himself to form abstractions, then he experiences that he grows gradually together with the things and that he obtains a sure judgement.

There are people who are directed by a certain sure instinct to such a thinking. This is because they are already born with special dispositions to develop such a thinking. Such a person was Goethe. He had grown together with the things so that his thinking did not proceed in the head, but in the things inside. Goethe, who was once a lawyer, had a healthy power of judgement and a sure instinct to tackle the things. There was no long referring to documents and reviewing of documents if a case had to be undertaken. Goethe did not allow that. It was a practitioner.

If once all documents of the Weimar minister Goethe are published—I have seen big parts of them—then the world will recognise Goethe as an eminently practical nature, not as a quixotic human being. One knows that he accompanied his Grand Duke with the training of recruits to Apolda (small town near Weimar). He observed everything that took action—and, besides, he wrote his Iphigenia. Compare to it what disturbs a modern poet at work. Moreover, Goethe was a much greater poet than anyone was who is not allowed to be disturbed today. Because of the eminently practical thinking, he could also say, for example, if he looked through the window: today we cannot go out, because it will be raining in three hours.—He had done cloud studies, but had put up no theory. It was in such a way that from his thinking developed what developed in nature outdoors. One calls this concrete thinking. One obtains such concrete thinking if one does such exercises in particular as I have just stated them. However, this is connected with a certain unselfishness, as strange as this sounds. However, there are principles also in the soul, and someone will not attain very much who thinks only of himself if he does such experiments. If he looks, for example, at a fact and says then immediately, ah, have I not said it? Therefore, this is the most certain obstacle of practical thinking. Thus, we could state many things to show how one can systematically develop the sympathetic adherence of the thoughts to the things, so that one learns to think in the things.

The second is desire and love of all we do. They really only exist if we can renounce success. Where it depends only on success desire and love are not undimmed. Hence, not anyone who is dependent on success can develop that rest in trying which is necessary, so that desire and love of activity can inspire us bit by bit. By nothing, we learn more than by lending a hand to everything possible and renouncing the so-called success. I knew somebody who had the habit to bind his schoolbooks himself (Steiner himself). It looked bad, but he thereby learnt enormously. If he had looked at the success, he would have maybe refrained from it. However, just in the activities we develop the qualities, the talents that enable us to become dexterous up to the movements. We never become dexterous if we look at the success of our activities in particular. If we are not able to say to ourselves, the failures in our activities are as dear to us as our results, we never reach the second level, which is necessary if one trains thinking.

Thirdly, we have to find satisfaction in thinking itself. This is something that appears so unambitious and is mostly combated today. How often does one hear saying, why have our children to learn this and that? They cannot need this in the practical life.—This principle to think only what one can need is the most impractical principle. There must be areas for a human being if he wants to think practically where the mere activity of thinking grants satisfaction to him.

If a human being does not find time, may it be only short, to do something that he does purely intellectually and that satisfies him intellectually, he can remain always only on beaten paths. If he finds, however, such a thing that he does only because of his inner interest, then he has something that has a big, strong effect on him, on his finer organisation, on the finer structure of his organism. Never work the things on us creatively, which captivate us to life, which enslave us; they wear out our talents, they take vitality from us. The things, however, which we do intellectually only to our satisfaction create vitality, new talents and they go into the subtlest organisation of our being and increase the subtle structures of our organism. Not by working for the benefit of the outside world, but by working to our satisfaction we create something by which we advance a developmental step. If we approach practice with this finer organisation again, this affects the practice, and everybody can see that it is right.

Take a painting, for example, the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, and put a human being and a dog before it. The painting makes a different impression on the human being and the dog. The same applies to the life praxis. If one remains captivated in life, the things always make the same impression on us, and one is not able to intervene creatively. If anyone develops a level higher in his activity of thinking, he faces the impressions as the same being in two different forms. He faces it once with that on which he has not yet worked, the other time with that on which he has worked. He becomes more and more practical because the impressions, which make the things on us, are raised more and more. Hence, there is loss of time, indeed, if one does such a thing that does not belong to life praxis directly, however, it promotes life praxis extraordinarily indirectly.

These are the three levels of any practical development of thinking: interest in the environment, desire, and love of all trying and working, and perpetually controlling oneself. You see, for example, such an astute man like Leonardo da Vinci already describing the way in which one can advance just while trying. He does not despise to say how one can appropriate the art of drawing bit by bit. He says, draw on tracing paper, put what you have drawn on the template, and look at that in which the drawn differs. Then make it once again and try—doing so—to do the right thing at the wrong places.—Thus, he shows how it depends on working with desire and love. The third is the satisfaction within contemplation that refrains from the external world and can quietly rest in itself. These are such things that can show us first that we grow into a real practice of thinking by the trust in the thoughts in nature, in the world building of thoughts. However, if we also believe that thinking itself is a creative force, we advance. Someone does much for the practical development of his thinking who does the following systematically: he thinks about something, for example, about what he has to do or about a question of the worldview, it may be anything usual or anything of the highest. If he is out now to find a solution quickly, then he develops no practical thinking as a rule. This rather means saying to himself: you are as little as possible allowed to interfere, actually, in your own thoughts.—Besides, most human beings can imagine nothing at all if one says this. This is a main requirement: that we open ourselves to the thoughts in ourselves that we get used to becoming the scene of the work of our thoughts. We could think, there would be only one single way to accomplish a certain thing, or only one single answer to a question. Nevertheless, we are no dogmatists to whom only one single answer is right.

If we want to learn practical thinking, we have to try to give ourselves also another answer, maybe also a third one, or a fourth. There are things to which one can think ten sorts of answers. One has to imagine them all carefully, of course, only such things where this is possible, not with such ones, which must be made quickly; one often makes them rather badly than too slowly. If one has ten possible solutions, one carries out each in thoughts with love. Then one says, I want to think no longer about it, I wait until tomorrow and open myself to the thoughts. These thoughts are forces that work in my soul, even if I am not at all involved with my consciousness. I wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and then I cause this thought again in myself.—Maybe I do this still a second or a third time, and each time I survey the single things much clearer and can then decide better than before. This is an incredible schooling of practical thinking presenting different possible solutions of a thing in thoughts to oneself, to allow them to rest and to take up them later again.

Who does this for a while notices that his thinking becomes versatile, that he develops presence of mind and repartee by a certain practice. Then he grows together with life until the most usual things and recognises what is clever and clumsy, what is wise, and what is foolish. It does not come into his mind to behave in such a way as often so-called practical persons behave. I already had to know many practical persons who can use the beaten paths of their occupation very well; if you see such persons in other situations, for instance, at travelling, their practice is often rather odd. The proof that the practical development of thinking can lead to real life praxis is founded in experience. This works up to the hands, up to the way to seize something. Much less, you drop plates and pots than other persons if you work in such way on your inside. Practical thinking works up to the limbs. If it is carried out actively and not in the abstract, it makes pliable and flexible.

However, impractical thinking is most obvious where the practice of thinking should work, for example, in science. I have stated the hypothetical astronomic experiment as an example. One often experiences, how frightfully impractical just the scientists of today are. I do not attack the real methodical work, the excellent activity of our science in the slightest. Nevertheless, the thoughts, which the modern human beings form, are often almost dreadful. Our microscopes and the photograph are very well developed. One can observe all possible mysterious facts in the various little beings. One observes plants and sees certain strange things in these plants, possibly faceted organs like the eyes of a fly, and one even sees a sort of lenses in some plants at this or that place.

One observes with other plants that certain insects are attracted, and then the plants close their leaves and catch the insects. One has excellently observed that all. How does the present impractical thinking explain these phenomena? One confuses the human soul, which reflects the outer processes internally, with that which one observes purely externally in the plants. One talks about the ensoulment of the plant, and one throws plant soul, animal soul and human soul in a mess. One throws this in a mess. Indeed, I object nothing to the marvellous observations of nature, which are popularised in the world. However, the thinking of our contemporaries is confused if anybody says, certain plants have their stomachs at the surface with which they draw in the food and devour it. This thought is approximate in such a way, as if anybody says: I know a being, this is organised artfully and has an organ in itself by which something like a magnetic force is exercised on little living beings, so that they are drawn in and are devoured; this being, which I have in mind, is the mousetrap! This thought is completely the same as that which assumes the ensoulment of the plant. You could speak in the same sense of an ensoulment of the mousetrap as you talk about the ensoulment of the plant if you really thought in this peculiar way.

The matter is that one is able to penetrate into the very own nature of thinking, and that one becomes no “carriage pusher from within” in such fields. Something else is important for the practical development of thinking and this is that one has confidence in the inner spiritual organ of thinking. With most human beings, the benevolent nature provides that this spiritual organ of thinking is not ruined too very much because the human being must sleep.

Because the spiritual does not stop then, because it is there always, this organ of thinking works for itself and the human being cannot ruin it perpetually. However, it is quite another matter if the human being allows nature to take care of thinking with important and serious facts of life only, or if he himself takes this in hand. It is a very important principle to let the organ of thinking work in yourselves. You are practicing this best of all if you try not to think for a while, howsoever short. A big, immense decision belongs to it to sit or to lie somewhere without letting thoughts go through the head. It is much easier to let your thoughts surge up and down in yourselves, until you are released from them by a good sleep than to tell yourselves: now you are awake and, nevertheless, you do not think, but you think nothing at all. If you are able to sit or to lie quietly and to think nothing with full consciousness, then the organ of thinking works in such a way that it gains strength in itself, accumulates strength. Who puts himself in the situation over and over again not to think with full consciousness notices that the clearness of his thinking increases, that in particular repartee grows because he does not only leave his apparatus of thinking to itself by sleep, but that he lets this apparatus of thinking itself work under his guidance.

Only somebody who has taken leave of his spiritual senses can believe that then it is not thought at all. Here the word applies that Goethe says about nature: “She has thought and thinks continuously.”

In addition, the innermost nature of the human being has thoughts, even if the human being is not present with his conscious thoughts. Nevertheless, in the case where he is not at all with his thinking, something thinks in him of which he is not aware. At these moments, if he lies there without his own personal thoughts, something higher really thinks in him, and this higher works tremendously educating on him. This is essential and important that the human being also lets the superconscious, the divine work in himself, which does not announce itself directly but in its effects. You become a clear and glib thinker gradually if you have dedicated yourselves to such exercises of thinking. A certain energy belongs to it to carry out such exercises of thinking.

You realise at the single examples, which I have given today, how one can develop this thinking with own strength. I could only give some examples of self-education of thinking, but these examples have shown that one is able to point to real remedies of thinking whose fruits life and experience can give only.

Who exercises his thinking that way experiences that—on the one side—he can go up to the highest fields of spiritual life, that he can use this thinking—on the other side—also in the everyday life. What one gains with the overview of the big spiritual facts one should apply to practical life. All fields of the everyday life, education in particular, could experience a tremendous fertilisation because of this, and another view of life praxis would make itself noticeable all around us. In addition, someone who wants to develop the qualities slumbering in him in order to penetrate to the spiritual fields would have a sure base and stand firmly in life. This is something that one has to demand absolutely, before anybody penetrates to the higher spiritual fields. In addition, the usual science would be able to attain tremendous knowledge if it is fertilised by spiritual science.

The carriage pushers of thinking who fancy themselves often as great practitioners do not have this practical thinking; they lack it. They are not able to lead back something to a simple, comprising thought. Spiritual science gives us this: it enables us to survey what is usually small and detailed in life, with big, comprising viewpoints. The human being thereby gets the survey because he is able to think from great viewpoints into the details; then he is led to real life praxis.

We can take Leonardo da Vinci as an example, who was a practitioner in many fields. He said, theory is the captain, and practice is the soldiers.—Who wants to be a practitioner without controlling the viewpoints of practical thinking is like someone who goes on board a ship without compass, he does not have the possibility to steer the ship correctly. Goethe showed repeatedly from his practical way of thinking how just scholarship gets by impractical thinking to infertile fantasising. There are people, who lead the outside world back to atoms, and others who lead them back to movements; others deny any movement. On the other hand, the most practical thinkers point to the fact that simplicity comes from the greatness of the worldview. Goethe's dictum is suitable, and we can put it before our eyes:

Some hostile may occur,
Keep quiet, remain silent;
And if they say
There is no movement,
Walk around right
Under their noses.

If there is talk of the practical significance of the invisible, particularly of the invisible in the human being, I would like to illustrate by a comparison what I meant. Those people are practical who turn their look, their view to the supersensible view of existence, and those are impractical who stop at the only exterior, at the mere physical. Is anybody, actually, the true practitioner who has a horseshoe-shaped iron as a magnet before himself and uses this thing for anything that appears useful to him by all appearances? On the other hand, is such a person not impractical in the true sense of the word, and practical only someone who says to himself: in this piece of iron something rests that makes a lot of higher, nobler application possible to me than the mere inspection allows to suppose.—This is, of course, only a comparison, because we are not allowed to compare the higher forces about which we speak today with any natural force. However, practical is only someone who chooses the internal forces from the things and can use the things corresponding to their true values. Compared with those who can be led by a certain practical sense one could quote Fichte's word of the practical significance of ideals. Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762–1814) tried to explain the determination of the human being using high ideals.

In the introduction to his lectures on The Vocation of the Scholar (1794), he protests that none who speaks from such high idealistic viewpoints knows what can be objected to it, namely, that ideals cannot be shown directly in practical life. Perhaps, those who put up these ideals know this better than the opponents do. “We state only that reality has to be assessed and modified according to them by those who feel sufficient strength in themselves. Assumed, they could also not convince themselves, they lose very little, after they are once what they are; and, besides, humanity loses nothing. It becomes thereby only obvious that one does not count on them in the plan of the improvement of humanity. This will continue its way without any doubt; the benevolent nature may provide for them rain and sunshine, wholesome food and undisturbed circulation of humours at the proper time and—clever thoughts as well!” I want to point to this in particular. We briefly want to imagine the invisible members of the human nature. Spiritual science speaks of these invisible members of the human nature, but not as of anything that is there, as of an adjunct of the visible, but it speaks just of the spiritual as of the creative of the visible.

An almost obvious example is the following: everybody—also someone who cannot see into in the workshop of spiritual life—should imagine the senses of shame and anxiety repeatedly, so that he learns to believe that the supersensible is the reason of the sensuous. What are they? They are soul experiences undoubtedly to someone who does not think complicatedly. Anything, we must say, is there that threatens us; the soul feels threatened. This expresses itself as sensations of fear. Indeed, we could state various physical mediations. This would be easy, of course, and the modern researcher would hardly be able to state anything that the spiritual scientist would not know, too. Nevertheless, the matter is that the blood is forced back from the surface of the body to the centre.

We have a material process resulting from a soul process. The same is the case with the sense of shame. Again, we have a rearrangement of the blood, a change of the circulation caused by something spiritual. What one sees here in microcosm and what one can observe to a bigger extent, if because of a sad event tears are shed shows that the soul can cause bodily processes. Today, of course, there are people under the influence of our not evidently but latently materialistic way of thinking who also assert materialistic views here. I have also quoted the sentence of a certain worldview: one cries not because one is sad, but one is sad because one cries. This sentence came, actually, from somebody who thought idealistically, but one interpreted it wrong.

These are full-grown materialistic ways of thinking. Who has retained a piece of healthy thinking from the materialistic basis of our time sees in such evident connections between physical facts and spiritual-mental facts something that can make him gradually understand that spiritual science must say from its point of view: everything material has a spiritual origin.

Thus, something mental forms the basis of that which we see in the human being, what we can seize with hands with him. It is not the influence of the physical but just the primal ground of the physical. We call that a physical body in the human being, which he has in common with all beings surrounding him, which he has in common with the mineral world. The next, supersensible human member is the etheric body or life body. It prevents the physical body to being a corpse during the whole life, to following the principles of the physical only. Plants and animals also have such an etheric body, which one can deduce by thinking of someone who thinks philosophically only. It is real to the clairvoyant like the physical body.

A spiritual way of thinking defends itself with pleasure to understand the human body as a machine, however, does not need to defend itself if one is not a “carriage pusher of thinking from within.” One can absolutely say, the human body is a complex mechanism if one wants to include the physical and chemical in the mechanic. However, behind any machine, a builder and preserver must be, so also here, and this is the etheric body or life body, that is a loyal fighter against decay. Only at death, it separates from the physical body, and then the physical body follows as a corpse its physical laws. Then it is a corpse. The etheric body is something more certain than the mere physical body.

If we keep on studying the human being, we get to another member of his being, which every human being could already realise if he said to himself, I face a human being, a physical body, and an etheric body. Is there nothing else included in this human being than what one can see from without, what physiology et cetera disclose to us? Oh, there is something else: the sum of emotions, sensations, desires and wishes, pains and sufferings, impulses and passions.

All that represents the astral body. Now one could say, nevertheless, one cannot imagine that these things form a concluded reality. However, the spiritual scientist can perceive this clairvoyantly. There the astral body exists as the physical body exists. Nevertheless, the healthy human mind could also already say to itself that such a thing as an astral body must be there. Why could it say that to itself? I want to give you an example where, so to speak, with hands is to be seized how the astral body works, actually. There are people who say when the human being enters the physical world; he is not yet as developed as later. The external science can determine that, indeed, the senses and their organs exist in the brain that, however, the connections of the single senses in the brain develop relatively late. One can really study how the connecting nerve cords develop from the hearing to the facial sphere and make the human being the thinker finally. So—the materialist concludes—one sees how the internal parts develop bit by bit and then the world of sensations, images, sufferings, joys, complexes of thought et cetera flashes in the human being.—Imagine this development of the human brain. The complex lines of thought, which solve the world riddles, develop bit by bit. Are we then allowed to call that a mere mechanism which has developed, which builds itself up?

One can also admire a marvellous construction, as for example that of a clock. However, he would be a fool who wanted to believe that the clock has originated by itself. Who is able to do something, can develop only what he is able to do. Someone who had seconds, minutes, the principles of the clock in himself has joined it; one has thought ahead what we then reflect. Is there nothing that joins these connecting cords in the brain in such a way that you become a thinker finally? I mean, a healthy thinking would have to realise that for that which develops a master builder must exist who joins the cords, so that you can become a thinker. We are loyal only to ourselves and to our healthy human mind if we say, an astral body has to have constructed the physical brain. In the first weeks, months, years of the child, the astral body constructs the instrument only, which is able later to solve the world riddles. Who does not believe this, acts just as anybody who wants to use a machine, but denies that a constructor was there who has built it. The time will already come when again healthy judgments prevail in the human being, when they say to themselves that first the spiritual master builder must be there if anything should originate. This master builder has been already there before the human being is born.

The third human member is this astral body, that which forms the basis of the material again. The fourth human member is the ego, which makes the human being the crown of creation. The human being has the physical body in common with all minerals, the etheric body with all plants, and the astral body with the animals. He rises above the three physical realms by the ego. Therefore, all religions have probably directed their attention to the fact that there is only one name, which differs from all other. There is one thing that can be never called from the outside: this is in us as our core. No name can come from without that signifies us. Therefore, “I” was in the old Hebrew religion the inexpressible name that was inexpressible for all others.

These are the four lower members of the human nature from which only one is visible. The three others are real, are the primal grounds of the real. Any member is a basic being and cause for the next lower body; the ego-bearer for the astral body, the astral body for the etheric body, the etheric body for the physical body. Any experience of the ego imprints itself on the astral body. Here all experiences of the ego express themselves. Any momentary imagining, judging and feeling originate in the human being that way.

What lives in the astral body, expresses itself, imprints itself on the etheric or life body, and thereby it becomes permanent, not momentary, but keeps itself in a certain way. Let us assume that we pass momentary judgment; we make a mental picture about this or that. If we form a mental picture repeatedly, it becomes a habitual mental picture. Because it becomes a habitual image, it imprints itself in the etheric body. What lives in our memory, what we keep in mind from day to day, lives in our etheric body or life body. The fact that we play a piano piece once is in our astral body; the fact that we acquire the talent, the habit of playing is in the etheric body. All habits are in the etheric body or life body. If we pass moral judgment, it is again an action of the astral body. If a certain direction of judging imprints itself on us by repeated judgments, the moral judgment becomes a permanent once, it becomes conscience. The moral judgment is an experience of the astral body; the conscience is an experience of the etheric body or life body. Thus, we see how by the interaction of the higher members with the lower ones the whole human life builds itself up from within outwardly.

As far as the human being is a mere physical being, he has the etheric body or life body in common with the plants. What allows the humours to ascend in the plants, what causes that they subsist, reproduce, this causes the same in the human being. However, on this etheric body or life body custom, skill, conscience is imprinted top-down. Something mental-spiritual is imprinted on the human beings top-down. The experiences of the higher members are transferred more and more to the lower members. It is important for the human being to know that the higher members work into the denser members. Thus, the human being can work into the lower members in healthy, practical way.

The human being can ruin again, what nature has given him. As with the plant only malformation could originate if the etheric body or life body did not regulate what goes forward, an internal malformation originates in the human being if he works wrong inside, from the ego on the lower members. The astral body must be penetrated by the experiences of the ego in a healthy way. Who does not admit that an astral body builds on the brain of the child will also not realise how important it is that the ego has a proper effect on the astral body. Who realises this, however, says to himself, you are able to keep on working where nature has stopped. If you allow the whole scale of sensations to take place in healthy way, this continues working on your physical body, on your brain, and thus you build up your physical body during your whole life.

How many human beings walk around today with writer's spasm? The human body is wonderfully constructed. The human being adjusts his hand with everything that he does to the world outdoors. This cooperation of the hand with the outside goes adrift in certain ways from him if he is not able to set his hand aglow, to invigorate it with his inner life. This is a similar process, as if one gets artificial teeth. It is essential that all that we can get as our own is set aglow and invigorated by our ego. You get trembling hands only if the hands go adrift from the remaining forces to some degree. These are matters which one takes into consideration most intensely again in a not so distant future, and then one will realise what it means to grasp the spirit of the human being again.

I want to make clear this at an example. We remain in our field. It will become apparent how that which happens in the spirit really seizes the human being and makes him suitable or unsuitable for life, practical or impractical. Let us take a person who is impractical for life because he suffers from certain sensations of anxiety, so that thereby nervousness originates. This word already sounds the whole sum of lacking practice. Any human being who does not control himself completely in any respect is characterised as nervous, or one uses the catchword of genetic predisposition if anything is absent or exists that makes the human being impractical for life. All these things do not originate from a careful observation of the real facts, but because one has no palate for the spiritual due to the materialistic way of thinking.

It is important to pursue whether in the first times of life, when the invisible works so intensely on the visible, everything proceeds properly and is not disturbed. What is omitted here cannot be corrected later. If something is not formed well enough, the manifold discrepancies originate in the whole life. The human being, who is not able to let harmonising experiences surge up and down in the astral body, will always make himself impractical for life in certain ways. Instead of searching for genetic predispositions of fear and anxiety, we should rather look for something that is formed by this or that experience which has a solidifying effect on the physical body. It could be, for example,—however, it needs not always be in such a way—that a considerable part of claustrophobia was caused possibly by a particular way of parenting in the human being. He does not get loose from this evil because he lacks the means to stir it up again. Imagine children who recognise all festivities, actually, all the year round, only because they are showered with presents! They receive more than they can destroy. This abundance of undeserved gifts immobilises certain striving forces, which would generate healthy self-assurance. Such a thing can slumber in the human being during the time when the external education fulfils him or a new occupation absorbs him; but this appears once in the form of claustrophobia.

One cannot realise this if one does not understand what it means that the astral body changes itself bit by bit into that which the human being is in his physical, discernible behaviour. On the other hand, we can find—if particular states of unsuitability appear anyhow—that something presses on his soul. He cannot say it, cannot confess it, and thinks to have to conceal it. Because the human being does not find the way to the word, it seizes the lower members and works on them. What a soothing effect experiences the human being if he can confess such a thing! Then he has the feeling, now it is no longer lying on my heart like a stone, and this feeling of relief works recovering. Confession is an important remedy in this respect. The denominations have known this well. There we realise how the invisible inside of the human being works on the visible. Even certain reasonable doctors already realise that one cannot cure unsuitability for practical life by systematic application of cold water (Kneipp cure), but in such a way that one has to induce a kind of confession, has to detach something from the human being if healing should take place.

We want to look at the reverse now. There are reasonable doctors who say to themselves, one has to turn to the soul of the human being if one wants to know how the human being becomes unsuitable in certain respects. These doctors know that joy and desire are remedies, that they work recovering, that they soften again, what is solidified and ossified, and bring it under our control. However, this is not enough, just as little as it is enough if anybody says, the concealed secret must be detached from the soul of the human being. They do not know that everything that is experience of the inside has a big significance even if it appears wrong. Should we cancel everything mysterious in the human nature because it appears wrong with some persons? Should we make the doctors father confessors, as it one demands here and there? It can also be infinitely recovering for the soul if it is able to draw the veil of secret about some things. A Persian saying says, one saves the time that one uses for silent reflection, before one says something, in relation to the time of remorse about that which one has said thoughtlessly! Goethe pronounced the word of the “obvious secret” not without reason. In everything sensuous that surrounds us, we can realise something mysterious, something that lies so deeply in the things and that one cannot pronounce; however, it still flows from soul to soul. Health spreads out if the human being can feel the secret of life that way.

Spiritual science maintains this secret of life. Indeed, it does not make it easy for the human beings to approach the things. It is not so comfortable to approach them. Spiritual science can only stimulate, only say, this and that exists. Then the human being has to approach and co-operate. It may be uncomfortable, but it is infinitely healthy. The innermost member of the human being is thereby stimulated; spiritual science works immediately on the ego. If we hear anything about the evolution of the planets, if to us is told about the invisible members of the human nature, what goes from life to life with the human being—with all that one appeals immediately to the ego. All these world-enclosing ideas do not remain dry ideas and abstractions. They emit warmth and bliss; warmth and bliss irradiate and penetrate the astral body of the human being. Contentment and bliss originate from that which spiritual science offers. What sets the human being aglow as warmth, as fire keeps moving to his life body. The forces of spiritual science itself penetrate all forces of the etheric body, and the etheric body transfers the forces again to the physical body, it transfers it as a skill, in such a way that, for example, the hand becomes dexterous and practical if the great, elated ideas of spiritual science flow into the physical body.

Spiritual science makes the brain a flexible, pliable tool, so that it can get away from prejudices. Spiritual science works strongly down until the physical body of the human being. Up to the practical movements, he can be immersed in spiritual science. I want to give you an example of that. It helps, indeed, if one makes gymnastics possible to the child. This is an exceptionally healthy exercise if one makes it properly. Already in the talk on education, I have drawn your attention to the fact that it is important to remain aware that the human being is not only a physical apparatus, but is spiritualised by higher members. One should be able to project oneself completely into doing gymnastics to share any emotion of the etheric and the astral bodies. I knew a gym teacher, who was a big theorist. He knew the human physical body to a hair's breadth. He also had to give theoretical physical education. It does not matter that one knows the physical exactly, but that he experiences an increase of the inner ease with any exercise. One should experience purposefully what should be the single exercise. Who has a living feeling, not only an abstract idea of the physical body knows that one can have a living feeling for everything that the child experiences, for example, while climbing up a ladder.

A sort of gymnastics is imaginable that works so harmoniously on the cooperation of the etheric and the physical bodies that the best basis is laid of a good memory in old age. In addition, that which takes action visibly is properly understood only if it is understood from spiritual science. We would have the best means against the dwindling memory in old age in gymnastics if one wanted to do physical education from spiritual science.

Spiritual science is no theory, nothing dogmatic, but bestows something living to life. Once one will realise that only by spiritual science the human being can become a true practitioner of life. Someone only is a practical person who can use this life who is not its slave. The human being should always control his outer nature with his invisible members. The human being becomes a practitioner only down to the last detail of his life if he is the guide of the bodily. That human being is a practical person who can understand out of a true understanding of his members what Fichte said, but what is often misunderstood. This will be the ideal of the human being if he controls the visible from his invisible again: “The human being can what he has to do; and if he says: I cannot, he does not want it.”

The only meeting with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900, German philosopher) belongs to the experiences I do not forget again. At that time, he was quite mad. The sight was very important. Imagine a human being, a man who has dealt with the question the whole morning which immediately suggests itself, and who has the wish to rest some time after dinner and to let go on the thoughts sounding in himself: he lay there this way. I had the impression of a healthy man, and, besides, he was already completely mad; he recognised nobody. His forehead was moulded like that of an artist and a thinker, and, nevertheless, it was the forehead of a maniac. A riddle faced me. Human beings of his kind of insanity would have had to look completely different. Only by means of spiritual science, one can explain this unusual.

The etheric body, the carrier of memory, is connected with the physical body during the whole life, but it is connected different with the different human beings. With some, the relation is not very solid, with others very close. Now Nietzsche's etheric body was very movable from the start. Such human beings can have two qualities: the one is an ingenious, easily movable mental force and imagination, the ability to connect widely separated concepts and to get a synopsis of widely divergent perspectives. Such persons are not as easily restrained as others are by the gravity of the physical body in the conditions given by life.

Before Friedrich Nietzsche had done his doctorate, he was appointed professor of Classics in Basel. From his teacher, Professor Ritschl (Friedrich Wilhelm R., 1806–1876), information was gathered. This answered: Nietzsche is able to do everything he wants. Thus, it happened that he did his doctorate when he already held a chair. Nietzsche had an agile mind. Such a human being does not live in ideas, which are palpable. He lives, so to speak, separated like by a wall from the everyday life.

However, something else is connected with such a mental disposition: he is condemned to a certain life tragedy. He hard finds the way to the immediate things of existence, he easily lives in that which cannot be seen by the eyes, be seized by the hands what can be observed in the everyday life but in that which humanity has acquired as spiritual goods. He lives in certain ways like separated by walls from the sufferings and joys of life. His look wanders into the vast, more in that which humanity has gained and created for itself, than in the everyday. Hence, it could occur that Nietzsche was in a special situation towards the civilisation of the nineteenth century.

Someone who surveys the civilisation of the second half of the nineteenth century sees that an immense jerk forward is done in the conquest of the physical world. We take the year 1858/59. It was the year, which brought the work of Darwin (Charles D., 1809–1882, English naturalist) of the origin of species by which the look of the human beings was banished completely in the physical concerning the evolution idea. This year also brought the work by which the matters of our fixed stars and the most distant sky space were conquered: the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, German chemist). Only since that time, it was possible to say, the substances, which are found on earth, are also found on the other planets. Then appeared the book about aesthetics by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887, 1846–1857: Aesthetics or the Science of Beauty) which wanted to found the science of beauty bottom up, while one had once explained beauty top down, from the idea. To complete the picture: that work appeared which wanted to force the social life into the only sensuous world, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818–1883). Briefly, the time in which Nietzsche grew up was the time in which the human beings directed their look completely to the physical world.

Now imagine which forms all that has accepted in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century: think of Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist) and other researchers who only targeted what presented itself to their sensuous eyes; think of everything that natural sciences and technology have performed in the nineteenth century. It appears to us compared with these currents like an escape of humanity to spirituality if at that time wide circles are seized by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860). At that time, the mere interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy shows that the human souls escaped to something that should grant spiritual satisfaction. We see one of the great spirits of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813–1883, composer), attempting to let spirituality flow again into civilisation.

In this cultural trend, Nietzsche positioned himself. How did he do this? The just mentioned persons positioned themselves creatively in it, and creating is something blissful. Working makes the human being young and fresh. This becomes apparent with Haeckel. Somebody who works on the microscope and other instruments and does research can make himself happy and rejuvenate in this work, he is able to do all that also light-heartedly, and he forgets the need for a spiritual world; in him something lives that can animate the human being, creative enthusiasm, which has something divine-spiritual. Nietzsche's destiny was this cultural trend. He was destined to take joy and sorrow from this cultural trend because he was not directly connected with the everyday life. He had the nagging feeling, how can one live with that which the modern civilisation offers? Nietzsche's heart was involved in everything with joy or sorrow. He lived through everything with his soul that happened in the nineteenth century.

We see two spirits intervening early in Nietzsche's life: Schopenhauer whom he got to know not personally who had a deep effect on him by his writings, and Richard Wagner with whom he was tied together by the most tender bond of friendship. Both spirits induced Nietzsche to become engrossed in the riddle of ancient Greece in the beginning of our culture. He had done deep looks in the Greek world, from the oldest time up to those periods which history illumines brighter. The Greek of the oldest time seems to be much closer to divinity than later, when he tries to show pictures of the gods in his pieces of art: he makes them human-like, raises the form of the human being to the ideal image. The Greek was not that way in primeval times. He felt everything vividly flowing into himself what was outdoors what blows in the storm and grumbles with the thunder, what streaks in the flash what as harmonising wisdom has set up the world outdoors. At that time, in his original music the Greek expressed this harmony and created it in his temple dances.

Nietzsche called the ancient Greek the Dionysian human being. The later Greek, the Apollonian human being, reproduced what the original Greek was. He stood there considering and expressed it in his pieces of art. At this development Nietzsche looked like at a riddle, because he had no knowledge of that primeval culture which was the basis of the Greek and even earlier cultures from which it had taken its force. An expression of that primeval culture was also, what was expressed as wisdom in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries as myth creation and art. Nietzsche did not know this. He thought that everything was instinct, basic instinct with the ancient Greek. He knew nothing about that wisdom which was fostered by initiates originally in the mysteries, which then flowed into the world, illustrated in pieces of art and mystery plays. Nietzsche was not able to look into these mysteries, but he had a premonition of them. Hence, he felt worried, because he could not find the correct answer to his questions. In that primeval wisdom of the human being to which spiritual science goes back, he would have had to search the answer to his Dionysian human being and his Apollonian human being. He would have to get the solution of the riddle from the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. Then he could have seen how art fosters the beholding, and how science and religion look for that which can penetrate the human heart with devoutness.

Religion, art, and science were not yet separated in the old mysteries from each other. They originated from one root. The ancient mysteries are this root. With the leading peoples of antiquity, they were fostered in secret sites efficiently and were developed to ritual acts. The descent of the primeval wisdom was represented to the neophyte in pictures. This remained concealed to Nietzsche; therefore, he could not find the coherence, which he searched. Only tragically, the development of the Greek spiritual life could present itself to him. He stills sees Aeschylus (525–456 BC), who was close to the mysteries, creating his drama penetrated with inner wisdom. However, he also sees Sophocles (497–406 BC) and in particular Euripides (480–406 BC) already creating their dramas which only show the exterior. He recognises that the Socratics find concepts that are far from the world sources and that they place themselves like considering beyond the world content in the universe. It seemed to him in such a way that in Socrates the world itself does no longer pulsate, but only the concepts of it, that he leads the Greek pulsating life to dry, sober abstraction. Nietzsche was painfully affected by the fact that Socrates put up the sentence that virtue is teachable. He understood it in such a way that the old Greek felt what he should do; he did not ask whether it is right or wrong. Only a time estranged to divinity could ask, can one learn what is good? Hence, Nietzsche considered Socrates as the person of the decline of Greek culture.

Schopenhauer appeared to Nietzsche as a human being who had an idea of that what led to the sources of existence. He built the bridge from the abstract world of human mental pictures to the deeper sources of existence pulsating in the will. This satisfied Nietzsche's pursuit of truth. Richard Wagner appeared to him as a person risen from the old Hellenism. It was blissful for Nietzsche to develop according to such an exceptional person who walked along beside him in flesh and blood. A substitute of that which the external world is to the other human beings was this friendship with Richard Wagner.

As a deposit of his world of thought in this time we have the writing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, appeared in 1872, in which already the whole Nietzsche is included. There is already found the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Further Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche writes empathically about Schopenhauer like someone who writes about his father. Then Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, it is regarded by everybody as the best writing about Richard Wagner.

No time is so closely related to philistines as the time of materialism. In no book, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, German theologian) expresses this connection so strongly as in the book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/36). Nietzsche named and shamed this philistine attitude in his writing about David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche who longed for the re-erection of the Dionysian human being could be outraged against the philistine attitude of David Friedrich Strauss. David Friedrich Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer is a redeeming essay.

Then he did something as an academician. He had experienced the time without fire and enthusiasm of the academics. If anybody said, there can be new ideas, one can do this or that, then the others came who said: however, history shows us that nothing can develop by leaps and bounds, everything goes on quietly. One was afraid of what one called a leap in history. Nietzsche wrote a book in which he said, pluck up courage, be a human being, do not only look for history, have the courage to be independent and to act independently! Again a releasing book, of a comprising radicalism in its demand for emancipation from history. He expressed that historical mood is an obstacle of everything original in the impulses of the human beings.

Nietzsche lived up to 1876 in such a way. His development was in such a way that he stood far from the events in the world. The easy mobility of his etheric body caused this. In 1876, when Wagner was at the peak of his creating and had realised in the outside world what lived in his soul, Nietzsche discovered, what faces you does not correspond to the picture, which has lived in you.—This was the case simply because he had built something like a wall against the demands of the external realities.

He could not recognise in the outside what he had formed inside as mental pictures. There Nietzsche became confused. What made him confused? Wagner? Not really. Richard Wagner never made him confused, because he did not know the objective Richard Wagner at all. He was confused by his idea, which he had got of Wagner. Now Nietzsche became confused by the whole perspective, which had led him to Wagner. He was confused by any idealism. With the idealistic Wagner, he lost all ideals which humanity can generally spin out. Thus, the feeling originated in him: idealism and all contemplation about the spiritual is a lie, is untruthfulness, illusion. The human beings have deluded themselves about that what is real, while they have made pictures of the real to themselves. Nietzsche began to suffer from himself.

Now he is engrossed in opposite currents of the spiritual life, in the positive natural sciences and the branches, which are built up on these. He becomes acquainted with an interesting spirit, with Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher) who had written a book about moral sensations and the origin of conscience. This work The Origin of the Moral Sensations, 1877) is typical for the last third of the nineteenth century in which is searched and worked according to the methods of natural sciences. It completely gets the origin of moral sensations and conscience out of the impulses and instincts of the human being. Paul Rée makes this wittily. Nietzsche is delighted by this worldview about which he says to himself, there any illusion is overcome, and one can understand human life only from that which is palpable. Now I feel all ideals like masks of desires and instincts. In Human, All Too Human, a book which appears in aphoristic form, he tries to show how basically all ideals do not lead beyond the human being, but are something that is rooted in the all too human, in the feeling and in the everyday. Nietzsche could never find the way to the everyday immediately. He did not know the general-human from practice. He wanted to experience it now from theory with all joys and sufferings. In addition, life praxis became theory to him. This was wonderfully expressed in Daybreak (1881). Everything appears to him not only disproved, but got cold, as put on ice.

With particular satisfaction, Nietzsche now studies Eugen Dühring's (1833–1921) Philosophy of Reality (1878). In it, he delights himself; however, he is not a parroter of it. He writes many, partly extremely disparaging remarks in his personal copy. However, he tries to experience emotionally what is brought forward there as positive science. The French morality authors who aim at assessing moral of life not by standards, but by events become a stimulating reading for him. This becomes his tragedy or also his bliss. These are the essentials that he lives through all that. It works different on him from those who had created these works. He must always ask himself, how does one live with these things?

Now, however, we see significant ideas originating to him from such conditions, ideas from which we must say that Nietzsche knocked at the gate of spiritual science, just as he had once stood before it with his Dionysian human being, guessing the mysteries. The gates were not opened to him. With one of these ideas, one can prove almost how it has originated. In Dühring's book A Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life you find a strange passage. There Dühring tries to put the question whether it is possible that the same combination of atoms and molecules, which has been there once, returns one day in the same way.

During three weeks in which I have ordered Nietzsche's library, I myself have seen that he had marked this passage in this book and had added remarks. From then on, at first in the subconsciousness, the idea of the so-called everlasting return worked in him. This idea, which he developed more and more, has imprinted itself on Nietzsche's soul in such a way that it became a creed to him; he has familiarised himself with it that it became his tragedy. It expresses that everything that was there once returns in the same combination and with all details repeatedly, even if after long intervals. As well as we are sitting here now, we would come again heaps of times. This was a feeling, which belonged to the tragedy of his soul, the feeling: with all grief which now you experience you will always return.—Thus, we realise that Nietzsche has become the materialistic thinker by Dühring's idea of return—which Dühring rejects. For him there was only this return of the same a consequence of a materialistic idea.

We see Nietzsche's ideas crystallising from the cultural trend of the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows how the evolution of the imperfect to the perfect takes place how evolution advances from the simple living being to the developed human being. As for Nietzsche, it is not speculation; this becomes a source of bliss for him. It is a satisfaction for him to see the world in its development. However, he cannot stop. He says to himself, the human being has become; should he not develop further? Should the development be concluded with the human being if we see that imperfect beings have developed up to the human being? There we must look at the human being as a transition to a super-human.—Thus, the human being became to him a bridge between worm and super-human.

Nietzsche stood with his idea of the everlasting return with his whole feeling and thinking before the gate of the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He stood also with the idea of the super-human before the gate of spiritual science, which shows us that in every human being something lives that we have to understand as a divine essence of the human being. This essence is a kind of super-human if we are allowed to use the expression. When the human being has gone through many incarnations and has become more and more perfect, he will ascend to even higher degrees of existence.

Nietzsche knew nothing about all these concrete secrets of spiritual science. He knew nothing about that what we know if we look behind the sensuous, palpable. He could only emotionally grasp what lived in his soul, not with his ego. Instead of the portrayals of the spiritual facts that can fulfil us with bliss, instead of the portrayal of that world of facts which shows us how within the planetary development the human being ascends from stage to stage, all that lived with Nietzsche in the feeling, and sounds lyrically from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). It is an enthusiastic portrayal of the guessed that he could not behold. Like a question appears to us his hymn on the super-human.

How could this thirsty soul have been satisfied? Only if it had got to know spiritual science as contents. Nietzsche had to bleed out emotionally in his longing for it. Only spiritual science could have brought him what he strove for without being able to grasp it. In the last book, which he wanted to call Will to Power, it is especially clear how he could come to no fulfilment of his soul with the desired spiritual contents. Compare everything that spiritual science says about the higher human being and his affiliation to spiritual worlds with the abstract will to power, which has, actually, no contents. Power is something quite abstract if it is not said what should have power.

Just this posthumous work Will to Power shows Nietzsche's vain and fateful striving that is so great in its notions. Again, you can observe the tragedy, how this striving for an unknown land grows into insanity. Just at the example of Nietzsche, you can see where the civilisation of the nineteenth century had to lead the deeper feeling personalities. Therefore, many people who guessed something beyond the material, the palpable and could not find it because they stopped with this civilisation had to bleed out. That is why Nietzsche's tragedy also shows a big piece of the tragedy of the nineteenth century. This tragedy appears in particular, if we realise how Nietzsche with a boldness which only a human being can have who is not firmly connected with his etheric body, with the inhibitions of the physical body, how Nietzsche criticises Christianity in his Antichrist (1895). For Christianity is that what he says a harsh but comprehensible and extremely urgent criticism. A lot of that which this Antichrist contains is exceptionally worth reading. Nevertheless, the whole standpoint of Nietzsche shows us how a mind must behave to whom all philosophy appears as nihilism, who wants to search the spirit from reality and cannot find this spirit in the modern form of Christianity. It will turn out more and more that humanity recognises the big impulses and the whole deepness of Christianity only by spiritual science, so that one can say, Christianity has been recognised up to now only to a lesser extent. Nietzsche did not have this consciousness; he did not recognise Christianity properly. Why could he not recognise it? Because he could not anticipate the course of development—in the sense of spiritual science. I want to show it with an example.

About 600 years before Christ, Buddha appeared whom one cannot admire and revere enough if one recognises him really. He grows up as a king's son, surrounded by all joys of life. Any grief is kept away from him. It is ensured that he never leaves the gardens of his palace. Nevertheless, once he comes out of the sanctified area of the palaces and temples. He meets an old man, a sick person, a dead person. He sees: age is suffering, illness is suffering, and death is suffering. He recognises that in every rebirth the sufferings must come again. The great truth of the spiritual life reveals itself to Buddha. Therefore, he teaches that one should give up his longing for re-embodiment to be merged in the peace of the spiritual world.

We look at Christ now. We reincarnate in the substances of the earth. Our task is to purify, to internalise and to spiritualise this substance gradually. We carry the fruits of our pilgrimage on earth up to the spirit, and connect them thereby with the spiritual existence. May the earth then be only a vale of tears, which one should leave? No, the earth was blessed, because Christ walked about it, because his body was built from the substances of the earth, and because He permeated the earth with his forces.—The first Christians spoke that way. The human being absorbs something of the Christ principle in every life, purifies himself thereby gradually. Rebirth is not suffering, because only thereby we become able to recognise illness, age, evil as tests, as a means of education of our soul to become good and strong. The soul, which soars this knowledge, is healthy and fosters its surroundings.

Today the fear of hereditary predisposition penetrates humanity. If the human being opened himself or herself to the Christ impulse again, the illnesses would be overcome. On Golgotha, the symbol of death became the symbol of redemption. Being separated from that what one loves is suffering. However, one can be connected with those whom one loves if one is inspired by the Christ principle. One learns bit by bit to experience this union as reality. The Christ principle transforms the sufferings described by Buddha. Overcoming the sufferings one can reach not only by turning away from life, but also by the transformation of the soul. At the sight of the corpse of the crucified, we realise the riddle of the everlasting life going through death.

Nietzsche regards Christianity just as the opposite of that, what lies in its concealed deepness and what should be brought to light by spiritual science. He bleeds out because he could not recognise this. Nietzsche's grief is the deepest, most painful longing for the sources of life. Because his spirit was not firmly tied to his physical body, he does not come to the right solution of the world riddles tormenting him. Thus, it could happen that he did not find the right answer to his question to life which spiritual science could have given him, that he passed by. When the tools of the physical body could no longer serve him, he cast it off, so to speak, he divests himself of the physical body that has become useless for the thinker, and he hovers over it as it were. Thus, he appears to the viewer looking at him as healthy, as someone who only wants to rest from intensive work of thought. In such a way, he lay there like a picture of the tragedy of modern materialistic science, which cannot recognise the spiritual.

This year I shall again be giving a series of lectures on subjects related to Spiritual Science, as I have done now for several years past. Those of my audience who attended those previous lectures will know what is meant here by the term, Spiritual Science (Geisteswissenschaft). For others, let me say that it will not be my task to discuss some abstract branch of science, but a discipline which treats the spirit as something actual and real. It starts from the premise that human experience is not unavoidably restricted to sense-perceptible reality or to the findings of human reason and other cognitive faculties in so far as they are bound up with the sense-perceptible. Spiritual Science says that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind the realm of the sense-perceptible and to make observations which are beyond the range of the ordinary intellect.

This introductory lecture will describe the role of Spiritual Science in present-day life, and will show how in the past this Spiritual Science—which is as old as humanity—appeared in a form very different from the form it must take today. In speaking of the present, I naturally do not mean the immediate here and now, but the relatively long period during which spiritual life has had the particular character which has come to full development in our own time.

Anyone who looks back over the spiritual life of mankind will see that “a time of transition” is a phrase to be used with care, for every period can be so described. Yet there are times when spiritual life takes a leap forward, so to speak. From the 16th century onwards, the relationship between the soul and spiritual life of human beings and the outer world has been different from what it was in earlier times. And the further back we go in human evolution, the more we find that men had different needs, different longings, and gave different answers from within themselves to questions concerning the great riddles of existence.

We can gain a clear impression of these transition periods through individuals who lived in those days and had retained certain qualities of feeling, knowing and willing from earlier periods, but were impelled to meet the demands of a new age.

Let us take an interesting personality and see what he makes of questions concerning the being of man and other such questions that must closely engage human minds—a personality who lived at the dawn of modern spiritual life and was endowed with the inner characteristics I have just described. I will not choose anyone familiar, but a sixteenth century thinker who was unknown outside a small circle. In his time there were many persons who retained, as he did, mediaeval habits of thinking and feeling and wished to gain knowledge in the way that had been followed for centuries, and yet were moving on towards the outlook of the coming age. I shall be naming an individual of whose external life almost nothing is historically known. From the point of view of Spiritual Science, this is thoroughly congenial. Anyone who has sojourned in the realm of Spiritual Science will know how distracting it is to find attached to a personality all the petty details of everyday life that are collected by modern biographers. On this account, we ought to be thankful that history has preserved so little about Shakespeare, for instance; the true picture is not spoilt—as it is with Goethe—by all the trivia the biographers are so fond of dragging in. I will therefore designate an individual of whom even less is known than is known about Shakespeare, a seventeenth century thinker who is of great significance for anyone who can see into the history of human thinking.

In Francis Joseph Philipp, Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz, who led the life of a solitary thinker during the second half of the seventeenth century in Bohemia, we have a personality of outstanding importance from this historical point of view. In a little work entitled Libellus de nominis convenientia¹—I have not inquired if it has since been published in full—he set down the questions which occupied his soul. If we immerse ourselves in his soul, these questions can lead us into the issues that a reflecting man would concern himself with in those days. This lonely thinker discusses the great central problem of the being of man. With a forcefulness that springs from a deep need for knowledge, he says that nothing so disfigures a man as not to know what his being really is.

Count von Hoditz turns to important figures in the history of thought, for instance to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., and asks what Aristotle says in answer to this question—what the essential being of man really is.² He says: Aristotle's answer is that man is a rational animal. Then he turns to a later thinker, Descartes, and puts the same question, and here the answer is that man is a thinking being.³ But on reflection he comes to feel that these two representative thinkers can give no answer to his question; for—as he says—in the answers of Aristotle and Descartes he wanted to learn what man is and what he ought to do. When Aristotle says that man is a rational animal, that is no answer to the question of what man is, for it throws no light on the nature of rationality. Nor does Descartes in the seventeenth century tell us what man ought to do in accordance with his nature as a thinking being. For although we may know that man is a thinking being, we do not know what he must think in order to take hold of life in the right way, in order to relate his thought to life.

Thus our philosopher sought in vain for an answer to this vital question, a question that must be answered if a man is not to lose his bearings. At last he came upon something which will seem strange to a modern reader, especially if he is given to scientific ways of thought, but for our solitary thinker it was the only answer appropriate to the particular constitution of his soul. It was no help for him to know that man is a rational animal or a thinking being. At last he found his question answered by another thinker who had it from an old tradition. And he framed the answer he had thus discovered in the following words: Man in his essence is an image of the Divine.⁴ Today we should say that man in his essence is what his whole origin in the spiritual world makes him to be.

The remaining remarks by Count von Hoditz need not occupy us today. All that concerns us is that the needs of his soul drove him to an answer which went beyond anything man can see in his environment or comprehend by means of his reason. If we examine the book more closely, we find that its author had no knowledge gained direct from the spiritual world. Now if he had been troubled by the question of the relation between sun and earth, he could, even if he were not an observer himself, have found the answer somewhere among the observations collected by the new forms of scientific thought. With regard to external questions of the sense-world he could have used answers given by people who had themselves investigated the questions through their own observations and experiences. But the experiences available to him at that time gave no answer to the questions concerning man's spiritual life, his real being in so far as it is spiritual. Clearly, he had no means of finding persons who themselves had had experiences in the spiritual world and so could communicate to him the properties of the spiritual world in the same way as the scientists could impart to him their knowledge about the external world. So he turned to religious tradition and its records. He certainly assimilated his findings—this is characteristic of his quality of soul—but one can see from the way he worked that he was only able to use his intellect to give a new form to what he had found emerging from the course of history or from recorded tradition.

Many people will now be inclined to ask: Are there—can there be—any persons who from their own observation and experience are able to answer questions related to the riddles of spiritual life?

This is precisely what Spiritual Science will make people aware of once more: the fact that—just as research can be carried out in the sense-perceptible world—it is possible to carry out research in the spiritual world, where no physical eyes, no telescopes or microscopes are available, and that answers can thus be given from direct experience as to conditions in such a world beyond the range of the senses. We shall then recognise that there was an epoch, conditioned by the whole evolutionary progress of humanity, when other means were used to make known the findings of spiritual research, and that we now have an epoch when these findings can once more be spoken of and understanding for them can again be found.

In between lay the twilight time of our solitary thinker, when human evolution took a rest, so to speak, from ascending towards the spiritual world, and preferred to rely on traditions passed down through ancient records or by word of mouth. In certain circles it began to be doubted whether it was possible for human beings to enter a spiritual world through their own powers by developing the cognitive faculties that lie hidden or slumbering within them. Are there, then, any rational grounds for saying that it is nonsensical to speak of a spiritual world that lies beyond the sense-perceptible? A glance at the progress of ordinary science should be enough to justify this question. Precisely a consideration of the wonderful advances that have been made in unraveling the secrets of external nature should indicate to anyone that a higher, super-sensible knowledge must exist. How so?

If we study human evolution impartially, we cannot fail to be impressed by the exceptional progress made in recent times by the sciences concerned with the outer world. With what pride—and in a certain sense the pride is justified—do people remark that the vast, ever-increasing advance of modern science has brought to light many facts that were unknown a few centuries ago. For example, thousands of years ago the sun rose in the morning and passed across the heavens, just as it does today. That which could be seen in the surroundings of the earth and in connection with the course of the sun was the same then, for external observation, as it was in the days of Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and so on. But what could men say in those earlier ages about the external world? Can we suppose that the modern knowledge of which we are so justly proud has been gained by merely contemplating the external world? If the external world could itself, just as it is, give us this knowledge, there would be no need to look further: all the knowledge we have about the sense-perceptible world would have been acquired centuries ago. How is it that we know so much more and have a different view of the position of the sun and so on? It is because human understanding, human cognition concerning the external world, has developed and changed in the course of hundreds or thousands of years. Yes, these faculties were by no means the same in ancient Greece as they have come to be with us since the 16th century.

Anyone who studies these changes without prejudice must say to himself: Men have acquired something new. They have learnt to see the outer world differently because of something added to those faculties which apply to the external sense-world. Hence it became clear that the sun does not revolve round the earth; these new faculties compelled men to think of the earth as going round the sun.

No-one who is proud of the achievements of physical science can have any doubt that in his inner being man is capable of development, and that his powers have been remodeled from stage to stage until he has become what he is today. But he is called upon to develop more than outer powers; he has in his inner life something which enables him to recreate the world in the light of his inward capacity for knowledge. Among the finest words of Goethe are the following (in his book about Winckelmann)⁵ “if the healthy nature of man works as a unity, if he feels himself within the world as in a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole, if harmonious ease offers him a pure and free delight: then the universe, if it could become conscious of itself, would rise in exultation at having reached its goal and would stand in wonder at the climax of its own being and becoming.” And again: “Man, placed at the summit of Nature, is again a whole new nature, which must in turn achieve a summit of its own. He ascends towards that height when he permeates himself with all perfections and virtues, summons forth order, selection, harmony and meaning, and attains in the end to the creation of a work of art.”

So man can feel that he has been born out of the forces he can see with his eyes and grasp with his reason. But if he applies the unbiased observation we have mentioned, he will see that not only external Nature has forces which develop until they are observed by the human eye, heard by the human ear, grasped by the human reason. In the same way a study of human evolution will show that something evolves within man; the faculties for gaining exact knowledge of nature were at first asleep within him, and have awakened by stages in the course of time. Now they are fully awake, and it is these faculties which have made possible the great progress of physical science.

Is it then inevitable that these inner faculties should remain as they are now, equipped only to reflect the outer world? Is it not perfectly reasonable to ask whether the human soul may not possess other hidden powers that can be awakened? May it not be that if he develops further the powers that lie hidden and slumbering within him, they will be spiritually illuminated, so that his spiritual eye and spiritual ear—as Goethe calls them⁶—will be opened and will enable him to perceive a spiritual world behind the sense-world?

To anyone who follows this thought through without prejudice, it will not seem nonsensical that hidden forces should be developed to open the way into the super-sensible world and to answer the questions: What is man in his real being? If he is an image of the spiritual world, what, then, is this spiritual world?

If we describe man in external terms and call to mind his gestures, instincts and so forth, we shall find all these characteristics represented imperfectly in lower beings. We shall see his external semblance as an integration of instincts, gestures and forces which are divided up among a number of lower creatures. We can comprehend this because we see around us the elements from which man has evolved into man. Might it not be possible then, to use these developed forces to penetrate similarly into a spiritual external world and to see there beings, forces and objects, just as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world? Might it not be possible to observe spiritual processes which would throw light on man's inner life, just as it is possible to clarify his relationship to the outer world?

There has been, however, an interval between the old and the modern way of communicating Spiritual Science. This was a time of rest for the greater part of mankind. Nothing new was discovered; the old sources and traditions were worked over again and again. For the period in question this was quite right; every period has a characteristic way of meeting its fundamental needs. So this interlude occurred, and we must realise that while it lasted men were in a special situation, different both from what had been in the past and from what would be in the future. In a certain sense they became unaccustomed to looking for the soul's hidden faculties, which could have given insight into the spiritual world. So a time drew on when men could no longer believe or understand that the inner development of hidden faculties leads to super-sensible knowledge. Even then, one fact could hardly be denied: that in human beings there is something invisible. For how could it be thought that human reason, for example, is a visible entity? What sort of impartial thinking could fail to admit that human cognition is by its nature a super-sensible faculty?

Knowledge of this fact was never quite lost, even in the time when men had ceased to believe that super-sensible faculties within the soul could be developed so as to give access to the super-sensible. One particular thinker reduced this faculty to its smallest limit: it was impossible, he said, for men to penetrate by super-sensible vision into a world that comes objectively before us as a spiritual world, just as animals, plants and minerals and other people are encountered in the physical world. Yet even he had to recognise impartially that something super-sensible does exist and cannot be denied.

This thinker was Kant,⁷ who thus brought an earlier phase of human evolution to a certain conclusion. For what does he think about man's relationship to a super-sensible, spiritual world? He does not deny that a man observes something super-sensible when he looks into himself, and that for this purpose he employs faculties of knowledge which cannot be perceived by physical eyes, however far the refinement of our physical instruments may be carried. Kant, then, does point to something super-sensible; the faculties used by the soul to make for itself a picture of the outer world. But he goes on to say that this is all that can be known concerning a super-sensible world. His opinion is that wherever a man may turn his gaze, he sees only this one thing he can call super-sensible: the super-sensible element contained in his senses in order that he may perceive and grasp and understand the existence of the sense-world.

In the Kantian philosophy, accordingly, there is no path that can lead to observation or experience of the spiritual world. The one thing Kant admits is the possibility of recognising that knowledge of the external world cannot be attained by the senses, but only by super-sensible means. This is the sole experience of the super-sensible that man can have.

That is the historically important feature of Kant's philosophy. But in Kant's argument it cannot be denied that when man uses his thinking in connection with his actions and deeds, he has the means to affect the sense-perceptible world. Thus, Kant had to recognise that a human being does not follow only instinctive impulses, as lower animals do; he also follows impulses from within his soul, and these can raise him far above subservience to mere instinct. There are countless examples of people who are tempted by a seductive impulse to do something, but they resist the temptation and take as their guide to action something that cannot come from an external stimulus. We need only think of the great martyrs, who gave up everything the sense-world could offer for something that was to lead them beyond the sense-world. Or we need only point to the experience of conscience in the human soul, even in the Kantian sense. When a man encounters something ever so charming and tempting, conscience can tell him not to be lured away by it, but to follow the voice that speaks to him from spiritual depths, an indomitable voice within his soul. And so for Kant it was certain that in man's inner being there is such a voice, and that what it says cannot be compared with any message from the outer world. Kant called it the categorical imperatives significant phrase. But he goes on to say that man can get no further than this voice from the soul as a means of acting on the world from out of the super-sensible, for he cannot rise beyond the world of the senses. He feels that duty, the categorical imperative, conscience, speak from within him, but he cannot penetrate into the realm from which they come.

Kant's philosophy allows man to go no further than the boundary of the super-sensible world. Everything else that resides in the realm from which duty, conscience and the categorical imperative emanate is shut off from observation, although it is of the same super-sensible nature as the soul. Man cannot enter that realm; at most he can draw conclusions about it. He can say to himself: Duty speaks to me, but I am weak; in the ordinary world I cannot carry out fully the injunctions of duty and conscience. Therefore I must accept the fact that my being is not confined to the world of the senses, but has a significance beyond that world. I can hold this before me as a belief, but it is not possible for me to penetrate into the world beyond the senses; the world from which come the voices of moral consciousness, duty and conscience, the categorical imperative.

We will now turn to someone who in this context was the exact antithesis of Kant: I mean Goethe. Anyone who truly compares the souls of these two men will see that they are diametrically opposed in their attitudes towards the most important problems of knowledge. Goethe, after absorbing all that Kant had to say about these problems, maintained on the ground of his own inner experience that Kant was wrong. Kant, says Goethe, claims that man has the power to form intellectual, conceptual judgments, but is not endowed with any contemplative faculty which could give direct experience of the spiritual world. But—Goethe continues—anyone who has exercised himself with the whole force of his personality to wrest his way from the sense-world to the super-sensible, as I have done, will know that we are not limited to drawing conclusions, but through a contemplative power of judgement we are able actually to raise ourselves into the spiritual world. Such was Goethe's personal reply to Kant. He emphasises that anyone who asserts the existence of this contemplative judgement is embarking on an adventure of reason, but he adds that from his own experience he has courageously gone through this adventure!⁸

Yet in the recognition of what Goethe calls “contemplative judgement” lies the essence of Spiritual Science, for it leads, as Goethe knew, into a spiritual world; and it can be developed, raised to ever higher levels, so as to bring about direct vision, immediate experience, of that world, The fruits of this enhanced intuition are the content of true Spiritual Science. In coming lectures we shall be concerned with these fruits: with the results of a science which has its source in the development of hidden faculties in the human soul, for they enable man to gaze into a spiritual world, just as through the external instruments of the senses he is able to gaze into the realms of chemistry and physics.

It could now be asked: Does this possibility of developing hidden faculties that slumber in the soul belong only to our time, or has it always existed?

A study of the course of human history from a spiritual-scientific point of view teaches us that there existed ancient stores of wisdom, parts of which were condensed into those writings and traditions which survived during the intermediate period I described earlier. This same Spiritual Science also shows us that today it is again possible not merely to proclaim the old, but to speak of what the human soul can itself achieve by development of the forces and faculties slumbering within it; so that a healthy judgment, even where human beings cannot themselves see into the spiritual world, can understand the findings of the spiritual researcher. The contemplative judgment that Goethe had in mind when he spoke out against Kant, is in a certain sense the beginning of the upward path of knowledge which today is by no means unexplored. Spiritual Science is therefore able to show, as we shall see, that there are hidden faculties of knowledge which by ascending order penetrate ever further into the spiritual world.

When we speak of knowledge, we generally mean knowledge of the ordinary world, “material knowledge”; but we can also speak of “imaginative knowledge”, “inspired knowledge” and finally “intuitive knowledge”.⁹ These are stages of the soul's progress into the super-sensible world which are also experienced by the individual spiritual researcher in accord with the constitution of the soul today. Similar paths were followed by the spiritual researcher in times gone by. But spiritual research has no meaning if it is to remain the possession of a few; it cannot limit itself to a small circle. Certainly, anything an ordinary scientist has to say about the nature of plants or about processes in the animal world can be of service to all mankind, even though this knowledge is actually possessed by a small circle of botanists, zoologists and so on. But spiritual research is not like that. It has to do with the needs of every human soul; with questions related to the inmost joys and sorrows of the soul; with knowledge that enables the human being to endure his destiny, and in such a way that he experiences inner contentment and bliss even if destiny brings him sorrow and suffering. If certain questions remain unanswered, men are left desolate and empty, and precisely they are the concern of Spiritual Science. They are not questions that can be dealt with only in restricted circles; they concern us all, at whatever stage of development and culture we may be, for the answering of them is spiritual food for each and every Soul.

This has always been so, at all times. And if Spiritual Science is to speak to mankind in this way, it must find means of making itself understood by all who wish to understand it. This entails that it must direct itself to those powers which are most fully developed during a given period, so that they can respond to what the spiritual researcher has to impart. Since human nature changes from epoch to epoch and the soul is always acquiring new aptitudes, it is natural that in the past Spiritual Science should have spoken differently about the most burning questions that concern the soul. In remote antiquity it spoke to a humanity which would never have understood the way it speaks today, for the soul-forces which have now developed were non-existent then. If Spiritual Science had been presented in the way appropriate for the present day, it would have been as though one were talking to plants.

In ancient times, accordingly, the spiritual researcher had to use other means. And if we look back into remote antiquity, Spiritual Science itself tells us that in order to give answers in a form adapted to the soul-powers of mankind in those times, a different preparation was necessary for those who were training themselves to gaze into the spiritual world; they had to cultivate powers other than those needed for speaking to present-day mankind.

Men who develop the forces that slumber in the soul in order to gaze into the spiritual world and to see spiritual beings there, as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world—these men are and always have been called by Spiritual Science, Initiates, and the experiences that the soul has to undergo in order to achieve this faculty is called Initiation. But in the past the way to it was different from what it is today, for the mission of Spiritual Science is always changing. The old Initiation, which had to be gone through by those who had to speak to the people in ancient times, led them to an immediate experience of the spiritual world. They could see into surrounding realms which are higher than those perceived through the senses. But they had to transform what they saw into symbolic pictures, so that people could understand it. Indeed, it was only in pictures that the old Initiates could express what they had seen, but these pictures embraced everything that could interest people in those days.

These pictures, drawn from real experience, are preserved for us in myths and legends which have come down from the most diverse periods and peoples. In academic circles these myths and legends are attributed to the popular imagination. Those who are cognisant of the facts know that myths and legends derive from super-sensible vision, and that in every genuine myth and legend we must see an externalised picture of something a spiritual researcher has experienced, or, in Goethe's words, what he has seen with the spiritual eye or heard with the spiritual ear. We come to understand legends and myths only when we take them as images expressing a real knowledge of the spiritual world. They are pictures through which the widest circles of people could be reached.

It is a mistake to assume—as it so often is nowadays—that the human soul has always been just as it is in our century. The soul has changed; its receptivity was quite different in the past. A person was satisfied then if he received the picture given in the myth, for he was inspired by the picture to bring an intuitive vision of the outer world much more directly before his soul. Today myths are regarded as fantasy; but when in former times the myth sank into a person's soul, secrets of human nature were shown to him. When he looked at the clouds or the sun and so forth, he understood as a matter of course what the myth had set before him. In this way something we could call higher knowledge was given to a minority in symbolic form. While today we talk and must talk in straightforward language, it would be impossible to express in our terms what the souls of the old sages or initiates received, for neither the initiates nor their hearers had the soul-forces we have now developed.

In those early times the only valid forms of expression were pictorial. These pictures are preserved in a literature which strikes a modern reader as very strange. Now and then, especially if one is prompted by curiosity as well as by a desire for knowledge, one comes across an old book containing remarkable pictures which show, for example, the interconnections between the planets, together with all sorts of geometrical figures, triangles, polygons and so on. Anyone who applies a modern intellect to these pictures, without having acquired a special taste for them, will say: What can one do with all this stuff, the so-called Key of Solomon¹⁰ as a traditional symbol, these triangles and polygons and such-like?

Certainly, the spiritual researcher will agree that from the standpoint of modern culture nothing can be made of all this. But when the pictures were first given to students, something in their souls really was aroused. Today the human soul is different. It has had to develop in such a way as to give modern answers to questions about nature and life, and so it cannot respond in the old way to such things as two interlocked triangles, one pointing upwards, the other downwards. In former times, this picture could kindle an active response; the soul gazed into it and something emerging from within it was perceived. Just as nowadays the eye can look through a microscope and see, for example, plant-cells that cannot be seen without it, so did these symbolic figures serve as instruments for the soul. A man who held the Key of Solomon as a picture before his soul could gain a glimpse of the spiritual world. With our modern souls this is not possible, and so the secrets of the spiritual world which are handed down in these old writings can no longer be knowledge in the original sense, and those who give them out as knowledge, or who did so in the 19th century, are doing something out of line with the facts. That is why one cannot do anything with writings such as those of Eliphas Levi,¹¹ for instance, for in our time it is antiquated to present these symbols as purporting to throw light on the spiritual world. In earlier times, however, it was proper for Spiritual Science to speak to the human soul through the powerful pictures of myth and legend, or alternatively through symbols of the kind I have just described.

Then came the intermediate period, when knowledge of the spiritual world was handed down from one generation to the next in writing or by oral tradition. Even if we study only external history, we can readily see how it was handed down. In the very early days of Christianity there was a sect in North Africa called the Therapeutae¹² a man who had been initiated into their knowledge said that they possessed the ancient writings of their founders, who could still see into the spiritual world. Their successors could receive only what these writings had to say, or at most what could be discerned in them by those who had achieved some degree of spiritual development.

If we pass on to the Middle Ages, we find certain outstanding persons saying: we have certain cognitive faculties, we have reason; then, beyond ordinary reason we have faculties which can rise to a comprehension of certain secrets of existence; but there are other secrets and mysteries of existence which are only accessible by revelation. They are beyond the range of faculties which can be developed, they can be searched for only in ancient writings.

Hence arose the great mediaeval split between those things that can be known by reason and those that must be believed because they are passed down by tradition, are revelation.¹³ And it was quite in keeping with the outlook of those times that the frontier between reason and faith should be clearly marked. This was justified for that period, for the time had passed when certain mathematical signs could be used to call forth faculties of cognition in the human soul. Right up to modern times, a person had only one means of grasping the super-sensible: looking into his own soul, as Augustine,¹⁴ for example, did to some extent.

It was no longer possible to see in the outer world anything that revealed deep inner secrets. Symbols had come to be regarded as mere fantasies. One thing only survived: a recognition that the super-sensible world corresponded to the super-sensible in man, so that a man could say to himself: You are able to think, but your thought is limited by space and time, while in the spiritual world there is a Being who is pure thought. You have a limited capacity for love, whereas in the spiritual world there is a Being who is perfect love. When the spiritual world was represented for a human being in terms of his own inner experience, his inner life could extend to a vision of nature permeated by the Divine; then he had consciousness of God. But for particular facts he could turn only to information given in ancient writings, for in himself he had nothing that could lead him into the spiritual world.

Then came the later times which brought the proud achievements of natural science. These are the times when faculties which could go beyond the sense-perceptible emerged not only in those who achieved scientific knowledge, but in all men. Something in the soul came to understand that the picture given to the senses is not the real thing, and to realise that truth and appearance are contraries. This new faculty, which is able to discern outward nature in a form not given to the senses, will be increasingly understood by those who today penetrate as researchers into the spiritual world and are then able to report that one can see a spiritual world and spiritual beings, just as down here in the sense-perceptible world one sees animals, plants and minerals.

Hence the spiritual researcher has to speak of realms which are not far removed from present-day understanding. And we shall see how the symbols which were once a means for gaining knowledge of the spiritual world have become an aid to spiritual development. The Key of Solomon, for instance, which once called forth in the soul a real spiritual perception, does so no longer. But if today the soul allows itself to be acted on by what the spiritual researcher can explain concerning this symbol, something in the soul is aroused, and this can lead a person on by stages into the spiritual world. Then, when he has gained vision of the spiritual world, he can express what he has seen in the same logical terms that apply to external science.

Spiritual Science or occultism must therefore speak in a way that can be grasped by anyone who has a broad enough understanding. Whatever the spiritual researcher has to impart must be clothed in the conceptual terms which are customary in other sciences, or due regard would not be paid to the needs of the times. Not everyone can see immediately into the spiritual world, but since the appropriate forces of reason and feeling are now existent in every soul, Spiritual Science, if rightly presented, can be grasped by every normal person with his ordinary reason. The spiritual researcher is now again in a position to present what our solitary thinker said to himself: Man in his essence is an image of the Godhead.

If we want to understand the physical nature of man, we look to the relevant findings of physical research. If we want to understand his inner spiritual being, we look to the realm which the spiritual researcher is able to investigate. Then we see that man does not come into existence at birth or at conception, only to pass out of existence at death, but that besides the physical part of his organism he has super-sensible members. If we understand the nature of these members, we penetrate into the realm where faith passes over into knowledge. And when Kant, in the evening of an older period, said that we can recognise the categorical imperative, but that no-one can penetrate with conscious vision into the realm of freedom, of divine being and immortality, he was expressing only the experience natural to his time. Spiritual Science will show that we can penetrate into a spiritual world; that just as the eye equipped with a microscope can penetrate into realms beyond the range of the naked eye, so can the soul equipped with the means of Spiritual Science penetrate into an otherwise inaccessible spiritual world, where love, conscience, freedom and immortality can be known, even as we know animals, plants and minerals in the physical world. In subsequent lectures we will go further into this.

If once more we look now at the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his public, and at the difference between the past and present of Spiritual Science, we can say: The symbolic pictures used by spiritual researchers in the past acted directly on the human soul, because what today we call the faculties of reason and understanding were not yet present. The pictures gave direct vision of the spiritual world, and the ordinary man could not test with his reason what the spiritual researcher communicated to him through them. The pictures acted with the force of suggestion, of inspiration; a man subjected to them was carried away and could not resist them. Anyone who was given a false picture was thus delivered over to those who gave it to him. Therefore, in those early times it was of the utmost importance that those who rose into the spiritual world should be able to inspire absolute confidence and firm belief in their trustworthiness; for if they misused their power they had in their hands an instrument which they could exploit in the worst possible way.

Hence in the history of Spiritual Science there are periods of degeneration as well as times of brilliance; times in which the power of untrustworthy initiates was misused. How the initiate in those early times behaved towards his public depended to the utmost degree on himself alone. At the present time—and one might say, thank God for it!—all this is somewhat different. Since the change does not come about all at once, it is still necessary that the initiate should be a trustworthy person, and it will then be justified to feel every confidence in him. But people are already in a different relationship to the spiritual researcher; if he is to speak in accordance with the demands of his time he must speak in such a way that every unbiased mind can understand him, if the willingness to understand him is there. This is, of course, far removed from saying that everyone who could understand must now understand. But reason can now be the judge of what an individual can understand, and therefore everyone who devotes himself to Spiritual Science should bring his unbiased judgment to bear on it.

From now onwards this will be the mission of Spiritual Science: to rise into a spiritual world, through the development of hidden powers, just as the physiologist penetrates through the microscope into a realm of the smallest entities, invisible to the naked eye. And ordinary intelligence will be able to test the findings of spiritual research, as it can test the findings of the physiologist, the botanist, and so on. A healthy intelligence will be able to say of the spiritual researcher's findings: they are all consistent with one another. Modern man will come to the point of saying to himself: My reason tells me that it can be so, and by using my reason I can grasp clearly what the spiritual researcher has to tell. And that is how the spiritual researcher, for his part, should speak if he feels himself to be truly at one with the mission of Spiritual Science at the present time. But there will be a time of transition also today. For since the means to achieve spiritual development are available and can be used wrongly, many people whose purpose is not pure, whose sense of duty is not sacred and whose conscience is not infallible, will find their way into a spiritual world. But then, instead of behaving like a spiritual researcher who can know from his own experience whether the things he sees are in accord with the facts, these pretended researchers will impart information that goes against the facts. Moreover, since people can come only by slow degrees to apply their reasoning powers to understanding what the spiritual researcher says, we must expect that charlatanry, humbug and superstition will flourish preeminently in this realm. But the situation is changing. Man now has himself to blame if, without wishing to use his intellect, he is led by a certain curiosity to believe blindly in those who pass themselves off as spiritual investigators, so-called. Because men are too comfort-loving to apply their reason, and prefer a blind faith to thinking for themselves, it is possible that nowadays we may have, instead of the old initiate who misused his power, the modern charlatan who imposes on people not the truth, but something he perhaps takes for truth. This is possible because today we are at the beginning of an evolutionary phase.

There is nothing to which a man should apply his reason more rigorously than the communications that can come to him from Spiritual Science. People can lay part of the blame on themselves if they fall victim to charlatanry and humbug; for these falsities will bear abundant fruit, as indeed they have done already in our time. This is something that must not go unnoticed when we are speaking of the mission of Spiritual science today.

Anyone who listens now to a spiritual researcher—not in a willful, negative way that casts immediate doubt on everything, but with a readiness to test everything in the light of healthy reason—will soon feel how Spiritual Science can bring hope and consolation in difficult hours, and can throw light on the great riddles of existence. He will come to feel that these riddles and the great questions of destiny can be resolved through Spiritual Science; he will come to know what part of him is subject to birth and death, and what is the eternal core of his being. In brief, it will be possible—as we shall show in later lectures—that, given good will and the wish to strengthen himself by taking in and working over inwardly the communications of Spiritual Science, he will be able to say with deepest feeling: What Goethe divined and said in his youth is true, and so are the lines he wrote in his maturity and gave to Faust to speak:

The spirit world is ever open,
Dead is thy heart, thy sense-veil closely drawn!
Up, scholar, let thy breast unwearied
Bathe in the roseate hues of dawn!¹⁵

In the dawn-lines of the Spirit!

• 1. The “Libellus de hominis convenienta” by Francis Joseph Philipp Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz is a manuscript which was discovered in the Fürstenberg Library in Prague and which was written approximately between 1696 and 1700.
• 2. Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. Cf. the Parva Naturalia.
• 3. René Descartes, 1596–1650. Cf. for example the work “Meditationes de prima Philosophia”, 1641/42.
• 4. With this answer Hoditz goes back to the Neo-Platonist Philo of Alexandria (see Rudolf Steiner's comments on him in Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972) who in turn revives the Old Testament tradition; I Moses 1, 26/27
• 5. Goethe: Winkelmann, “Antikes” and “Schönheit”; in: Goethe, Werke, Weimar Edition, vol.46 (Weimar, 1891).
• 6. Cf. for example Goethe's essay “Wenige Bemerkungen” in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.107 or in “Entwurf einer Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie”, op. cit., p.262: “We learn to see with the eyes of the spirit, without which we grope around blindly as everywhere so also in natural science”. Also Faust II, sc. 1, 1 1.4667.
• 7. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Cf. the chapter “The time of Kant and Goethe” in Rudolf Steiner's The Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 8. Goethe, “Anschauende Urteilskraft” in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.1 15/116.
• 9. Cf. fundamental account of the stages of knowledge in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979, in the chapter “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”.
• 10. The symbol of two intertwined triangles, the one pointing upwards, the other downwards.
• 11. Eliphas Levi, 1810–1875, occultist. Pseudonym for the originally catholic deacon Alphonse Louis Constant from Paris. Dogme et Rituel de la haute Magie, 2 vols, 1854 and 1856.
• 12. Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.–50 A.D.) describes the life and thought of the Therapeutae in his work “De vital contemplative”. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972, p.137.
• 13. Decisive in this respect are the writings of Thomas Aquinas, especially the four books of the Summa philosophica. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy and The Redemption of Thinking.
• 14. St. Augustine, 354–430 A.D.. Had the greatest influence of the Church Fathers on theology and philosophy.
• 15. Faust I, sc.1,11.443–446.

We were able to close our lecture on the Mission of Anger (illustrated in Prometheus Bound) with the saying of Heraclitus: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We came to know this depth in the working and interplay of the powers of the soul; and the truth of the saying came home to us especially when we turned our attention to the most deeply inward part of man's being. Man is most spiritual in his Ego, and that was our starting-point.

The Ego complements those other elements of man's being which he has in common with minerals, plants and animals. He has his physical body in common with minerals, plants and animals; his etheric body in common with animals and plants; his astral body in common with animals. Through his Ego he first becomes man in the true sense and is able to progress from stage to stage. It is the Ego that works upon the other members of his being; it cleanses and purifies the instincts, inclinations, desires and passions of the astral body, and will lead the etheric and physical bodies on to ever-higher stages. But if we look at the Ego, we find that this high member of man's being is imprisoned, as it were, between two extremes.

Through his Ego, man is intended to become increasingly a being who has a firm centre in himself. His thoughts, feelings and will-impulses should spring from this centre. The more he has a firm and well-endowed centre in himself, the more will he have to give to the world; the stronger and richer will be his activities and everything that goes out from him. If he is unable to find this central point in himself, he will be in danger of losing himself through a misconceived activity of his Ego. He would lose himself in the world and go ineffectually through life. Or he may lapse into the other extreme. Just as he may lose himself if he fails to strengthen and enrich his Ego, so, if he thinks of nothing but developing his Ego, he may fall into the other extreme of selfish isolation from all human community. Here, on this other side, we find egoism, with its hardening and secluding influence, which can divert the Ego from its proper path. The Ego is confined within these two extremes.

In considering the human soul, we called three of its members the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. We also came to recognise—surprisingly, perhaps, for many people—that anger acts as a kind of educator of the Sentient Soul. A one-sided view of the lecture on the mission of anger could give scope for many objections. But if we go into the underlying significance of this view of anger, we shall find in it an answer to many important riddles of life.

In what sense is anger an educator of the soul—especially the Sentient Soul—and a forerunner of love? Is it not true that anger tends to make a man lose control of himself and engage in wild, immoral and loveless behaviour? If we are thinking only of wild, unjustified outbursts of anger, we shall get a false idea of what the mission of anger is. It is not through unjustified outbreaks of anger that anger educates the soul, but through its inward action on the soul.

Let us again imagine two teachers faced with children who have done something wrong. One teacher will burst into anger and hastily impose a penalty. The other teacher, though unable to break out into anger, is also incapable of acting rightly, with perfect tranquility, out of his Ego, in the sense described yesterday. How will the behaviour of two such teachers differ? An outburst of anger by one of them involves more than the penalty imposed on the child. Anger agitates the soul and works upon it in such a way as to destroy selfishness. Anger acts like a poison on selfishness, and we find that in time it gradually transforms the powers of the soul and makes it capable of love. On the other hand, if a teacher has not yet attained inner tranquility and yet inflicts a coldly calculated penalty, he will—since anger will not work in him as a counteracting poison—become increasingly a cold egoist.

Anger works inwardly and can be regarded as a regulator for unjustified outbursts of selfishness. Anger must be there or it could not be fought against. In overcoming anger the soul continually improves itself. If a man insists on getting something done that he considers right and loses his temper over it, his anger will dampen the egoistic forces in his soul; it reduces their effective power. Just because anger is overcome and a man frees himself from it and rises above it, his selflessness will be enhanced and the selflessness of his Ego continually strengthened. The scene of this interplay between anger and the Ego is the Sentient Soul. A different interplay between the soul and other experiences takes its course in the Intellectual Soul.

Although the soul has attributes which it must overcome in order to rise above them, it must also develop inwardly certain forces which it should love and cherish, however spontaneously they may arise. They are forces to which the soul may initially yield, so that, when it finally asserts itself, it is not weakened, but strengthened, by the experience. If a man were incapable of anger when called upon to assert himself in action, he would be the weaker for it.

It is just when a man lovingly immerses himself in his own soul that his soul is strengthened and an ascent to higher stages of the Ego comes within reach. The outstanding element that the soul may love within itself, leading not to egoism but to selflessness, is truth. Truth educates the Intellectual Soul. While anger is an attribute of the soul that must be overcome if a man is to rise to higher stages, truth should be loved and valued from the start. An inward cultivation of truth is essential for the progress of the soul.

How is it that devotion to truth leads man upwards from stage to stage? The opposites of truth are falsehood and error. We shall see how man progresses in so far as he overcomes falsehood and error and pursues truth as his great ideal.

A higher truth must be the aim of man's endeavour, while he treats anger as an enemy to be increasingly abolished. He must love truth and feel himself most intimately united with it. Nevertheless, eminent poets and thinkers have rightly claimed that full possession of truth is beyond human reach. Lessing,²¹ for example, says that pure truth is not for men, but only a perpetual striving towards it. He speaks of truth as a distant goddess whom men may approach but never reach. When the nature of truth stirs the soul to strive for it, the soul can be impelled to rise from stage to stage. Since there is this everlasting search for truth, and since truth is so manifold in meaning, all we can reasonably say is that man must set out to grasp truth and to kindle in himself a genuine sense of truth. Hence we cannot speak of a single, all-embracing truth.

In this lecture we will consider the idea of truth in its right sense, and it will become clear that by cultivating a sense of truth in his inner life man will be imbued with a progressive power that leads him to selflessness.

Man strives towards truth; but when people try to form views concerning one thing or another, we find that in the most varied realms of life conflicting opinions are advanced. When we see what different people take for truth, we might think that the striving for truth leads inevitably to the most contradictory views and standpoints. However, if we look impartially at the facts, we shall find guidelines which show how it is that men who are all seeking truth, arrive at such a diversity of opinions.

Let us take an example. The American multimillionaire, Harriman,²² who died recently, was a rarity among millionaires in concerning himself with thoughts of general human interest. His aphorisms, found after his death, include a remarkable statement. He wrote: No man in this world is indispensable. When one goes, another is there to take his place. When I lay down my work, another will come and take it up. The railways will continue running, dividends will be paid; and so, strictly speaking, it is with all men.

This millionaire, accordingly, rose to the point of declaring as a generally valid truth—no man is indispensable!

Let us compare this statement with a remark by a man who worked for many years in Berlin and gained great distinction through his lecture courses on the lives of Michelangelo, Raphael and Goethe—I mean the art-historian Herman Grimm.²³ When Treitschke²⁴ died, Herman Grimm wrote of him roughly as follows: Now Treitschke is gone, and people only now realise what he accomplished. No-one can take his place and continue his work in the same way. A feeling prevails that in the circle where he taught, everything is changed. Note that Herman Grimm did not add the words, so it is with all men.

Here we have two men, the American millionaire and Herman Grimm, who arrive at exactly opposite truths. How does this come about? If we carefully compare the two statements, we shall find a clue. Bear in mind that Harriman says pointedly: When I lay down my work, someone else will continue it. He does not get away from himself. The other thinker, Herman Grimm, leaves himself entirely out of account. He does not speak about himself, or ask what sort of opinions or truths others might gain from him. He merges himself in his subject. Anyone with a feeling for the matter will have no doubt as to which of the two spoke truth. We need only ask—who carried on Goethe's work when he laid it down? We can feel that Harriman's reflections suffer from the fact that he fails to get away from himself. Up to a point we may conclude that it is prejudicial to truth if someone in search of truth cannot get away from himself. Truth is best served when the seeker leaves himself out of the reckoning. Would it be true to say, then, that truth is already something that gives us a view (Ansicht) of things?

A view, in the sense of an opinion, is a thought which reflects the outer world. When we form a thought or reach a decision about something, does it follow that we have a true picture of it?

Suppose you take a photograph of a remarkable tree. Does the photograph give a true picture of the tree? It shows the tree from one side only, not the whole reality of the tree. No-one could form a true image of the tree from this one photograph. How could anyone who has not seen the tree be brought nearer to the truth of it? If the tree were photographed from four sides, he could collate the photographs and arrive finally at a true picture of the tree, not dependent on a particular standpoint.

Now let us apply this example to human beings. A man who leaves himself out of account when forming a view of something is doing much the same as the photographer who goes all round the tree. He eliminates himself by conscious action. When we form an opinion or take a certain view, we must realise that all such opinions depend on our personal standpoint, our habits of mind and our individuality. If we then try to eliminate these influences from our search for truth, we shall be acting as the photographer did in our example. The first condition for acquiring a genuine sense of truth is that we should get away from ourselves and see clearly how much depends on our personal point of view. If the American multimillionaire had got away from himself he would have known that there was a difference between him and other men.

An example from everyday life has shown us, that if a man fails to realise how much his personal standpoint or point of departure influences his views, he will arrive at narrow opinions, not at the truth. This is apparent also on a wider scale. Anyone who looks at the true spiritual evolution of mankind, and compares all the various “truths” that have arisen in the course of time, will find—if he looks deeply enough—that when people pronounce a “truth” they ought first of all to get away from their individual outlooks. It will then become clear that the most varied opinions concerning truth are advanced because men have not recognised to what extent their views are restricted by their personal standpoints.

A less familiar example may lead to a deeper understanding of this matter. If we want to learn more about beauty, we turn to aesthetics, which deals with the forms of beauty. Beauty is something we encounter in the outer world. How can we learn the truth about it? Here again we must free ourselves from the restrictions imposed by our personal characteristics.

Take for example the 19th century German thinker, Solger.²⁵ He wished to investigate the nature of beauty in accordance with his idea of truth. He could not deny that we meet with beauty in the external world; but he was a man with a one-sided theosophical outlook, and this was reflected in his theory of aesthetics. His interest in a beautiful picture was confined to the shining through it of the only kind of spirituality he recognised. For him, an object was beautiful only in so far as the spiritual was manifest through it. Solger was a one-sided theosophist; he sought to explain sense-perceptible phenomena in terms of the super-sensible; but he forgot that sense-perceptible reality has a justified existence on its own account. Unable to escape from his preconceptions, he sought to attain to the spiritual by way of a misconceived theosophy.

Another writer on aesthetics, Robert Zimmermann,²⁶ came to an exactly opposite conclusion. As against Solger's misconceived theosophical aesthetics, Zimmermann based his aesthetics on a misconceived anti-theosophical outlook. His sole concern was with symmetry and anti-symmetry, harmony and discord. He had no interest in going beyond the beautiful to that which manifests through it. So his aesthetics were as one-sided as Solger’s. Every striving for truth can be vitiated if the seeker fails to recognise that he must first endeavour to get away from himself. This can be achieved only gradually; but the primary, inexorable demand is, that if we are to advance towards truth we must leave ourselves out of account and quite forget ourselves. Truth has a unique characteristic: a man can strive for it while remaining entirely within himself and yet—while living in his Ego—he can acquire something which, fundamentally speaking, has nothing to do with the egoistic ego.

Whenever a man tries in life to get his own way in some matter, this is an expression of his egoism. Whenever he wants to force on others something he thinks right and loses his temper over it, that is an expression of his self-seeking. This self-seeking must be subdued before he can attain to truth. Truth is something we experience in our most inward being—and yet it liberates us increasingly from ourselves. Of course, it is essential that nothing save the love of truth should enter into our striving for it. If passions, instincts and desires, from which the Sentient Soul must be cleansed before the Intellectual Soul can strive for truth, come into it, they will prevent a man from getting away from himself and will keep his Ego tied to a fixed viewpoint. In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love.

Truth is a lofty goal. This is shown by the fact that truth, in the sense intended here, is recognised today in one limited realm only. It is only in the realm of mathematics that humanity in general has reached the goal of truth, for here men have curbed their passions and desires and kept them out of the way. Why are all men agreed that three times three makes nine and not ten? Because no emotion comes into it, Men would agree on the highest truths if they had gone as far with them as they have with mathematics. The truths of mathematics are grasped in the inmost soul, and because they are grasped in this way, we possess them. We would still possess them if a hundred or a thousand people were to contradict us; we would still know that three times three makes nine because we have grasped this fact inwardly. If the hundred or thousand people who take a different view were to get away from themselves, they would come to the same truth.

What, then, is the way to mutual understanding and unity for mankind? We understand one another in the field of reckoning and counting because here we have met the conditions required. Peace, concord and harmony will prevail among men to the extent that they find truth. That is the essential thing: that we should seek for truth as something to be found only in our own deepest being; and should know that truth ever and again draws men together, because from the innermost depth of every human soul its light shines forth.

So is truth the leader of mankind towards unity and mutual understanding, and also the precursor of justice and love. Truth is a precursor we must cherish, while the other precursor, anger, that we came to know yesterday, must be overcome if we are to be led by it away from selfishness. That is the mission of truth: to become the object of increasing love and care and devotion on our part. Inasmuch as we devote ourselves inwardly to truth, our true self gains in strength and will enable us to cast off self-interest. Anger weakens us; truth strengthens us.

Truth is a stern goddess; she demands to be at the centre of a unique love in our souls. If man fails to get away from himself and his desires and prefers something else to her, she takes immediate revenge. The English poet Coleridge has rightly indicated how a man should stand towards truth. If, he says, a man loves Christianity more than truth, he will soon find that he loves his own Christian sect more than Christianity, and then he will find that he loves himself more than his sect.

Very much is implicit in these words. Above all, they signify that to strive against truth leads to humanly degrading egoism. Love of truth is the only love that sets the Ego free. And directly man gives priority to anything else, he falls inevitably into self-seeking. Herein lies the great and most serious importance of truth for the education of the human soul. Truth conforms to no man, and only by devotion to truth can truth be found. Directly man prefers himself and his own opinions to the truth, he becomes anti-social and alienates himself from the human community. Look at people who make no attempt to love truth for its own sake but parade their own opinions as the truth: they care for nothing but the content of their own souls and are the most intolerant. Those who love truth in terms of their own views and opinions will not suffer anyone to reach truth along a quite different path. They put every obstacle in the way of anyone with different abilities, who comes to opinions unlike their own. Hence the conflicts that so often arise in life. An honest striving for truth leads to human understanding, but the love of truth for the sake of one's own personality leads to intolerance and the destruction of other people's freedom.

Truth is experienced in the Intellectual Soul. It can be sought for and attained through personal effort only by beings capable of thought. Inasmuch as truth is acquired by thinking, we must realise very clearly that there are two kinds of truth. First we have the truth that comes from observing the world of Nature around us and investigating it bit by bit in order to discover its truths, laws and wisdom. When we contemplate the whole range of our experience of the world in this way, we come to the kind of truth that can be called the truth derived from “reflective” thinking—we first observe the world and then think about our findings.

We saw yesterday that the entire realm of Nature is permeated with wisdom, and that wisdom lives in all natural things. In a plant there lives the idea of the plant, and this we can arrive at by reflective thought. Similarly, we can discern the wisdom that lives in the plant. By thus looking out on the world we can infer that the world is born of wisdom, and that through the activity of our thinking we can rediscover the element that enters into the creation of the world. That is the kind of truth to be gained by reflective thought.

There are also other truths. These cannot be gained by reflective thought, but only by going beyond everything that can be learnt from the outer world. In ordinary life we can see at once that when a man constructs a tool or some other instrument, he has to formulate laws that are not part of the outer world. For example, no-one could learn from the outer world how to construct a clock, for the laws of Nature are not so arranged as to provide for the appearance of clocks as a natural product. That is a second kind of truth: we come to it by thinking out something not given to us by observation or experience of the outer world. Hence there are these two kinds of truth, and they must be kept strictly apart, one derived from reflective thought and the other from “creative” thought.

How can a truth of this second kind be verified? The inventor of a clock can easily prove that he had thought it out correctly. He has to show that the clock does what he expects. Anything we think out in advance must prove itself in practice: it must yield results that can be recognised in the external world. The truths of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy are of this kind. They cannot be found by observing external experience.

For example, no findings in the realm of outer Nature can establish the truth we have often dwelt on in connection with the immortal kernel of man's being: the truth that the human Ego appears again and again on earth in successive incarnations. Anyone who wishes to acquire this truth must raise himself above ordinary experience. He must grasp in his soul a truth that has then to be made real in outer life. A truth of this kind cannot be proved in the same way as truths of the first kind, gained by what we have called reflective thought. It can be proven only by showing how it applies to life and is reflected there. If we look at life with the knowledge that the soul repeatedly returns and ever and again goes through a series of events and experiences between birth and death, we shall find how much satisfaction, how much strength and fruitfulness, these thoughts can bring. Or again, if we ask how the soul of a child can be helped to develop and grow stronger, if we presuppose that an eternally existent soul is here working its way into a new life, then this truth will shine in on us and give proof of its fruitfulness in daily experience. Any other proofs are false. The only way in which a truth of this kind can be confirmed is by giving proof of its validity in daily life. Hence there is a vast difference between these two kinds of truth. Those of the second kind are grasped in the spirit and then verified by observing their influence on outer life.

What then is the educational effect of these two kinds of truth on the human soul? It makes a great difference whether a man devotes himself to truths that come from reflective thought or to those that come from creative thought. If we steep ourselves in the wisdom of Nature and create in ourselves a true reflection of it, we can rightly say that we have in ourselves something of the creative activity from which the life of Nature springs. But here a distinction must be made. The wisdom of Nature is directly creative and gives rise to the reality of Nature in all its fullness, but the truth we derive from thinking about Nature is only a passive image; in our thinking it has lost its power. We may indeed acquire a wide, open-minded picture of natural truth, but the creative, productive element is absent from it. Hence the immediate effect of this picture of truth on the development of the human Ego is desolating. The creative power of the Ego is crippled and devitalised; the Self loses strength and can no longer stand up to the world, if it is concerned only with reflective thoughts. Nothing else does so much to isolate the Ego, to make it withdraw into itself and look with hostility on the world. A man can become a cold egoist if he is intent only on investigating the outer world. Why does he want this knowledge? Does he mean to place it at the service of the Gods?

If a man desires only this kind of truth, he wants it for himself, and he will be on the way to becoming a cold egoist and misogynist in later life. He will become a recluse or will sever himself from mankind in some other way, for he wants to possess the content of the world as his own truth. All forms of seclusion and hostility towards humanity can be found on this path. The soul becomes increasingly dried up and loses its sense of human fellowship. It becomes ever more impoverished, although the truth should enrich it. Whether a man turns into a recluse or a one-sided eccentric makes no difference; in both cases a hardening process will overtake his soul. Hence we see that the more a man confines himself to this kind of reflective thought, the less fruitful his soul will be. Let us try to understand why this is so.

Consider the realms of nature and suppose that we have before us an array of plants. They have been formed by the living wisdom which calls forth their inherent productive power. Now an artist comes along. His soul receives the picture that Nature sets before him. He does not merely think about it; he opens himself to Nature's productive power and lets it work upon him. He creates a work of art which does not embody merely an act of thinking; it is imbued with productive power. Then comes someone who tries to get behind the picture and to extract a thought from it. He ponders over it. In this way its reality is filtered and impoverished. Now try to carry this process further. Once the soul has extracted a thought from the picture, it has finished with it. Nothing more can be done except to formulate thoughts about the thought—an absurd procedure which soon dries up.

It is quite different with creative thinking. Here a man is himself productive. His thoughts take form as realities in outer life; here he is working after the example of Nature herself. That is how it is with a man who goes beyond mere observation and reflective thinking and allows something not to be gained from observation to arise in his soul. All spiritual-scientific truths require a productive disposition in the soul. In the case of these truths all mere reflective thinking is bad and leads to deception. But the truths attainable by creative thought are limited, for man is weak in the face of the creative wisdom of the world. There is no end to the things from which we can derive truths by reflective thought; but creative thought, although the field open to it is restricted, brings about a heightening of productive power; the soul is refreshed and its scope extended. Indeed, the soul becomes more and more inwardly divine, in so far as it reflects in itself an essential element of the divine creative activity in the world.

So we have these two distinct kinds of truth, one reached by creative thought, the other by reflective thought. This latter kind, derived from the investigation of existent things or current experience, will always lead to abstractions; under its influence the soul is deprived of nourishment and tends to dry up. The truth that is not gained from immediate experience is creative; its strength helps man to find a place in the world where he can co-operate in shaping the future.

The past can be approached only by reflective thought, while creative thought opens a way into the future. Man thus becomes a responsible creator of the future. He extends the power of his Ego into the future, in so far as he comes to possess not merely the truths derived from the past by reflective thinking, but also those that are gained by creative thinking and point towards the future.

Herein lies the liberating influence of creative thinking. Anyone who is active in the striving for truth will soon find how he is impoverished by mere reflective thinking. He will come to understand how the devotee of reflective thinking fills his mind with phantom ideas and bloodless abstractions. Such a man may feel like an outcast, condemned to a mere savouring of truth and may come to doubt whether his spirit can play any part in shaping the world. On the other hand, a man who experiences a truth gained by creative thinking will find that it nourishes and warms his soul and gives it new strength for every stage in life. It fills him with joy when he is able to grasp truths of this kind and discovers that in bringing them to bear on the phenomena of life he can say to himself: Now I not only understand what is going on there, but I can explain it in the light of having known something of it previously.

With the aid of spiritual-scientific truths we can now approach man himself. He cannot be understood merely by reflective thinking, but now we can comprehend him better and better, while our feeling of unity with the world and our interest in it are continually enhanced. We experience joy and satisfaction at every confirmation of spiritual-scientific truths that we encounter. This is what makes these truths so satisfying: we have first to grasp them before we can find them corroborated in actual life, and all the while they enrich us inwardly. We are drawn gradually into unity with the phenomena we experience. We get away more and more from ourselves, whereas reflective thinking leads to subtle forms of egoism. In order to find confirmation of truths gained by creative thinking we have to go out from ourselves and look for their application in all realms of life. It is these truths that liberate us from ourselves and imbue us in the highest degree with a sense of truth and a feeling for it.

Feelings of this kind have been alive in every genuine seeker after truth. They were deeply present in the soul of Goethe when he declared: “Only that which is fruitful is true”—a magnificent, luminous saying of far—reaching import. But Goethe was also well aware that men must be closely united with truth if they are to understand one another. Nothing does more to estrange men from one another than a lack of concern for truth and the search for truth. Goethe also said: “A false doctrine cannot be refuted, for it rests on a conviction that the false is true.”²⁷ Obviously there are falsities that can be logically disproved, but that is not what Goethe means. He is convinced that a false viewpoint cannot be refuted by logical conclusions, and that the fruitful application of truth in practical life should be our sole guide-line in our search for truth.

It was because Goethe was so wonderfully united with truth that he was able to sketch the beautiful poetic drama, Pandora, which he began to write in 1807. Though only a fragment, Pandora is a ripe product of his creative genius—so powerful in every line, that anyone who responds to it must feel it to be an example of the purest, grandest art. We see in it how Goethe was able to make a start towards the greatest truths—but then lacked the strength to go further. The task was too arduous for him to carry through; but we have enough of it to get some idea of how deeply he had penetrated into the problems of spiritual education. He had a clear vision of everything that the soul has to overcome in order to rise higher; he understood everything we learnt yesterday about anger and the fettered Prometheus, and have learnt today about that other educator of the soul, the sense of truth.

How closely related these two things are in their effects on the soul can be seen also in the facial expressions they call forth. Let us picture a man under the influence of anger, and another man upon whom truth is acting as an inward light. The first man is frowning—why? In such cases the brow is knitted because an excessive force is working inwardly, like a poison, to hold down a surplus of egoism which would like to destroy everything that exists alongside and separate from the man himself. In the clenched fist of anger we see the wrathful self closed up in itself and refusing to go forth into the outer world. Now compare this with the facial expression of someone who is discovering truth. When he perceives the light of truth, he too may frown, but in his case the wrinkled brow is a means whereby the soul expands, as though it would like to grasp and absorb the whole world with devoted love. Observe, too, the eyes of a man who is trying to overhear the world's secrets. His eyes are shining, as though to encompass everything around him in the outer world. He is released from himself; his hand is not clenched, but held out with a gesture that seeks to absorb the being of the world.

The whole difference between anger and truth is thus expressed in human physiognomy and gesture. Anger thrusts the human being deeper into himself. If he strives for truth, his being expands into the outer world; and the more united he becomes with the outer world, the more he turns away from the truths gained by reflective thinking to those gained by creative thinking. Therefore, Goethe in his Pandora brings into opposition with each other certain characters who can be taken to represent forces at work in the human soul. They are intended to express symbolically the relationships between the characteristics and capacities of the soul.

When you open Pandora, you come upon something remarkable and highly significant at the very start. On the side of Prometheus, the stage is loaded with tools and implements constructed by man. In all these, human energies have been at work, but in a certain sense it is all rough and ready. On the side of Epimetheus, the other Titan, there is a complete contrast. Here everything is perfectly finished; we see not so much what man creates, but a bringing together of what Nature has already produced. It is all the result of reflective thinking. Here we have combination and shaping, a symmetrical ordering of Nature's work. On the side of Prometheus, unsymmetry and roughness; on the side of Epimetheus, elegant and harmonious products of Nature, culminating in a view of a wonderful landscape. What does all this signify? We need only consider the two contrasted characters: Prometheus the creative thinker, Epimetheus the reflective thinker. With Prometheus we find the products mainly of creative thinking. Here, although man's powers are limited and clumsy, he is productive. He cannot yet shape his creations as perfectly as Nature shapes her own; but they are all the outcome of his own powers and tools. He is also deficient in feeling for scenes of natural beauty.

On the side of Epimetheus, the reflective thinker, we see the heritage of the past, brought into symmetrical order by himself. And because he is a reflective thinker, we see in the background a beautiful landscape which gives its own special pleasure to the human eye. Epimetheus now comes forward and discloses his individual character. He explains that he is there to experience the past, and to reflect upon past occurrences and the visible world. But in his speech he reveals the dissatisfaction that this kind of attitude can at times call forth in the soul. He feels hardly any difference between day and night. In brief, the figure of Epimetheus shows us reflective thinking in its most extreme form. Then Prometheus comes forward carrying a torch and emerging from the darkness of night. Among his followers are smiths; they set to work on the man-made objects that are lying around, while Prometheus makes a remarkable statement that will not be misunderstood if we are alive to Goethe's meaning. The smiths extol productivity and welcome the fact that in the course of production many things have to be destroyed. In a one-sided way they extol fire. A man who is an all-round reflective thinker will not praise one thing at the expense of another. He casts his eye over the whole. Prometheus, however, says at once:

In partiality let the active man
Find his pleasure

He extols precisely the fact that to be active entails the acceptance of limitations. In Nature, the right is established when the wrong destroys itself. But to the smiths Prometheus says: Carry on doing whatever can be done. He is the creative man; he emerges with his torch from the darkness of night in order to show how from the depths of his soul the truth gained by his creative thinking comes forth. Unlike Epimetheus, he is far from a dreamlike feeling that night and day are all one. Nor does he experience the world as a dream. For his soul has been at work, and in its own dark night it has grasped the thoughts which now emerge from it. They are no dreams, but truths for which the soul has bled. By this means the soul advances into the world and gains release from itself; but at the same time it incurs the danger of losing itself. This does not yet apply to Prometheus himself, but when a man introduces one-sidedness into the world, the danger appears among his descendants.

Phileros, the son of Prometheus, is already inclined to love and cherish and enjoy the products of creative work, while his father Prometheus is still immersed in the stream of life's creative power. In Phileros we are shown the power of creative thinking developed in a one-sided way. He rushes out into life, not knowing where to search for enjoyment. Prometheus cannot pass on to his son his own fruitfully creative strength, and so Phileros appears incomprehensible to Epimetheus, who out of his own rich experience would like to counsel him on his headlong career.

We are then magnificently shown what mere reflective thinking involves. This is connected with the myth that Zeus, having fettered Prometheus to the rock, imposes Pandora, the all-gifted, on mankind.

Most beautiful and gifted she approached
The amazed watcher, moving with noble grace,
Her gracious look inquiring whether I,
Like to my sterner brother, would repel her,
But all too strongly were my heart-beats stirred,
With sense bemused my charming bride I welcomed.
Towards the mysterious dowry then I turned,
The earthen vessel, tall and shapely, stood
Close-sealed ...

Prometheus had warned his brother against this gift from the gods. But Epimetheus, with his different character, accepts the gift, and when the earthen vessel is opened, all the afflictions that can befall mankind come pouring out. Only one thing is left in the vessel—Hope.

Who, then, is Pandora and what does she signify? Truly a mystery of the soul is concealed in her. The fruits of reflective thinking are dead products, an abstract reflection of the mechanical thoughts forged by Hephaestus. This wisdom is powerless in the face of the universally creative wisdom from which the world has been born. What can this abstract reflection give to mankind?

We have seen how this kind of truth can be sterile and can lay waste the soul, and we can understand how all the afflictions that fall on mankind come pouring out of Pandora's vessel. In Pandora we have to see truth without the powers of creativity, the truth of reflective thinking, a truth which builds up a mechanised thought-picture in the midst of the world's creative life. For the mere reflective thinker only one thing remains. While the creative thinker unites his Ego with the future and gets free from himself, the reflective thinker can look to the future only with hope, for he has no part in shaping it. He can only hope that things will happen. Goethe shows his deep comprehension of the myth by endowing the marriage of Epimetheus and Pandora with two children: Elpore (Hope) and Epimeleia (Care), who safeguards existing things. In fact, man has in his soul two offspring of dead, abstract, mechanically conceived truth. This kind of truth is unfruitful and cannot influence the future; it can only reflect what is already there. It leaves a man with nothing but the hope that what is true will duly come to pass. This is represented by Goethe with splendid realism in the figure of Elpore, who, if someone asks her whether this or that is going to happen, always gives the same answer, yes, yes. If a Promethean man were to stand before the world and speak of the future, he would say: “I hope for nothing. With my own forces I will shape the future.” But a reflective thinker can only reflect on the past and hope for the future; thus Elpore, when asked whether this or that will happen, replies always, yes, yes. We hear it again and again. In this way a daughter of reflective thinking is admirably characterised and her sterility is indicated.

The other daughter of this reflective thinking, Epimeleia, is she who cares for existing things. She sets them all in symmetrical order and can add nothing from her own resources. But all things which fail to develop are increasingly liable to destruction; hence we see how anxiety about them continually mounts, and how through mere reflective thinking a destructive element finds its way into the world. This is wonderfully well indicated by Goethe when he makes Phileros fall in love with Epimeleia. We see him, burnt up with jealousy, pursuing Epimeleia, until she takes refuge from him with the Titan brothers. Strife and dissension come simultaneously on to the scene. Epimeleia complains that the person she loves is the very one to seek her life.

Everything that Goethe goes on to say shows how deeply he had penetrated into the effects of creative thinking and reflective thinking on the soul. The creative thinking of the smiths is set in wonderful contrast to the outlook of the shepherds; whilst the latter take what Nature offers, the former work on the products of Nature and transform them. Therefore Prometheus says of the shepherds: they are seeking peace, but they will not find a peace that satisfies their souls:

Go your ways in peace; but peace
You will not find.

For a wish merely to preserve things as they are leads only to the unproductive side of Nature.

The truths which belong to creative thinking and reflective thinking respectively are thus set before us in the figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and in all the characters connected with them. They represent those soul-forces which can spring from an excessive, one-sided predilection for one or other way of striving after truth. And after we have seen how disastrous are the consequences of these extremes, we are shown finally the one and only remedy—the co-operation of the Titan brothers. The drama leads on to an outbreak of fire in a property owned by Epimetheus. Prometheus, who is prepared to demolish a building if it no longer serves its purpose, advises his brother to make all speed to the spot and do all he can to halt the destruction. But Epimetheus no longer cares for that; he is thinking about Pandora and is lost in his recollection of her. Interesting also is a dialogue between the brothers about her:

Prometheus:

Her form sublime, from ancient dark emerging,
Came near me also. To make another like her,
Even Hephaestus would have failed in that.

Epimetheus:

Art thou, too, prating of this fabled birth?
From ancient gods, a mighty race, she springs:
Uranione, Hera's peer, and sister
Of Zeus himself.

Prometheus:

And yet Hephaestus, for her rich adornment,
Made for her head a net of shining gold,
Weaving with subtle hand the finest threads.

In every sentence spoken by Prometheus we see how mechanised, abstract limitations obsess his mind. Then Eos, the Dawn, appears. She is an unlit being who precedes and heralds the sun, but also contains its light within herself already. She does not simply emerge from the darkness of night; she represents a transition to something which has overcome night. Prometheus appears with his torch because he has just come out of the night. The artificial light he carries indicates how his creative work proceeds from the night's darkness. Epimetheus can indeed admire the sunlight and its gifts, but he experiences everything as in a dream. He is an example of pure reflective thinking. The way in which light can escape the attention of a soul absorbed in creative activity is shown by what Prometheus says in the light of day. His people, he says, are called upon not merely to observe the sun and the light, but to be themselves a source of illumination. Now Eos, Aurora, comes forward. She calls upon men to be active everywhere in doing right. Phileros, already having sought death, should unite with the forces which will make it possible for him to rescue himself. The smiths, who are working within the limits of their creative thinking, and the shepherds, who accept things as they are, are now joined by the fishermen. And we see how Eos gives them advice:

Morning of youth, dawning of day,
More beautiful than ever,
From the unfathomed ocean
I bring you now.
Awake, shake off your sleep,
You dwellers in the bay
By cliffs encircled,
You fishermen, arise,
And ply your craft.
With speed spread out your nets
Around the well-known waters,
A splendid catch is certain
When my voice cheers you on.
Swim, you swimmers! Dive, you divers!
Watch, you watchers on the heights!
May the shores and seas together
Swarm with swift abounding life!

Then we are shown in a wonderful way how Phileros is rescued on the surging flood and unites his own strength with the strength of the waves. The active creative power in him is thus united with the creative power in Nature. So the elements of Prometheus and Epimetheus are reconciled.

Thus Goethe offers a solution rich in promise, by showing how knowledge gained from nature by reflective thinking can be fired with productive energy by the creative thinking element. This latter acquires its rightful strength by receiving, in loyalty to truth, what the gods “up there” bestow:

Take note of this:
What is desirable, you feel down here;
What is to be given, they know up there.
You Titans make a great beginning,
But the way to the eternal good, the forever beautiful,
That is the work of the gods; they ensure it.

The union of Prometheus and Epimetheus in the human soul will bring salvation for them and for mankind. The whole drama is intended to indicate that through an all-round grasping of truth the entire human race, and not only individuals, will find satisfaction. Goethe wished to show that an understanding of the real nature of truth will unite humanity and foster love and peace among men. Then Hope, also, is transformed in the soul—Hope who says yes to everything but is powerless to bring anything about. The poem was to have ended with the transformed Elpore, Elpore thraseia, coming forward to tell us that she is no longer a prophetess but is to be incorporated into the human soul, so that human beings would not merely cherish hopes for the future but would have the strength to co-operate in bringing about whatever their own productive power could create. To believe in the transformation wrought by truth upon the soul—that is the whole perfected truth which reconciles Prometheus and Epimetheus.

Naturally, these sketchy indications can bring out only a little of all that can be drawn from the poem. The deep wisdom that called forth this fragment from Goethe will disclose itself first to those who approach it with the support of a spiritual-scientific way of thinking. They can experience a satisfying, redeeming power which flows out from the poem and quickens them.

We must not fail to mention a remarkably beautiful phrase that Goethe included in his Pandora. He says that the divine wisdom which flows into the world must work in harmony with all that we are able to achieve through our own Promethean power of creative thinking. The element that comes to meet us in the world and teaches us what wisdom is, Goethe called the Word. That, which lives in the soul and must unite itself with the reflective thinking of Epimetheus, is the Deed of Prometheus. So the union of the Logos or Word with the Deed gives rise to the ideal that Goethe wished to set before us in his Pandora as the fruit of a life rich in experiences. Towards the end of the poem, Prometheus makes a remarkable statement: “A real man truly celebrates the deed.” This is the truth that remains hidden from the reflective thinking element in the soul.

If we open ourselves to this whole poem, we can come to realise the heroic yearning for development felt by men such as Goethe, and the great modesty which prevents them from supposing that by reaching a certain stage they have done enough and need not try to go further. Goethe was an apprentice of life up to his last day, and always recognised that when a man has been enriched by an experience he must overcome what he has previously held to be true.

When as a young man, Goethe was beginning to work on Faust, and had occasion to introduce some translations from the Bible, he decided that the words “In the beginning was the Word”, should be rendered as “in the beginning was the Deed”. At this same time he wrote a fragment on Prometheus.²⁸ There we see the young Goethe as altogether active and Promethean, confident that simply by developing his own forces, not fructified by cosmic wisdom, he could progress. In his maturity, with a long experience of life behind him, he realised that it was wrong to underestimate the Word, and that Word and Deed must be united. In fact, Goethe revised parts of his Faust while he was writing his Pandora. We can understand how Goethe came by degrees to maturity only if we realise the nature of truth in all its forms.

It will always be good for man if he wrestles his way to realising that truth can be apprehended only by degrees. Or take a genuine, honest, all-round seeker after truth who is called upon to bring forcibly before the world some truth he has discovered. It will be very good if he reminds himself that he has no grounds for pluming himself on this one account. There are no grounds at any time for remaining content with something already known. On the contrary, such knowledge as we have gained from our considerations yesterday and today should lead us to feel that, although the human being must stand firmly on the ground of the truth he has acquired and must be ready to defend it, he must from time to time withdraw into himself, as Goethe did. When he does this, the forces arising from the consciousness of the truth he has gained will endow him with a feeling for the right standards and for the standpoint he should make his own. From the enhanced consciousness of truth we should ever and again withdraw into ourselves and say, with Goethe: Much that we once discovered and took for truth is now only a dream, a dreamlike memory; and what we think today, will not survive when we put it to a deeper test. The words often spoken by Goethe to himself in relation to his own honest search for truth may well be echoed by every man in his solitary hours:

A poor wight am I
Through and through.
My thoughts miss the mark,
My dreams, they are not true.²⁹

If we can feel this, we shall be in the right relationship to our high ideal, Truth.

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• 21. Cf. for example the polemic “Eine Duplik” (1778), part 1.
• 22. Edward Henry Harriman, 1848–1909. North American railway magnate.
• 23. Herman Grimm, 1828–1901, in his essay “Ernst Curtius, Heinrich von Treitschke, Leopold von Ranke”, in: Fragmente, vol 1, Berlin & Stuttgart, 1900, p.246.
• 24. Heinrich von Treitschke, 1834–96. German historian.
• 25. Karl Friedrich Solger, 1780–1819, from 1811 Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. Cf. Erwin. Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst, 1815, and Vorlesungen uber Asthetik, ed. Heyse, 1829.
• 26. Robert Zimmermann, 1824–98. Professor in Vienna. Member of the school of Herbart. Cf. his Asthetik, 1858–65.
• 27. The first quotation is from the poem “Vermächtnis”, 1829; the second is from the “Sprüche in Prosa” in vol V, p.402 of Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited with a commentary by Rudolf Steiner, 5 vols, Dornach, 1975.
• 28. Faust 1, 11.1224 and “Prometheus”, a dramatic fragment, 1773.
• 29. From the poem “Sprichtwörtlich”.