The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Even when we reflect on current events, as we are doing now, reflections that we then want to expand into certain perspectives, perspectives that can only be achieved through spiritual science, even when we reflect in this way, we must always bear in mind that we have arrived at the age of the consciousness soul in the developmental stream of humanity, and that it is precisely the task of the human being in the present to follow things from the point of view of entering into the consciousness soul. The basic impulse of our time will be such that only those who want to seek out of the most recent and further past understanding for the forces that prevail in the present, only those who will have the good will for understanding, can grow to meet the demands that the difficult present and future will make of people. For even if many conditions are such that the forces are thrown into confusion, that chaotic conditions arise – oh, much more chaotic conditions could arise than there are – in the chaos live nevertheless the continuations of those forces that were already there. And only he will understand chaos who understands the forces that were already there and that continue, perhaps very masked, but that continue from earlier times. But also the demands that are made on humanity must be understood to a much greater extent than many people today imagine.

Yesterday I pointed out that an understanding will have to be acquired for the truth that reigns in things. It is quite certain that very many people today have no conception at all of the truth that reigns in things. That truth or untruth prevails in things themselves, in the events, and that one can devote oneself to one or the other, is still not believed by many people today, because they only have the abstraction in mind, that truth is the subjective agreement of what one imagines with something that is going on outside. But in events, especially as they affect human life, truth or untruth itself prevails, and it is quite unimportant whether a person knows or not about some untruths, because the worst untruths very often pulsate precisely in human life as subconscious forces, not reaching up into human consciousness at all. But especially in the present time one must get to know these subconscious forces, one must bring them up into consciousness. This is extremely difficult for many people, and to deal with the immediate future can make the task easier; to deal with the coming events in such a way that they can, as it were, teach something, that is important. But it is not so very easy, because it is not quite comfortable either way. In recent years, we have heard various judgments — I have already mentioned this — judgments from this or that point of view. From a certain superficial point of view, of course, neither the one nor the other point of view could be blamed. It was only regrettable that so little investigation was made into the deeper issues at work in these tremendous catastrophic events; and it is also regrettable that people have repeatedly fallen back into their old complacency, judging by appearances, or I would not say by catchwords, but by catchwords, by catchphrases. Even when events have called for quite different judgments, people have continued to judge according to the old ways of thinking, and even today, instead of really focusing on the big questions that arise every day, they still judge in many ways according to the old ways of thinking.

Particularly with regard to what I suggested at the beginning of yesterday's reflections, namely to immerse oneself in the truth of the facts, it is important to now set our sights on something. Regarding many things, there is only a beginning, but regarding some things, something decisive has occurred. What has happened is perhaps not exactly what the victorious powers of the present day had imagined, in a different way, would be the fate of the Central Powers after victory. At least not after four and a half years. But there is something connected with these decisions, which should be clear to the scholar, if he judges the situation quite objectively. There has not been a war for a long time, and what people still imagine, that peace could be made in the next few weeks, or, I don't know when, will of course look just like the curious peace of Brest-Litovsk and everything that is currently called peace. It is only an old habit to still believe that catastrophic events can end with an ordinary peace agreement, just as it is an old habit to believe that the war has remained a war, which it has not been for a long time; because what was ruling behind it can be seen in more abbreviated manifestations through minor details, I might say.

You see today that the so-called German Revolution, the revolution in the former German Reich, has taken on a strange form. Probably most people, in Germany and outside of Germany, did not imagine that things would take on such a form. They have taken on such a form because the historical symptoms – I have indeed spoken to you for a long time about historical symptoms – point only to something deeper, and ultimately a symptom could play out in one way or another. Finally, what is happening now is all just a consequence of the fact that a certain party within Germany wanted to play one last trump card, which wanted to maintain this Germany, one last gamble: the fleet, which had not yet been activated or at least only in minor ways, was to be induced to carry out one last attack, one last action. The sailors did not go along with this, and so it was precisely the sailors who staged the form – only the form, of course – of the revolution that then came.

I have not spoken to you about historical symptomatology for nothing, so that what should be the case with you at least can at least be the case with people of the present and the future: the assessment of what is happening from the symptoms, which are not to be taken as in ancient history, but precisely as symptoms, as revelations of realities that stand behind these symptoms, so that one must evaluate and weigh these symptoms. But the way these decisions, these provisional decisions, are now presented, they are the starting point of things that, after so much has been wrongly evaluated for so long, should now be more correctly evaluated by at least some people.

You see, everything that has been done wrong by the central powers, if I may use the term, everything that the various rulers in power have sinned against, and all the untruthfulness that has been at the root of the events, will come to light. Events have developed in such a way that the world will learn in the most minute details in the relatively not-so-distant future all the sins committed by the Central European rulers. And I myself will communicate what I know of the events – and I can only say that karma has also given me the opportunity to know quite a lot about the crucial things in this case – and, if my life is sufficient for that, I will do everything to ensure that truth takes the place of what has been presented to the world so far. But on the other hand, the events are such that this does not seem to lead to it. Of course, you should know from the very things that have been discussed here over the years that no less untruth has prevailed on the other side. Do you think that this will also be presented to the people in detail? Not even the documents for the judgment are there for that! Not even the intellectual documents for the judgment are there, but all the documents are there to ensure that the truth remains hidden.

If I compare the mood with which the events of August, September, October and November 1914 were judged in neutral and enemy countries with regard to the actions of the Central Powers, and compare it with the benevolence with which the outrageously cruel armistice conditions for the Central Powers, with the general, strange silence with which the fact that these armistice conditions, as they were and as they will remain even after they have been mitigated, are a veritable death sentence, is passed over in silence, then I notice a difference, a very enormous difference in the will to judge. For this difference in the will to judge is also based on the fact that there was no will to judge in August, September, October, November 1914 and so on. Perhaps I can only go into some of this hypothetically, which, as I said, will already be known to the world, whereas now, in order to come to a judgment, it is not at all necessary to do anything other than read paragraph by paragraph. I know that I am speaking to deaf ears even with this, speaking to deaf ears in many directions, but why should I not, when one has the obligation to speak the truth without sympathy or antipathy, purely in its objectivity, even at this moment when it may not be very welcome in this direction, why should the truth not be spoken, since I cannot know how much longer it will be permitted to speak even such truths. I speak these things truly not to express any sympathy or antipathy, but to express a bloodily won realization dutifully. In the age of the consciousness soul, it is necessary to approach things knowingly and to make knowledge the impulse of one's actions and especially the impulse of insight. And insight is necessary – I have emphasized this again and again in recent days – insight will be necessary for the people of the age of consciousness.

It will become clear to the world that all the talk that has prevailed for the past four and a half years with regard to the so-called question of guilt was, in fact, quite superficial talk. What has taken place is much more tragic in a higher sense than one can speak of guilt, because one cannot speak of guilt when, for example, inability plays a large part in a series of events. Of course, inability, as I have shown you, played an enormous role in the central powers, for example, in the decisive positions, but precisely the absolute intellectual inability, also the inability in the assessment of the circumstances, in the power of judgment and the like. It will be necessary to consider some realities. I will point out just one.

It is true that out of passion one can judge, condemn, misjudge and so on a great many things. Yes, the person who speaks on the basis of the facts, who knows the facts, must answer many questions, which are extremely important historical questions, in sharp contours. You see, of course things always look different from different points of view. There are various reasons that can be given for why in August 1914 a war also came about from Germany to France. I have already pointed out some of them. One can say: Only those who really have the will to speak accurately can express things correctly under these circumstances. It was a matter of a hair's breadth, one can say, so in August 1914 there would have been no war on two fronts at all, but the inevitable war against Russia. I am now speaking from the point of view of the Central Powers; the matter looks different from the other side, of course. It was a matter of a hair's breadth. What was it? What is this 'hair's breadth'? Well, you see, the gentleman who is now supposed to be in Holland and whom foreign countries in particular took so tremendously seriously, which was a great injustice done to the German people, he was, as you can see from my account a few days ago, an extraordinarily indiscreet man. Not true, when - as I told you - he was offered an alliance by Russia and France over the years, so that an alliance between Russia, France and Germany against England would have come about, In 1908, in the famous Daily Telegraph affair, he boasted that he had immediately informed his grandmother of the Russian and French request and that he had thereby rendered a great service to the British Empire. You could ask the relevant authorities what actually happened with the invasion of Belgium. After all, this gentleman, whom I am referring to, was the supreme commander and could decide. The gentleman in question - please do not object that many people in Europe already knew this - but the gentleman in question did not know that Belgium would be invaded until July 29, 1914. And why? Because it couldn't be told to him, because if it had been told to him today, the whole world would have known about it tomorrow, when all those people, like Sven Hedin and so on, who admired him so much, came to him. What kind of anomaly is it when a war plan has to be strategically worked out for certain reasons that are based on strategy, and the supreme commander must not know the most important point, the starting point at all! Is something supposed to come of it that can then be judged in the usual way?

Now the situation was such that, due to the European constellation, well, that is, due to the very, very innocent Entente Powers – they are, after all, in their opinion, quite innocent, aren't they, of the outbreak of this war – that due to these very innocent Entente Powers, the opinion has arisen in Germany for a long time, since the 1890s, perhaps even earlier: You have to fight a war on two fronts, a war on the left and on the right. I don't know what the situation is like in other countries, whether war plans are made there in a week! In Germany it was not so. Making such a war plan takes a very long time. You change it in individual, very subordinate parts, but it takes a very long time. This war plan had been worked on for decades, certainly the details had been changed, but in terms of its main point it had been worked on for decades and was ready in every detail. You must not forget that you have to look at the matter purely from a military point of view; now it will be possible to look at it a little more objectively, now that the military point of view seems to have been overcome in the world! If you judge the matter purely from a military point of view, you will judge it more objectively. Every single train and everything that has to be loaded must be specified; the departure of each individual train from there and there, the rush of each individual soldier is specified in such a war plan.

Now, events took a turn for the worse. I will not give a full account now, but just a sample; perhaps the opportunity will arise to present the full account in detail before the World Forum. The circumstances that led to this dreadful catastrophe became so urgent that within Germany in the last days of July the question actually arose from all sides: Should war be waged against France or not? Will it become necessary to wage war against France, will it not be necessary from a military, rather than a political point of view, to wage war against France?” The supreme commander, who was perhaps able to decide on something else every half hour, had repeatedly made the serious decision not to let the army march to the west at all, but only to the east. And it was hanging by a thread in the behavior of the British government, so something strange would have happened, but it would have been a matter of placing a certain judgment, I mean, on a curious basis. Among the contradictory things, it had already been ordered not to march to the west at all, but only to the east. There was a definite objection to that, and from what was against it, you can see, if you consider it properly, how strangely things are in the world. There was an objection to the fact that the German general staff had drawn up a war plan that envisaged a war on two fronts, but no war plan that envisaged a war on only one front, because such a thing could not be strategically foreseen from the European situation. And the supreme commander once replied: Yes, we can't do that at all, because if we are supposed to march only to the east, we have an unruly, wild, chaotic crowd. Our war plan is based on two fronts; we can't help but march to the west. Well, order must be maintained, but if you can give such an answer to a question, you really can't say that there was some mischievous thought of instigating this or that, but something quite different. And it is still not clear whether, if there had been time, a war plan could have been made in such a way that the move to the west would not have been the prerequisite for the entire war plan, and then all the events would have happened without the move to the west. I am not touching on the question of whether this would not have been a huge world-historical escalation, because I myself never believe that if the German army had marched east, the French would have remained calm. But I am telling facts and not conjectures and not hypotheses; facts that are likely to give the judgment an appropriate, realistic direction.

I would like to give an idea of how incredibly reckless it is to talk about the question of guilt one way or the other, especially after the confusing red and blue and yellow and flash blue books that have been scrapped and that can be scrapped in any direction, from which you can make anything. You may be inclined to suspect something deeper behind the whole sequence of facts, which you see more as symptoms, than what can be judged in such a superficial way, as has often happened in recent years. You must take this into account, as I have only hinted at it to you now on a trial basis. The things that underlie this catastrophic world event are, after all, incredible. They must be known as facts if one is to base a judgment on them. And it is no different in the so-called Entente countries.

But now, out of what mankind has called war and from which it has cherished the idea that it will be replaced by peace, something has developed that is only just beginning. I said here at a certain point: one should look at the things that are happening in Russia, and one has something much more important when considering future issues than what people in recent times have still very illusory spoken of as a war and a peace that should follow.

Much has been unleashed. But at least this should be understood: there is hardly anything in literary or writing history that has had such a tremendous impact as Karl Marx's work. In 1848, he published the so-called “Communist Manifesto,” which briefly summarized the main impulses of the Social Democratic view of life. It ended with the words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” The book on “Political Economy” and the book “Das Kapital” were written by the same Karl Marx, with the support of his friend Engels. What underlies these books as principles has indeed become the knowledge and world view of the leading proletariat across the globe. The leading proletariat has dealt with what Marxism is in the most penetrating way.

Even on the surface – but this superficiality is perhaps the most important internal aspect – Karl Marx and his achievements are something that, I would say, was born out of the civilized world of Europe and in turn had a profound effect on the proletarian world, the proletarian part of the civilized world. Karl Marx's personality and work are not that simple. First of all, it has a very specific basic structure. This is an innate acumen, extraordinary acumen, which always has a certain effect. Isn't it true that this effect can be illustrated by something that seems far removed, but which can illustrate the matter? You see, the most bourgeois, the most philistine, the actual philosopher of the philistines, Kant, Immanuel Kant – he is the basic philosopher for the academic philistines – why is he actually considered to be so particularly witty? Well, I have never met a university professor who understood Hegel or Schelling, but I have met many—even university professors—who have at least come close to understanding Kant. Now, they think: I am a clever man – such a gentleman thinks, of course – and since it takes me such an effort to understand Kant and I have finally understood him after all, Kant is also a clever man, and since it has taken me, as a man of such exquisite taste, such an effort to understand him, Kant must be the most exquisite man. This is roughly the impression these people have. It is the impression of the philistine, which then passes over to the academic philistines and their followers, their journalistic and other followers. Something similar also worked on the proletariat in the understanding of Karl Marx, who was a very astute man. One has some difficulties in understanding. The proletarian tries harder than many an average philistine, I should say average bourgeois, is inclined to try, even when reading proletarian books. The proletarian tries harder to understand his Karl Marx; he also appreciates what takes effort. It truly takes more effort to absorb the impulses of the proletarian world in the books of Karl Marx than it may have taken the bourgeoisie to understand their economists. But very few people do that. Instead, a number of particularly well-fed bourgeois have also been content to get to know proletarian life from Hauptmann's “Webern”. So you can combine pleasure, you know, with learning, and the like. That's the first thing about Karl Marx: a certain innate perspicacity.

But then it cannot be denied that Karl Marx's dialectic is a great one. This dialectic, this ability to work with concepts, which most people today lack completely – our entire official science lacks this dialectic – this art of working with concepts as realities, Karl Marx had from Hegel, because in this respect he was a disciple of Hegel. So that one can say: Karl Marx had his dialectic, the art of working with concepts, from German folklore. He had the socialist impetus from his Frenchness, where Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc in particular had a great influence on him, so that he combined what the German Hegelian developed in finely crafted, plastic, sharply contoured concepts with the revolutionary impulse, the revolutionary impetus of a Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc. And this in turn, what was in him, could only express itself in the way it did, with Karl Marx going to London, to England, and there, through the study of economic conditions, he thoroughly studied this whole way of thinking and this way of feeling – the one from the Germans, the other from the French – in terms of English conditions, whereby he applied the whole thing only to material economic conditions. Thus, what is born as I have described it to you: the proletarian out of the industrial and machine age, out of the mechanism, which therefore could only be observed at its source in England, because it first came to expression only there until 1848, that was grasped by Karl Marx with Hegelian dialectic. And that which has been grasped with Hegelian dialectics, in that, I would say, the entire revolutionary impetus of a Louis Blanc or a Saint-Simon prevails. So you see: From components that are German, French, English, on the basis of the astute Semitism that was in the blood of Karl Marx, because he was Jewish – this is of course meant only very objectively – so from four ingredients together, what this Karl Marx has delivered to the proletariat as the most effective weapon – because it is a spiritual weapon – is composed of that spiritual-chemical. Hence the penetrating effect, the unlimited effect. Of course, this has been further disseminated in numerous popular writings. All circumstances have been judged from this point of view.

Yes, of course, what has been prepared in this way over the decades can only really be weighed by, for example, let us say, acquiring knowledge of how some professor in bourgeois circles spoke about Lessing and then how proletarian circles spoke about Lessing in a Marxist way. Both things are really quite different from each other.

You see, the impact of this Marxism is by no means exhausted. This Marxism contains very important things. Through this Marxism—which arose from the fact that a German, well educated in Hegel, came to London through the circumstances of France and there applied what lay in his thinking from Hegel's school and what lay in his feeling from Louis Blanc and Saint-Simon to the external, purely material conditions of the modern world – through him, what is most modern in the British state – not in the British people, but in the state, the state structure, the social order – has indeed found its way into the world. It is only the beginning of this introduction. The first phase of this introduction is already Marxism. You must not forget: over and above this there is the best English tradition in many fields. We must distinguish clearly between what is English tradition and what is the British Empire, that monster which has been formed not only on the basis of British nationality but also of the geographical and historical conditions of modern times. Marxism is the first emanation, as it were. These radiations will continue. Because all kinds of future perspectives will arise from what now lies there as a basis. Above all, the following must be considered today.

You see, the role of the German element in modern civilization is fundamentally quite different from that of other ethnic elements. You can see this in the details. The world has become accustomed to identifying the Germans with the Central Powers. But what do these Germans as Germans have to do with one or the other empire? What do the Germans of Austria have to do with the Habsburg monarchy? The Germans of Austria would never have been the most hated people in Italy if the Germans of Austria had not been treated exactly the same by the House of Habsburg as the small proportion of Italians who were under the House of Habsburg. The Germans have suffered just as much from the House of Habsburg as any Italian has suffered, only that the Germans now have the tragedy of being hated by those with whom they have suffered the same. And so it is throughout. There is a lack of understanding of the completely un-national character of the Germans, who were the leaven of Europe but never had any national character or anything aggressively national at all. This is not part of the basic German character; it has been grafted on from various sides. This German element had nothing special to do with either the House of Habsburg, by which it was subjugated, or with the other ruling house, and it is no reason to confuse the German essence with it. But that is what happens in the world, and it happens, one might say, with a certain delight. It also happens to peoples for whom there is truly no obstacle to feeling a unity, perhaps only with the exception of a few splinters that have been snatched from them. But one should not forget the main thing: what is German as a people has never really been predisposed to form any kind of unity. The very best qualities would be lost if the Germans wanted to live in such a way that they would form an abstract unity, a unity of peoples. Of course, under the influence of certain European impulses, certain aspirations towards unity, such as were to be found in Italy, have also been felt by the German people, although not in an unorganized way. They were strong from 1848 into the 1850s and 1860s. But this always went hand in hand with the German character's longing to merge with the world. And that has indeed been achieved to a very special extent. Consider that you will hardly find such understanding of other nations in literary works as can be found in German literature. There is, for example, a beautiful book that does real justice to the most beautiful and most significant impulses that have been at work in the French character from the Revolution to the second Napoleon. The author of this book is called Heinrich von Treitschke. The book was written between 1865 and 1871. It is a complete appreciation of Frenchness and Italian nature in this book by Heinrich von Treitschke: “The French State Form and Bonapartism”. I could give you all sorts of interesting details from which you would see all sorts of truths that people are not inclined to listen to in the world. There has certainly never been such an insightful discussion of English and American nature by a foreign people as that which Herman Grimm unfolds about the Americans and the English.

Of course, we must not forget that all sorts of other things that are not part of German folklore have also been incorporated. I will not go into the absurdity that confuses Germanness with something that is as un-German as possible, with Pan-Germanism, as it has been called. Well, it is just absurd to want to measure German character against Pan-Germanism. There is no other way to put it. But if, at some point, efforts were made to achieve something like German unity, which would not have lasted very long anyway – yes, just study the history from 1866 to 1870, what was said in France at the time about the desired German unity! They could not be tolerated, they were not wanted under any circumstances.

These are things that raise the question: Why is there so much grumbling about the German character? And there is a source of untruthfulness in the world that is quite terrible and will be the starting point for effective untruth. But what the German essence is and what has been structured in a certain inorganic way since 1871 will have its task in the world, even if today it is an abomination for many people to speak of the task of the German essence. It must have its task in the world. If you have asked a reasonable person so far – I will cite Heinrich Heine, for example, among these reasonable people who have spoken out particularly clearly on the matter – then two poles have been cited, from which two completely different basic directions of human thinking have emerged for a long time. We will have to go into this in more detail. I once told a lady who, when I was last here in 1917, had asked me what the mission of Judaism in the world was: “That will come too, that I have to talk about it.

Heinrich Heine indicated these two poles, from which, so to speak, all the impulses that exist in humanity from a certain point of view are nourished: Heinrich Heine indicated Judaism on the one hand and Greek culture on the other. Now, Judaism has always had to prove itself as the Great Seal-bearer for the human capacity for abstraction, for the human capacity to unify the way of thinking, the world view. Greekship has always had the task of bringing to the world that which lives in pictoriality, in imaginative elements. The world view, the outlook on life of the modern proletariat has absorbed everything from Judaism, but nothing yet from Greekship, because it completely lacks the imaginative element. It will still have to receive that. In the course of the future, the third will then come, because all things consist of a trinity, and to Judaism and Greekness will come Teutonism in the course of time - that will be the trinity - when that materialism will have eaten strongly at the modern world in the age of the consciousness soul, which has taken its beginning with that phase that radiated into the world with Marxism from the British Empire.

This materialism, which will radiate out from the British Empire and America and flood the world, has indeed laid its foundations; let us not forget, the foundations have been solidly laid. And such things must be taken into consideration, for example, that immediately before the war England, and at that time Russia as well – but that no longer comes into question – France, Belgium and Portugal together had 23% million English square miles of colonial possessions with 470 million people living on these colonial possessions. Germany and the United States together had only 1 million English square miles of colonial possessions with 23 million people; it will be different now, won't it, the English-speaking population is now united. So: England, France, Portugal, Belgium, and then, with something that comes into it only marginally, Russia: 23¾ million square miles with 470 million people; in contrast, Germany and the United States — who have now redeemed the world — with 1 million square miles of English colonial possessions and 23 million people. The ground is well prepared. For this reason, materialistic and ever more materialistic culture will develop, because it only goes into economic conditions. That culture, whose first emphasis, whose first nuance, has come about precisely because it is already rooted in the starting point. Just compare Lassalle with Karl Marx, Lassalle, who only has certain similarities with Karl Marx: natural acumen and Hegelianism, but he did not go through the French and English experience that Karl Marx did. Therefore, he has a certain dialectical and also a certain astute conception of the modern labor movement, but not the effective one that lay in the Marxist system. This Marxist system arose in such a way that the dialectic of the German character drew its content from the material culture, from the pure material culture of the British society, of the British context, not of nationality, but of the context of the empire, of the developing empire.

Well, things have an after-effect. What has happened will almost completely eliminate French culture from future currents; it will have little significance. French culture also belongs to the defeated. It is absolutely certain that in the future perspective – and I will talk to you in more detail about this tomorrow – French nationality will be eliminated by the constellation of events for future influence in the world. World domination passes to the English-speaking empires.

But if the first pole was created by Karl Marx using a certain dialectic that he had learned at the Hegelian school to place himself in the material circumstances of the British Empire, the future will bring something else into play. Today, it can be discarded as a matter of course in a variety of directions, and one can say that what I am saying is only the continuation – well, I don't know what other nonsense there is in the world – of German plans for world conquest or something like that. And yet it must be said, which is a truth that is just as firmly established in perspective as other truths: Just as the German Hegelian Marx went to England, to material England, in order to absorb from there the first phase of material culture, so when this material culture, which will of course have an ascending and a descending curve and will destroy a certain kind of spirituality, when this material will have produced the counter-movement in its own English people, when those of whom I have already spoken, who rebel, for example, against the most terrible principle of the doctrine of utility: “The greatest good of men consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” which is already being remonstrated against today, precisely from the occultist side, will be heard, when the material culture of the British Empire, spreading over the earth as a world power in the age of the consciousness soul, scorches and exterminates the spiritual. When that has spread, then the opposition will arise from within the British people itself. They will feel the need to turn to what remains of Goetheanism, rooted in German national culture, in order to seek from it the impulse for how the world can be healed. They will turn to the third element. Just as people studied Jewish impulses long after Judaism had fallen as a political power, just as all of modern education is based on Greek culture after the Romans destroyed Greek culture, so the recovery of the world will one day be based on what is taken from German Goetheanism. A monument should be erected for this. Even if this monument itself experiences this or that fate, the important thing is the decision: that the decision has been made.

Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ]

At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not.

This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change?

We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science.

Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole.

I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind.

So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist.

Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking?

Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic.

Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine.

Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context.

Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history.

After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.

I Logic: Idea in itself
II Nature: Idea in its external being
III Spirit: Idea in its separateness

Soul—State—World-history
Art—Religion—Philosophy

When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction.

Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself.

Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea.

In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical.

I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything.

Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man).

Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite.

Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being.

Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back.

In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this.

Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea!

Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme!

In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality.

Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit.

Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution.

Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand.

You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question.

Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history.

Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

Notes:

1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German.

Recently I have become aware of mystics who have attempted to elucidate the nature of the human being in the following way. I will quote the result to which they believe they have arrived. They say something like this: If we look at the human being as he walks on earth, his whole existence is a kind of riddle. His soul-being towers mightily above what he is able to represent in his entire humanity, to reveal himself, as it were, in the living out of the interrelationship with other people. Therefore, one must assume - so such mystics think - that man is actually something quite different in his essence from what he appears to be here in his earthly walk. He must be a comprehensive cosmic being, who, according to his inner nature, is much, much more powerful than what he presents himself as being here on earth; he must have forfeited his place in the great cosmos for some reason and must have been banished into this earthly existence – as for example, a mystic follower of this direction - to learn modesty here, to learn to be modest here, to feel small here for once, while in truth he is a great, powerful cosmic being, but who in some way has made himself unworthy to live out this cosmic being.

I know that there are many people who just laugh at such an idea. But the one who understands life from a deeper point of view knows that even such a mystical idea ultimately arises from the great difficulty of solving the riddle of life, which difficulty imposes itself ever more sharply and sharply on the human soul, precisely the more this human soul seeks to delve into true reality. I do not, of course, want to cite anything in particular in support of this idea of a modern mystical trend, which I have just characterized. I just wanted to cite it as something that has also found a place in human souls as a concept. One could just as easily cite a dozen other, more or less philosophical or mystical solutions to the human riddle in abstracto.

If one then tries to understand the reason why the most diverse people try to understand in such different ways, sometimes in quite unusual ways, what it actually means to be human here on earth, one comes to different conclusions. Above all, it is found that precisely with regard to the great, real questions of existence, people do not want to fulfill one thing for themselves, which they certainly admit on a small scale on every possible daily occasion: on every possible daily occasion, man will admit that one should not obscure the truth with one's desires, that what one desires to be true cannot be decisive for the objectivity of the truth. In ordinary life, in small matters, man will readily admit this; but in the great matters we see, as it were, the impossibility for people to arrive at a realistic world view, precisely because people cannot help asserting their desires when it comes to grasping the truth. And most of the time, it is precisely those desires that play a major role that could be called unconscious desires, which a person does not even admit are desires in his soul. Yet these desires are present in the soul; they remain subconscious or unconscious. And that would be the task of spiritual training: to make one aware of such desires that remain unconscious, in order to rise above the illusory life and penetrate into the sphere of truth.

These unconscious desires play a particularly important role when the highest truths of life are to be asserted within the human being, the truths about the essence of human life itself, let us say now of this ordinary human life as it unfolds in the physical world between birth and death. A real, appropriate, realistic consideration must always look at the whole course of life if life is to be understood. And just imagine that such a realistic consideration of life should yield a result that man, even if only in his subconscious desires, does not desire at all. Then man would do anything to get away from such an inconvenient result by means of apparent logic.

Surely, if we consider only life on earth, there is nothing to suggest that the truth must correspond to human desires, even if these desires are unconscious. It could, after all, be that the truth about human life is also completely unpleasant.

Spiritual science shows that this is truly the case. Of course, a higher point of view can be found from which the matter may appear differently. But for the life that a person would like to lead on this earth, a truthful examination shows that the truth about man is such that most people who are too comfortable in life feel a slight shudder - albeit a subconscious shudder, but you will understand what I mean - a slight unconscious, sometimes very strong subconscious shudder. But then the whole of human life must be considered.

We know that this whole of human life, when considered objectively and in detail, breaks down into distinct periods. You can read about these periods in my little booklet The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science. We know that we can only understand the human being by observing life, first from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, from sexual maturity to the beginning of the twenties, let us say on average to the age of twenty-one; then again to the age of twenty-eight. We can understand the human being's life in the same way that we seek to understand anything scientifically, by looking at the seven-year cycles of human life.

Significant events occur in human life during each of these periods. From what we mentioned again yesterday, you know that the human being stands in life, integrating himself into the cosmos – I reminded you of the image of the magnetic needle yesterday – so that, for example, the formation of his head points far, far into the distant past, and the formation of his extremities points into the distant future, just as the magnetic needle points with one pole to the north and with the other pole to the south.

But this alignment with the cosmos is different in each of the main human periods. In each of the main human periods, different forces intervene in the organization of humanity. In the first seven years of our lives, something quite different prevails in us than in the second seven years. Everything that comes to expression in the seventh year, in that, one might say, all the growth is dammed up, as at a bank, by the eruption of the permanent teeth, everything that is dammed up in the eruption of the permanent teeth plays out of the forces of the cosmos in the first seven years of life. And again, there is something that the human being takes back in his education. What the human being takes back in his education, by becoming sexually mature, that with which he, I would like to say, tinges himself, it forms in that certain developmental forces, which are thoroughly grounded in the cosmos, develop in the second epoch of life and so on.

Now the thing is that one must say: in the whole human being, the various members do interact. The child, up to the change of teeth, also develops a certain psychic activity; and this psychic activity is extraordinarily important, especially in these first years of life. I am reminded of the truly wise saying of Jean Paul, who said that at the beginning of his life, one undoubtedly learns more for life from one's nurse than from all one's professors in the academic years. There is something very wise and very true in this saying. One must only assess things in the right way. One learns a lot in these first seven years of life, but what is learned remains, so to speak, intellectually and otherwise in the dullness of the soul life, which is still almost a physical life, down below. But if you read my booklet 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and of Humanity', you will see that this life, which the child develops in the first seven years, can also be evaluated differently from the usual way. In these first seven years, there is truly not much wisdom in the human organism. When the child - as the bourgeois expression goes - has seen “the light of day”, his brain is still quite undifferentiated. It only differentiates over time, and what emerges in terms of brain structures truly corresponds, when studied, to influences of a deeper wisdom than anything we can muster in later life when we construct machines or do anything scientifically. Of course, we cannot do this later in a conscious way, which we do unconsciously when we have just seen the light of the world, as I said. Cosmic reason rules in us, that cosmic reason of which we also had to speak when we mentioned the development of language. Truly, a high cosmic reason rules in the human being in the first seven years of life.

In the second seven years of life, this cosmic reason then focuses on tingeing the human being with what leads to sexual maturity; there it prevails, this cosmic intellectuality, to a small extent already. One might say: that which remains, which is not used inwardly, well, that just rises up into the head. And it affects the head – and usually it is afterwards! But what affects the head is actually something that is spared in the inner being, in the unconscious of the soul life. And then it continues in seven-year periods.

Nowadays, the usual approach is to study the whole of human life, the so-called normal human life; because to study this normal human life, a certain devotion is necessary, first to the real human being, but then also to the great cosmic laws. And however strange it may sound, what takes place in the first seven years of childhood cannot be understood, not as a child, not as a young man or woman, not even when one imagines that one has already grasped the whole of life in one's twenties. One cannot understand it. One can come to some understanding of what takes place in childhood if one seeks this understanding inwardly in the human being, in inner experience, say between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three. Old age, old age itself, only gives us the opportunity to gain a slight insight into what rules in us during the first seven years of childhood. This is an uncomfortable thing, because today, when a person has barely outgrown the young badger years, he wants to be a full human being. And today it is uncomfortable to admit to oneself that there is something in the world, even in oneself, that can only be understood at the turn of fifty. And again, if it is a matter of understanding, of inner-human understanding, as we can first achieve it as human beings, then we can learn to understand something of what takes place in human nature during the years in which sexual maturity develops, that is, from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life. This takes place between the ages of forty-nine and fifty-six, at the beginning of the fifties.

It would be good if such truths were to be recognized, because through such truths one would learn to understand life, while the other truths that are usually established about human beings are such as one wishes. One just does not realize that unconscious desires are there. And again, what takes place in us from puberty to the age of twenty-one, one gets some inner, experienced insight into that, so that one can have a certain judgment about it between the forty-second and forty-nine, and again, what happens in the twenties up to the twenty-eighth year, about that one can get some information between the thirty-fifth and forty-second year. What I say about these things is based on real observation of life, which one must do by training oneself in spiritual-scientific observation, and not by engaging in the kind of nonsense of self-knowledge that is often called self-knowledge today, but by engaging in real self-knowledge, that is, by engaging in knowledge of human nature. And it is only in the period from about twenty-eight to thirty-five that one can experience something and at the same time understand it by experiencing it; there is a certain balance between understanding and thinking. In the first half of life one can think various things, one can imagine various things; in order to experience with understanding what one can imagine in the first half of life, one must await the second half of life.

It is an uncomfortable truth, but that is how life is. I can even imagine people saying: Yes, if the human being is so circumscribed in his or her entire inner conformity to law, where does that leave the free will of the human being? Where does freedom go? Where is the consciousness of humanity? - Certainly, I can also imagine that someone feels unfree because he cannot be in Europe and America at the same time, that someone feels unfree because he cannot reach down to the moon. But facts do not conform to human desires. Even when it comes to man gaining insight into himself, it is necessary to face the facts. These facts are as follows: We do not live a life that is constantly changing and metamorphosing for no reason. We live this life in such a way that each period of life has its meaning and significance in relation to others. And for that we live, as we say, the normal life, if we are granted such, until the age of sixty — we will also talk about early death from this point of view tomorrow — in a way that only in the second half of life does it become clear to us what prevails in the first half of life. People would be able to orient themselves in the world much more securely and correctly if this knowledge of life were to gain some ground. For then they would build on a true foundation of life, whereas today, because they do not base themselves on objectivity but on desires, they often simply cling to the idea that one must learn something until one's twenties, but after that one is a finished person, then one is ready for anything in life. In this way one completely overlooks the inner coherence of life. To get to know life is really an inner task. And one must not forget, especially when it comes to this intimate task, that desires must remain silent and that objectivity must be taken into account.

Now a certain balance is emerging in the course of human evolution. In earlier times the matter was quite different, as I have already presented: You remember how I spoke of the human development from the Atlantic time until today, of the ever-younger becoming of humanity. A certain equalization has occurred in that in the course of evolution it has been found that one element was related to the other. If that had not occurred, then one would simply have to keep the matter in life so: A person in their twenties would have to believe a forty-year-old when it comes to certain things that relate to truths in a person that can only be grasped as vividly as I have characterized them in the forties. It is not quite like that, but in the course of human development, the concepts themselves, the ideas, have become such that one can have a certain intuitive conviction at one age and at the other. If you are sufficiently devoted to let the forty- and fifty-year-olds tell you about their life experiences, provided, of course, that they have had any, today people usually don't, if you let yourself be told about these life experiences when you are still younger, you are not dependent on mere authority authority, that has already become the case through development; but by thinking – as a young person one can only think – there is more to the way and character that the thoughts have taken than what merely appeals to faith. There is already a certain possibility in it to also understand. Otherwise one would have to say: in youth man thinks, in old age he comprehends. But there is already something in it that can teach one more than a religious belief, a mere authoritative conviction. This gives a certain balance.

But take what I have said as a truth of life. If you take it as a truth of life, it will shed light on the practice of life. Just think, when what I have said is present in life, when it is thought and felt and sensed by people, how it expresses itself in the relationship between people! How it creates, as it were, binding links from soul to soul! A person who is still young looks at the old in a special way when he knows: He can experience something that, in relation to him, who can only think, is an understanding of what is thought. One is interested in a completely different way in the messages that a person in a different age can give, if one understands life in such a way. And one retains one's interest, even when one has reached a higher age, for what abounds as younger people, even as children. They remember how often I have said: The wisest can learn from the little child! Of course, the wisest of all will gladly and lovingly learn from a small child. Even if he does not want to be taught by a small child about morals or other views of life, he would be able to gain an infinite amount of wisdom from the child, especially with regard to cosmic secrets, which are expressed quite differently in a small child than in a later human being. The interest that prevails from soul to soul increases quite substantially when such things are not mere abstract theories, but when such things are wisdoms of life.

Real spiritual science has the peculiarity of strengthening, enhancing, and reinforcing the bonds of love that people have for one another, which must essentially be based on the bonds of mutual interest. Ordinary wisdom can leave people dry, as dry as some scholars are. Spiritual science, truly grasped in its substance, cannot leave people dry, but will, under all circumstances, make people love, wants to strengthen and increase mutual human interest.

I had planned to tell you a small number of such things today, things that are unpleasant for life, but are truths, are facts, because one does not progress spiritually if one does not get used to boldly facing facts, even if they are uncomfortable.

Another fact is this – it is already clear from yesterday's observations – that the intellect, as we can achieve it in the present cycle of humanity, is only suitable for awakening understanding over a certain period of time. I do not envy those people who today set about translating Aeschylus, or even Homer, the Psalms and so on, truly, I do not envy them! That faith can exist in our time, such philistine fibbing as Mr. Wilamowitz' translations of the Greek dramas, which really betray Aeschylus or whatever, that is just a sad sign of the times. You can't observe as soon as something big happens; often you don't even have the patience to observe small things. It would be good to try to observe small things as an exercise. I will give you an example of a very childlike, small thing.

Recently I read an article in one of these international magazines published here in Switzerland, in which the socialist writer Kautsky complained about a Russian socialist who quoted Kautsky in the most terrible way, so that the opposite of what is in Kautsky's books is given as Kautsky's opinion. That there was any intentional distortion of Kautsky's text was, given the nature of the matter and the personalities involved, quite out of the question. I then read the article by the person in question myself, but I also found it curious that what was quoted was presented as Kautsky's opinion. And while I was still reading, I formed an opinion about it, because I was interested in how something like this could be possible at all; but I very soon realized, by reading the essay, what must have happened, and this was also confirmed to me afterwards because the person concerned apologized; but I only saw that later. The person in question had not read Kautsky's book in German, but had read it in Russian translation, and, having written his essay in German, had retranslated it. So that was what had happened: translation from German into Russian and retranslation. In the process, the opposite of what was in the German book came out and was quoted!

All that is needed to turn things upside down is to translate a text from one language into another, honestly and accurately! It is not even necessary to talk about incorrect facts, but basically only about the principles that are commonly applied in translation today. The observation I have made is a small, childish one. But anyone who has the patience to observe such things in life should no longer find it incomprehensible when he is told that it is impossible to understand Homer with what is available to us today; it is only an imagined understanding.

Now, that is the external side of the matter. But there is also an essential internal side to the matter. The state of mind in Homer's time was so essentially different from the state of mind of today's man that today's man is also far removed from the possibility of understanding Homer. For today's state of mind is such that it is essentially tinged with intellectuality. That was not the Homeric state of mind. Man today cannot discard this tinge if he remains in the ordinary everyday state of mind. This state of mind forces man more strongly than he believes, and more strongly than he is aware of, to live in abstract terms, in which Homer did not live at all. But it is difficult for people to reconcile this with their subconscious or unconscious desires, so they say to themselves: Yes, with the understanding that is the normal understanding of the present, one must refrain from understanding something that comes from the time of Homer or even from the time of Aeschylus. This renunciation of man is something that does not correspond at all to the subconscious desires. This is where spiritual science must intervene, which does not remain with the ordinary state of mind, but evokes a comprehensive state of mind so that one can place oneself in states of mind that are different from the normal states of mind of the present. With the means of spiritual science, one can in turn penetrate into that which cannot be reached with the present-day mind, with the present-day state of mind. It would be of immense importance for the modern man to say to himself: Only over a certain stretch of the development of humanity does the understanding that we can have extend. Even with a view to the future, it is not entirely unimportant to keep such things in mind.

No matter how clearly you express yourself today, no matter how clearly you write or speak, record what is spoken, it will not be too long before, in the near future, times will move faster, if I may use the paradoxical expression, than they did in the past, it will be completely impossible to understand what we speak or write today in the same way as we understand it. It is only possible for our understanding to comprehend what we speak and write over a certain period into the future. The historian goes back to documents and wants to rely only on external documents. But it does not depend on whether one understands something or not, whether documents are there or not, but whether the possibility of understanding extends that far. Well, for more distant times, this possibility of understanding does not extend that far. And if one does not have resignation, then Kant-Laplacean theories or the like come out. I have spoken about this often enough. What, after all, is a Kant-Laplacean theory other than the impotent attempt to use the intellect of the present to think about the origin of the world, despite the fact that our understanding, our normal state of mind, has distanced itself so far from this origin of the world that what we think about time with our present understanding of the world, which should coincide with the Kant-Laplacean theory, can no longer resemble it at all.

This knowledge, that it is necessary to resort to other types of knowledge when going beyond a certain period of time and distance, is what spiritual science must also produce. Man cannot recognize anything beyond a certain age if he does not resort to spiritual scientific research, if he does not try to understand existence with senses other than those to which the intellect is bound. Now, if we consider what I have just said, we can see how narrow the horizon of the modern man must be if he does not want to resort to other levels of research, to other levels of knowledge, for those things that ordinary intellectuality, which is actually the prevailing one today, does not suffice to recognize. We know that one can ascend to imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. These types of knowledge then lead to other paths; only they can supplement what can only be seen as an island of existence if one relies on the present state of the soul.

That which comprises the present state of mind is actually bound to the human ego; you can read about this in my “Theosophy”, “Secret Science in Outline” and so on. But the human being also carries other aspects of their being within them: we know of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. But the soul's usual state today does not extend down into the astral body, not into the etheric body, not into the physical body. For what the anatomist recognizes from the outside is, after all, the outside. The inner recognition does not extend beyond the ego, let alone beyond the physical body. One must come to observe the human being from the inside with understanding, and the knowledge of life of which I spoke at the beginning of today's reflections is a beginning of this inner knowledge, and what one can comprehend in the second half of life is a beginning, albeit a weak beginning. When one takes hold of the human being inwardly, one descends from the mere intellect to the sphere of the will. Yesterday I mentioned that the subject of the will, the actual volition in us, preserves the cosmic memory. So one must descend into the human being. What the human being could develop if he had the will to do so, by developing normal wisdom in the second half of life, would be a beginning of this descent. It would not shed much light, but it would shed light on what the human being needs to live. But if he then descends with the developed higher knowledge, then by descending into his own being the memory of the cosmos opens up to him. Then, however, something different emerges than the Kant-Laplacean theory, for example, what we carry within us in our physical being. You know that, according to its nature, it is our oldest, going back to the fourth past incarnation on earth. If you go down there, you learn to recognize what this fourth past incarnation on earth was like in the Saturn era. But one can learn from the ordinary wisdom that opens up in the second half of life what one has to do to penetrate deeper and deeper into the nature of the human being, who is an image of the world, and by learning to recognize this image, to recognize the world.

It is usually subconscious or unconscious desires that dominate a person when he thinks up something with a light heart or in complete comfort, something that he should actually say is not accessible to his thinking, such as the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar. And so we touch again – we must, I would like to say, approach our tasks in circles – that which prevents people of the present from building the bridge between ideality and reality, which is of course of great concern to us now.

People of all ages have tried to find a way beyond these things. But it is difficult to fully understand these things, precisely because it is uncomfortable to approach the real facts. In our time it has become customary, I might say, everywhere to recognize half of the matter, the other half not. Here is a classic example: Karl Marx once said that philosophers had so far only endeavored to interpret the world with their concepts; but what was important was to change the world, one really had to find thoughts that would change the world. The first part is absolutely correct. Philosophers have endeavored, insofar as they are philosophers, to interpret the world, and if they were a little clever, they did not believe that they could do anything other than interpret the world. But the very archetype of all philosophical philistinism, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who taught in Leipzig from 1809 to 1834 and wrote a great many books on everything from fundamental philosophy to the highest stages of philosophy, demanded that Hegel's philosophers should not only deduce concepts but also the development of the pen – something that infuriated Hegel. But even in this field, resignation is necessary, resignation that says: Of course, we human beings are called upon to change the world as whole human beings, insofar as the world consists of human life. But thinking, the thinking of the present, is simply not capable of bringing about this change. One must have the resignation to say to oneself: This thinking, which the human being of the present has, which is so gloriously sufficient, which is really quite suitable for understanding nature, this thinking is completely unsuitable for achieving something when it comes to the will to act. But that is an uncomfortable truth. Because once you see through this, you no longer say: Philosophers have so far endeavored to interpret the world, but what matters is changing the world – and secretly believe that they can contribute to this through some dialectic; instead, you say to yourself: Philosophers have only been sufficient for interpreting things because philosophers can cite them. With nature, it is enough for us to merely interpret it, because nature is, one might say, thank God, there without us, and we can content ourselves with interpreting it. Social and political life is not there without us, and we cannot be content with merely grasping it with such concepts, which are only suitable for interpreting life and not for shaping it. It is necessary to rise from mere theorizing, which mostly consists of hallucinations, as I explained yesterday, and which is so truly the hobbyhorse of the present, to the life of reality. And the life of reality in the facts demands that one does not take it so straightforwardly, this life, as one is accustomed to taking it. Certainly, ideas that one person conveys to another lead to something; but they do not always lead to the same thing. There are no absolute truths, just as there are no absolute facts, and there are no absolute facts just as there are no absolute truths. Everything is relative. And the effect of something I say is determined not only by whether or not I believe it to be true, but also by the nature of the people in a particular age, and how they react to it, if I may use the expression. I will cite a significant case that is very important to consider.

If you go back to around the 14th century of the Christian era, you could present mysticism to people before that century. In those days, mystical concepts still had the power to educate and inspire people. The Oriental population of Asia, the Indian, Japanese, Chinese, has retained these qualities in many ways, because older qualities are preserved by certain members of humanity in later times. One can still study many things in the present that were also the case with European populations in earlier times; but the whole state of mind of humanity has changed. And anyone who passes on mysticism today, for example, must be aware that we are approaching the age when, by teaching mysticism, real mysticism – Meister Eckhart's, Tauler's, and the like, you teach them by the way they react to it, what Lucifer only coaxes out of man, what brings them to bickering and quarreling. And it may well be that there is no better way to prepare a sect for quarreling and fighting, for disunity, for mutual grumbling, than to give them mystically pious speeches. Now, when understood in a straightforward way, this seems almost impossible; but it is a factual truth. It is a factual truth because it depends not only on the content of what one says, but on the way in which the person reacts to things. And one must know the world. And above all, one must not base one's views on one's desires.

I can always remember the conversation I once had in a southern German town with two Catholic priests who were in my lecture, which I gave at the time on the Bible and wisdom. The two Catholic priests could not really object to anything. The lecture contained precisely the things about which they could not reasonably object. But priests, even if they cannot object, cannot of course accept something like that; so they have to object to something. So they said: Yes, in terms of content, we could indeed say roughly what you said. But what we say, we say in such a way that every person can understand it; you, after all, are only saying it for a certain number of people who have a certain education, and what is said for people must be understandable for everyone. - Then I said to them: Yes, you see, what you believe is understandable to all people, and what I believe about it, that is not the point. What matters is not our theoretical views about what people understand, but the study of reality. And there you can easily do a reality test yourself. I ask you: If you now apply these methods and present this in your church today in the way you believe that all people will understand it – will all people go to your church, or aren't some already staying away today? That some stay away is much more important than you believing that you speak for all people. Because the reality is that some do stay away. That you believe you speak for all people is your belief. And for those who no longer go to church with you, I speak for them, because I believe that one has to submit to reality and that one can also speak to those who no longer go to church but who are still entitled to seek the path to the spiritual worlds. Here, in a trivial example, the difference is illuminated between how one thinks realistically, letting one's views be dictated by reality, and how most people believe they know what they just imagine, think up and wish for, and then swear by it. The reality researcher is even prepared at any time to discard anything he considers right, and when the facts teach him, to come to a different line of thought, because reality is not as straightforward as people wish it to be.

And so it may well be, and will increasingly be the case – this is the trend of the development of human nature – that while you want to teach the most pious mysticism, the most heartfelt mysticism of a sect, the people of that sect become more and more quarrelsome and quarrelsome. But it is just as unwise to teach people one-sided scientific views. To gain scientific knowledge, one needs a great deal of acumen, and you know that I am not at all inclined to be in any way inferior to anyone in fully recognizing scientific truths. But the fact also exists that if one were to teach the world only scientific truths or scientifically-oriented truths, the acumen that is applied to finding scientific truths would contribute significantly to condemning people to a lack of freedom. Just as one-sided mysticism would increasingly lead to quarrels and disputes, one-sided natural science in the sense of today's time would lead people to inner bondage, to inner bondage. So you see, it is fully considered when spiritual science strives neither to be one-sidedly mystical nor one-sidedly scientific, but to do justice to each individual without underestimating or overestimating it, but progressing from duality to trinity. Not the either-or, but the both-and, illumination of the one by the other, that is what spiritual science leads to by itself. For example, a person with a purely scientific mind who rants about mysticism is always going to be in the wrong, because what he says will generally be nonsense. But it is just as wrong, as a rule, for a purely mystical person who knows nothing of scientific knowledge to rant about science. Only a mystic should grumble about mysticism, if I may vary it, and only someone who knows about natural science should grumble about natural science now and then. Then his things will be as he says, because they will be weighed correctly. But it will always be bad if someone who does not understand natural science and perhaps believes himself to be a great mystic passes judgment on it, or if a scientist does not understand mysticism and passes judgment on mysticism. It has often been said in spiritual scientific circles that certain truths must appear paradoxical to people because they so strongly contradict the complacency of ordinary life.

Today I have presented you with a whole series of things that have, so to speak, struck your soul without being resolved. I have presented you with some facts of life that have to be admitted even if one would like things to be different. Many a person who today considers himself a great person, who is capable of much, has no idea of these truths of life. But this is precisely the basis of the catastrophes of our time, that our time so urgently needs to get to know this life and does not want to get to know this life.

Tomorrow we will talk about some of the things that should lead to the resolution of some contradictions that have rightly been brought to your souls today.

The tasks assigned to the humanity of the present and of the immediate future are great, significant, and peremptory; and it is really necessary to bring forth a strong soul courage in order to do something toward their accomplishment. Anyone who today examines these tasks closely, and tries to get a true insight into the needs of humanity, must often reflect how superficially so-called public affairs are treated. We might say that people today talk politics aimlessly. From a few emotions, from a few entirely egotistic points of view—personal or national—people form their opinions about life, whereas a real desire to gain the factual foundations for a sound judgment would be more in conformity with the seriousness of the present time. In the course of recent months, and even years, I have inquired into the most varied subjects, including the history and the demands of the times, and have given lectures here on such subjects, always with the purpose of furnishing facts which will enable people to form a judgment for themselves—not with the purpose of placing the ready-made judgment before them. The longing to know the realities of life, to know them more and more fundamentally, in order to have a true basis for judgment—that is the important thing today. I must say this especially because the various utterances and written statements which I have made regarding the so-called social question, and regarding the threefold structure of the social organism, are really taken much too lightly, as anyone can clearly see, for the questions asked about these things are concerned far too little with the actual, momentous, basic facts. It is so difficult for people of the present time to arrive at these basic facts, because they are really theoreticians in all realms of life, although they will not acknowledge it. The people who today most fancy themselves to be practical are the most decidedly theoretical, for the reason that they are usually satisfied to form a few concepts about life, and from these to insist upon judging life; whereas it is possible today only by means of a real, universal, and comprehensive penetration into life to form a relevant judgment about what is necessary. One can say that in a certain sense it is at least intellectually frivolous when, without a basis of facts, a man talks politics at random, or indulges in fanciful views about life. It makes one wish for a fundamentally serious attitude of soul toward life.

When in the present time the practical side of our spiritual scientific effort, the Threefold Social Order, is placed before the world as the other side has been, it is a fact that the whole mode of thought and conception employed in the elaboration of this Threefold Social Order is met with prejudices and misgivings. Where do these prejudices and misgivings originate? Well, a man forms concepts about truth (I am still speaking of the social life), concepts about the good, the right, the useful, and so forth, and when he has formed them, he thinks they have absolute value everywhere and always. For example, take a man of western, middle, or eastern Europe with a socialistic bias. He has quite definite socialistically-formulated ideals; but what kind of fundamental concepts underlie these ideals? His fundamental concept is that what satisfies him must satisfy everyone everywhere, and must possess absolute validity for all future time. The man of today has little feeling for the fact that every thought that is to be of value to the social life must be born out of the fundamental character of the time and the place. Therefore he does not easily come to realize how necessary it is for the Threefold Social Order to be introduced with different nuances into our present European culture, with its American appendage. If it is adopted, then the variations suited to the peoples of the different regions will come about of themselves. And besides, when the time comes, on account of the evolution of humanity, that the ideas and thoughts mentioned by me in The Threefold Commonwealth are no longer valid, others must again be found.

It is not a question of absolute thoughts, but of thoughts for the present and the immediate future of mankind. In order, however, to comprehend in its full scope how necessary is this three-membering of the social organism in an independent spiritual life, an independent rights and political life, and an independent economic life, one must examine without prejudice the way in which the interaction of the spiritual, the political, and the economic has come about in our European-American civilization. This interweaving of the threads—the spiritual threads, those of rights or government, and the economic threads—is by no means an easy matter. Our culture, our civilization, is like a ball of yarn, something wound up, in which are entangled three strands of entirely different origins. Our spiritual life is of essentially different origin from that of our rights or political life, and entirely different again from that of our economic life; and these three strands with different origins are chaotically entangled. I can naturally give only a sketchy idea to-day, because I shall briefly follow these three streams, I might say, to their source.

First, our spiritual life, as it presents itself to one who regards as real the external things, the obvious, is acquired by people through the influence of what still persists of the ancient Greek and Latin cultural life, the Greco-Latin spiritual life, as it has flowed through what later became our high schools and universities. All the rest of our so-called humanistic culture, even down to our elementary schools, is entirely dependent upon that which, as one stream let us say, flowed in first from the Greek element (Diagram 13. orange); for our spiritual life, our European spiritual life, is of Greek origin; it merely passed through the Latin as a sort of way-station. It is true that in modern times something else has mingled with the spiritual life which originated in Greece: namely, that which is derived from what we call technique in the most varied fields, which was not yet accessible to the Greek, the technique of mechanics, the technique of commerce, etc., etc. I might say that the technical colleges, the commercial schools, and so forth, have been annexed to our universities, adding a more modern element to what flows into our souls through our humanistic schools, which reach back to Greece—and by no means flows only into the souls of the so-called educated class; for the socialistic theories which haunt the heads even of the proletariat are only a derivative of that which really had its origin in the Grecian spiritual life; it has simply gone through various metamorphoses. This spiritual life reaches back, however, to a more distant origin, far back in the Orient. What we find in Plato, what we find in Heraclitus, in Pythagoras, in Empedocles, and especially in Anaxagoras, all reaches back to the Orient. What we find in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, in Euripides, in Phidias, reaches back to the Orient. The entire Greek culture goes back to the Orient, but it underwent a significant change on its way to Greece. Yonder in the Orient this spiritual life was decidedly more spiritual than it was in ancient Greece; and in the Orient it issued from what we may call the Mysteries of the Spirit—I may also say the Mysteries of Light (Drawing). The Grecian spiritual life was already filtered and diluted as compared with that from which it had its origin: namely, the spiritual life of the Orient, which depended upon quite special spiritual experiences.

Naturally, we must go back into prehistoric times, for the Mysteries of Light, or the Mysteries of the Spirit, are entirely prehistoric phenomena. If I am to represent to you the character of this spiritual life, the manner of its development, I must do so in the following way: We know, of course, that if we go very far back in human evolution, we find increasingly that human beings of ancient times had an atavistic clairvoyance, a dream-like clairvoyance, through which the mysteries of the universe were revealed to them; and we speak with entire correctness when we say that over the whole civilized Asiatic earth, in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, there dwelt people to whom spiritual truths were revealed through clairvoyance—a clairvoyance that was completely bound to nature, to the blood, and to the bodily organization. This was true of a widely dispersed population; but this atavistic clairvoyance was in a state of decline, and became more and more decadent. This “becoming decadent” of the atavistic clairvoyance is not merely a cultural-historical phenomenon, but is at the same time a phenomenon of the social life of mankind.

Why? Because from various centers of this wide-spread population, but chiefly from a point in Asia, there arose a special kind of human being, so to speak, a human being with special faculties. Besides the atavistic clairvoyance, which still remained to these people in a certain sense—for there still arose out of their inner soul-life a dream-like comprehension of the mysteries of the world—besides this they also had what we call the thinking faculty; and indeed they were the first in the evolution of humanity to have this power. They were the first to have dawning intelligence.

That was a significant social phenomenon when the people of those ancient times, who had only dream-like visions of the mysteries of the world arising within them, saw immigrants enter their territories whom they could still understand, because they also had visions, but who had besides something which they themselves lacked: the power of thought. That was a special kind of human being. The Indians regarded that caste which they designated as Brahman as the descendants of these people who combined the thinking power with atavistic clairvoyance; and when they came down from the higher-lying regions of northern Asia into the southern regions, they were called Aryans. They formed the Aryan population, and their primal characteristic is that they combined the thinking-power with—if I may now use the expression of a later time—with the plebeian faculties of atavistic clairvoyance.

And those mysteries which are called the Mysteries of the Spirit, or particularly, the mysteries of Light, were founded by those people who combined atavistic clairvoyance with the first kindling of intelligence, the inner light of man; and our spiritual culture derives from that which entered humanity at that time as an illuminating spark—it is nothing but a derivative of it.

Much has been preserved in humanity of what was revealed at that time; but we must consider that even the Greeks—just the better educated personalities among them—had seen the ancient gift of atavistic clairvoyance gradually wane and become extinguished, and the thinking-power remained to them. Among the Romans the power of thought alone remained. Among the Greeks there was still a consciousness that this faculty comes from the same source as the ancient atavistic clairvoyance; and therefore Socrates still clearly expressed something which he knew as experience when he spoke of his Daemon as inspiring his truths, which were of course merely dialectic and intellectual.

In art, as well, the Greeks significantly represented the pre-eminence of the intelligent human being, or better, the development of the intelligent human being from the rest of humanity; for the Greeks have in their sculpture (one need only study it closely) three types differing sharply from one another. They have the Aryan type, to which the Apollo head, the Pallas Athene head, the Zeus head, the Hera head belong. Compare the ears of the Apollo with those of a Mercury head, the nose of the Apollo with that of a Mercury head, and you will see what a different type it is. The Greek wanted to show in the Mercury-type that the ancient clairvoyance, which still persisted as superstition and was a lower form of culture, had united with intelligence in the Greek civilization; that this existed at the bottom of Greek culture; and that towering above it was the Aryan whose artistic representation was the Zeus head, the Pallas Athene head, and so forth. And the very lowest races, those with dim remnants of ancient clairvoyance—who also still lived in Greece but were especially to be observed near the borders—are plastically preserved in another type, the Satyr-type, which in turn is quite different from the Mercury-type. Compare the Satyr nose with the Mercury nose, the Satyr ears with the Mercury ears, and so forth. The Greek merged in his art what he bore in his consciousness concerning his development.

What gradually filtered through Greece at that time, by means of the Mysteries of the Spirit or of the Light, and then appeared in modern times, had a certain peculiarity as spirit-culture. It was possessed of such inner impulsive force that it could at the same time, out of itself, establish the rights life of man. Therefore we have on the one hand the revelation of the gods in the Mysteries bringing the spirit to man, and on the other, the implanting of this spirit acquired from the gods into the external social organism, into the theocracies. Everything goes back to the theocracies; and these were able not only to permeate themselves with the legal system, the political system, out of the very nature of the Mysteries, but they were able also to regulate the economic life out of the spirit. The priests of the Mysteries of Light were at the same time the economic administrators of their domains; and they worked according to the rules of the Mysteries. They constructed houses, canals, bridges, looked after the cultivation of the soil, and so forth.

In primitive times civilization grew entirely out of the spiritual life, but it gradually became abstract. From being a spiritual life it became more and more a sum of ideas. Already in the Middle Ages it had become theology, that is, a sum of concepts, instead of the ancient spiritual life, or it had to be confined to the abstract, legalistic form, because there was no longer any relation to the spiritual life. When we look back at the old theocracies we find that the one who ruled received his commission from the gods in the Mysteries. The last derivative is the occidental ruler, but he no longer gives any evidence of having originated from the ruler of the theocracy, with his commission from the gods of the Mysteries. All that remains is crown and coronation robe, the outer insignia, which in later times became more like decorations. If one understands such things it may often be observed that titles go back to the time of the Mysteries; but everything is now externalized.

Scarcely less externalized is that which moves through our secondary schools and universities as spiritual culture, the final echo of the divine message of the Mysteries. The spiritual has flowed into our life, but this has now become utterly abstract, a life of mere ideas. It has become what the socialistically-orientated groups latterly call an ideology, that is, a sum of thoughts that are only thoughts. That is what our spiritual life has really become.

Under its influence the social chaos of our time has developed, because the spiritual life that is so diluted and abstract has lost all impulsive force. We have no choice but to place it again on its own foundation, for only so can it thrive. We must find the way again from the merely rational to the creative spirit, and we shall be able to do so only if we seek to develop out of the spiritual life prescribed by the State the free spiritual life,¹ which will then have the power to awake to life again. For neither a spiritual life controlled by the Church, nor one maintained and protected by the State, nor a spiritual life panting under economic burdens, can be fruitful for humanity, but only an independent spiritual life.

Indeed the time has come for us to find the courage in our souls to proclaim quite frankly before the world that the spiritual life must be placed on its own foundation. Many people are asking: Well, what are we to do? The first thing of importance is to inform people about what is needed: to get as many people as possible to comprehend the necessity, for example, of establishing the spiritual life on its own foundation; to comprehend that what the pedagogy of the 19th century has become can no longer suffice for the welfare of mankind, but that it must be built anew out of a free spiritual life. There is as yet little courage in souls to present this demand in a really radical way; and it can be thus presented only by trying to bring to as many people as possible a comprehension of these conditions. All other social work today is provisional. The most important task is this: to see that it is made possible for more and more people to gain insight into the social requirements, one of which has just been characterized. To provide enlightenment concerning these things through all the means at our disposal—that is now the matter of importance.

We have not yet become productive with regard to the spiritual life, and we must first become productive in this field. Beginnings have been made in this direction, of which I shall speak presently—but we have not yet become productive with regard to the spiritual life; and we must become productive by making the spiritual life independent.

Everything that comes into being on earth leaves remnants behind it. The Mysteries of Light in the present-day oriental culture, the oriental spiritual life, are less diluted than in the Occident, but of course they no longer have anything like the form they had at the time I have described. Yet if we study what the Hindus, the oriental Buddhists, still have today, we shall be much more likely to perceive the echo of that from which our own spiritual life has come; only in Asia it has remained at another stage of existence. We, however, are unproductive; we are highly unproductive. When the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha spread in the West, whence did the Greek and Latin scholars get the concepts for the understanding of it? They got them from the oriental wisdom. The West did not produce Christianity. It was taken from the Orient. And further: When in English-speaking regions the spiritual culture was felt to be very unfruitful, and people were sighing for its fructification, the Theosophists went to the subjugated Indians to seek the wellsprings for their modern Theosophy. No fruitful source existed among themselves for the means to improve their spiritual life: so they went to the Orient. In addition to this significant fact, you could find many proofs of the unfruitfulness of the spiritual life of the West; and each such proof is at the same time a proof of the necessity for making the spiritual life an independent member in the threefold social organism.

A second strand in the tangled ball is the political or rights current.

There is the crux of the cultural problem, this second current. If we look for it today in the external world, we see it when our honorable judges sit on their benches of justice with the jurors and pass judgment upon crime or offence against the law, or when the magistrates in their offices rule throughout the civilized world—to the despair of those thus ruled. All that we call jurisprudence or government, and all that results as politics from the interaction of jurisprudence and government, constitutes this current (see drawing, white). I call that (orange) the current of the spiritual life, and this (white) the current of rights, or government.

Where does this come from? As a matter of fact this too goes back to the Mystery-culture. It goes back to the Egyptian Mystery-culture, which passed through the southern European regions, then through the prosaic, unimaginative Roman life, where it united with a side branch of the oriental life, and became Roman Catholic Christianity, that is, Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism. Speaking somewhat radically, this Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism is also fundamentally a jurisprudence; for from single dogmas to that great and mighty Judgment, always represented as the Last Judgment throughout the Middle Ages, the utterly different spiritual life of the Orient, which had received the Egyptian impulse from the Mysteries of Space (see drawing), was really transformed into a society of world-magistrates with world-judgments and world-punishments, and sinners, and the good and the evil: it is a jurisprudence. That is the second element existing in our spiritual tangle which we call civilization, and it has been by no means organically combined with the other. That this is the case anyone can learn who goes to a university and hears one after the other, let us say a juridical discourse on political law, and then a theological discourse even on canonical law, if you like, for these are found side by side. Such things have shaped mankind; even in later times, when their origins have been forgotten, they are still shaping human minds. The rights life caused the later spiritual life to become abstract; but externally it influenced human customs, human habits, human systems.

What is the last social offshoot in the decadent oriental spiritual current, whose origin has been forgotten? It is feudal aristocracy. You could no longer recognize that the aristocrat had his origin in the oriental, theocratic spiritual life, for he has stripped off all that; only the social configuration remains (drawing). The journalistic intelligence often has very strange nightmarish visions. One such it had recently when it invented a curious phrase of which it was especially proud: “spiritual aristocracy”—this could be heard now and then. What is that which passed through the Roman Church system, through theocratising jurisprudence, juridical theocracy, became secularized in the civic systems of the Middle Ages, and completely secularized in modern times—what is it in its ultimate derivative? It is the bourgeoisie (drawing). And thus are these spiritual forces in their ultimate derivatives actually jumbled up among men.

And now still a third stream unites itself with the other two. If you would observe it today in the external world, where does this third current appear in an especially characteristic way? Well, there actually was in Central Europe a method of demonstrating to certain people where these final remnants of something originally different were to be found. It happened when the man of Central Europe sent his son to an office in London or New York to learn the methods of the economic system. In the methods of the economic life, whose roots are to be found in the popular customs of the Anglo-American world, the final consequence is to be seen of that which has been developed as outgrowths from what I might call the Mysteries of the Earth, of which, for example, the Druid Mysteries are only a special variety. In the times of the primitive European people the Mysteries of the Earth still contained a peculiar kind of wisdom-filled life. That European population, which was quite barbaric, which knew nothing regarding the revelations of oriental wisdom, or of the Mysteries of Space, or of what later became Roman Catholicism—that population which advanced to meet the spreading Christianity possessed a strange kind of life-steeped-in-wisdom, peculiar to it, which was entirely physical wisdom. Of this one can at best study only the most external usages, which are recorded in the history of this current: namely, the festivals of those people from whom have come the customs and habits of England and America. The festivals were here brought into entirely different relations from those in Egypt, where the harvest was connected with the stars. Here the harvest as such was the festive occasion; and the highest solemn festivals of the year were connected with other things than was the case in Egypt: namely, with things that belong entirely to the economic life. We have here without doubt something which goes back to the economic life.

If we wish to comprehend the whole spirit of this matter, we must say to ourselves: Over from Asia and up from the South men transplanted a spiritual life and a rights life which they had received from above and brought down to earth. Then, in the third current, an economic life sprang up which had to develop of itself and work its way up, which really was originally so completely economic in its legal customs and in its spiritual adaptations that, for example, one of the yearly festivals consisted in the celebration of the fructification of the herds as a special festival in honor of the gods; and there were similar festivals all derived from the economic aspect of life. If we go through the regions of northern Russia, middle Russia, Sweden, Norway, or into those regions which until a short time ago were parts of Germany, or to France, at least northern France, and to what is now Great Britain—if we go through these regions, we find dispersed everywhere a population which, before the spread of Christianity in ancient times, undoubtedly had a pronounced economic life. And what ancient customs can still be found, such as festivals of legal practices and festivals in honor of the gods, are an echo of this ancient economic culture.

This economic culture met what came from the other side. At first it did not succeed in developing an independent rights life and spiritual life. The primitive legal customs were discarded because Roman law flowed in, and the primitive spiritual customs were cast aside because the Greek spiritual life had entered. And so this economic life becomes sterile at first, and only gradually works its way out of this sterility; it can succeed in this, however, only by overcoming the chaotic condition created by the introduction of the spiritual life and rights life from outside. Consider the present Anglo-American spiritual life. In this you have two things very sharply differentiated from one another. First, you have everywhere in the Anglo-American spiritual life, more than anywhere else on earth, the so-called secret societies, which have considerable influence, much more than people know. They are undoubtedly the keepers—and are proud to be the keepers—of the ancient spiritual life, of the Egyptian or oriental spiritual life, which is completely diluted and evaporated into mere symbols,—symbols no longer understood but having a certain great power among those in authority. That, however, is ancient spiritual life, not spiritual life grown in its own soil. Side by side with this there is a spiritual life which does grow entirely in economic soil, but hitherto it has produced only very small blossoms, and these in abundance.

Anyone who studies such things and is able to understand them knows very well that Locke, Hume, Mill, Spencer, Darwin, and others, are nothing but these little blossoms springing from the economic life. You can get quite exactly the thoughts of a Mill or a Spencer from the economic life. Social democracy has elevated this to a theory, and considers the spiritual life as a derivative of the economic life. That is what we encounter first: everything is brought forth from the so-called practical—actually from life's routine, not from its real practice. So that going along side by side are such things as Darwinism, Spencerism, Millism, Humeism—and the diluted Mystery teachings, which are perpetuated in the various sectarian developments, such as the Theosophical Society, the Quakers, and so forth. The economic life has the will to rise, but has not yet made much progress, having produced thus far only these small blossoms. The spiritual life and the rights life are exotic plants and—I beg you to note this well—they are more and more exotic the farther we go toward the West in the European civilization.

There has always been in Central Europe something—I might say like a resistance, a struggling against the Greek spiritual life on the one hand and against the Roman Catholic rights life on the other. An opposition has always been there. An illustration of it is the Central European philosophy, of which really nothing is known in England. Actually, Hegel cannot be translated into the English language; it is impossible. Hence, nothing is known of him in England, where German philosophy is called Germanism, by which is meant something an intelligent person cannot be bothered with. In just this German philosophy, however—with the exception of one incident, namely, when Kant was completely ruined by Hume, and there divas brought into German philosophy that abominable Kant-Hume element, which has really caused such devastation in the heads of Central European humanity—with the exception of this incident, we have later, after all, the second blossoming of this struggle in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; and we already have the search for a free spiritual life in Goethe, who would have nothing to do with the final echo of the Roman Catholic jurisprudence in what is called the law of nature. Just feel the legal element in the shabby robes and the strange caps which the judges still have from ancient times, and feel it likewise in the science of nature, the law of nature—the legal element is still there! The expression “law of nature” has no sense in connection, for example, with the Goethean science of nature, which deals only with the primordial phenomenon, the primordial fact.

There for the first time is radical protest made; but naturally it remained only a beginning. That was the first advance toward the free spiritual life: the Goethean science of nature; and in Central Europe there already exists the first impulse even toward the independent rights life, or political life. Read such a work as that of Wilhelm van Humboldt, who was even Prussian minister of public instruction—read The Sphere and Duties of Government,² and you will see the first beginning toward the construction of an independent rights life, or political life, of the independence of the true political realm. It is true it has never gone beyond beginnings, and these are found as far back as the first half of the 19th century, even at the end of the 18th century. It must be borne in mind, however, that there are nevertheless in Central Europe important impulses in this very direction, impulses which can be carried on, which must not be left unconsidered, and which may flow into the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism.

In his first book Nietzsche wrote that passage that I have quoted in my book on Nietzsche³ in the very first pages, a premonition of something tragic in the German spiritual life. Nietzsche tried at that time in the foreword to his work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, to characterize the events of 1870–71, the founding of the German Empire. Since then this strangulation of the German spirit has been thoroughly accomplished; and when in the last five or six years three-fourths of the world fell upon this former Germany (I do not wish to speak about the causes or the guilty, but only to sketch the configuration, the world situation), it was really then already the corpse of the German spiritual life. But when anyone speaks as I did yesterday, characterizing the facts without prejudice, no one should infer that there is not still in this German spiritual life much that must come forth, that must be considered, that intends to be considered, in spite of the future gypsy-like condition. For what was the real cause of the ruin of the German people? This question must also be answered without prejudice. They were ruined because they too wanted to share in materialism, and they have no talent for materialism. The others have good talents for it. The Germans have in general that quality which Herman Grimm characterized excellently when he said: The Germans as a rule retreat when it would be beneficial for them to go boldly forward, and they storm ahead with terrific energy when it would be better for them to hold back. That is a very good description of an inner quality of character of this German people; for the Germans have had propulsive force throughout the centuries, but not the ability to sustain this force. Goethe was able to present the primordial phenomenon, but he could not reach the beginnings of spiritual science. He could develop a spirituality, as, for example, in his Faust, or in his Wilhelm Meister, which could have revolutionized the world if the right means had been found; but the outer personality of this gifted man achieved nothing more than that in Weimar he put on fat and had a double chin, became a stout privy counselor, who was also uncommonly industrious as minister, but still was obliged at times to wink at certain things, especially in political life.

The world ought to understand that such phenomena as Goethe and Humboldt represent everywhere beginnings, and that it would really be a loss to the world and not a profit, to fail to take into account what lives in the German evolution in an unfinished state, but to which must come forth. For after all, the Germans do not have the predisposition which the others have in such remarkable degree the farther we go toward the West: namely, to rise on all occasions to ultimate abstractions. What the Germans have in their spiritual life is called “abstractions” only by those who are unable to experience it; and because they themselves have squeezed out the life, they believe others lack it too. The Germans have not the talent for pressing on to ultimate abstractions. This was shown in their political life, in their most unfortunate political life! If the Germans had had from the beginning the great talent for monarchy which the French have preserved so brilliantly to this day, they would never have become the victims of “Wilhelmism”; they would neither have countenanced this strange caricature of a monarch, nor have needed him. It is true that the French call themselves republicans, but they have among them a secret monarch who firmly holds together the structure of the state, who keeps a terribly tight rein on the people's minds; for in reality the spirit of Louis XIV is everywhere present. Naturally, only a decadent form remains, but it is there. There is no doubt that a secret monarch is there among the French people; for it is really shown in every one of their cultural manifestations. And the talent for abstraction demonstrated in Woodrow Wilson is the ultimate talent for abstraction in the political field. Those fourteen points of the world's schoolmaster, which in every word bear the stamp of the impractical and unachievable, could only originate in a mind wholly formed for the abstract, with no discernment whatever for true realities.

There are two things which the cultural history of civilization will doubtless find it difficult to understand. One I have often characterized in the words of Herman Grimm—the Kant-Laplace theory, in which many people still believe. Herman Grimm said so finely in his Goethe: People will some day have difficulty in comprehending that malady now called science, which makes its appearance in the Kant-Laplace theory, according to which all that we have around us today arose through agglomeration, out of a universal world-mist; and this is supposed to continue until the whole thing falls back again into the sun. A putrid bone around which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing morsel than these fanciful ideas, this fantastic concept of world-evolution. So thinks Herman Grimm. Naturally, there will some day be great difficulty in explaining this Kant-Laplace theory from the standpoint of the scientific insanity of the 19th and 20th centuries!

The second thing will be the explanation of the unbelievable fact that there ever could be a large number of people to take seriously the humbug of the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson—in an age that is socially so serious.

If we study the things that stand side by side in the world we find in what a peculiar way the economic life, the political rights life, and the spiritual life are entangled. If we do not wish to perish because of the extreme degeneration which has come into the spiritual life and the rights life, we must turn to the Threefold Social Order, which from independent roots will build an economic life now struggling to emerge, but unable to do so unless a rights life and a spiritual life, developed in freedom, come to meet it. These things have their deep roots in the whole of humanity's evolution and in human social life; and these roots must be sought. People must now be made to realize that way down at the bottom, on the ground I might say, crawls the economic life, managed by Anglo-American habits of thought; and that it will be able to climb up only when it works in harmony with the whole world, with that for which others also are qualified, for which others also are gifted. Otherwise the gaining of world dominion will become a fatality for it.

If the world continues in the course it has been taking under the influence of the degenerating spiritual life derived from the Orient, then this spiritual life, although at one end it was the most sublime truth, will at the other rush into the most fearful lies. Nietzsche was impelled to describe how even the Greeks had to guard themselves from the lies of life through their art. And in reality art is the divine child which keeps men from being swallowed up in lies. If this first branch of civilization is pursued only one-sidedly, then this stream empties into lies. In the last five or six years more lies have been told among civilized humanity than in any other period of world history; in public life the truth has scarcely been spoken at all; hardly a word that has passed through the world was true. While this stream empties into lies (see drawing), the middle stream empties into self-seeking; and an economic life like the Anglo-American, which should end in world-dominion—if the effort is not made to bring about its permeation by the independent spiritual life and the independent political life, it will flow into the third of the abysses of human life, into the third of these three. The first abyss is lies, the degeneration of humanity through Ahriman; the second is self-seeking, the degeneration of humanity through Lucifer; the third is, in the physical realm, illness and death; in the cultural realm, the illness and death of culture.

The Anglo-American world may gain world dominion; but without the Threefold Social Order it will, through this dominion, pour out cultural death and cultural illness over the whole earth; for these are just as much a gift of the Azuras as lies are a gift of Ahriman, and self-seeking, of Lucifer. So the third, a worthy companion of the other two, is a gift of the Azuric powers!

We must get the enthusiasm from these things which will fire us now really to seek ways of enlightening as many people as possible. Today the mission of those with insight is the enlightenment of humanity. We must do as much as possible to oppose to that foolishness which fancies itself to be wisdom, and which thinks it has made such marvellous progress—to oppose to that foolishness what we can gain from the practical aspect of anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science.

My dear friends, if I have been able to arouse in you in some measure the feeling that these things must be taken with profound seriousness, then I have attained a part of what I should very much like to have attained through these words.

When we meet again in a week or two, we shall speak further of similar things. Today I wished only to call forth in you a feeling that at the present time the really most important work is to enlighten people in the widest circles.

• 1. The human being is essentially a spiritual being. When he is engaged in art, science, and religion, he is active spiritually; this activity is his spiritual life.—Editor.
• 2. Translated by Joseph Coulthard, London, 1845.
• 3. “Extirpation des deutschen Geistes zu Gunsten des deutschen Reiches,” Extirpation of the German Spirit in favor of the German Empire—quoted in Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kampfer gegen seine Zeit (not translated).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conceptual life: Complete Wakefulness: Wisdom

Feeling: Dreaming: Wisdom

Will: Sleeping: Wisdom

I. Conceptual Life

II. Imaginations

III. Inspirations

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

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

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

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

I. Conceptual Life (Lucifer)

II. Imaginations (consciousness)

III. Inspirations (Ahriman)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My task today will be to discuss how hard it is for people to keep to the truth of a situation in their ordinary trains of thought. I want to convey to you how far from easy it is in thinking to keep all the factors involved so before us that the course of our thoughts doesn't go astray from reality, that we follow the thread of reality.

The theme proposed for us today is certainly more difficult than others we might choose. But there is inner moral value to be derived from the realization that truth is hard to get at and that it is very easy to go astray as we forge ahead in a train of thought in the attempt to arrive at the truth by means of strict logical reasoning.

You will find that what I am going to tell you today will make it easier to understand certain matters that will occupy us in the next lecture. I will be speaking then about the important concepts chance, necessity, and providence. And I want to begin today with an introduction that, though it has its difficulties, will nevertheless contribute something vital and significant, not only to our theoretical understanding, but to the feeling we will then be able to develop for the way to seek truth.

I have often had occasion to mention the fact that there is a contemporary philosopher by the name of Fritz Mauthner who has written a Critique of Language.¹ This Critique of Language was intended to provide our period with something better suited to it than Kant provided for his time with his Critique of Pure Reason.² For Mauthner no longer believes—if that expresses it—that people seek knowledge in the form of concepts. It is rather his conviction that it is fundamentally just language to which people attach their insights. He believes that they don't really have true concepts when they are thinking, but merely have what words convey, and that words simply suggest this or that to them. He pictures people as having certain inner experiences in connection with words, putting their faith in words, jumbling them up, putting them together, and deriving insights from these processes. This is a total misconception of the entire cognitive process, but one that was bound to emerge eventually in an age working its way through to the worst consequences of materialism.

I want to convey just a sense of how Mauthner came to hold this view by quoting a passage from his Dictionary of Philosophy, written after his Critique of Language.³ Since we will be concerning ourselves with chance, necessity and providence, I will quote a passage from his article on the word “chance.” As I read it you will see that the materialistic age has gradually learned to talk about certain things. I am not so much interested in touching on any theoretical aspects involved in what I'll be reading you as I am in getting you to examine your feelings as you are exposed to what a materialistic philosopher of the present has to say on such a subject. I'd like to have you try to sense the way he speaks. He says of chance in his treatise on it “And it would be like going back to childhood and taking out of a magic package the surprises some kindly merchant has concealed in it.” He believes that looking at all the things that happen by chance is like becoming a child again and taking out of a magic package all the surprises put into it by a kindly merchant! “As though one were to keep on making God responsible, as Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer did ...” is his sense of it. Trying to explain the world by ascribing everything to a kindly God would, in his opinion, be to regress to the state of a child gradually discovering what some kind merchant has hidden in a surprise packet. The child explores its content and comes upon one lovely thing after another. That is how Mauthner sees anyone who, attempting to find a wise explanation of the phenomena of the world, makes God responsible by regarding Him as the world's Creator. And he goes on to say, “... if one wanted to follow the example of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer in making Schopenhauer's elderly Jew” (he calls Him that because the term “God of the Christians” strikes him as unsuitable) “responsible for unscrambling this confusion of chance and purpose.”

You see the type of expression into which a materialist lapses if he takes himself seriously. Of course it is true that many people do not take materialism (which inevitably is also atheism) any more seriously than did the man who exclaimed “As surely as God is in heaven I am an atheist!” But anyone who takes it seriously today has to ridicule providence and similar matters; there is really no other possibility for those who have adopted materialism.

Though Fritz Mauthner is bound to give deep offense to our feelings and our sense of the fitness of things, I have brought him up because he is an honest, upright seeker after truth in the current materialistic sense. It is not my intention to do battle with individuals who are philosophers by profession, but rather with someone who comes to philosophy out of inner necessity from a quite different professional background and attains a certain degree of competency in it. For what one misses so greatly today in the way world views are evolved is a really serious coming to grips with what the various branches of science have brought forth up to the present. Fritz Mauthner has really grown into a learned gentleman, enabling me, as I take him for my point of departure and describe the difficulties inherent in the search for truth, to base my commentary on the thoughts developed by a very learned, very brilliant man. I am not basing it on what just any person thinks, but on the thinking of a very scholarly, clever man.

To begin with, I must take a very simple concept to show you at hand of a very special example from Mauthner's work how hard the search for truth is. You all know that there has long been what is called in mathematics the calculus of probability. It's quite easy to grasp the principle involved. Let's assume, for example, that you have some dice. I don't want to lead you astray into gambling with them, but let us say you have some dice. You know that they are so arranged that there is a single dot on one side, two on another, and so on, up to six dots on one of the six sides. If you roll these dice, they can turn up any one of the six sides; there are six possibilities. Now we can ask what the chances are of turning up a 6. You might really want to know what the chances are of getting a 6 when you shake the dice cup and throw the dice. The mathematician makes his calculation and says there are six possibilities; there is thus one-sixth of a chance of turning up a 6 on a single throw. You see how unlikely this possibility is. You would have to run through all six possibilities to be certain of a particular outcome. The numerator and the denominator would have to be identical, since certainty would equal 1 (6/6 = 1). Probability is therefore six times smaller than certainty in throwing dice.

Now we can pursue the matter further and ask what the chance is of throwing two sixes if two dice are thrown. This can also be calculated. You will get one divided by thirty-six if you calculate as follows: Throwing a 2 with one dice, you can get anything from a I to a 6 with the second. Getting a 2 with the first throw, you can also get anything from a 2 to a 6 with the second, and so on, until you have counted thirty-six different possible throws. The probability of getting any particular outcome is thus 1 in 36, or 1/36. If you wanted to calculate probability with 3 dice, you would get 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6, or 1/216, a very unlikely event indeed. The probability gets smaller and smaller the more dice are involved. The more possibilities there are, the less probable is any particular outcome.

You see, then, that it is possible to express in mathematical formulas the degree of probability of any particular outcome, and calculations of this kind can be applied to all sorts of cases. But I don't need to explain more than this principle to you; you see that it is possible to express in mathematical formulas what one feels. One can always feel that there is a certain degree of improbability that a 6 will be thrown, but the actual probability is 1/6, with two dice 1/36, and so on. Such feelings can, in a sense, be expressed in mathematical terms.

Now there is a certain way of thinking about divine providence. Materialists say something like this about it: We want to examine the reasoning of those who believe in God and providence; what are their thoughts? Believers in providence say, Let us take a work like Goethe's Faust or Homer's epics. What is Goethe's Faust in the last analysis? If we think as the materialists do, picturing the world as composed of atoms or molecules, we would really have to conceive Faust in its entirety as composed of letters, of single letters, unless we wished to go deeper. People who believe in providence and also believe in atoms and molecules formulate the situation more or less like this: Let's imagine that we have a container of type and in it all the letters that make up Faust, and some machinery—not some intelligence—spreads out these letters. The believers in providence could now ask how great the probability is of Goethe's Faust emerging from a typesetting machine that simply put the letters one after the other as they happened to fall on being thrown out of the container. They ask the question, perhaps, but have to admit that the probability of such a thing happening is so slight as to be nonexistent. One cannot assume that a haphazard scattering of type could possibly result in a chance (Voltaire's “His Majesty, Chance”) printing of Goethe's Faust. Since that can't be the case with Goethe's Faust, we can scarcely think that this world, which is much, much more gloriously put together, could have been flung down so thoughtlessly and simply.

This is approximately how a person with the current atomistic outlook would think if he could not avoid accepting providence as necessary in the scheme of things because of the impossibility of the world's having put itself together out of chaos.

Now Fritz Mauthner is a thorough gentleman, so he has let himself in not just for producing this train of thought but for correctly calculating how improbable it is that, for example, Goethe's Faust could have originated from a mere scattering of the letters it consists of. He has really figured it out, and I want to show you how he did it. He makes a fairly thorough job of it. He says,

God's existence is proved by the fact that the world's beauty and order are just as improbably the product of pure chance, achieved without purpose on the part of a creator, as we would regard the production of Faust as a consequence of upsetting a huge container of type and an accidental arranging of the letters and punctuation in the sequence found in Faust. The improbability of such a production is truly vast, beyond anything fantasy could conjure up, even if one disregards the utterly nonsensical assumption that letters could arrange themselves into sentences, and assumes the probability of an immeasurably favorable special case—something, say, along the lines of a German typewriter or typesetting machine getting into the hands of a Chinaman who, totally unfamiliar with the German language and letter-symbols, nevertheless experiments tirelessly with the keys for weeks or months, handling the machine correctly, with the result of this mere experimenting producing Faust!

Mauthner goes on to say:

I entertained myself working out an approximate calculation of the probability of a chance emergence of Goethe's Faust from this experiment. There was no need to bother about a few decimal places in the decimal part of the logarithm, and I magnanimously upped the probability by allowing for one hundred typographical errors and still recognizing the product as genuinely Faust, thus giving it a more than generous benefit of the doubt. Faust contains approximately 300,000 letters. Now the probability of striking the right key at every touch is not exactly small; it is almost 1 out of 100, since there are about 100 different symbols.

So one can light upon 100 symbols. Blindly tapping away, the probability of getting the right one is 1 in 100, according to the principle explained at hand of the dice. Thus the probability of the Chinaman totally ignorant of the language in which Faust is written striking the right key is 1/100. “But since, according to elementary rules, the chance of accidentally producing the whole of Faust with its 300,000 letters equals the product of 300,000 partial probabilities, the probability of an accidental production of Faust must be calculated as (1/200)300,000.”

You see, the probability of Faust coming into existence in the above way is not 1/6 or 1/36, and so on, but equals the fraction obtained by dividing 1 by 100x100x100, and so on, until we have done it 300,000 times. That is a fraction with a gigantic denominator, as you can see; in other words, the probability is exceedingly tiny. Mauthner continues, “We have here a fraction whose numerator is 1, whose denominator consists of 600,000 digits. Even the conceptual power of the Indians,” (which Mauthner rates very highly), “even the mathematical genius of Archimedes is not up to grasping so vast a denominator. There is not even a name for such a number. The Greeks and the Romans were right, then, when they considered the chance production of any organized whole as extremely improbable. Here we reach the limits of the possible”—but only for human conceiving, he means. One cannot obtain Faust this way.

And the Greeks and Romans would also have concluded that the meaningful production of a Faust on the part of a creator could most probably—or even quite certainly—equally prove the existence of a world-creator if the whole proof or metaphor or line of reasoning were not so unspeakably foolish. I could never even bring myself to believe that the marvelous build of a mosquito could be the product of chance in a materialistic sense. The chance material production of a mosquito is just as improbable as that of Faust. Darwinism has not really lessened the incomprehensibilities. But the headwork on the part of a God Who would have had to organize not merely 3 times 100,000 elements or letters (with repetitions) but all the elements that make up the cosmos an endless number of times (with repetitions) is, if possible, even more improbable for human conceiving (and we really have no other!) than a chance production of Faust. I have no wish to extend my calculations to figuring out the degree of the improbability of a world- dominion and providence.

You see what tremendously learned reflections one can engage in. You will have thought them quite learned enough to arrive at the logical conclusion: what must God not have had to keep in mind, if He wanted to put the world together out of all its elements, if producing Faust out of an upset typecase or the chance striking of typewriter keys represents such an improbability as to be practically out of the question? Therefore, says Mauthner, both the concept of chance and that of divine providence are inconceivable. For if the degree of probability in the case of Faust is so minuscule, one can certainly not presuppose in the world's case that it could have been the chance creation of an upsetting of a cosmic typecase, so to speak. But then, one can just as little presuppose God—for what wisdom would He not have had to possess to have built the world out of all its elements!

So one can take neither God nor “His Majesty, Chance” for granted. Mauthner therefore maintains that neither has validity, that all that is involved here is just concepts in language, and people deal with them as they do with languages themselves and with translations. And he calls this a Critique of Language! We have here a truly incisive train of thought indeed, pursued with a great deal of effort. It leads to two alternatives: one has either to presuppose that the world came into being by chance—an exceedingly tiny probability, of course—or, still less credibly, to conceive of a kind God with a head so full of wisdom that He could use it to build a world out of chaos.

Now, since we are concerned in spiritual science not only with getting to know things but with thinking correctly, taking into account all the factors involved in developing a sound train of thought, let us examine this particular train of thought in a way commensurate with the serious approach of spiritual science. Let us review again the proposition that the probability of Goethe's Faust resulting from a jumbling up of the contents of a typecase is so infinitesimal as to be represented by a fraction with a numerator of 1 over a denominator consisting of 600,000 digits. The probability of the world's coming into being as the result of a similar accident would, of course, be infinitely smaller. But the fact is that Faust did come into being in its entirety! Now did this happen because the good Goethe—not the good God in this case—had in his head the laws whereby, according to the principles of typesetting, 300,000 letters taken from the typecase could be set in soldierly rows to eventuate in Faust? Was Goethe thinking of the right way to reach into that container to get hold of the right letters?

Certainly not! When we think of the origin of Faust, we don't picture it as having anything to do with selecting type. The creator of Faust proceeded quite differently. It would never have occurred to him that Faust could have resulted from the placement of 300,000 letters. It was totally unnecessary for Goethe to know that Faust could be composed of 300,000 letters, and yet he composed it! We might, on the one hand—and indeed we even must—picture a chaos, with things in a state of utter disorder, but conceive on the other of a good God with all the various laws in mind according to which He would arrange the world, exactly as Goethe would have done if he had been set before a typecase to bring forth his Faust. But neither God nor Goethe went to work in this fashion. What we have to picture going on in God's soul has nothing whatever to do with the whole train of thought about composition, any more than such an incredibly cleverly conceived composition applies in the case of the creation of Goethe's Faust. In other words, this whole train of thought leads to absurdity. It is brilliant, it is well reasoned, it is conscientious—all these things; yet it ends in absurdity. That comes of a conscientious person engaging in a train of thought and pursuing it, but losing sight of the actual factors that could have led to a sound conclusion.

This is a much more important matter than we might suppose, for it demonstrates how extraordinarily difficult it can be, no matter how scientifically one proceeds, to avoid losing sight of reality as we pursue a train of thought. We must imbue our feelings with this realization and learn a great deal from just such an example. Two things are required as we mull it over. One is that we educate ourselves through an outstanding example of this kind to an awareness that the search for truth is far from easy, and that we badly need to develop a feeling for the fact that not just any thought sequence that strikes us at first glance as correct is actually a sound one. The more we can imbue ourselves with the feeling that we could err, that even at our most conscientious we might be wrong, the more easily will we avoid a rigid clinging to our own opinions, to a stubborn belief in the correctness of our views.

It is a very common thing, these days, to encounter people who declare that they think this or that to be a fact. The typical reaction one has in such encounters is how fortunate and at the same time how simple-minded such people are—fortunate, because they have no idea what it really means to believe in something they have figured out, and simple-minded because they don t have a glimmering of how far removed from reality their thoughts may be. But we should be aware that we mustn't allow this realization to depress us. It will make us very modest indeed, but not to the point of driving us into melancholia, to a sense of despair about human life because of the great difficulty of achieving truth. For we know that the life of the human soul is unending and must be a quest, that it may even be due to a wise ordaining that the quest for truth is so difficult. And we will find that life rests upon this fact.

It would be the death of our souls if the quest for truth were easy, if those people who say they have found out how to arrange things in a way to make the whole world happy were right. If, confronted by the world's complexity, it were such a simple matter to discover truth as most individuals believe it to be, that would mean the death of the soul. For the soul's life depends on our inability to find any access to the totality of truth; it requires a long slow search for truth, and the preservation of a profound degree of modesty as one progresses in it, step by step. Error is the more likely the more comprehensive the truth we seek. So it was natural for even one of the most learned men to fall into childish error such as that demonstrated in connection with solving the cosmic problem of chance and providence.

But dismay and depression over the fact that truth can be discovered only with such difficulty cannot touch us if we bear in mind that life derives from our having to seek truth. The quest is what matters. You might say, Well, if it were to mean the death of the soul not to have to search for truth, that fate is surely going to claim us now, for we have currently reached a high point in human evolution in the lack of feeling for a true quest for truth. In the whole course of history there have never been more people with programs, more individuals who believe that they can solve the whole cosmic riddle with a word or two. So we do have the very outlook right now that can be described as leading to the death of the soul. And it would indeed mean the death of the soul if what these program-people think were true. But it is not true, fortunately!

The thinking of people like Fritz Mauthner is more typical than one might assume, and there are many of them. The volumes of his Philosophical Dictionary are a perfect example of the current outlook. They really reflect the way most people think who aren't interested enough in freeing themselves from the trend of contemporary thought to move in a direction such as spiritual science has taken. People like Mauthner say, We come, on the one hand, to the untenable concept of a world that has come into being by chance (for this has the degree of improbability I have been demonstrating). But the alternative concept of an all-wise God is just as untenable since our human minds find it impossible to credit the existence of a god, a good God, who created in His head everything He needed to assemble out of initial chaos the various “letters” that compose the universe. Mauthner believes that people used to make do with concepts like chance and providence, but that we have now advanced beyond them since we realize today that they have no cosmic significance, no objective meaning; as mere figments of our human minds they hold meaning for ourselves alone. They are judged entirely on the basis of whether they are presently applicable to the world at large. People like this always say, Look how childish people used to be! They talked on the one hand of “divine providence and on the other of the concept “chance.” We must recognize the fact that both concepts exist only in the thoughts of human beings and are not even remotely applicable to the world.

And on what do they base this judgment? They say, When we survey the whole range of philosophical thought, the philosophical procedure followed by many philosophers (and Mauthner has really sat down and studied the world's philosophers and is as familiar with all of them as anyone can be in a single lifetime), we see what trouble they took to arrive at concepts. But all these are just human concepts; they can't be applied to reality. There is no reality in the concept of divine providence. And Mauthner's article on chance ends with the statement that divine providence, the cosmic order, cosmic harmony, and the beauty of the world used to be looked upon as concepts in the following context: “Yes, there are elements of chance in the world, but the world is also endowed with order and beauty.” And Mauthner ends: “But we realize that the concept of chance is man-made, and so are the concepts of beauty and order, of God, of causality.” We know, in other words, that they are all of human origin and lack objective applicability. “Thus it is the height of literal-mindedness even to ask the question whether chance or God is the origin of universal order and beauty, and worse to try to answer it with a childish simile.”

Now what have Mauthner and all the other philosophers who agree with him done to arrive at the insight that the concepts of God and chance and order are human products, and that neither order nor beauty and so on really exist outside us? You needn't believe me, but they have demonstrated with all possible philosophical incisiveness how profoundly human reason goes to work to produce such concepts and how true it is that they are human products. They have demonstrated this. He has offered proof when he says, “But we know ...” etc. He has proved it! But if we look at how he proved it, we have to say, Yes, dear Mr. Mauthner, you are right. But we are familiar with the fact that the concepts of chance, beauty, God, and the June bug are all the work of man. That is true, looked at in the right light. Now you would have to spend years making a really thorough study of it, but if you were to examine the penetrating thinking that has gone into demonstrating how all the concepts mentioned above are the fruits of human thinking, you would find trains of thought that can very properly be applied to the assertion that the June bug concept is also man-made. That is certainly true, but does that say anything about whether June bugs can fly around outside there and are real? What is childish is to say that the concept of the June bug is just a human product. One can think really penetratingly and be totally convinced of the correctness of one's conclusions, and yet have lost the thread on which the true facts are strung. All the proofs adduced in support of the finding that the above concepts are simply fruits of human thinking do not say anything about the objective existence of these things; just as calling the June bug concept a human product does not help us when its objective existence is in question.

You see what tremendous certainty the modern scientific way of thinking generates. It is reflected in such a statement as “We know that the concepts of chance, beauty, order, God, and causality are all man-made. So it seems to us to be the very height of literal-mindedness even to ask the question whether chance or God is the origin of universal order and beauty.”

Well, then, one must comment, you believe—since you can prove that the June bug concept is man-made—that it is being childish, being a victim of literal-mindedness to apply the June bug concept to an insect flying around there outside the window? It is all exactly the same thing, you simply don't notice the similarity.

What is the point of bringing up such matters? Why, to call attention to how difficult it is to get at truth by stringing logical concepts together; to show what the outcome can be, no matter how penetratingly one proceeds; to illustrate how thoroughly we must imbue ourselves with a sense of the difficulty of the quest for truth, both in great and small concerns. The more you develop a feeling for this as a result of what has been discussed today, the better it will be.

On Hegel's birthday, August 27, we will build on the foundation laid today in a spiritual scientific approach to the concepts chance, necessity, and providence.

• 1. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923, German philosopher and writer. Critique of Language, 1901.
• 2. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, German philosopher of the Enlightenment, Published Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.
• 3. Fritz Mauthner, Dictionary of Philosophy, 1909.

The Truth About Anthroposophy and How to Defend It Against Untruth

Dear attendees, I would like to say at the outset that this lecture truly gives me no satisfaction. It is perhaps one of those that are least likely to give me satisfaction – none of those that I desire to hold – but it has been provoked in a certain way by events that have been taking place for quite some time here in the immediate vicinity. And I may also say that it has increasingly become the case in the movement in which I stand that I have been given the task of developing the spiritual current in question, and that I am fully occupied with this development in the most diverse directions. Therefore, I truly have neither the time nor the inclination to undertake these or those attacks against the outside world. On the other hand, the attacks that others are making on this movement have recently increased in a quite monstrous way, not only in number, but above all in content. I will endeavor to keep today's lecture as objective as possible. Unfortunately, the abundance of material will force me to proceed more or less aphoristically. But I would like to divide my remarks into two parts. In the first part, I would like to present, so to speak, the historical development of the spiritual movement that I call anthroposophical, and in doing so, I will only cast a few highlights on what has aggressively asserted itself against this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from here or there. In the second part of the lecture, I will then go into more detail, summarized more or less into types, and mention only very individual cases where it is absolutely necessary.

First of all, I would like to note that there is truly the most perfect right to call the spiritual movement in question, of which this structure is supposed to be a representative, the “anthroposophically oriented” one. And not only is there every right to do so, but also to describe this spiritual movement as a completely independent one in relation to all other spiritual movements of the present day. Both, ladies and gentlemen, are being disputed. The justification of the term “Anthroposophy” is disputed in a way that is truly recognized immediately as impossible if one makes even the slightest effort to look at the whole matter historically. You must forgive me if today I have to pepper what is objective with all manner of seemingly personal observations. But in this case these seemingly personal observations are also objective and belong to the matter at hand. Anyone who wants to see the truth and follows my writings, who follows what I have written since the beginning of the 1880s in connection with Goethe's scientific writings, will find that the spiritual path is already hinted at everywhere in terms of its method, which then, as is natural, has been further developed over time (it has now been four decades since then). What from here on out will be called Anthroposophy can be distinguished in two directions. One is the way of presenting, the way of seeking, of researching; the other is the content, the results of this research, insofar as they have been able to be developed to date. It would, of course, be a poor testimony to the anthroposophical school of thought if, after four decades, we had to say that nothing had been achieved over this long period of time, but that we were merely repeating the same things that had been discussed in the publications of the 1980s.

But, ladies and gentlemen, anyone who considers the direction of thought, the direction of research, or, if I want to express myself more eruditely, the method that is considered here, will find that everything that comes into consideration was already expressed as a preliminary stage in the 1880s; I would even go so far as to say that the basic nerve of what is called spiritual science here was already hinted at then. It was natural that this spiritual research, which I mentioned in the 1880s, should first deal with that which set the particular tone for the heights of modern spiritual development. And that was the scientific world view. I had nothing but a dispute with the scientific world view in mind, which of course also made a dispute with contemporary philosophy of the time necessary. Anyone who believes otherwise misunderstands the content of what I wrote until the 1890s. There they will find little consideration of any religious beliefs or the like; but they will find repeated efforts to spiritualize the prevailing scientific direction.

Now it was self-evident that a critical examination of certain dominant factors of scientific thought at that time was necessary. But how was this examination carried out? I would like to present only the facts that, in my opinion, come into consideration. First of all, it was the case that, especially at the beginning of the 1880s, what could be called Darwinism, Haeckelism, or Darwinist Haeckelism, was, so to speak, the prevailing trend in certain scientifically minded circles. At that time, Haeckel was a factor that had to be reckoned with. Not long ago – I am now talking about the beginning of the 1890s – he had given a lecture that caused a sensation in educational circles at the time and had it published: “Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science”.

Dear attendees, the following may serve to illustrate how I have engaged with such movements. I gave a speech in Vienna – which was the nearest platform to which I had access before I went to Weimar – which is, in the most eminent sense, the rectification I undertook of what at the time could be called Haeckelism. I opposed materialistic monism with spiritual monism. A few weeks before I delivered this speech, a movement was spreading across wide areas of the educated world that was then called the “Movement for Ethical Culture”. This movement aimed essentially to treat ethics separately from world-view, to spread moral views among people as something that should exist without religious or other world-views. I opposed such a view because an ethics without a foundation seemed impossible to me. Today I can only report; the evidence will be found if one ever studies my writings historically in sequence. The essays to be mentioned today will soon be published in order, according to the year of publication, so that everyone can see how things are. I objected because, according to my insights, I could not assume that ethics, the doctrine of morals, could be anything other than that which is based on a worldview. I discussed the subject in question at the time in one of the first issues of “Zukunft”, which was just being launched. It was then that Haeckel - I had been in Weimar for quite some time when I wrote this essay and had passed Haeckel by, had not concerned myself with Haeckel, who was in Jena in the immediate vicinity - turned to me after this essay on ethical culture. I answered him at the time and later sent him a copy of my lecture in Vienna, which essentially consisted of opposing spiritual monism to materialistic monism. I never made any attempt to offer myself to any contemporary direction in any way. And if there was any kind of rapprochement with Haeckelism, it was because Haeckel approached me first; and it was also natural that a discussion with natural science took place.

Dear attendees, anyone who can read will see from all that is written in my “World and Life Views in the 19th Century”, which is dedicated to Ernst Haeckel, and from a certain reverent feelings for this courageous personality, who, despite all his downsides, was a man of great vision. It will be seen that I agreed to nothing more than could be agreed to on account of the scientific significance of Haeckel's findings. It can never be inferred from that book that I agreed with Haeckel philosophically or in terms of the highest worldview issues. On the contrary, I may relate a personal experience here. I was once in Leipzig with Haeckel and told him that it was actually a shame that he evoked in so many people the very thing he did not actually want, namely the opinion that he completely denied the spirit. He said: Do I do that? I just want to lead people to a retort and show them what happens in the retort when this and that occurs, how everything starts moving.

One could see that Haeckel imagined nothing of the workings of the spirit other than the workings of movement; but in his naivety, he could not help it. He saw matter coming to life and called that “spiritual” manifestation. He was basically naive about everything that is called spirit and the like. This gives a judgment of what I wrote in the nineties up to the small writing “Haeckel and his opponents”. Anyone who can really read will have to find, in the face of this writing, how I insert at a crucial point what a scientific foundation can never offer. Everyone will see that at that time in the 1890s I was seeking nothing more than a discussion between what I had indicated in the general direction in my Goethe writings in the 1880s, which I then further expanded in the 1897 publication “Goethe's World View,” and the scientific direction of the time.

Now, my dear audience, nothing less than a straightforward continuation of all that was at stake at the time is then given in the writing “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to Modern Worldviews”, which was written almost simultaneously with “World and Life Views”. It was simply a matter of the straightforward progress of serious research that the path had to lead from the natural scientific presuppositions to what was tackled in this writing. I believe that one cannot emphasize this orientation more strongly and clearly than it was done in the preface to this writing 'Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life'. One consequence of this writing was that it was translated into English in a short time. It appeared in an English journal. I had first presented the content of this writing in the form of lectures in Berlin, at the invitation of a group of Berlin Theosophists. That was in the winter of 1900 to 1901.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, consider what it means when you now put two facts together: two facts that are, of course, put together quite differently today. I was invited in the winter of 1900 by a group of Theosophists to give them these lectures, which are now available in print. These lectures are delivered solely from the intentions that were mine, before a group of Theosophists, at whose invitation, after I had written three years earlier:

I would advise anyone who meets a Theosophist to begin by putting themselves completely in a state of faith and to try to hear something of the revelations that such an enlightened person, steeped in Oriental wisdom, experiences within himself. One hears nothing, nothing but phrases borrowed from Eastern writings, without a trace of content. The inner experiences are nothing but hypocrisy.

Now, my dear audience, it cannot be said that I predicted flattery to those who then invited me to speak before them. I once hinted at the fact at issue here in a lecture given here in the vicinity. I said at the time: When I gave my lectures in Berlin during the first years, and also in other places, I had not read any of Blavatsky and Besant's writings. I had not read them either. And above all, the lectures on “Mysticism in the East” were spoken and written before I had even decided to read anything by Blavatsky and Besant. And today, for example, it is said that I claimed not to have even known the names of Blavatsky and Besant fifteen years before the Liestal lecture. I had not read anything by them. It is a peculiar way in which polemics are conducted from some quarters. While I said – and it is important to draw attention to such things from time to time, because such things are used to throw dust in people's eyes – while I said that I had not read the writings of Besant and Blavatsky, and what is quoted is what I said, a few lines later it is said that I claimed that fifteen years ago I did not even know the name Blavatsky and Besant. — So my attackers are in stark contradiction to the facts, to their own statements made a few lines earlier.

Indeed, I wonder how many readers of the attacks that appear here, for example, will not even notice that they are being fobbed off in this way. Of course I am familiar with Blavatsky and Besant by name and I have known enough of their followers personally. But, ladies and gentlemen, it is said with a certain leathern irony that I said on the one hand that I did not know Blavatsky and Besant by name, but would have nevertheless passed this damning judgment on the Theosophists; that would be a contradiction. — Well, my esteemed audience, I never passed judgment on Blavatsky and Besant, I passed judgment on Theosophists who were their followers and whom I knew all too well. You will admit that it was nothing more than that those people, whom I had addressed in such an unflattering way, invited me to lecture to them. The lectures were so successful that, as I said, they were translated into English and I was invited by the same group, which had now grown in number, to give them another series of lectures the following winter.

I have to insert something here. In the meantime, I had also given another series of lectures to a different group, one that I had belonged to for a long time and that had been founded by my friend Ludwig Jacobowski. I had given a whole series of lectures to this circle, which called itself the “Kommende” (Upcoming), under the title “From Buddha to Christ”, in which I had already presented essentially the same main content as in my present talks: the tremendous upsurge that has taken place in the development of the earth from Buddha to Christ, and how Christ Jesus cannot be compared with anyone else who has appeared in the field of earth development. It was essentially an apology for Jesus Christ, in which sounded that which I then held before a society of worldlings, of worldlings who were more inclined to make fun of such a subject than to accept it with faith. For me, it was not a matter of whether people made fun of it or not, but rather a matter of saying what seemed true to me about something that I felt needed to be said.

As I said, I was asked to give a second cycle before the circle of Theosophists, which in the meantime had grown to include all sorts of other people, and this second cycle was essentially the content that is now in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact'. It so happened that the first lectures I gave along the lines one might call theosophical or anthroposophical contain a vindication of Christianity. In my series of anthroposophical lectures, I started from a vindication of Christianity. From the very beginning, in answer to the accusation of oriental hypocrisy (for that is what it was), everything I have said and written on this theme has been that the whole ancient mystery religion was a preparation for the Christ event. I did not call my book “The Mysticism of Christianity”; I consciously called my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact” to suggest that no one can understand the fact of the event of Golgotha who does not - for my part call it mystical or call it spiritual or anthroposophical, it does not matter - who does not, in a spiritual way, in a kind of meta-history, meta-history, grasp the course of world history. And what has been emphasized as something radically different from the old mysteries is what I called the Mystery of Golgotha. And if it is said today that I have ever presented the matter as if the Mystery of Golgotha were a transformation of the old mysteries, then this is an objective untruth, a hair-raising objective untruth.

The two lecture series led to me being asked by the Theosophical Society to represent within its ranks what I had to represent. No one there was left in any doubt that I would never say a word that had not arisen from my own research. I did not concern myself with any of the Theosophical Society's regulations, because I did not approach the Theosophical Society – it approached me. This must also be said, not out of immodesty, but because of today's untrue attacks. And I was faced with the fact that I had to present what I personally had to say to people who wanted to hear it, regardless of whether they were Theosophists or not. And when in Berlin the people who had, as it were, provided me with an audience from their ranks, founded the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I gave a lecture from my then cycle on 'Anthroposophy' on the same day that this German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded. That is to say, I spoke about anthroposophy on the day the German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded. And I gave a lecture at the Berlin Giordano Bruno Bund before the founding of this German Section, in which I said: there is no connection to all the stuff that existed in the Theosophical movement. But I said, one should read Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the definition of 'theosophy', which will give my efforts direction.¹

So I have left no one in any doubt about the exact definition and exact objective involved, neither in relation to the examination of Christianity nor in relation to what else I want to present. And to anyone who claims that I have presented anything that is not based on my own research, I can say without hesitation: they are telling an objective untruth, a hair-raising objective untruth. This untruth is all the more hair-raising, dear attendees, since I may be the one who has truly told the Theosophical Society the densest truths, that is, who has given it the densest denials, even during the time when I was, so to speak, lecturing to it. Perhaps no one has had to take as much abuse as I have from the Theosophical movement that calls itself that. And not just before I became General Secretary, but also while I held the position. My dear attendees, is it then a possible approach to put together a selection of the most stupid things that can be found not in my writings but in the writings of theosophists, and to put that on my account today? Is that a fair and honest approach? Everyone should ask themselves that. And I ask that of every person who has a sense of truth.

Dear attendees, I then wrote my “Theosophy”. I ask whether anyone who writes a book under any title and defines the title exactly, whether he can be named after a single title of a book. If someone writes a theory of cockchafers, for example, can he then only be called a cockchafer man for the rest of his life? I wrote a book about Theosophy because the content of this book corresponds to the title “Theosophy”. Just as one gives a book on chemistry a certain title and a book on physics another, so I gave the title 'Theosophy' to a book that was devoted to this particular part of general spiritual science. And anyone who says that there has been any change of flag is lying.

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to say about assertions such as those recently made by the Protestant pastor and theologian Traub: that in 1897 I wrote against the Theosophists, and that in 1902 I myself was one of their number. No, ladies and gentlemen, the fact is this: in 1897 I wrote what I thought was right, and in 1902 I said exactly the same thing to those who wanted to hear it. I always said the same thing. And in 1902 I was not in the ranks of the Theosophists, but in 1902 the Theosophists were standing before me and wanted to hear what I had to say to them. On the other hand, I never reflected on anything the Theosophists had to say, which those who had joined the Theosophical movement glued together.

Now, with the book “Theosophy”, I began to present the content of what I had to say in a spiritual scientific direction in a literary way. In this book, 'Theosophy', which was first published in 1904, I stated exactly why I called the book 'Theosophy', and no one is entitled to use the word 'Theosophy' in relation to me in any other sense than the one I defined at the time. For in this book from 1904 there is nothing about my wanting to use the word “theosophy” in the sense of the nonsensical theosophical movement, but it says: “The highest that man is able to look up to, he designates as the ‘divine’. And he must connect his highest destiny in some way with this divine. Therefore, the higher wisdom that reveals to him his nature and thus his destiny may well be called “divine wisdom or theosophy.”

I would like to ask those who harp on about the word theosophy whether they do not know, for example, that Dante called his poem the “Commedia” and that “Divina” is an epithet. The “Divine Comedy” is merely intended to express how this poem is appreciated. From the definition I gave at the time, everyone can see how I took the word from the literary usage of the world. But I did not take it according to any complicated ideas that people here or there might have about it. But such complicated ideas arise everywhere. They arise here in a way that we will discuss in a moment, at least in a few examples. They do appear in a peculiar formulation. Regarding this formulation, ladies and gentlemen, I would just like to say the following right here. This formulation is such that I cannot decide for the time being to believe the rumor that is circulating here, that the man who is named is really the author of the Spectator articles. Until this rumor is proven to me, I do not want to believe it, because to me these articles appear to be devoid of any education, devoid of any moral conscience. And so I cannot assume anything other than that the “Katholisches Sonntagsblatt” had these articles written by a completely uneducated person who had never been touched by academia. As I said, I could never bring myself to believe that the man who would have to be academically educated to write these articles, which many people attribute to him, could have written them, because they make the most uneducated impression on me, I can actually only imagine.²

In my “Theosophy” of 1904, however, I also said:

Out of the spirit hereby implied, an outline of a theosophical world-view is sketched in this writing. The one who has written it does not want to represent anything that is not a fact for him in a similar sense as an experience of the external world is a fact for the eyes and ears and the ordinary mind.

I wanted to suggest at the time that I set myself the task – others may set themselves other tasks – that I set myself the task of saying nothing but what I myself could vouch for with my whole person as something I had investigated. When a mathematician presents a particular area of research, he occasionally has to repeat in his presentation what the ancient Euclid wrote, for example. Then those who are completely devoid of historical sense might come and say: he is not offering anything new, because he is just copying the ancient Euclid. It is quite natural that in the presentation one takes from history what has already been said; but nothing has been said by me that has not been carefully checked. Everything that I could not carefully check myself has been eliminated, so that all the talk of borrowing, whether it comes from Protestant or Catholic theologians, is nothing more than objective untruths. Not just errors, but objective untruths, ladies and gentlemen. For anyone can see that although a man like Leadbeater, who is often mentioned in theosophical circles, copied almost every line of his nonsensical book about Christianity from Iamblichus, no one who proceeds with real scientific conscientiousness can accuse my books of borrowing. Everything that refers to such is talk, albeit a talk that occurs in a strange way. It was mentioned, for example, among those things that were supposed to influence my anthroposophy: Buddhism, Nagazena, the Upanishads, the Egyptian Isis Mysteries, the Mysteries of Eleusis , Gnosticism, Manichaeism, “Apollinaris of Tyna” — literally —, Islam; and that from which I am said to have mainly copied is the Akasha Chronicle.

Now, dear attendees, I do not know how the writer of the article found out that I had said before how strange it is to say that anthroposophy is copied from this Akashic Chronicle. This Akashic Chronicle does not exist as an external book. The Akasha Chronicle is something quite different from any external book. What is it? If we apply the methods, which I will say a few words about in a moment, but which I always discuss in all public lectures, we can acquire a kind of meta-historical picture of the processes not only of human development but also of the cosmos. One can spiritually survey in intuitions — in corresponding images, of course — what has happened and is happening on earth or in the cosmos. Today, of course, I cannot give you all the reasons for accepting such a view, because that would take hours, but these can be found in my books. I also mention them every time I talk about the principles of anthroposophy in public lectures. So this Akashic Chronicle is something that only exists in the spirit. This Akashic Chronicle does not exist as some old book that could be compared to the Upanishads or to the yoga philosophy literature of the Indians and so on. No, this Akasha Chronicle is something purely spiritual. The person who wrote these articles, which are distributed here in the area, has no idea that he is talking about something that only exists in the mind as if it were an actual book.

Now the following has happened: I have not objected to this so far because I assumed that it was a printing error. The person in question, who is so well informed about the Akasha Chronicle, also writes or has printed or is printed instead of “Akasha” Chronicle “Akasha” Chronicle. That could be a printing error. But what happens? Isn't it true that the person who claims that anthroposophy copied from the Akasha Chronicle, since this Akasha Chronicle does not physically exist, has obviously lied, because he is leading people to believe that he has the Akasha Chronicle in his library or that other people have it in their library. Dr. Boos, in order to pick up the gauntlet, wrote: That is a deliberate untruth. — It is, of course, a deliberate untruth, because you have to know that you cannot find the Akasha Chronicle in any bookcase, because it cannot be had as a physical document. It does not exist as such. So if you claim that it is there like the Upanishads, you are telling a deliberate untruth. How is Dr. Boos now polemicized against? It is said: Dr. Boos has avoided the fact by harping on the misprint “Akasha” Chronicle. But the attacker does not indicate that Dr. Boos said that there was a deliberate untruth. And then the talk continues about the Akasha Chronicle as a real old writing that is said to have been found in a country called Atlantis. Strangely enough, according to the articles that are in circulation here, this country of Atlantis is said to have been situated between Australia and Asia and at the same time between Europe and America. Now, my dear audience, there are truly many reasons why the person who wrote these articles cannot really be considered an academically educated man; nor can he be considered a man who can think.³

The attacks that have come from a certain quarter in Munich, from a Jesuit priest born in Switzerland and living in Munich, are directed against the method, and I must, because I must speak about the whole character of the attacks, also go into these remarks about the method of spiritual research to some extent. I would just like to say this beforehand: the same man who undertook this attack on the method and later also on the content of anthroposophy claimed a few years ago that I was a runaway priest. Now this is, of course, an unscrupulous untruth, because I would never have been able to enter any monastery, which is clear from the fact that I never had a grammar school education, but only acquired the necessary grammar school education later, when I needed it. I attended a secondary modern school and did my studies at the Technical University in Vienna, so that my whole education naturally speaks against the fact that I could ever have been considered for a priestly career. So what is being said in this regard is also an unscrupulous untruth. What did the priest in question do when it was pointed out to him from some quarter – not from mine, because I cannot engage with someone who proceeds in such an unscrupulous manner unless it is necessary – what did the priest in question do when it was pointed out to him from some quarter that he had told an untruth? He could find no other way than to say in his newspaper: This is something that was claimed earlier, which can no longer be maintained today. Well, my dear audience, I was always somewhat impressed by what Deputy Walterskirchen threw in the face of an Austrian minister at a certain moment: Once a liar, never believed, even when telling the truth. One must understand what it means that there are people who spread such shameless untruths, built on nothing, plucked out of thin air, and then believe they are justified when they say: the matter can no longer be maintained.

The same man – and I would not go into his arguments, for the reasons I have now sufficiently explained, but others take up things and spread them around, because today the public reads with a sleepy soul – he attacks the method and says that one must consider this method to be something that, from a Catholic point of view, must not be, and fights against the particular way in which I describe how, through a certain development of human thought, one comes to recognize a spiritual world alongside the physical-sensual one. Nor can I go into the special characteristics of this spiritual vision here. The necessary points have often been explained in my public lectures. I now have to deal only with the question: Does someone who takes the standpoint, and really takes it, of Catholic research methodology have the right to turn against this method of research in anthroposophy?

Dear attendees, anyone who is familiar with Catholic philosophy knows that a distinction is made within it between two types of inner abilities. Every person can aspire to one type of inner ability if they organize their lives accordingly. Of course, in Catholic teaching, it is called a grace when the person in question rises to such a level. But what a person can rise to, to immerse themselves in a spiritual world, to the point of living with the deity – I am explicitly mentioning the latter – Catholic teaching calls this the “gratiae sanctificantes”. The Catholic Church carefully distinguishes these gratiae sanctificantes, as effects of grace within the soul of man, which can be granted to every man who rises to them through work, from the gratiae gratis datae. These are the effects of grace to which only individual people can rise through a special influence from the spiritual world. Such is the meaning of the matter in the writings of Catholic teachers of old. I remark this first, regardless of whether, because progress has taken place, things have to be described differently today. According to the writings of Catholic teachers such as John of the Cross or Thomas Aquinas, that is, according to the most orthodox Catholic theology, for the Catholic himself, if he does not contradict his Catholic teaching method, what is presented in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” should be presented as a special case of the ‘gratiae sanctificantes’, not of the ‘gratiae gratis datae’, so that from the Catholic point of view the matter is absolutely incontestable with regard to the method. You can read about it in John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, and you will find that they say that the one who wants to do spiritual research rises up into a spiritual world, so that he experiences something there that does not just arise from his inner being as a kind of haze, but that it is as objective an external reality in the world as the sensual world is in its own way. That is why Thomas Aquinas characterizes what is bestowed on man in this way with the words: “Inspiratio significat quandam motionem ab externo.” These inspirations do not come from within, but from without. There is no other fact here than that which has only been given in a correspondingly advanced form for the 20th century in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” What is the situation here?

Simply this, my dear audience: that anyone who works towards what Thomas Aquinas defines as inspiratio is considered a heretic today. Read my Theosophy. You will find it written in such a way that no one who does not come into discord with his own Catholic method of teaching can dispute what is presented there as a method. What is presented there as a method in the sense of the present is what Catholic theologians have correspondingly recognized and called “contemplation” for earlier centuries. In this way one arrives at the results presented in this book “Theosophy”. And so exactly does this correspond to the correctly understood old description that in the whole book the Divine Being is not spoken of in such a way as to give a theory about the Divine. And now read the definitions that can be found in canonized Catholic theologians, and you will see: According to their view, one can come not only to a definition, but to a coexistence with the deity, if one really practices that which can be bestowed on every human being. That is, someone once dared to make real that which has been preached by the Catholic Church for so long until this Catholic Church has taken on a different character for the present time. Nothing else has happened. And anyone who today does not want to admit that through the special method of contemplation, man today comes to results that may be erroneous in the details, but which on the whole are correct, as I have presented them in my books, he must prohibit the method of Catholic contemplation; he must forbid his faithful by force of measures to do that which the fathers and theologians of earlier centuries have presented as something entirely in line with the Catholic Church.

If I had ever needed to agree with anyone – which goes without saying, even today – I would be able to prove that, for example, what is referred to as the method of being oriented towards the present day does not contradict the teachings of Thomas Aquinas or John of the Cross in any way. It is not methods that the Catholic Church is entitled to dispute, for these methods are nothing other than a further development of something that the Catholic Church itself once held to be true. The fact that this method, when applied correctly, leads to different results from those of the scholastics today is what is causing offence. But then one should not claim to represent scholasticism, but to have left it within the church.⁴

Now, anyone who has the necessary seriousness and conscientiousness to deal with factual matters - but, ladies and gentlemen, in our time it is a strange thing about this objectivity and this conscientiousness - anyone who, for example, reads my little Truth and Science, written at the end of the 1980s and published at the beginning of the 1990s, anyone who reads it will see that it steers in an epistemological direction towards what later became anthroposophy. At the time, I had to do away with all the epistemological prejudices associated with Kantianism. And anyone who has followed my writing throughout the decades, insofar as it is philosophical, can see that the rejection of Kant's philosophy is an organic part of what I wanted. Everything I have to say is based on a rejection of Kant's philosophy. Such are the facts. Nevertheless, in our time it is possible that someone - because I, who have devoted my whole life, among other things, to refuting Kantian philosophy, had to discuss the contrast between Thomism and Kantianism in the Whitsun lectures on Thomas Aquinas that I gave here - that someone dares - I cannot use any other expression - to say that this was done for contrast. That characterizes the level of those bushes from which anthroposophy is viewed today.

And how many people are inclined to examine things on the basis of the facts? How many people are inclined to look at how it was taken for granted that when absurdity triumphed within the Theosophical Society in 1912 and anthroposophy was declared a heresy – after all, things have been declared heresy before – that the long-prepared became a fait accompli, namely that all those who believed that I had something to say about these things turned their backs on the Theosophical Society. Nevertheless, it is possible that, for example, the following will be printed:

Annie Besant's claim that a new Christ was on the horizon in the form of Krishnamurti, a thirteen-year-old Hindu boy whose previous lives, starting with a monkey existence, Besant had clairvoyantly researched, also contributed to the split. National sensitivities also played a role. During the war, the Englishwoman Besant is said to have conducted anti-German propaganda. She is said to have stated in a proclamation: “The chosen people of God (meaning the Germans) stink in the nostrils of Europe. This embryo world empire, conceived by hatred and formed in the womb of greed, must never be born. It is the new barbarism, the opposite of everything that is noble, compassionate and human.”

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what Annie Besant said during the war. What was said before: that anthroposophy was thrown out by the Theosophical Society, that was before these national events took place. Nevertheless, it continues here:

Steiner founded a separate society with a so-called “separate” doctrine and gave it the proud name of “spiritual science” with its “university” in Dornach. The Swiss lodges joined him.

Dear attendees, the belief is created that the separation of the Anthroposophical and Theosophical Societies had something to do with these national sensitivities. So a smorgasbord of objective untruths is written up to refute Dr. Boos' claim that 23 lies have been spread; the lies are left behind, and the defense is conducted in such a way. 23 objective untruths about anthroposophy are stated. This fact is characterized by Dr. Boos in an appropriate way, although not very delicately – but it would truly have been a sin to be delicate in this case. Now, my dear audience, it has often been demanded by those who are attacked as anthroposophists that they should refute all the stuff that is hurled at them as untruths. I ask: Where in the world is there such a thing that it can be demanded that the one about whom untruths are asserted is obliged to provide the proof of truth? The attacker has to prove; otherwise one could throw anything at anyone and he would have to prove that the assertion was untrue. Those who have spread the 23 untruths have to prove them, not those to whom they have been thrown. What do these attackers do instead of proving? They write objective untruths again, and the 23 original untruths are not touched. That is the method of those who speak about anthroposophy here.

Yes, as I said in the introduction, what I have to say today does not give me any satisfaction. I would much rather be working on the building than compiling these things, and basically I don't have time to follow all these absurdities and defamations. For, you see, my dear ladies and gentlemen, even when people of some intelligence come up with such things – and Professor Traub is certainly more intelligent than certain others – then one has to say: strange views indeed! This Professor Traub, who wrote the book 'Rudolf Steiner as Philosopher and Theosophist', who – I will not touch on the rest – finds it appropriate to say: Yes, Steiner claims things that cannot be verified. – But, ladies and gentlemen, Steiner does not claim any different things from those that can be verified by someone who uses the same methods as he does and who has publicly stated them. That is to say, anyone who procures the means to do so – although he must be diligent and have good will – can verify the matter.

But what does Professor Traub say? He says:

I may have to become a historian, physicist, chemist, in order to be able to check independently.

He admits that if he doesn't understand a thing about chemistry, then of course he can't talk about chemistry, and if he doesn't understand a thing about history, then of course he can't talk about history. He admits all of this. But now, my dear audience, he continues:

The theosophical truths, on the other hand, I cannot verify if I am not clairvoyant.

But I cannot verify the chemical truths either if I am not a chemist. Yet Traub says:

I can only check them in a negative way, ...

— that is, he can only say that he does not know them —

... I can determine whether they contradict logic.

It is interesting that anthroposophy is supposed to be different from physics, history and so on. For chemistry, Professor Traub claims that you have to be a chemist to test what it says; for history, he claims, you have to be a historian, and so on. For anthroposophy, he claims that he has to be able to test it, even though he has never bothered with its methods. He then says quite naively:

The question is whether they

— he prints this in bold letters —

... have been or can be verified by me, and that, apart from the formal-logical criticism, I must deny.

I believe that he cannot verify them! But it does not mean anything if some person who has never sniffed around a chemical laboratory and has not studied a chemical book cannot verify chemical truths. But you see what is being demanded and what people are saying about formal logic when they use such logic.

Some time ago, there were attacks from the Protestant side, and as a result of these attacks, some Protestant pastors and theologians became aware of anthroposophy. Now, if I wanted to talk in detail about the matters at hand here, I would have to characterize the development of the entire Protestant theological movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. But it is well known that within Protestant theology, not only a strong skepticism but also a strong nihilism has taken hold. And one day things were so that a whole number of Protestant theologians said to themselves: From the side of anthroposophy, a fertilization can come for theology. Something could come that would lead people back to Jesus Christ in a way that theology can no longer do today. And so it came about that a number of followers emerged among Protestant theologians, which of course terribly annoyed the majority of Protestant theologians. Then, gradually, those who approach it from today's Catholic theological perspective came forward. This was despite the fact that for a long time, and out of a certain prejudiced notion, it has been said that anthroposophy is Catholic and that therefore those who think in an evangelical way cannot find any favor in it.

I have already dealt with some of the ways in which people approach it. But first I would like to highlight two examples as really quite interesting details. Everything that I have presented since 1900, since my lectures 'From Buddha to Christ' to the 'Kommenden' in Berlin, was such that no one can say that there is no fundamental difference between what emerged as the culmination of earthly development in the Mystery of Golgotha and what is a teaching for many other people, Buddhism. At the time, I characterized the current from Buddha to Christ and pointed out that no one who stands on an anthroposophical point of view must confuse what appeared in Christ and what only allows for a single appearance in the world with what is seen as the ever-recurring Buddhas. I then repeatedly pointed this out in lectures given only to members. Nevertheless, the following is asserted today:

Buddhism speaks of transmigration of souls, ...

- I have never spoken of transmigration of souls, but always of repeated lives on earth.

... Steiner of reincarnation. Both are the same.

Dear attendees, transmigration and repeated earthly lives, as I represent them, are as different as black and white. It is further said:

Whether one says: such and such a person reincarnates or such and such a person's earthly life repeats itself, it comes out the same.

So please, now consider the logic that prevails here. First it is said that transmigration of souls and reincarnation, repeated lives on earth, are the same. Transmigration of souls is understood to mean that after death, human souls migrate into various animals. I have never even hinted at such nonsense in any way. The repeated lives on earth mean something quite different. They are what follows from spiritual-scientific foundations, just as the theory of evolution in the physical world follows from physical research foundations.

According to this theory...

- it is said -

... Christ is nothing more than a reincarnated Buddha or a re-appeared Buddha.

A blatant objective untruth of the boldest kind, because every time I have spoken about Christ and Buddha, I have said the opposite, and because anyone who wanted to listen must clearly have known that what I am being imputed here was rejected every time, firmly rejected.

The whole long argument reveals Steiner's sophistry and his alleged “scientific” approach.

Now I would like to know where the sophistry is. Admittedly, the sophistry that is revealed on that page is already one of the moral evils, not just one of the logical ones.

Furthermore, in those lectures that were only given to members - for a very simple reason, which I will discuss in a moment - it is expressly emphasized from all the sources that are only accessible to me that a certain forerunner of Christ Jesus was Jeshu ben Pandira. It is pointed out there as clearly as possible that the physical earth personality, spirit and soul, is also something quite different with that Jeshu ben Pandira than with the Christ Jesus. Nevertheless, my dear attendees, we read in that attacker:

This small example shows how far Steiner is removed from the true Christ impulse, proving that for him Christ is not a divine master (the way, the truth and the life), but only the “Sage of Nazareth” or, in theosophical language, a Jeshu ben Pandira or a Gautama Buddha, in German a re-embodied Buddha.

So the opposite of what I have said countless times is trumpeted out into the world as my opinion.

My dear attendees, when teaching elementary school students, you call every child into the elementary school; when teaching at the gymnasium, those who are to come to the gymnasium must have attained a certain level of maturity. When people are accepted into the medical or philosophical faculties, they are required to pass the school-leaving examination. No other principle underlay the fact that certain lecture cycles were printed only for a narrower circle of people who were sufficiently prepared, just as those who listen to higher mathematics must be prepared by lower mathematics. Anyone who wanted to listen to a lecture on elliptic functions without knowing the lower mathematics would naturally understand nothing of it and would have to mistake the whole thing for cabbages if he wanted to judge it according to what he could think. Nothing else was the basis for this selection of the one for a limited circle, which presupposed the foregoing. All that was presupposed has been presented by me again and again in public lectures for decades, and has been presented almost every year since 1907 in Basel.

I ask you: could anyone have expected that the Basel lectures, which have been held publicly in Basel for this same world view since 1907, would be discontinued after the construction in Dornach began, or that something other than anthroposophy would be done here in this building? What is it other than foolish talk when it is claimed that propaganda is now being done when it was said that no propaganda would be done? Nothing else is being done than what has been done in Basel since 1907, of course on a smaller scale.

Nor has anyone been attacked in the way that I am now. Go through everything I have ever said or written – I was never the first to attack anyone in this way. Everything I have ever written against anyone was always provoked. Check the facts. And it must be said that the attack that is taking place here, for example, was provoked. For no one here has attacked these attackers. Nevertheless, one of the articles is emblazoned with the title: “Defense and reply to the omissions of the theosophist lawyer Dr. Boos,” in order to throw dust in people's eyes in bold letters, to awaken in them the belief that the other side is defending itself, while we are truly being showered with buckets of foul-smelling objective untruths here, to our great dissatisfaction. We are not to make a sound, while we know full well what these objective untruths are intended for.

And, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that they do not just mean that they want to refute something with honest weapons – the last statement from the side of these attackers can prove that to you. From the statement that has just appeared, I would like to read you just a few sentences that begin:

Have you never walked past a swamp at night? You saw will-o'-the-wisps there. They appeared and disappeared. Such will-o'-the-wisps mainly appear after great catastrophes, also in the spiritual realm in world history. Be it Protestantism in and during the unfortunate Peasants' War, in the era of the Thirty Years War, be it the Kulturkampf during and after the Seven Years War. Today, the Jew, the Freemason and the Theosophist are emerging as the main opponents. ... The Church is a militant church.

Dear attendees, yesterday I read a new encyclical of the current Pope, where he calls for love and unity, where he says that the church strives to reconcile people and not to quarrel. Here we read:

The church is a militant church.

But then it is said – so the Church is a militant Church:

This time is today, when the triumvirate, the Jew, the Freemason and the Theosophist, is attacking the Church. Let us look the three in the face. The Jew, Judaism is old. Judaism fought against our Savior from the beginning. It was guilty of the deicide at Golgotha, it was guilty of the persecution of Christians...

— and so on and so on. And further it is said:

Another worse opponent has risen today, the theosophist. We do not hide the fact that Theosophy, based in Dornach, is perhaps the greatest danger for Switzerland, greater than Bolshevism, greater than any other danger. Theosophy is well enough known. Every believer could be educated in our newspaper.

Yes, let yourself be instructed, my dear audience, as one does when disregarding any factual material. That one wants something completely different than merely fighting against insights or supposed insights for my sake, you can see from such an omission. Well, I have presented you with some examples of what the “spirit” of these attacks is: the polar opposite of what one can hear here at the Goetheanum at least once a week is claimed outside that it is being said here. That is the fact. The polar opposite of what is actually said here is presented to the people in the local area as the opinion held here, as an explanation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy – the name is not important. For example, they talk about an interpretation I have given of the Lord's Prayer. Well, my dear audience – yes, things are very strange – for example, a tidbit is served up, a few verses of mine that only have a meaning if you know them in their full context:

It speaks to the universe,
Forgetting itself
And mindful of its origin...

- but the article of attack says “his emergency”. My dear audience, this continues line by line in terms of truth and accuracy. What is said with regard to my interpretation of the Lord's Prayer goes beyond anything imaginable in this direction.

As the most typical and practically instructive example of Steiner's exegesis, we mention his interpretation of the Lord's Prayer. First, the theosophical text. Or is there a new anthroposophical one? The improved “theosophical” Lord's Prayer reads: “Our Father, who permeates the universe! Your name resound! Your kingdom of peace come to us! Thy will be done on earth! (Theosophists do not believe in a heaven.) Give us all your bread of life! In you we forget our sins and forgive our brothers their faults. Lead us through the trials! Deliver us from all error! For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory from eternity to eternity! Amen.

The person who wrote the following and the following, namely, counts on the fact that no one from his readership will pick up my little booklet about the Lord's Prayer, because everything he writes here is not in it, because I give the text that Catholics pray every day for themselves - I hope at least - at home and every Sunday in church. No other text is interpreted than this. They are counting on the fact that this little booklet will not be picked up, that this check will not even be carried out.

The fact that they are not dealing with a highly educated person can be seen from another sentence. For example,

Just as light expresses itself in the world in seven colors, the fundamental tone in seven tones, so the seven-part nature of man (spirit self, life spirit and spirit man, physical body, etheric body, astral body and I) is expressed in the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Listen!

This “Hear!” is a phrase we read again and again in these articles. We know why. It is fair to say that even people who have read my booklet on the Lord's Prayer but have only superficially thought about it do not immediately realize how subtly the objective untruth is expressed here. For it is clever to say that I had claimed that the seven-part nature of man is expressed in the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer. That is simply not true. I stated something quite different. I tried to show that seven qualities of feeling arise in one who experiences the seven petitions one after the other, and that these point to seven nuances of feeling in the soul. And in these seven nuances of the soul there is a certain indication of the seven-part nature of man. So I did not say that the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer indicate the seven parts of man's nature, but that the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer represent seven nuances of feeling, and these seven nuances of feeling point to the seven-part nature of man.

If the article of attack had been written by a Catholic theologian – and I can tell you, I know Catholic theology very well, and I appreciate the strict logic that it used to have and still retains to some extent – he would have had to notice what the insertion of a link in the conclusion means. I cannot believe that a real theologian would write such a thing, unless I am proved wrong.⁵ Only someone who deals with my Father Our Exegesis with very clumsy logic can write something like that.

We must focus on how it has come about in recent times that such things have become possible at all. What is emerging here is basically only an imitation of what can be observed in many circles today. I avoid it, even though it is an absolute objective untruth to lump me together with all the excesses and aberrations of the Rosicrucians and the like, that it is nonsense to forge the sentence that I am dependent on Blavatsky and to prove it with the words:

Steiner also draws from Blavatsky's Theosophy. He supplements it...:

– all in the same breath! –

... 'We work best...

– now my words are quoted –

... if we bring what was closed to Blavatsky.

This is quoted as my words, as proof that I am bringing what Blavatsky brought! They claim that Blavatsky brought it, and as proof they quote a line from it that I want to bring what was closed to Blavatsky. Such is the logic of the attackers. One would like to understand, from a certain larger context, how such things are even possible.

Now I can only talk about this in aphorisms. I can only point out that around the middle of the 19th century, but especially at the beginning of the last third of this century, Catholic theology did absorb genuine spiritual-scientific seeds which, if they had been further developed, could have worked to the benefit of humanity. Perhaps, if such things as Möhler attempted in his Symbolik had met with progress instead of retrogression, something might have come of it that would have resembled the emergence of a spiritual-scientific school. Even if it had not come to the recognition of the truths of repeated earth-lives and of the fate of man's life conditioned by repeated earth-lives, which, objectively and scientifically, can be proved (as you can see in my books), there might still have been a certain progress in the direction of spiritual science. But no, Catholicism has broken with a very well-known world policy for the sake of what was moving in the indicated direction.

These are things that have become very clear to me, who have had a lot of contact with Catholic theologians and have come to know the ways of thinking of tolerant and educated Catholic theologians very well. It means a lot, for example, that the philosopher Franz Brentano was a Catholic priest before taking off the cassock and leaving the Catholic Church just after the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility.⁶ He examined — and those who are familiar with this remarkable work will know this — certain truths concerning the Incarnation and the Trinity. He came up with quite different things that did not correspond to the infallibility dogma, as they are, on which one must indeed come, at least if one does not consider very specific formulations, for example that in 1773 a Pope has abolished the Jesuit order as harmful to humanity and in 1814 another Pope has reinstated it. Well, these are the things that lie on the surface. But also the very subtle things about the Trinity and the Incarnation, which 19th-century minds were also very much concerned with, they remained a mystery to someone like Brentano in the version of certain Catholic theologians. And in particular, it remained a mystery to him how the most diverse dogmas on these matters could have been established and recognized by the popes. It has always been a Catholic principle that only that which is generally recognized in Catholic Christendom may be established as a dogma. The Immaculate Conception was not, yet it was made into a dogma. And it is a straight ascent from the Immaculate Conception to the encyclical of 1864 and the Syllabus and further to the declaration of the infallibility dogma. Then it was natural for a man as great and in some respects as important as Leo XII to issue the encyclical Aeterni Patris. This then led with logical consistency to the demand for the anti-modernist oath from all those who were allowed to teach in Catholicism.

All you have to do, dear attendees, is go through the literature that has been published as a result of this anti-modernist oath and you will soon come across some amazing things, of which I can only mention a very few today, as time is running out. The following is characteristic, for example. There is a very learned doctor, the theology professor Simon Weber at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He has to justify that the freedom of science is perfectly compatible with swearing the anti-modernist oath, which, for example, also contains a paragraph stating that anyone who represents Catholic doctrine, whether as a theologian or as a pulpit orator, should never believe that anything can be proven through history that has not been recognized by the Church as correct doctrine. He does not merely have to swear that he has not yet recognized anything that testifies to such a contradiction, but he must swear that it is his opinion that he will never be able to come to studies that could somehow represent a contradiction to what has been established by the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. In order to justify the fact that there is a given body of teaching, a body of teaching that is simply commanded to be believed and that must be sworn to be believed, and in order to reconcile this with the freedom of scientific teaching, very strange views had to be put forward. Among other things, a view had to be adopted that is very strangely presented in the book “Theology as a Free Science” by Weber. If one proceeds conscientiously, one can conduct strange examinations of these things. There is now the Catholic scholar theologian who is obliged to prove that, as a mathematician, one must also teach the correct mathematics and yet not violate the freedom of science; so one must also be able to teach the teaching material ordered by Rome. He writes that it would not violate the freedom of science if a scholar were expected to test his new findings by refuting conflicting findings and not expecting any indefinite acceptance of his findings without this refutation, nor claiming them to be absolutely true. We will deal with this first sentence less now. But now comes the other sentence:

Furthermore, is it against the freedom of science as a path to truth if, on the basis of proven findings and results, the disciple of science is encouraged to take the starting point of his studies from the ground of such findings and results? I believe that one should not affirm the first question, nor deny the second.

That is what it said in this book. Now, my dear audience, let us read the second question again:

Furthermore, is it against the freedom of science as a path to truth if, on the basis of proven knowledge and results, the disciple of science is encouraged to take the starting point of his studies to the ground of such knowledge and results?

That is to say: is it contrary to the freedom of science to make a theologian swear that he may only teach a very specific body of doctrine? Then he can do whatever he wants, but he must always come back to this body of doctrine. The author then says:

I believe that one cannot affirm the first question, nor deny the second.

One could now believe that this is the case. But you see, the good Professor Simon Weber wrote these two questions one after the other, and he got so tangled up in a knot that he then wrote with a single logical thread:

I believe that one should not affirm the first question and deny the second.

People are very happy to grant him that you can't say no to the second. He just couldn't hold on to the thread – he only noticed that once the book had already been published, which is why there's a thick, black line stamped over the second “not”! You see, these sentences are written in such a way that they are not very consistent or logically coherent. Only when perhaps a friend of his came afterwards and said: Hey, what have you written there! All modernists agree on the “not”, and you have sworn the anti-modernist oath! - Now a thick line had to be printed over the “not” in every copy here with the stamp.

You see, you have to be more conscientious than our opponents are if you want to get at the facts of the matter. But the general public does not go in for such things; you can throw a lot of dust in their eyes. One of the sentences in which the freedom of science is justified as compatible with the fact that one has to teach a very specific, firmly and dogmatically defined body of teaching is the following. It says: Does it violate the freedom of the soldier, who has sworn to be with his regiment at a certain point in time, if he is given the freedom to choose whether to travel by coach or by passenger train or by express train? That is entirely up to him. It is the same with the Catholic theologian. He has sworn to arrive at his teaching material. He must prove it, no matter how he proves it, he must prove it, because whether he travels by express train or by passenger train or by coach is irrelevant. And this is the style in which the whole of “Theology as Free Science” is written.

Dear attendees, I have tried hard in my lecture, which I gave in Liestal, “Human Life from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, to prove that it is impossible, if one really further development of Thomism, not to extend what Thomas Aquinas regards as the Präambula fidei to what is asserted through anthroposophy on the basis of truly attainable human spiritual powers. But what use is all that? Such matters are not taken into account. And what is compiled column by column is such that it runs directly counter to objective facts everywhere.

Summarizing what has been presented here today in aphoristic form, I may say: Catholic teaching, if it engages with its own method, has no right to say anything against anthroposophy, because it has no right to oppose the method of contemplation. But if it has no right to oppose the method of contemplation, then it must also leave untouched that which, from the points of view offered by today's human development, results from this method of contemplation.

Furthermore, I must summarize some of what has been said in such a way that for decades I have been careful to create something that should stand alongside scientific knowledge as spiritual-scientific knowledge. Everything I have envisaged has been envisaged with a view to elevating natural science to the spirit. Whatever has been done in this way has always been done with the intention that people who want to be enlightened about Christianity from a point of view that corresponds to the present day should be able to receive such enlightenment from the sources that spiritual science can provide. Therefore, everything that is undertaken by the attackers of Anthroposophy is merely rash. No cause has been given for it. When I hear these attacks, a word that Cardinal Rauscher, one of the first church princes in Europe, spoke to me about some progress resounds again. This word sounded to me when I came to Vienna as a very young student. It was still at that time, in which the great Catholic reaction had not yet fully taken effect, but was just beginning to assert itself. Then I heard the word that Cardinal Rauscher spoke in the Austrian House of Lords through his virile voice in the face of some progress that was also being attempted at the time by Catholic theology: The Church knows no progress.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot find anything other than the facts that I described here at Pentecost in my Thomas lectures: that in the time of high scholasticism, in the time of the scholastic realism of an Albertus Magnus and a Thomas Aquinas, a magnificent logic was present, but that nothing remains of it - as with many modern philosophers, so also within Catholic thought. The training that one can have, if one knows how to carefully distinguish between substance, hypothesis, essence, nature, person and so on, has also escaped from Catholic theology. More recent philosophers, such as Wundt, for example, polemicize against the substance of the soul because they know nothing of a substance. Therefore, they say, it does not exist at all – according to the principle: What I know nothing about does not exist. But precise thinking, which was highly developed in scholasticism, has not been resurrected from the encyclical Aeterni Patris either. Instead, there was the contortion of thought that was necessary to prove the anti-modernist oath.

If one must prove such a thing, my dear audience, then one cannot have much time for what one can learn through the strict logic of high scholasticism. And then it may well be said, as I have said here in the Whitsun lectures: Yes, in spiritual science there is a real continuation of what high scholasticism strove for in the 13th century. But is it not the case that Thomas Aquinas could not, of course, deal with natural science? It did not exist at that time. But anthroposophy wanted to engage with natural science. If one were to enter into such an engagement, a truly fruitful work would unfold from a spiritual scientific treatment of nature. I attempted such a thing here in the physicians' course, which wanted to carry methodically into the medical, into the therapeutic science, what can be carried in from the anthroposophical point of view. In Stuttgart, when the Waldorf School was founded, an attempt was made to illuminate education from an anthroposophical point of view. My dear audience, anthroposophy wants to do positive work; it has never wanted to attack anyone. Anyone who says otherwise is objectively speaking untruthfully. And anyone who acts as if they had been attacked and needed to defend themselves against any attacks is telling an objective untruth. Anyone who acts as if this were the case, as is happening now, against anthroposophy, anyone must start the reasons for attacks.

I was obliged to speak some harsh words today. Now, I believe that, in view of the attacks in question, the words I have spoken are not too harsh, for among the various attacks that have been made here, there are some that do not even address what I have said, but instead achieve the incredible feat of attributing to me the Theosophical nonsense that has been put forward here and there, and which I myself have always opposed. But my attackers lack the courage to discuss my views; they only have the courage to defame the person who champions anthroposophy. And among the many things that have come up, there is, for example, the claim that I am demonstrably Jewish. Well, ladies and gentlemen, here sits the man who presented the photograph of my baptism certificate from the lectern in Stuttgart, which shows how I was baptized immediately after my birth, out of a Catholic family, was baptized Catholic; and everyone was invited to see for themselves when the baptism certificate was shown. What was done about it? Just one example of the way they are fighting at present: they wrote all kinds of letters to my Austrian hometown to find out whether I really was a Jew or not. And after even the pastor of that Austrian hometown testified that I was an “Aryan,” as he put it, they did indeed find the objection that Jews are also Aryans. But leaving that aside, ladies and gentlemen, they did not shy away from having the following printed: Yes, of course, the baptismal certificate is available, the siblings also testify and the people of the hometown that he is descended from Catholic parents, but what prevents us from assuming that he is an illegitimate child, that he a Jewish father, who was unknown to his real father, was born out of wedlock to the mother, which neither his siblings nor the local pastor need know.

My dear attendees, today even such things are not shunned. Such things have become possible in the world in which we have come so gloriously far. I ask you: can we still hope to achieve anything by revealing the opponent's facts? — No. It is precisely the facts that are most unpleasant to the opponents. Therefore, they do not rely on the facts, but on what is objective untruth in every line they themselves have invented. And that is what they call “enlightenment of the people”.

Never would anyone have heard me say a word of attack, as I had to say today – seemingly attacking, however, only if each of these words were not challenged ten times as a defense. I would never have used such words in my defense if they had not been challenged in such an outrageous way. Because, ladies and gentlemen, what I am supposed to represent, what I have tried to explain to you today in a positive way through the historical events, what I have tried to explain to you in the spirit in which it arose from the underground from which it really emerged, as the polar opposite of what is being served up by the attackers, is something that I believe I have recognized as the truth that is appropriate for our present era. And anyone who has grown together in his soul with the search for truth will not let anything stop him from this search, but he also feels obliged to express this truth to everyone who wants to hear it from him. Therefore, when those people whom I characterized in 1897 as I have repeated to you today demanded the truth from me in 1902, I was obliged to present it to them. That is what matters: the inner connection with a real, honest striving for truth.

Anyone who, after having put forward such arguments as have been characterized today, can still find words like these:

Another even worse opponent has risen today, the theosophist. We do not hide the fact that Theosophy, based in Dornach, is perhaps the greatest danger for Switzerland, greater than Bolshevism, greater than any other danger....

- and so on, he may perhaps achieve something for some time. It may be that when those who are friendly towards Anthroposophy sleep, such opponents, who do not shy away from such outrageousness, may achieve much of what they want to achieve. But I have often said, as the words of a deceased Catholic theologian friend of mine, who was a professor of Christian philosophy at the University of Vienna, still ring in my ears - I have also had quite dogmatic discussions with many theologians, right down to the most intimate details - that a Christian never has to fear that the glory of God or of Christ will be diminished by gaining more knowledge about their creation. I have often said that those who admit this show more courage for Christianity than those who, at every opportunity, when new truths arise, even if only supposed ones for my sake, complain about the endangerment of Christianity – and now even about the endangerment of being Swiss. I have always said that to me a Christian and Catholic who speaks constantly of dangers seems a pusillanimous person, while to me a true Christian seems to be someone who says: No matter how many billions of new insights are gained, Christianity stands so firmly - and this has been said countless times on anthroposophical ground - that it cannot be shaken by anything. I would like to know who in truth is the better Christian.

But as I said, those who boldly dare to tell humanity that what they pass off as Theosophy and what has nothing to do with Anthroposophy is a greater danger than Bolshevism, in order to frighten people, and who speak many objective untruths to do so, may achieve something in the short term. But untruthfulness cannot be effective in the long run. My dear audience, from here, as long as it is possible, the truth that is meant as anthroposophy will be sought and taught. But nothing will be taught that is presented by those attackers as the view taught here through defamation. No matter what success may be achieved on their side, I shall at least see to it that an Anthroposophy be taught here that is in keeping with the demands of the present time. I have repeatedly endeavored to characterize such an Anthroposophy in my public lectures. I declare it to be an objective and very audacious untruth that I would ever have referred to Mahatmas for that which I personally stand for; this, like everything else in the attacks that have prompted today's words, is also untrue. This anthroposophy is, of course, also a human work. And even if it were a mistake, which would be incomprehensible to me, I know that in the universe only truth will ultimately triumph. Then the opposite truth will triumph over the error here, and then anthroposophy would meet the fate it deserves, for errors can never achieve lasting victories. Therefore, if it were an error, anthroposophy could not harm the truth, it would be refuted. But if it is the truth, then for some time and perhaps quite a long time, those who dare to pursue it, as I have had to characterize today, may achieve their goal through the persecution of individuals. But in the long run, my dear audience, the laws of the world will not speak differently than that in the end truth must triumph, not untruth.

Roman Boos: After the last lectures by Dr. Steiner on Thomas Aquinas, which were held here at Pentecost, a review in a newspaper criticized the fact that there was no opportunity for discussion. Anyone who wishes to enter into a discussion about today's lecture should be aware that the following things are available, which I would like to record for the record:

There is material here for a discussion. I have brought it with me physically in these four pages of the “Katholisches Sonntagsblatt”, where at least two full pages were devoted to each of the topics presented to you. Anyone who, like the reviewer of the last lectures, is present today, may pick out any point from these lectures and may demand that this point be discussed and accounted for. And then, when it is discussed, he may form his own opinion. This is a topic that has been put forward for discussion. The discussion will begin in a few minutes in such a way that? the opportunity will be given to ask oral or written questions or to take the floor.

Break

Roman Boos: For the discussion to be conducted in a formally correct manner, in accordance with the rules of procedure, those who wish to speak orally and not just to ask a brief question are asked to come to the front and speak from there. Furthermore, it is requested that those who speak here state their names. It goes without saying that the form of decency must be maintained in every respect.

Who would like to have one of these four numbers or all four for review in order to pick out points on which he wants to demand accountability? - Who would like to claim on a single point that what has been said today in opposition to what has been written down in those four long articles does not correspond to the truth? Who would like to claim that the other corresponds to the truth? Who would like to claim that a single one of those twenty-three whopper lies that I nailed in the “Tagblatt für das Birseck-, Birsig- und Leimental” is not a lie? Who would contradict the assertion that people who do what has happened here and write what is now being written Sunday after Sunday in the “Katholisches Sonntagsblatt” of the Canton of Baselland, edited by Father Arnet in Reinach, that such people are grossly abusing their priestly duty? Who would object to this?

I state: I have publicly accused Father Arnet of Reinach of having seriously violated the trust placed in him as a Catholic clergyman by those who read his newspaper. I have to state: Not a single assertion has been proven. Then another paper, the Spektator, came to his aid and claimed that it would provide proof of the accuracy of the allegations that Arnet had made in his paper. I declare that it is therefore right and justifiable that Father Arnet in Reinach has gravely and grossly violated the duties assigned and imposed on him as a Catholic clergyman. I declare that he continues to declare his solidarity with the content of the Spektator articles and that I therefore personally call him a slanderer and moral poisoner. I ask anyone who wants to contradict me to please tell Mr. Arnet.

Karl Sauter: Mr. President, esteemed attendees! You also requested that anyone who wishes to take part in the discussion go to the podium. I only have one sentence to say for the time being, so I will remain here. I object to the fact that such a meeting at the Goetheanum is considered public. A public meeting would be when the gentlemen, the friends of this direction, came down to Arlesheim and asked to present their case in the community hall. That is public. And then you also have to expect an opposition not only from one speaker, which may serve the truth in the sense of the public. But up here, the matter is not satisfied if you transplant the discussion up there - that is not public. I have closed for the time being.

Rudolf Steiner: I can only say in response what I have already said this evening: when someone is confronted with twenty-three lies, it is the duty of the person who has told these twenty-three lies to prove them. And it is impossible to ask those who are being confronted with these twenty-three lies to chase after the liars and tell them, wherever the liars wish, that they have lied. That is a strange way of demanding that those who have been attacked in this way chase after their attackers.

Karl Sauter: You cannot oblige the speaker, nor oblige Catholics, to go up there to speak up to the word. You are certainly given the freedom to take part in the discussion orally or in the sense of the press, and it is certainly an honor for us Catholics that you are scrutinizing the “Katholisches Sonntagsblatt” in this way. It is not finished; development continues. That is why neither I nor you can finish speaking this evening. Come down to Arlesheim next time, and we will meet again.

Rudolf Steiner: That is a strange way to behave. Just when one has said that one has no reason to go down to Arlesheim, then to say that we should come.

But I would like to say the following in conclusion: Just consider that it has been said again that we should go down to Arlesheim to do I know what. From that side, twenty-three objective untruths have been spread in the world. These objective untruths were identified as such by us. This was done very much in public. In response, four articles have been published to date. None of these articles addressed any of the twenty-three points, but new untruths were added to the old ones. This is how things develop, this is how they progress. Now, my dear audience, in almost every article you will find the phrase that has just been spoken again: we should just wait until the last article comes. Well, ladies and gentlemen, until the last one comes! But it is not possible for anyone to demand that those to whom twenty-three lies have been thrown in the face should run after the other, so that the other can say new untruths in his own way before an audience that is willing to listen. Everyone is free to come up here and hear the truth from us. We only want to spread the truth from here.

Dear attendees, just think about the logic behind this. We are told: you said you don't do propaganda. — We have, I said this evening, not built this building to merely stage musical comedies in it, but to do anthroposophy. We did not agree to somehow carry down to Arlesheim what we have to say here, what we want to say here, but we said it here. What has been attacked has been presented here. And I must describe it as an outrageous audacity when what has only been presented here is embellished with lies. They demand that we should now go down to Arlesheim to clear up the untruth there. Or is this perhaps another cunning trick, so that they can later say: Now they are even starting their propaganda down in Arlesheim!

Roman Boos: Does anyone wish to speak? Please, Mr. Hartwig.

Walther Hartwig: Dear attendees! Allow me to say a few words. This evening you have heard what can be done against the spiritual good that we strive for. I can only add a few things: From this evening it can only follow that we must pull ourselves together and stand firm, each one of us like a rock, and do what we can to undermine this brood of liars. Roman Boos: I would still like to make one more observation. It was just stated by the teacher Sauter that the matter is not finished, but will continue. I will always insist that the matter started with the twenty-three whoppers, and that what is continuing is just a continuation of what started there. And that is why, above all, it will be important to allow something to take its course that does not have such a starting point. Would anyone else like to take the floor?

Curt Englert: Dear attendees, it is also about time that we Swiss said a word here. So far, Dr. Steiner has been speaking and he has presented his case. He could not speak as he might have done if he had been Swiss. And so it is the duty of those people who adhere to anthroposophy and are Swiss to say publicly what they have to say about what is going on from up here. I am Swiss and not a paper Swiss, but from good Swiss blood. And everywhere in our country, since the agitation began, we have always been accused: From Dornach, there is Pan-German spiritual imperialism represented, there Switzerland is contaminated with ideas from the “great canton”, as it is popularly called; Swissness, the Swiss way of life is in danger of being overwhelmed and destroyed by German spiritual imperialism. These reasons are given by all parties, both by the Catholic side, which stirs here, and by the nationalists, who stir and make their machinations.

In response to this, it should be said that purely in what is represented here, no national matters are ever represented. On the contrary, Dr. Steiner says that every people and every nation has its own value and its own task to help in the spiritual development of humanity. And if you are asking how it is that those who rail against foreigners here in Switzerland, and in particular against what comes from here, how is it that they get their instructions? Who listens to Rome? Is that Swissness, to listen to Rome? Or do those people in Switzerland who joined the League of Nations on May 16 still have the right to speak of Swissness? No, they no longer do. And it is our task, we who are free Swiss, to take up the thoughts of humanity in their true form and not to represent any group of nationalities. Therefore, we are Swiss and we will remain Swiss without giving up a single iota of Swissness. On the contrary, our nationality can only remain Swiss if we ennoble and deepen it from the depths of our spiritual science. And if our nation perishes from foreignness, if it is not healthy and strong enough to resist all foreign influences, then it is worthy of perishing.

Roman Boos: Mr. Sauter has the floor.

Karl Sauter: I would like to ask the assembly whether it has been unpleasant for her to have heard a different voice on the matter for a change. That is the first fact. And secondly, it is clear – I want to acknowledge this at the end – that this direction is one of those that have helped and are helping to dematerialize the spirit of the times, and also science. I am happy to admit that today. And I am not the one who would have wanted to start a fight on this matter; but you are calling for the discussion, and I have taken the liberty of using this. It will not be finished by tonight. I can believe you, and you will believe us, and it is perhaps good that the discussion is also being promoted among the general public through the press, be it from the left or the right, from above or below. So there will probably be clarity in the course of this year, and then next year we can talk about what remains. So in this sense I would like to conclude.

Roman Boos: Isn't Mr. Sauter perhaps the “Catholic teacher” who made the comment in the “Volksblatt”: “No opportunity was offered for a discussion”?

Karl Sauter: There was no discussion about that either.

Roman Boos: That was registered there in the sense that Catholics who would have liked to speak were not allowed to do so by us. That is why the opportunity was offered today. And now it is being said that we are challenging a discussion. If this is to be continued, this tactic will probably become more entrenched. Before a reasonable discussion can take place, the first thing to do is to clean up and remove the dirt, otherwise it could happen that a party with so much dirt on its weapons could cause an explosion. For it is by no means certain that victory must be on that side. It now depends on whether our Swiss people still have so much decency and inner feeling for cleanliness that they also judge by whether or not the weapons are clean. Does anyone else wish to speak?

A number of written questions have already been submitted before the lecture. Perhaps Dr. Steiner will be able to address them. This is meant in the sense of a final word, after which no further discussion will take place.

Rudolf Steiner: The questions that have been asked, my dear attendees, were asked before the lecture. First:

How is it that your science ascribes so much power to evil, since God is almighty and no power exists besides him?

Well, my dear attendees, that means positing a proposition that is, to begin with, extremely vague, because it is said: How is it that your science ascribes so much power to evil? — how much, then? But then the question here is only in the sense of how far one can comprehend evil, which after all represents a power, despite the fact that certain creeds speak of the omnipotence of God. I would like to hear someone who ascribes sole power to God and recognizes no other power besides him and who then identifies God only with what is not evil, I would like to hear that person explain how he reconciles the existence of evil with the existence of God. From our point of view, from what is advocated here at the Goetheanum, one can only say that the obligation is felt to explain the existence of evil despite the divinity of the world. Secondly:

Does reincarnation lead all people to the divine-spiritual? What about the sentence: Many are called, but few are chosen?

Now, dear assembled ladies and gentlemen, I actually spoke about the sentence, “Many are called, but few are chosen” – in its most abrupt form, in the form in which Augustine advocated it in his Whitsun lectures. And what is said here can now be linked to another question that was asked here, even before the lecture:

Why did Christ die for us after all, since in each person, through many earthly lives, that is balanced out which was incurred in past earthly lives?

Now, my dear audience, you must bear in mind that the Christ, the Christ-act, the event of Golgotha, has to do with humanity, with humanity as such, and you must above all consider what is said here about St. Paul's words: “Not I, but the Christ in me”. By understanding these two things together: that the Christ died for humanity and that the Christ in me – not me – is what is actually effective in the world process, lies the possibility of gaining insight into the difference that exists between the fate of humanity and the fate of the individual human being. Just imagine the consequences if it were proposed that man could remain purely passive and still be redeemed by Christ. But all these things are not at issue; rather, the issue is that spiritual science investigates repeated earthly lives quite independently of everything else, just as, for all I care, the physical sciences investigate mutation or some other process, and that spiritual science simply conquers this knowledge of repeated earthly lives. The question then is to investigate what power the Christ impulse has within world evolution, into which the repeated earthly lives are placed.

The way of thinking that leads to such questions is related to what now arises as a further question:

How does anthroposophy come to speak of the re-embodiment of man, since nowhere in the Bible is this said?

Dear attendees, just consider that the Bible also does not say that America exists - or is it said? I don't think so. Nevertheless, no one will be deterred from recognizing America's existence, even though they stand on the ground of the Bible. There is a big difference between really standing on the ground of the Bible and standing on the ground of people who imagine that they alone are allowed to represent the content of the Bible identically. You see, my dear attendees, in the Catholic Church it was forbidden for a long time to even give the Bible to the faithful to read. And one could tell a lot about what then led to the Bible now also being given to Catholic believers. But all the results of conscientious research would lead nowhere if the discussion were always to be based on the same principles as those we are discussing with. For someone need only glance through my writings to find what I said in my lecture: that a good part of my life has been spent refuting Kant's theory of knowledge. If someone then objects that I have introduced Kant into the lectures on St. Thomas Aquinas merely as a contrast for the sake of contrast, then, my dear audience, it must also be said: Everyone is free to think and express their thoughts as they please in their own circles, but anyone who goes public with their ideas must first convince themselves that they are allowed to make such an assertion before doing so. And one certainly cannot make such an assertion to someone who has been fighting against Kantianism for forty years.

Another question was asked:

Is Christianity the continuation of Oriental, theosophical wisdom? If so, how can the two be combined?

Well, I have already said a good deal about this in my lectures. In my writings, especially in my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”, you will find a great deal about this, as the literature that comes from me says a great deal about these questions in particular. You see, it has been said that the lectures on Thomism have remained without discussion. Now, my dear audience, if I were to speak again, say, about Scotus Eriugena or, say, about Augustine or, say, about the later nominalism, about the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Kant, or if I were to speak about Schelling or Hegel or about Lessing, then, ladies and gentlemen, it must be up to me whether I want to express what I have acquired through decades of research or not, and whether or not a discussion can follow from it. That must be entirely up to me, and I will not allow anyone to take away my right to give lectures in the future, even if no discussion can follow from them. One could really lose all interest in discussions if one had to make the experience of being confronted with such a level in the discussion, as it is when someone says - I don't know from which side it was said, but it was said - when someone who has spent forty years trying to determine the relationship between Kant and other worldviews is told that he is only doing it for the sake of contrast. That is indeed difficult to discuss. When one has fought for every word one utters with one's heart's blood, then, ladies and gentlemen, one also thinks somewhat differently about the value of discussions than those who enter into discussions out of such motives, as I have just characterized them, can think - can I say emphatically. And so I must say once more: I find it at least very strange when someone who takes the side of those who have spoken twenty-three objective untruths against us, who has not yet made even a start at justifying anything of these twenty-three lies, despite four articles - not in the “Bayerischer Vaterland”, one could mistake it for that based on the style confused with it, no, in the “Katholischen Sonntagsblatt” it says - despite these four articles has not even made an attempt to somehow justify any of these twenty-three lies, if this someone says: Just wait and see, the matter will come up.

Well, my dear attendees, the twenty-three assertions that were made at the time are simply untrue, and no subsequent discussion will be able to prove them true. What do you want to discuss? Prove, try to prove, if you want to discuss, a single one of those twenty-three points! Start sometime and don't keep referring us to the end, otherwise you might end up coming to that end only when the matter has actually become too boring for us or when the matter has taken a different turn in some way.

I find it very strange, and others probably do too, that people are being asked to wait for the end when the beginning was done in such a way as it was done. What end should do anything differently from the twenty-three lies at the beginning, which can never be proven as truth? Is the discussion over when someone says, “Wait for the end”? The discussion would at least attempt to justify any of the twenty-three untruths. It would not be successful in any case, because they are untruths.

Roman Boos: This concludes the event.

• 1. Footnote by Rudolf Steiner in the first edition: Anyone who is in a position to allow their views to be dictated by the society or community in which they live can hardly understand the position I have adopted towards the Theosophical Society. I have never allowed it to impose a view on me, but I have presented my views in it, as I do everywhere, where my views are wanted. This seems fully justified to me.
• 2. Footnote by Rudolf Steiner in the first edition: I was able to speak these last sentences at the time because the essays referred to here had been published anonymously; I did not have to believe that they were written by Pastor Kully. They were later published in a collected brochure, and Pastor Kully confessed himself as the author. I leave the sentences as they are so that no one can say that I suppressed anything of what was said. 2
• 3. footnote by Rudolf Steiner in the first print: The crowning achievement of objective untruths in Catholic newspapers in the local area is achieved with the article that has now been published: ‘The stolen threefold social order’. It is printed in the ‘Leuchtturm’ in Lorch. It is claimed that before I began to advocate the threefold social order, I received a written communication from a lady in which this threefold order was already contained. Now, firstly, this is all a lie, because I did not receive anything of the kind, secondly, I advocated the threefold order in front of many people even before the time when I am said to have received that written communication. Thirdly, for me – I received the pamphlet of that lady, which has only recently appeared, a few days ago – what that lady claims about her threefolding is complete nonsense, foolish, amateurish, unclear chatter. But the best thing is that even this lady cannot claim that my threefold order has anything to do with hers. That is why she says that I was familiar with her cause but botched it. The whole thing is too foolish to find it malicious. But the Catholic press thinks it good enough to print it. I advise every reader of this foolish talk to read the writing of that lady in which she accuses me of theft; it is called “3:5,5:8 = 21:34. The secret of being able to pay off the debts in the foreseeable future” and is by Elisabeth Metzdorff-Teschner. If anyone still believes in the stolen threefolding after reading this writing, whose content is as mystical as the title, I would like to know.
• 4. Footnote by Rudolf Steiner in the first edition: It must be admitted that the method of the older church teachers, applied today by people, does not lead to the results that those claim as dogmas who declare anthroposophy to be heresy. But a truly logical way of thinking cannot but reject this slap in the face of logic.
• 5. footnote by Rudolf Steiner in the first : As stated above, it was later proved.
• 6. Footnote by Rudolf Steiner in the first edition: Perhaps, in order to not to give rise to misunderstandings, it is necessary that I should expressly say that by the “Catholic theologians” of whom I have just spoken I do not mean Franz Brentano.

Today, we want to talk about some peculiarities of the occult development of the human being, in order to then prepare for something else. We are allowed to speak of this occult development because, basically, engaging with spiritual science is the beginning of a real occult development. Even if most people do not recognize the fact that simply occupying oneself with spiritual science is really the first step towards occult development, it is nevertheless the case. And it has been emphasized time and again, and must always be emphasized, that spiritual science is not meant to merely convey knowledge to us, a theoretical knowledge, but that spiritual science is meant to give us something that transforms our whole being, that makes something different out of our whole being than the external culture of the present can do.

Now we will gain an insight into the difficulty that spiritual science has in impressing itself not only on our memory but also on our whole cultural life of the present, if we familiarize ourselves with the peculiarities of spiritual scientific research, with the way in which the results of spiritual scientific research relate to us humans. They relate to us differently than other knowledge that we acquire in life. We acquire knowledge through our experiences, through our experiences; because even if we acquire scientific knowledge, it is either through direct or indirect experience. Wherever we acquire knowledge, we acquire it first through experience and then we store it in our memory, in our recollection. We keep these results of life.

We have often made it clear what it means, in more intimate terms, to store something in our memory, especially in recent times we have talked a little more about what memory is. In any case, for life, memory is an extraordinarily important thing. Just think: if we did not have memory, if we could not remember what we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago or ten years ago, how very different our lives would have to be. It is inconceivable to us that the ordinary life of the soul, taking place on the physical plane, could take place without memory.

But compare the power that enables you to retain experiences of the physical plane in your memory with the much lesser power that enables you to retain dream experiences in your memory. Consider how much more easily you forget a dream than experiences in the physical world. One may initially ask the question: Why do we forget dream experiences more easily than experiences of the physical world? Well, the answer to this question will also give us an important point of view for higher knowledge.

How are dream experiences acquired? They are acquired by not being completely inside the physical body. When we are completely inside the physical body, we do not dream. Then we experience through the senses on the physical plane and through the mind bound to the senses. When we dream, we must at least be partially outside the physical body. What does the physical body do when it works through the power of memory? Yes, as difficult as it is for a person to think at first, it is nevertheless true: every time a person has an experience and stores this experience in their memory through a thought, an imprint, a kind of cliché of the experience, is formed in our etheric body. But – and I have already discussed this – it is not the case that this imprint would photographically depict the experience. Just as the letter of a writing has nothing to do with the sound, what exists in our body as an imprint has just as little to do with the experience itself. The imprint is only a sign. And this sign is strangely similar to the human form itself. And if you take the upper parts of the human form, the head and at most a little of the upper body and the hands, you have what can be observed in the etheric body every time a person forms a memory of an experience.

So, we can say: I experience something; the experience remains with me, whether it be a small or a great experience, as a memory. An impression is formed, something like this (see drawing). Something like this arises in your etheric body every time a memory is formed, and if it were to be extinguished, you would no longer be able to remember the experience.

Think of how many things you remember in life! You have just as many thousands and thousands of such ethereal images of people within you. Your etheric body, and also your physical body, allow so many different images to be there. If two were the same, you would not be able to distinguish the experiences. If you observe a person occultly, you will find thousands and thousands of such images of people within him. But they do not only arise in the etheric body; a fine impression of each such human image also arises in the physical body, and these impressions also all remain, insofar as the person has memories. So thousands upon thousands of such homunculi are present in a person.

Let us say you are listening to today's lecture. Just by listening to this lecture, hundreds and hundreds of such homunculi are forming in your soul. These also make impressions in your physical body when you remember them later, and these impressions also remain.

But what about dreams? Yes, you see, in a dream the homunculus is formed in the etheric body, but

but it does not leave an impression on the physical body. It leaves a weak impression, or sometimes no impression at all. Then the person is well aware that he has dreamt, but he cannot remember what he dreamt. Dreams leave a weak impression, much weaker than any experience on the physical plane. This is why it is so difficult to retain a memory of them.

The strength of the memory therefore depends entirely on how strong the impression is that the homunculus of the etheric body makes on the physical body. However, what the spiritual researcher finds, what he experiences in the spiritual world, is initially such that it cannot make any impression on the physical body at all. For if an experience can make an impression on the physical body, then it is no longer a purely spiritual experience; then it has already been acquired with regard to the physical body. This must be the peculiar thing about the spiritual experience, that at first nothing at all happens in the physical body, while the spiritual is being experienced.

What follows from this? It follows that the spiritual researcher has to understand that there is no memory for the results of spiritual research. The experiences of the spiritual researcher cannot be memorized. They pass away the very moment they arise.

This is the difficulty of knowing anything of the spiritual world while living in the physical world and wanting to live only through the physical body. Since man has a poor memory even for dreams, which still have a loose connection with the physical body, it shows how understandable it must be that man has no memory for what he really experiences occultly.

There are now people who begin to apply to themselves the rules of my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the rules that are called the rules of occult development. They may apply them for a very long time; but then, after years, they come and say, “I have practiced over and over again, I have done all kinds of exercises; I see nothing, I hear nothing of the spiritual world. My sense for the spiritual world does not want to open up. Perhaps what these people say is completely wrong; it can be completely wrong. The people in question may have long since found entry into the spiritual world and may have perceptions in the spiritual world. But these perceptions disappear the moment they are made, because these perceptions cannot be incorporated into the physical memory. The fact that one can know something from one's spiritual experiences depends on something quite different from memory. And I would now like to make clear to you what it depends on.

Imagine that you make a toy for a child. The child can enjoy this toy. You can make it today and the child can enjoy it. You take the toy and put it in the cupboard. Tomorrow you give it to the child again, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. And the child can always enjoy the toy that you made today.

But something else can also happen. Let us assume that you are not interesting the child by making a toy, but that you are putting something together for him out of random things. Or you might even just make something up for him by imitating gestures or something similar. Let us assume that you attract the child's attention by imitating something with your hands or fingers in a very specific way, by pre-evolving something, for example. You cannot put this in the cupboard, take it out again tomorrow and the day after and give it to the child again and again like a toy. What is to make such an impression on the child must be done afresh each time. You can make a doll and keep it; the child can have it again and again. But if you use something you have done yourself, through gestures or the like, to attract the child's attention, you must do it freshly each time.

This is something that can explain to us the difference between what we acquire on the physical plane and what can become memory, and what we experience on the spiritual plane and what cannot immediately become memory. When we have experiences on the physical plane, something like a homunculus forms in our etheric body and an imprint of it is imprinted in the physical body. It remains, like a doll with a child. You can store it and find it in yourself again and again. This then points to the experience of the past. The experience you have in the spiritual world passes. But you had to do something to bring it about. You had to use the rules that you apply to the soul in the sense of “How to Know Higher Worlds” to put the soul in such a state that the occult experience could occur. You can evoke this state in yourself again and again, so that you can have the experience again and again, but you cannot store it like a memory image. For the physical plane, experiences become memories by preserving after-images, by being remembered. The re-occurrence, the re-memory - if we now use the word “memory” in a figurative sense - of occult experiences can only occur if we create the same conditions through which we experienced the event for the first time.

Let us be clear about one thing: we really have to be infinitely more active and engaged with experiences in the spiritual world than with experiences in the physical world. In contrast to experiences in the physical world, something really forms in us that, I would say, gradually acquires the greatest density. Something internally diverse and manifold is this in us. These many people that you have inside you go through life with you and are something complete. This makes life in the physical world easier for you, because you are spared the work that you have to do over and over again in the occult experiences in the spiritual world if you want to have the experience again. You can only remember the conditions under which you brought about the experience, so never the occult experience itself, but only the way in which it was brought about. And you have to bring about these conditions again to have the occult experience again.

If we – and I say this not comparatively but in the real sense – if we go down a path and there is a church or a house at the end of that path and we go back, we can carry the memory of this image of the church or the house with us on the whole way back. This is because the experience of the church or the house is an experience on the physical plane. If a spirit had stood there instead, and the spirit would only manifest itself at this place, then it would be necessary each time to go to the same place again to see this spirit. One must bring about the same conditions, for one can only remember by which route, through which conditions, one arrived at this experience.

That is the strange thing about these things, that a good memory is of no immediate use for retaining occult experiences, but that on the contrary, something that supports us in ordinary life in consciously developing a good memory can be a hindrance to us in the occult. Certain people are born with a good memory right from the start. Now they live and have a good memory. Others have a less good memory. This is based on very specific karmic conditions: A good memory is something that comes into the world from a previous incarnation in such a way that the soul's penetration of the whole body is as late as possible, and that certain parts of the physical body remain untouched by the soul for as long as possible. In this case it is possible that, without our doing anything, these impressions, these homunculi, which I have described, are formed.

But when someone enters life through physical birth and their personality is so inwardly disposed for their individual physical experience that the impressions take complete possession of their physical body as quickly as possible, then they will not be able to develop a particularly good memory because they fill their memory with themselves; and then it is too hard for so many impressions of such homunculi to enter it. Therefore, we will preferably find a good memory in those people who, I might say, have an otherwise vague egoistic interest in the experiences of the physical plane.

On the other hand, memory can also be developed to a certain extent. But it can only be developed by stimulating attention and interest. Interest, attention and memory belong together. If you try to take a very intense interest in some experiences, in some area of life, to be very much involved with it with your whole self, your memory, your recollection of these experiences will also become better and better. So if someone wants to develop their memory for something, the best way to do it is to sharpen their interest in the subject as much as possible. There is nothing we remember for which we do not create an intense interest. Thus, attention and interest are something that can help us to improve a poor memory in the physical world.

For the right approach to occult experiences, so that these experiences do not constantly flash past us like dreams and we are unaware of them, loving attention and loving interest for the spiritual in general is of the utmost importance. Without this spiritual interest, without this loving attention, we cannot have spiritual experiences again and again that we have had once. It is quite possible to have an occult experience. It flits by. Only through this will one be able to create not memories, but the conditions under which one can have the experience again and again, and again and again, by intensifying one's interest in the events in the spiritual world.

That is why it is so important that we do not just acquire as much knowledge as possible about the spiritual world by way of memory; that is actually the least important thing. The more important thing is that we never pursue these matters of the spiritual world without love, never without the most intense interest. If we absorb knowledge from spiritual science indifferently, perhaps just so that we can boast about it or for some other reason, as we so often absorb other knowledge of the world, then it has no significance. What is important is the degree of love, of sympathy for the spiritual world that we acquire. That is the important thing, that is the meaningful thing. And that is why we try to present the events of the spiritual world from so many points of view, again and again from different points of view; because this way we are more and more encouraged to actively approach the knowledge of the spiritual world, and not to come to the desire to understand this knowledge of the spiritual world in the same way as the knowledge of physical things. That is actually the most fatal thing for the real occultist: when the longing arises in a person to gain spiritual knowledge, but when one desires to gain this knowledge in a different way than physical knowledge.

People would prefer to have books about the spiritual world, just as they have books about the physical world; they would like to acquire knowledge about the spiritual world in the same way that they acquire knowledge about the physical world. But it is not at all possible to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world in this way; instead, books that deal with the spiritual world must stimulate our inner activity each time anew, setting our inner powers in motion. Therefore, it is not the same as when we acquire knowledge about the physical world, where we have to repeat it over and over again in order not to forget, when we acquire knowledge about the spiritual world. When we read a cycle again and again or a spiritual science book, then that is actually not a repetition, but an immersing ourselves in the activity through which we arrive at the knowledge. And that is the most important thing, that is the essential thing. You see, if someone were asked to pray when they went to church, you would look at them rather strangely if they said: I don't need to pray today; when I was seven years, three months and two days old, I read the prayer once. I will always remember that I have prayed it; I do not need to pray it again, because I know that I have prayed it; I will just remember it now. You would look at this person strangely, you would make it clear to him that it is not important to remember the prayer once it has been said, but to keep bringing it up because it is alive in every renewal. This is precisely how we should understand our experience in occult science. We should not say, as we do about ordinary science: Yes, we have absorbed it, we remember it - but we want to get used to delving into the subject again and again, to going through the activity again and again. But people of the modern age do not like this at all. Rather, people of modern times love to stop at what they have once attained. Isn't it true that one feels most happy when one has acquired some knowledge and then carries this knowledge in one's inner “backpack,” as it were, through life, and when one needs it, takes it out and remembers it again. This is something that modern humanity is increasingly in danger of falling into. But in modern times, I would say, there is an immediate need to transform this sitting on the acquired content so that human work, human striving, corresponds to the

Only he earns freedom and life who
must conquer them daily.

This beautiful saying from Faust.

And it is truly the case that nothing more than the Faust attitude, which we have often considered here, awakens and stirs in the human soul that which gradually leads to the occult, to the occult attitude.

Goethe wrote the first great monologue of Faust in the 1770s, in keeping with his mood at the time. Today it has become trivial for many, but it is something that, when viewed in its originality, weighs on the soul with all the tragedy of life:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and, unfortunately! theology,
with great zeal.
There I stand, poor fool that I am!
And I am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this himself, from his own nature, from the depths of his soul, as a young man in the 1770s. Then came the time when a high point of human philosophical development was experienced in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But this high point of philosophical development was connected with legal development. Hegel wrote a natural law, Fichte wrote a natural law; Schelling published a medical journal. Something mighty and great has passed through the human soul, leading to Goethe's saying:

Have now, alas! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately! also theology,
studied thoroughly, with ardent endeavor.

But do you think that if Goethe had lived in 1840 and had begun his “Faust” only in 1840 instead of in 1772, do you think that because great and mighty things have been achieved in the cultural development of humanity, and that he had really searched in a truly philosophical way for what goes on in the human soul, do you think he would have said: “Now, thank God, I have found the answer!” studied philosophy, law and medicine and, of course, theology with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: “There I stand now, I clever, wise man, and am no longer as foolish as before, but have become quite wise, as wise as one can only be”? Do you think that Goethe would have said that? Suppose it took much longer for the Earth's culture to develop, would this opening monologue of “Faust” have been written exactly the same way in 1840 as it was in 1772, exactly the same way? All these things are part of the real understanding of “Faust.” This great, gigantic idea cannot be understood if you do not grasp it in its details. And if Faust were to be started today, it would have to begin with the same words.

And once countless facts from the humanities have been brought to light, the following sentiment will no longer be shared: “Thank God I have studied philosophy, law and medicine, and thank God theology too, and of course theosophy as well, and am as wise as can be.” That would never be the true Faust mood! Only the one to whom the following applies would have the true Faust mood: “Only he earns freedom, like life, who must conquer it daily.” This is the mood that underlies “Faust” and at the same time shows us where the impulses lie that lead from the old, frozen culture to the new culture of humanity. Man must never cease to acquire something new and different, and I have also advocated this within the spiritual scientific movement to which we belong. It was truly terrible when one repeatedly heard in the old society: Yes, we need schemas, and when I presented this or that, then there should be schemas and tables hanging on the walls so that one has something to remember by. And people were dissatisfied when one came and basically reversed what was once there, what was established; since it always has to be acquired anew. Because it is this never-resting, never-ceasing striving forward that matters.

It can be said directly: By having driven out of itself a Faust, the newer culture has really built the bridge from the merely external materialistic culture to the new spiritual culture that must come over humanity.

But much, very much, in relation to the right view of life is connected with all this, with these peculiarities of the new knowledge, which must indeed be drawn from occultism, and which therefore makes demands on the active impulses of men. Thus it is connected with the principle of taking everything as it is finished, as it is complete, when people strive to preserve that which cannot be preserved. For example, something that I have really tried to explain for decades now, I can say, cannot be preserved; something that is called human freedom.

Freedom as an external institution, as an external condition in the human organization on earth, is something impossible, something unthinkable. Preserved in this way, as it was once conceived for a particular point in time, freedom would be a terrible fetter for man at the next point in time. Freedom is something that must constantly be unleashed as it arises, and man can only acquire freedom in each moment by developing within himself a sense of relating to the whole spiritual world. You can read about this in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. There you will find that the whole mood is expressed there. There you can see that freedom is truly a key to that which leads into the spiritual world.

But it is obvious that freedom can only be understood by people who gradually develop the will to study spiritual science. Freedom cannot be understood by other people, because other people will always confuse certain peculiarities of external institutions with freedom, whereas freedom can only ever exist in the state that a person can acquire at any given moment.

We impair our freedom, namely, already through one thing by which we usually do not believe our freedom to be impaired: we impair our freedom already through our memory. For suppose, for a moment, that you have acquired certain sympathies and antipathies through the experiences you have undergone since your birth; then your freedom is already impaired by what has remained of these sympathies and antipathies. These acquired sympathies and antipathies, everything that is stored in the memory, impairs your freedom. And all knowledge that humanity strives for and that is then executed in order to become memory, that also distances us more and more from a real concept of freedom. On the other hand, with every acquisition of occult knowledge, one is brought closer to the true concept of freedom, genuine freedom.

But this whole thing is connected to something else: consider that with everything that takes root as memory, we are actually planting a homunculus within us. And everything that takes shape in us as a homunculus is really the case that by setting our inner life in motion, we do not get any further with our activity than this homunculus, than these impressions. We cannot get beyond them. If we could break through what has accumulated as memory, if we could really bring out of ourselves everything we have experienced since the time of our childhood, up to the time we can remember back to, we would break through something like a skin of life. But behind this skin of life is the spiritual world. There it is, right behind it! And by beginning to build up a picture of his own life from earliest childhood, by retaining from all his experiences that which makes up the content of his memory, he weaves a veil throughout his life, and this veil covers the spiritual world.

We could not stand in the physical world if we did not spin this web, for we are, insofar as we remember, this web itself.

But we arise as human beings in the physical world only by forming ourselves out of the veil, which we at the same time hold up before the spiritual world. It is really as if someone, well, I would like to say, wants to look at a stage and says: I want to look in there now. But he does it by hanging a curtain in front of it. In doing so, he covers up bit by bit what is behind it. That is what man does in life. The memories man stores up are a curtain that is hung over spiritual reality, woven before the spiritual world. This is a contradiction that we face in life, but it must not be blamed or criticized because it is the condition for our being in the physical life. It can only be characterized, but not blamed. If we did not spiritually weave the curtain before us, we would not be there in the physical world. And that is precisely what matters: that we know such a thing, that we do not mistake ourselves for a reality when we are only a curtain.

We immediately penetrate all deception by considering ourselves a curtain and not a reality, in the moments when we say to ourselves: You are actually only what stands before the true world, and your own form, what you yourself are, stands behind the form that you yourself weave throughout life. - When you keep this fact in mind, you stand in truth. Then you do not consider yourself to be reality, but only a curtain. But people are afraid of considering themselves a mere curtain. They want to consider themselves a reality in what they are. But that is why they cannot come to any clarity about the most important things in life.

All people thirst for preservation after death, for immortality, they all thirst to know something about the fact that they still exist after death. But they secretly think: if everything that is in me, that I have on the physical plane, perishes, what will then still be there? That this must go away after death, that the curtain not only tears, but must be dissolved, so that the human being can emerge: this is self-evident for the one who ascends in spiritual knowledge.

Thus we must accept such things, as they have been touched upon today, in such a way that we really say more and more to ourselves: For spiritual science, different human attitudes must be inwardly adopted than those in the culture up to now. There must arise a much greater striving for constant activity among people, for activity, for being there. The idea that one has grasped something and can retain it and carry it through life must disappear. If that disappears, all the other things that stand in the way of clear perception will disappear as well. I have often pointed out how people, even in science, have the most confused ideas about what is true. For example, you will often read in physiological works today that people sleep because they experience this or that in their waking state and become tired from it. Sleep would therefore be a result of fatigue. I have pointed out that the reindeer, which does not need to work very hard, should not have any need for sleep either. But if you listen to the reindeer, you will learn that if you do nothing at all, you feel most tired and you fall asleep without having done the slightest thing. From this you can see that fatigue has nothing to do with sleep, and sleep has nothing to do with fatigue, any more than day has to do with night.

At most, minds like Hume or Kant will have difficulties because they confuse what follows from each other. No one will consider the day as the cause of the night and the night as the cause of the day. Day and night arise one after the other. Day arises from the sun rising above the horizon, and night from the sun going below the horizon. The sun's standing above the horizon is the cause of day, and the sun's going below the horizon is the cause of night. Just as night is not the cause of day, or day the cause of night, so it is not essentially true that waking is the cause of sleeping or sleeping the cause of waking. Rather, it is rhythmic states that alternate, just as the positions of the sun above and below the horizon alternate, and these have nothing to do with a cause-and-effect relationship.

But just as it is true that the sun, when it goes below the horizon, causes twilight, and when it goes further down, causes darkness, so the truth is not that because we feel tired, we also want to sleep, but we feel tired because we want to sleep. We must have a desire for sleep, then we feel tired.

This seems to contradict everything that is thought today, but it is true, just as true as that day is not the cause of night and night is not the cause of day. So tiredness is not the cause of sleep. But just as night occurs when the sun goes down, so tiredness occurs because one wants to sleep. Here, cause and effect are completely confused and mixed up.

Today I want to draw attention to something else. There is an enormous difference between the relationship between day and night, the relationship between the sun and the earth, and the relationship between sleeping and waking in humans: you cannot imagine that the same thing can happen to the sun as can happen to humans. I mean, a person has a good meal and sleeps at the wrong time, or sleeps at the wrong time for some other reason. The sun does not do that. Because, think about what it would be like if the sun suddenly decided not to rise above the horizon at a certain time and everything that makes day into night happened all at once. You cannot possibly imagine that a constellation will arise in the universe that is analogous to man sleeping when he wants, arbitrarily arranging his waking and sleeping times. How far removed the sun is from that! It is impossible for the sun to overdo itself and stop shining in the middle of the day, so that night falls. As far as it is from anyone falling asleep during the day – it is easy, it just needs to be a little hot and one thinks that one has to sleep with the heat – so far away from freedom are natural necessity and natural law, so far away from the spirit is nature. But so far is the understanding that humanity has today, that the present time has, from the understanding that it will have to acquire through spiritual science.

We must always bear in mind that it is not only a serious but also a great task to find our way into the aspirations that spiritual science wants to bring to human culture. And there are many things that have not yet been overcome that will have to be overcome if spiritual science and its results are to be incorporated into the spiritual development of humanity.

Today, I would like to draw attention to two things – we will see more tomorrow – that must be acquired by anyone who wants to enter the field of spiritual science and make it fruitful for the spiritual life of the future: the first is a certain shyness, a certain reverence for the truth. One need only open one's eyes to see that, especially today, everything that happens in the world seems to be a revolt against this awe, against reverence for the truth. Those who have reverence for the truth will wait a long time before making an assertion about something or passing judgment on it. Today there is a tendency to do the opposite, to feel as little respect as possible for the truth, but rather to shape the truth to suit one's own convenience, to suit one's own feelings and perceptions. The ability to wait until the truth reveals itself as the chaste divinity of the human soul is a feeling that can be said to It is truly necessary for today's humanity to acquire it. But external culture resists this acquisition; it is a culture in which it is important to fabricate messages and to communicate all facts as quickly as possible, as today's journalism does. The opposite mood is present to that which our spiritual science must produce in us. The way in which the world is presented today through the press and the media is the opposite of what must be striven for by spiritual science, by those who mean well by humanity. This must be admitted by those who want to belong to the spiritual science movement. The first is reverence for the truth.

The second is reverence for knowledge. It must weigh heavily on the soul of those who recognize the impulses of the times and strive to introduce new impulses into the development of humanity that people do not take reverence for knowledge seriously enough. It is sad that people everywhere show that they do not have reverence for knowledge.

Particularly in our time, in view of the terrible events of the present, we do indeed see that people - most of all those who write and have it printed, but unfortunately the others do it too - judge as if the world were really created, say, in June or July 1914.

Strangely enough, when the events of the present are being discussed, one repeatedly hears the beginning of the story “In 1914” being repeated, and there the events are jumbled up and mixed up, and people believe that something can come of it. Nothing can come of it. One cannot understand why things are as they are in the present if one does not have the reverence for knowledge that leads to the times of the distant past and sees that the events of the present are the consequences of these distant pasts and are deeply connected with them.

The heart bleeds for those who are serious about the development of humanity when they see how thoughtlessly people judge the way cause and being are connected here or there. And these judgments are made by people whose judgments show that they basically do not know what is important.

Now one could object: You cannot demand that everyone should be able to judge. - Yes, certainly not. But what one can demand is reverence for knowledge, an awareness that one must first know something before judging.

This is something one would like to wish for people above all today: that they should not judge before knowing. It is one of the most terrible evils of the present day that people judge without knowing. It is what makes the products of contemporary culture so terrible, because you can see everywhere that they breathe exactly the opposite of what reverence for real knowledge is, what reverence for truth is.

Reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge, that is what we should acquire. I say: reverence for knowledge. I do not, of course, say reverence for scientific authority – so as not to distort things – but reverence for knowledge, especially for one's own knowledge. You have to acquire that first; then you can also have reverence for your own knowledge. As long as you do not possess it, you cannot, of course, have reverence for what does not exist. Then you also lack the necessary reverence in life.

But above all, it is important that we penetrate into our souls, that we experience new feelings and emotions, and that we do not try to make progress in the same way, now on the paths, on the paths of spiritual science, as has been attempted in material culture. Our serious task here must be to acquire the ability to distinguish.

The theme of this cycle of lectures was not chosen because it is traditional within academic or philosophical disciplines, as though we thought epistemology or the like should appear within our courses. Rather, it was chosen as the result of what I believe to be an open-minded consideration of the needs and demands of our time. The further evolution of humanity demands new concepts, new notions, and new impulses for social life generally: we need ideas which, when realized, can create social conditions offering to human beings of all stations and classes an existence that seems to them humane. Already, to be sure, it is being said in the widest circles that social renewal must begin with a renewal of our thinking.¹ Yet not everyone in these widest circles imagines something clear and distinct when speaking in this way. One does not ask: whence shall come the ideas upon which one might found a social economy offering man a humane existence? That portion of humanity which has received an education in the last three to four centuries, but particularly since the nineteenth century, has been raised with certain ideas that are outgrowths of the scientific world view or entirely schooled in it. This is particularly true of those who have undergone some academic training. Only those working in fields other than the sciences believe that natural science has had little influence on their pursuits. Yet it is easy to demonstrate that even in the newer, more progressive theology, in history and in jurisprudence—everywhere can be found scientific concepts such as those that arose from the scientific experiments of the last centuries, so that traditional concepts have in a certain way been altered to conform to the new. One need only allow the progress of the new theological developments in the nineteenth century to pass before the mind's eye. One sees, for example, how Protestant theology has arrived at its views concerning the man, Jesus, and the nature of Christ, because at every turn it had in mind certain scientific conceptions that it wanted to satisfy, against which it did not want to sin. At the same time, the old, instinctive ties within the social order began to slacken: they gradually ceased to hold human life together. In the course of the nineteenth century it became increasingly necessary to replace the instincts according to which one class subordinated itself to another, the instincts out of which the new parliamentary institutions, with all their consequences, have come with more-or-less conscious concepts. Not only in Marxism but in many other movements as well there has come about what one might call a transformation of the old social instincts into conscious concepts.

But what was this new element that had entered into social science, into this favorite son of modern thought? It was the conceptions, the new mode of thinking that had been developed in the pursuit of natural science. And today we are faced with the important question: how far shall we be able to progress within a web of social forces woven from such concepts? If we listen to the world's rumbling, if we consider all the hopeless prospects that result from the attempts that are made on the basis of these conceptions, we are confronted with a dismal picture indeed. One is then faced with the portentous question: how does it stand with those very concepts that we have acquired from natural science and now wish to apply to our lives, concepts that—this has become clearly evident in many areas already—are actually rejected by life itself? This vital question, this burning question with which our age confronts us, was the occasion of my choosing the theme, “The Boundaries of Natural Science.” Just this question requires that I treat the theme in such a way that we receive an overview of what natural science can and cannot contribute to an appropriate social order and an idea of the kind of scientific research, the kind of world view to which one would have to turn in order to confront seriously the demands made upon us by our time.

What is it we see if we consider the method according to which one thinks in scientific circles and how others have been influenced in their thinking by those circles? What do we see? We see first of all that an attempt is made to acquire data and to order it in a lucid system with the help of clear concepts. We see how an attempt is made to order the data gathered from inanimate nature by means of the various sciences—mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.—to order them in a systematic manner but also to permeate the data with certain concepts so that they become intelligible. With regard to inanimate nature, one strives for the greatest possible clarity, for crystal-clear concepts. And a consequence of this striving for lucid concepts is that one seeks, if it is at all possible, to permeate everything that one finds in one's environment with mathematical formulae. One wants to translate data gathered from nature into clear mathematical formulae, into the transparent language of mathematics.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, scientists already believed themselves very close to being able to give a mathematical-mechanical explanation of natural phenomena that would be thoroughly transparent. It remained for them only to explain the little matter of the atom. They wanted to reduce it to a point-force [Kraftpunkt] in order to be able to express its position and momenta in mathematical formulae. They believed they would then be justified in saying: I contemplate nature, and what I contemplate there is in reality a network of interrelated forces and movements wholly intelligible in terms of mathematics. Hence there arose the ideal of the so-called “astronomical explanation of nature,” which states in essence: just as one brings to expression the relationships between the various heavenly bodies in mathematical formulae, so too should one be able to compute everything within this smallest realm, within the “little cosmos” of atoms and molecules, in terms of lucid mathematics. This was a striving that climaxed in the last third of the nineteenth century: it is now on the decline again. Over against this striving for a crystal-clear, mathematical view of the world, however, there stands something entirely different, something that is called forth the moment one tries to extend this striving into realms other than that of inanimate nature. You know that in the course of the nineteenth century the attempt was made to carry this point of view, at least to some extent, into the life sciences. And though Kant had said that a second Newton would never be found who could explain living organisms according to a causal principle similar to that used to explain inorganic nature, Haeckel could nevertheless claim that this second Newton had been found in Darwin, that Darwin had actually tried, by means of the principle of natural selection, to explain how organisms evolve in the same “transparent” terms. And one began to aim for just such a clarity, a clarity at least approaching that of mathematics, in all explanations, proceeding all the way up to the explanation of man himself. Something thereby was fulfilled which certain scientists explained by saying that man's need to understand the causes of phenomena is satisfied only when he arrives at such a transparent, lucid view of the world.

And yet over against this there stands something entirely different. One comes to see that theory upon theory has been contrived in order to construct a view of the world such as I have just described, and ever and again those who strove for such a view of the world called forth—often immediately—their own opposition. There always arose the other party, which demonstrated that such a view of the world could never produce valid explanations, that such a view of the world could never ultimately satisfy man's need to know. On the one hand it was argued how necessary it is to keep one's world view within the lucid realm of mathematics, while on the other hand it was shown that such a world view would, for example, remain entirely incapable of constructing even the simplest living organism in thought of mathematical clarity or, indeed, even of constructing a comprehensible model of organic substance. It was as though the one party continually wove a tissue of ideas in order to explain nature, and the other party—sometimes the same party—continually unraveled it.

It has been possible to follow this spectacle—for it seems just that to anyone who is able to view it with an unprejudiced eye—within the scientific work and striving of the last fifty years especially. If one has sensed the full gravity of the situation, that with regard to this important question nothing but a weaving and unraveling of theories has taken place, one can pose the question: is not the continual striving for such a conceptual explanation of phenomena perhaps superfluous? Is not the proper answer to any question that arises when one confronts phenomena perhaps that one should simply allow the facts to speak for themselves, that one should describe what occurs in nature and forgo any more detailed accounting? Is it not possible that all such explanations show only that humanity is still tied to its mother's apron strings, that humanity in its infancy sought a kind of luxury? Would not humanity, come of age, have to say to itself: we must not strive at all for such explanation; we get nowhere in that way and must simply extirpate the need to know? Why not? As we become older we outgrow the need to play; why, if we were justified in doing so, should we not simply outgrow the need for explanations?

Just such a question could already emerge in the most extraordinarily significant way when, on August 14, 1872, du Bois-Reymond stood before the Second General Meeting of the Association of German Scientists and Physicians to deliver his famous address, “The Boundaries of Natural Science” [“Grenzen des Naturerkennens”], an address still worthy of consideration today. Yet despite the amount that has been written about this address by the important physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, many still do not realize that it represents one of the important junctures in the evolution of the modern world view.

In medieval Scholasticism all of man's thinking, all of his notional activity, was determined by the view that one could explain the broad realms of nature in terms of certain concepts but that one had to draw the line upon reaching the super-sensible. The super-sensible had to be the object of revelation. They felt that man should stand in a relation to the super-sensible in such a way that he would not even wish to penetrate it with the same concepts he formed concerning the realms of nature and external human existence. A limit was set to knowledge on the side of the super-sensible, and it was strongly emphasized that such a limit had to exist, that it simply lay within human nature and the order of the universe that such a limit be recognized. This placement of a limit to knowledge was then renewed from an entirely different side by thinkers and researchers such as du Bois-Reymond. They were no longer Schoolmen, no longer theologians, but just as the medieval theologian, proceeding according to his own mode of thinking, had set a limit to knowledge at the super-sensible, so these thinkers and researchers set a limit at the sensible. The limit was meant to apply above all to the realm of external sensory data.

There were two concepts in particular that du Bois-Reymond had in mind, which to him established the limits natural science could reach but beyond which it could not proceed. Later he increased that number by five in his lecture, “The Seven Enigmas of the World,” but in the first lecture he spoke of the two concepts, “matter” and “consciousness.” He said that when contemplating nature we are forced, in thinking systematically, to apply concepts in such a way that we eventually arrive at the notion of matter. Just what this mysterious entity in space we call “matter” is, however, we can never in any way resolve. We must simply assume the concept “matter,” though it is opaque. If only we assume this opaque concept “matter,” we can apply our mathematical formulae and calculate the movements of matter in terms of the formulae. The realm of natural phenomena becomes comprehensible if only we can posit this “opaque” little point millions upon millions of times. Yet surely we must also assume that it is this same material world that first builds up our bodies and unfolds its own activity within them, so that there rises up within us, by virtue of this corporeal activity, what eventually becomes sensation and consciousness. On the one hand we confront a world of natural phenomena requiring that we construct a concept of “matter,” while on the other hand we confront ourselves, experience the fact of consciousness, observe its phenomena, and surmise that whatever it is we assume to be matter must also lie at the foundation of consciousness. But how, out of these movements of matter, out of inanimate, dead movement, there arises consciousness, or even simple sensation, is a mystery that we cannot possibly fathom. This is the other pole of all the uncertainties, all the limits to knowledge: how can we explain consciousness, or even the simplest sensation?

With regard to these two questions, then—What is matter? How does consciousness arise out of material processes?—du Bois-Reymond maintains that as researchers we must confess: ignorabimus, we shall never know. That is the modern counterpart to medieval Scholasticism. Medieval Scholasticism stood at the limit of the super-sensible world. Modern natural science stands at the limit delineated in essence by two concepts: “matter,” which is everywhere assumed within the sensory realm but nowhere to be found, and “consciousness,” which is assumed to originate within the sense world, although one can never comprehend how.

If one considers this development of modern scientific thought, must one not then say to oneself that scientific research is entangling itself in a kind of web, and only outside of this web can one find the world? For in the final analysis it is there, where matter haunts space, that the external world lies. If this is the one place into which one cannot penetrate, one has no way in which to come to terms with life. Within man one finds the fact of consciousness. Does one come at all near to it with explanations conceived in observing external nature? If in one's search for explanations one pulls up short at human life, how, then, can one arrive at notions of how to live in a way worthy of a human being? How, if one cannot understand the existence or the essence of man according to the assumptions one makes concerning that existence?

As this course of lectures progresses it shall, I believe, become evident beyond any doubt that it is the impotence of the modern scientific method that has made us so impotent in our thinking about social questions. Many today still do not perceive what an important and essential connection exists between the two. Many today still do not perceive that when in Leipzig on August 14, 1872 du Bois-Reymond spoke his ignorabimus, this same ignorabimus was spoken also with regard to all social thought. What this ignorabimus actually meant was: we stand helpless in the face of real life; we have only shadowy concepts; we have no concepts with which to grasp reality. And now, almost fifty years later, the world demands just such concepts of us. We must have them. Such concepts, such impulses, cannot come out of lecture-halls still laboring in the shadow of this ignorabimus. That is the great tragedy of our time. Here lie questions that must be answered.

We want to proceed from fundamental principles to such an answer and above all to consider the question: is there not perhaps something more intelligent that we as human beings could do than what we have done for the last fifty years, namely tried to explain nature after the fashion of ancient Penelope, by weaving theories with one hand and unraveling them with the other? Ah yes, if only we could, if only we could stand before nature entirely without thoughts! But we cannot: to the extent that we are human beings and wish to remain human beings we cannot. If we wish to comprehend nature, we must permeate it with concepts and ideas. Why must we do that?

We must do that, ladies and gentlemen, because only thereby does consciousness awake, because only thereby do we become conscious human beings. Just as each morning upon opening our eyes we achieve consciousness in our interaction with the external world, so essentially did consciousness awake within the evolution of humanity. Consciousness, as it is now, was first kindled through the interaction of the senses and thinking with the outer world. We can watch the historical development of consciousness in the interaction of man's senses with outer nature. In this process consciousness gradually was kindled out of the dull, sleepy cultural life of primordial times. Yet one must only consider with an open mind this fact of consciousness, this interaction between the senses and nature, in order to observe something extraordinary transpiring within man. We must look into our soul to see what is there, either by remaining awhile before fully awakening within that dull and dreamy consciousness or by looking back into the almost dreamlike consciousness of primordial times. If we look within our soul at what lies submerged beneath the surface consciousness arising in the interaction between senses and the outer world, we find a world of representations, faint, diluted to dream-pictures with hazy contours, each image fading into the other. Unprejudiced observation establishes this. The faintness of the representations, the haziness of the contours, the fading of one representation into another: none of this can cease unless we awake to a full interaction with external nature. In order to come to this awakening which is tantamount to becoming fully human—our senses must awake every morning to contact with nature. It was also necessary, however, for humanity as a whole to awake out of a dull, dreamlike vision of primordial worlds within the soul to achieve the present clear representations.

In this way we achieve the clarity of representation and the sharply delineated concepts that we need in order to remain awake, to remain aware of our environment with a waking soul. We need all this in order to remain human in the fullest sense of the word. But we cannot simply conjure it all up out of ourselves. We achieve it only when our senses come into contact with nature: only then do we achieve clear, sharply delineated concepts. We thereby develop something that man must develop for his own sake—otherwise consciousness would not awake. It is thus not an abstract “need for explanations,” not what du Bois-Reymond and other men like him call “the need to know the causes of things,” that drives us to seek explanations but the need to become human in the fullest sense through observing nature. We thus may not say that we can outgrow the need to explain like any other child's play, for that would mean that we would not want to become human in the fullest sense of the word—that is to say, not want to awake in the way we must awake.

Something else happens in this process, however. In coming to such concepts as we achieve in contemplating nature, we at the same time impoverish our inner conceptual life. Our concepts become clear, but their compass becomes diminished, and if we consider exactly what it is we have achieved by means of these concepts, we see that it is an external, mathematical-mechanical lucidity. Within that lucidity, however, we find nothing that allows us to comprehend life. We have, as it were, stepped out into the light but lost the very ground beneath our feet. We find no concepts that allow us to typify life, or even consciousness, in any way. In exchange for the clarity we must seek for the sake of our humanity, we have lost the content of that for which we have striven. And then we contemplate nature around us with our concepts. We formulate such complex ideas as the theory of evolution and the like. We strive for clarity. Out of this clarity we formulate a world view, but within this world view it is impossible to find ourselves, to find man. With our concepts we have moved out to the surface, where we come into contact with nature. We have achieved clarity, but along the way we have lost man. We move through nature, apply a mathematical-mechanical explanation, apply the theory of evolution, formulate all kinds of biological laws; we explain nature; we formulate a view of nature—within which man cannot be found. The abundance of content that we once had has been lost, and we are confronted with a concept that can be formed only with the clearest but at the same time most desiccated and lifeless thinking: the concept of matter. And an ignorabimus in the face of the concept of matter is essentially the confession: I have achieved clarity; I have struggled through to an awakening of full consciousness, but thereby I have lost the essence of man in my thinking, in my explanations, in my comprehension.

And now we turn to look within. We turn away from matter to consider the inner realm of consciousness. We see how within this inner realm of consciousness representations pass in review, feelings come and go, impulses of will flash through us. We observe all this and notice that when we attempt to bring the inner realm into the same kind of focus that we achieved with regard to the external world, it is impossible. We seem to swim in an element that we cannot bring into sharp contours, that continually fades in and out of focus. The clarity for which we strive with regard to outer nature simply cannot be achieved within. In the most recent attempts to understand this inner realm, in the Anglo-American psychology of association, we see how, following the example of Hume, Mill, James, and others, the attempt was made to impose the clarity attained in observation of external nature upon inner sensations and feelings. One attempts to impose clarity upon sensation, and this is impossible. It is as though one wanted to apply the laws of flight to swimming. One does not come to terms at all with the element within which one has to move. The psychology of association never achieves sharpness of contour or clarity regarding the phenomenon of consciousness. And even if one attempts with a certain sobriety, as Herbart has done, to apply mathematical computation to human mental activity [das Vorstellen], to the human soul, one finds it possible, but the computations hover in the air. There is no place to gain a foothold, because the mathematical formulae simply cannot comprehend what is actually occurring within the soul. While one loses man in coming to clarity regarding the external world, one finds man, to be sure—it goes without saying that one finds man when one delves into consciousness—but there is no hope of achieving clarity, for one swims about, borne hither and thither in an insubstantial realm. One finds man, but one cannot find a valid image of man.

It was this that du Bois-Reymond felt very clearly but was able to express only much less clearly—only as a kind of vague feeling about scientific research on the whole—when in August 1872 he spoke his ignorabimus. What this ignorabimus wants to say in essence is that on the one hand, we have in the historical evolution of humanity arrived at clarity regarding nature and have constructed the concept of matter. In this view of nature we have lost man—that is, ourselves. On the other hand we look down into consciousness. To this realm we want to apply that which has been most important in arriving at the contemporary explanation of nature. Consciousness rejects this lucidity. This mathematical clarity is entirely out of place. To be sure, we find man in a sense, but our consciousness is not yet strong enough, not yet intensive enough to comprehend man fully.

Again, one is tempted to answer with an ignorabimus, but that cannot be, for we need something more than an ignorabimus in order to meet the social demands of the modern world. The limit that du Bois-Reymond had come up against when he spoke [about] his ignorabimus on August 14, 1872 lies not within the human condition as such but only within its present stage of historical human evolution. How are we to transcend this ignorabimus? That is the burning question.

• 1. “... that social renewal must begin with the renewal of our thinking.” The original German (“... dass die soziale Erneuerung vom Geiste ausgehen musse”) might be translated alternately “that social renewal must proceed from the spirit.” The German word “Geist”—bane of all who would translate German into English—embraces two meanings that remain in English quite distinct “mind” and “spirit.” The translator must choose one, even though the German always implies both. If he chooses the former, he runs the risk of seriously distorting the author's intentions (as did the man who translated Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes as The Phenomenology of Mind). If he chooses the latter, he flies in the face of the dubious connotations that “spirit” and “spiritual” convey—no doubt as a result of the basically empirical cast of English thought. Although “Geist” as Steiner uses it should almost invariably be translated “spirit” (which of course comprehends “wind”), here the context has led us to choose the more restricted meaning.

The pictures we shall show today will enable us to give a kind of recapitulation of various things that came before our souls in former lectures. I shall draw attention today to further aspects, arising out of what we have said before. In the course of these studies, we have distinguished between the more Southern European and the Northern or Mid-European artistic streams and we have indicated characteristic aspects of these two. I do not wish to repeat what has already been set forth. Today we are able to show some further reproductions of pictures by Raphael, and I wish to say a few words about him, unfolding—if I may so describe it—a more special outcome of our ideas concerning the artistic genius of the South.

Anyone who lets Raphael's creations work upon his soul, will admit that in Raphael—with respect to certain artistic intentions—the highest ideal has been attained. When we let them work upon us and try to understand them, we ask ourselves again and again: What is it that comes to expression in his works, and how does it stand in relation to the World? Think for a moment from this aspect of the Madonna della Sedia,—how this picture is placed in a great world-perspective: It is so, indeed, in all directions. To begin with, you may consider the picture as an outcome of the Christian world-conception. So perfectly does it express this theme: The Birth of Christ Jesus in connection with the Madonna, that we must say, 'The ides, the meaning, the impulse, the world-historic significance which it is desired to express, has here been expressed by means that cannot ever be transcended.

From a certain point of view you cannot imagine a further enhancement of this theme—the Madonna with the Jesus Child—in its impression on the human soul. One of the ideas of the Christian conception of the world has come to expression here in the highest imaginable way, seen from a certain aspect.

1. Raphael. Madonna With Child.

And now let us look at the picture for a moment as though we knew nothing of the Christian world-conception. Let us consider it in the way Herman Grimm once spoke of it, simply as an expression of the deep mystery of the relation of the mother to the child. A mother with her child: Once more, the highest means of expression have been found by Raphael for one of the most mysterious themes in the whole Cosmos, as it lies before us human beings living in the Physical. Thus even if we take the pure picture of Nature—the mother and child—apart from the world-historic happenings, once more the thing is perfect in itself, the highest of its kind.

It is always so with Raphael. His themes are of universal significance, and perfectly expressed,—the means of expression proceeding from those streams and influences which we recognise as characteristic of the South. Always, however, his themes must be seen in the context of great universal meanings. We can regard them from a Christian aspect (and the above two points of view are by no means the only ones),—looking at it in a Christian way, the theme places itself at once in a great context of Nature. Again it rises free from the individually human; we seem to forget the human being that worked to create it—the human being, Raphael himself. Behind the artist stand great cosmic perspectives—world-conceptions coming to expression in him. This, indeed, is to characterise such an artist as Raphael, as the artist of an epoch that was drawing to it close: the Fourth Post Atlantean epoch. Such epochs, when they draw near their end—or when their inner essence reaches beyond the boundary of times, often bring forth their very highest.

We shall presently see how very different it is when we consider in this light, say, the personality of Albrecht Dürer. There it is altogether different. But you might also think of the Sistine Madonna, even as we have now spoken of the Madonna della Sedia. Again we should have to say: What is here placed before us interests us, above all, inasmuch as it stands out against the background of a great world-conception. Without this background of a great world-conception, the Sistine Madonna is, indeed, unthinkable.

2. Raphael. Sistine Madonna With Child

3. Raphael. Sistine Madonna With Child (detail)

Looking at some of Raphael's pictures today, let us bear in mind the aspect which has thus been characterised. For Raphael to create in this way—for his pictures to arise out of a mighty world-perspective—something of cosmic law and principle had to be working in his very soul. This is, indeed, the case. It comes to expression in the remarkable course of his life, which was already emphasized by Hermann Grimm. Raphael's work takes its course in regular cyclic periods. At the age of twenty-one he creates the Sposalize; four years later the Entombment; four years after this he completes the Frescoes of the Camera della Segnatura; four years later, once again, the Cartoons for the tapestries in the Vatican and the two Madonnas. And finally, four years after this, at the age of thirty-seven, he is working at the Transfiguration, which stands unfinished when he leaves this physical plane. In cyclic periods of four years, something of the nature of a cosmic principle works in Raphael. Truly, we here have something that proceeds from a great cosmic background. Hence Raphael's work is so strongly separated from his personality. Again and again the question comes to us: How is it that the themes—and they are world-historic themes—come to expression in his work so perfectly; so self-contained, so inwardly complete?

Down to this day, the study of Art derives—more than from any other source—from that great Art in the center of which is Raphael.

The study of Art in the exoteric life today is more or less of this kind. All its available ideas have been learned from the Art which finds its highest expression in Raphael—the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Thus in the outer life the concepts to express this Art are the most perfect, and all other Art is measured by this standard. The works of this Art are the ideal, and we have few words at our disposal, few concepts and ideas, even to speak of any other streams in Art, specifically different from this one. That is the unique thing.

And now we will let pass before our souls a number of pictures by Raphael, most of which we have not yet seen in these lectures.

4. Raphael. The Vision of Ezekiel. (Florence, Palazzo Pitti.)

4. Raphael. The Vision of Ezekiel. (detail) (Pitti. Florence.)

The ideas, the living conceptions, out of which such a picture proceeded even in Raphael's time, are naturally no longer near us today. To represent so truly this wandering of the soul in human form through the spiritual world, would no longer be attainable today for those who have not Spiritual Science. The animal nature below expressed what man has cast aside from himself, but it is still there, needless to say, even in his etheric body, and we find it there when the etheric is freed from the physical. The union of the soul with something childlike, as it is is represented by the angel figures here, is an absolutely true conception. The conception corresponds to a reality. We must consider man in his full being, such as he really is. In recent communications on the Guardian of the Threshold we had to speak of the Threefold being of Man. This threefold nature of man emerges everywhere, where reference is made to the Spiritual part of man emancipated from the Physical. We find this threefoldness in manifold forms—not symbolic, but corresponding to spiritual Realities. And so we find it here, in the full-grown Man related to the Child and the Beast.

5. Perugino. The Marriage of Maria. (Vienna, Albertina.)

Today we are able to show a study from the Sposalizo, the picture with which Raphael's great career as an artist properly begins. He did this at the age of twenty-one—at the beginning of the four-year period which dominated all his work.

6. Perugino. “Sposalizo”. (Caen.)

7. Raphael. “Sposalizo”. (Milan, Brera.)

8. Raphael. The Call of St. Peter. (London, Kensington Museum.)

9. Raphael. The Road to Calvary. (Madrid, Prado.)

10. Raphael. Sketch of the Mourning for Christ. (Louvre. Paris.)

11. Raphael. Sermon of St. Paul at Athens. (London, Kensington Museum.)

We will now show once more a reproduction of the so-called “Disputa,” with certain details.

12. Raphael. Disputa. (Vatican. Rome.)

13. Raphael. The Holy Trinity. (Perugia, San Severo.)

The Holy Trinity, as it is called.

14. Raphael. Sketch for the Disputa. (Windsor.)

15. Raphael. St. Cecilia. (Bologna.)

And now, as an example of Raphael's portraiture:—

16. Raphael. Cardinal Bihbiens. (Pitti. Florence.)

The next two are examples of his tapestries in the Vatican.

17. Raphael. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. (Tapestry in the Vatican.)

18. Raphael. The Healing of the Lame. (Tapestry in the Vatican.)

These are the things of which Goethe said that nothing he had known till then could compare with them in greatness.

Looking back once more over the pictures by Raphael which we have seen today, I beg you observe how we may recognise in them the echoing of a mighty tradition of great Art. Even the sketches which we have shown today reveal this most especially. Raphael's work is the last, the highest, the closing act in a great tradition. There is also another point I would ask you to consider. Think of the picture of the Sermon of St. Paul and others—the “Disputa,” for example. You may take any one of those that we have seen today. In every case, having distinguished the subject of the picture, you may naturally ask yourself about the event or personality represented. But it will never be sufficient to answer: The subject is such and such; it represents this or that. In Raphael's case you will have to ask: How is the artist contriving to express—whatever the subject is—in accordance with the ideas and canons of great Art? We cannot merely ask: How would St. Paul actually have lifted up his hand to speak? With Raphael we must ask: What angle will the arm have to make with the body according to aesthetic laws of balance and proportion? And so forth ... A magic breath is poured out over it all,—a magic breath of aesthetic traditions, of harmony and balance. Look at the boy who stands here, in this picture. It is not enough to ask: What is going on in the soul of the boy? Your question must, rather, be directed to these laws of artistic harmony. See how the line of the arm, reaching out on either side, is placed into the composition. In short, you can distinguish what is purely artistic from the underlying subject-matter. Here, however, the artist's power is so magnificent that it draws the subject-matter into its own sphere. With such an artist as Raphael, we may, indeed, pronounce the word, for it is literally true:—“Artistic truth makes all the rest true,—compels all the rest into its circle.”

You cannot apply this saying, in its present meaning, to the works we shall now let pass before our souls. We will begin with one by Martin Schongauer, who died in 1488.

19. Martin Schongauer. The Road to Calvary.

Here you see the very opposite. To begin with, the artist is simply concerned to express his subject. No longer is there poured out over it the magic breath of a peculiarly aesthetic truth, the climax of a great tradition. Here the effort is, to the best of the artist's technique and ability, with the artistic means at his disposal, to bring to expression what is there in the souls of men. Here the world speaks to us directly—not through the medium of a tradition of great Art.

We will now let work upon our souls the personality of Albrecht Dürer; showing a number of pictures which we did not see in the former lectures. In Albrecht Dürer, whom we may speak of as a contemporary of Raphael, we have before us an altogether different personality. It is impossible to think of Dürer's works in the same way as of Raphael's. In Dürer's case we shall not easily forget the personality, the human being. Not that we must always necessarily imagine him; but the pictures themselves are eloquent of all that is direct and intimate and near to the human soul, springing from the soul with elemental force. Raphael paints with the ever-present background of great world-perspectives. He is only conceivable if we imagine, as it were, the Genius of Christianity itself painting in the soul of Raphael. And, again, he is only conceivable as one who stands at the close of a great epoch, during which pupils were learning from their Masters many a tradition of aesthetic law, artistic harmony,—learning that certain things should be done in certain ways, to correspond with the canons of great Art.

In Raphael's works these things are always there before us. In Dürer's work, on the other hand, we feel in the background, as it were, the aura of the life of the time in Middle Europe,—the German towns and cities. Invisibly his pictures are pervaded by all that blossomed forth in the free life of the cities, working its way towards the Reformation. Nor does he stand before us with any cosmic perspectives in the background. It is, rather, the ordinary individual man's approach to the Bible and to his fellow-men, bringing his own soul to expression. The Human element can never be separated from his works. We cannot seek in Dürer for a cosmic principle working through his soul, as we can in Raphael. But we may look for something intimate and deep; deeply connected—we cannot say so too often—with the human soul, its feelings and its seeking, its longing and striving.

20. Dürer. The Four Witches. (Etching)

21. Dürer. Hercules.

22. Dürer. Melanchthon Etching.

Here we have a portrait of Melanchthon, the theological bearer of the Reformation, as against Luther, who was the “priestly” bearer.

23. Dürer. “Rosenkranzfest.” (Prague.)

This picture is now in the “Rudolfinum” at Prague. The Pope, the Emperor and representatives of Christianity are being crowned with roses by Mary, the Jesus Child and St. Dominic. The two figures against the tree trunk will be shown in detail in the next slide.

24. Dürer. Portrait of Himself and Pirkheimer. (Detail of the above.)

Further examples of Dürer's portraiture:—

25. Dürer. Portrait of his Father. (Uffizi. Florence.)

26. Dürer. Portrait. (Prado. Madrid.)

Looking at such a portrait, the whole life of the time comes vividly before you. Truly, in this sense Dürer is an historic figure of the very first rank. No historic document tells us so well, what the people of that time were like.

We shall now show some characteristic examples of Dürer's drawings—etchings and woodcuts. To begin with, from his cycle on the Apocalypse—fifteen leaves, done in 1498.

27. Dürer. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (1498.)

28. Dürer. The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Seven-headed Dragon (1498.)

29. Dürer. The Adoration of the Lamb and The Hymn of the Chosen. (1497).

30. Dürer. The Battle of the Angels. (1498.)

31. Dürer. Michael and the Dragon. (1493.)

And now we will show a number of pictures from the series of etchings of the Passion—known as the “Kupferstich-Passion.”

32. Dürer. The Kerchief of St. Veronica. (Etching)

Then the motif that occurs again and again in that time:—

33. Dürer. The Man of Sorrows. (Etching)

34. Dürer. The Scourging. (Etching)

35. Dürer. The Crowning with Thorns. (Etching)

36. Dürer. Ecce Homo. (Etching)

We will next show a number of pictures from the Holzschnitt-Passion—of thirty-six small woodcuts. They are extraordinarily tender and intimate. The first is the title-page:—

37. Dürer. Christ with the Crown of Thorns. (Woodcut)

38. Dürer. Saint Veronica. (Woodcut)

39. Dürer. The Last Supper. (Woodcut)

40. Dürer. The Scourging. (Woodcut)

41. Dürer. Ecce Homo. (Woodcut)

42. Dürer. The Way to Calvary. (Woodcut)

43. Dürer. Christ on the Cross. (Woodcut)

44. Dürer. Mourning for Christ. (Woodcut)

45. Dürer. The Resurrection. (Woodcut)

46. Dürer. The Ascension. (Woodcut)

We can also show two pictures by Hans Baldung, who worked for a certain time, at any rate—in Dürer's workshop. These pictures date from the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century.

47. Hans Baldung. The Three Fates.

48. Hans Baldung. Ecce Homo.

49. Hans Sebald Beham. The Man of Sorrows.

I would like to make the following remarks:—The transition from the Fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and all that is connected with it, finds expression—far more than we can realise from the ordinary textbooks of History—in the whole life of the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. We must remember that at such times, at the turning-point of one epoch and another, many things are perceptible in the life of the time, expressing the mighty transformation that is taking place. History, truly, does not take its course—though the text-books might lead one to suppose so—like a perpetual succession of causes and effects. At characteristic moments, at the turning-points of epochs, characteristic phenomena emerge, in the most varied spheres of life. Thus, at the transition from the age of the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings to that of the Spiritual Soul, phenomena appear in all domains of life, revealing how men felt when the impulses of the Spiritual Soul were drawing near. The evolution of the Spiritual Soul involved the development of those relationships with the purely physical plane into which men had to enter during the fifth post-Atlantean age. To a high degree, man was about to be fettered to that physical plane. Naturally, this brought in its train all the phenomena of reaction—of opposition and revulsion at this process. Moreover, at the same time many things emerged out of the former epoch, reaching over with multitudinous ramifications into the new.

Among the many symptoms of that time we see, for instance, the intense preoccupation of man with the phenomenon of Death. In many different spheres—as we can easily convince ourselves—the thought of Death came very near to men. Death as a great mystery—the Mystery of Death—drew near to men at the very time when their Souls had to prepare to come out most of all on to the physical plane of existence.

Moreover. the things of the fourth epoch were reaching over into the Fifth. There were the excesses of the Papacy which had degenerated more and more into a pure impulse of might. There were the excesses connected with the old divisions—the riches of the higher orders, their overweening arrogance, their growing superficiality of life,—while the religious themes themselves were being made external, flat and superficial. Those human beings, on the other hand, who attained some inwardness of soul were pondering deeply on the penetration of the Spiritual world into the physical. Added to this, there was the absolute need to turn one's attention to the spiritual world; inasmuch as the seeds of decay and destruction were entering most terribly into the physical world just at that time. For in those centuries the plague was raging far and wide in Europe—truly, an awful death, Death, in the Plague, came face to face with men as a visible phenomenon in its most awful form.

In Art, too, we see this intensive study of the significance of Death. It comes before us especially in the famous Procession of Death on the cemetery wall at Pisa—one of the earliest appearances of this kind. Then we find many pictures of Death as it draws near to men under the inexorable laws of Fate—draws near to man of whatsoever rank or class. The “Dance of Death,” the “Wandering of Death through the World,” Death's entry into all human relationships—this becomes a very favorite theme. It was out of this mood and feeling that Holbein himself created his cycle on the Dance of Death, three examples of which we shall now show. In Holbein's Dance of Death the object was especially to show how Death approaches the rich man, for instance; approaches man of every social rank—from the highest in the land to the lowest. Moreover, the object was to show Death as a righteous judge. Holbein in his Dance of Death desired to show every conceivable circumstance under which Death draws near to human life.

44a. Holbein. Death and the King.

Here we see Death coming to the King, to tear him away from his royal life.

44b. Holbein. Death and the Monk.

The people of that time had great delight in pictures such as these. This was the time when the Reformation strove to put an end to all the growing worldliness and emptiness of the religious life—to the corruption of the Church and the religious orders.

45. Holbein. Death and the Rich Man.

Death draws near to the rich man, and finds him with his pile of money.

My dear friends, we have seen how the German Art came to expression in these great examples—and especially in the greatest, in Dürer,—at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. One question cannot but interest us again and again: How is it with the origin and evolution of this special stream of Art? In order to say a little more upon this subject, we shall presently show a few pictures revealing how the several factors stood at a characteristic moment. We can make very interesting studies on the evolution of the Mid-European or German Art—and notably the Southern German Art—at the beginning of the 15th century. True, the pictures of the period, which we shall show, give only the outcome of a long line of evolution. But this outcome appears in them strongly and characteristically. When we wish to characterise a great range of phenomena, we have to sum up many things in a few words; and if we desire to be true, it is by no means easy ... It may be that the characteristic pictures we choose does not fully represent all that is here intended. But if we take things on the whole, we shall find it is confirmed, undoubtedly.

The origin of the Mediaeval Art of the German people shows itself most characteristically on the slopes of the Alps reaching out into Southern Germany, into the regions of Southern Bavaria and Swabia. And we must realise that here was a flowing together of two factors. The one represented by all that was imported from the South along the paths of evolution of the Church—and notably the Roman Church system. We must decidedly imagine (though the historic documents contain little about it) that in artistic matters, too, many an impulse came through the Church and the clerical orders. This applies especially to the districts to which I have just referred. Undoubtedly, many priests and clerics also became painters—good and bad—and they, of course, were always in close connection with the whole system of the Church, working its way upwards with its Roman, Latin impulses from the South. They carried with them all that was living there as artistic tradition. Needless to say, this great tradition reached its eminence only in men of genius, but it existed and was taught as a tradition even among lesser men. Tradition was especially at home in Italy, and thence the priests and monks absorbed and carried it with them to the North.

With all the other things which they derived from the Roman Church, they also took with them these conceptions of how the artist should work, ideas of artistic harmony and balance: Of how one ought to group the persons in a picture, and how the lines should go, and so forth. All this that we see at its loftiest eminence, say in the works of Michelangelo and, above all, Raphael, too, did not create naively, but, as I said before, out of a far-reaching artistic tradition. These artists knew how the figures should be grouped, in the composition, how the single figures should be placed, and so forth. And as I mentioned recently, they had brought the laws of perspective to a high degree of perfection.

All this was taken Northward. Monks and Priests who had enjoyed artistic training would frequently discuss such things with those who showed signs of artistic talent. But it must be said that the people whose home was in the German-speaking districts of what is now called Austria or Southern Bavaria or Swabia absorbed these rules of Art only with great reluctance. There can be no doubt about it; they confronted many of these things without real understanding. They heard that a thing must be done so, and so; but it did not truly appeal to them, it did not strike home. They had not yet developed in themselves a vision for these things. For a period, from which little has been preserved, we must assume, proceeding from these districts, works of Art carrying forward in a very clumsy fashion whatever had to do with the great artistic tradition of the Latin, Roman South. They could not enter into it; they had very little talent for it. The talents of the people of these districts lay in another direction.

I have spoken of all that was carried Northward by the Roman priesthood. This, as I said, was the one factor. The other was what I would call the elemental originality of heart and mind of the human beings themselves who in these regions showed any kind of talent for the Art of painting. They had no talent to follow the rules which were considered the highest requirements of Art in the South. To begin with, they had no eye for perspective. That a picture must somewhat express the fact that one figure is standing more in the foreground and another towards the back,—this they could only understand with great difficulty. To the people of these districts in the first half of the 15th century the spatial conception was still well nigh a closed book. Yet these very districts are in many respects the source and fountainhead of German Art. They could not work their way through to feel the laws of perspective independently and of their own accord. At most, they felt that the things must somehow be expressed by overlapping. The figure that overlaps the other is in front, the other is behind. In this way they tried to bring some measure of spatial order into their pictures, and so they began to find their way into the laws of space.

Primitive as they still are, we see in these pictures—appearing so characteristically in the first half of the 15th century—how hard it is for that stream of evolution which tries to take shape out of the elemental forces of the human heart, to discover for itself the laws of artistic creation. We will now show some examples from the above-mentioned districts. We shall see that they had no real inner relation to the tradition that has been brought to them. They absorbed it, as it were, unwillingly, with reluctance. Nor had they yet the power to obey the laws of space out of their own understanding. To begin with, I will show you an artist of the first half of the 15th century: Lucas Moser.

46. Lucas Moser. The Voyage of Mary and Lazarus. (Altar-piece at Tiefenbronn.)

46. Lucas Moser. The Voyage of Mary and Lazarus. (detail)

Here you see how difficult, how well-nigh impossible the artist finds it to escape from the flat surface. He seems quite unable to obey any kind of perspective law. He creates out of the elemental forces of heart and mind, but his figures are in the flat—he can scarcely get out of the plane. It is, however, interesting for once to see something so primitive.

Lucas Moser was one of those artists, creating within a social order wherein undoubtedly some of the laws and canons of Art, that had been introduced from the South, were living. Some element of the Southern style undoubtedly plays into his works. At the same time he tries to contribute something of what he sees for himself. And the one thing does not quite agree with the other. For one does not actually see things in accordance with the laws of Art.

Look at this Voyage of the Saints across the Sea, as it is called. Look in the foreground (although one can scarcely speak of a “foreground” here),—see the water in which the ship is floating. The waves are merely indicated by the crests, painted in lighter color. If you try to imagine a visual point from which the whole picture might be seen, you will get into difficulties at once. We must imagine it high up so as to look down on the water. But that, again, will not agree with the aspect of the figures of the saints, below.

On the other hand, you see this artist is already striving towards what afterwards emerged—as their essential greatness—in the German artists of a later time, whom we have now considered. Look at the element of naturalism—the faithful portrayal of expression in the faces of these saints. And yet they are sitting on the very edge of the boat, so that they would certainly fall overboard at the least breath of wind. In spite of this, how intimate is the artist's observation; how delicately the souls are expressed. He makes an unskillful attempt to observe the laws of Art, and tries to be realistic at the same time, and the two things do not agree ... Needless to say, the face could not be in this position, in relation to the body (see the figure of the saint, with the mitre). There are countless faults of the same kind. It is all clue to the fact that the artist is striving on the one hand towards what afterwards became the real greatness of the German Art, while on the other hand he is impressed with certain rules. For instance: That there should be a full-face figure in the middle of the picture, and others in profile to contrast with it. He has been taught certain rules in arrangements of composition. All this he tries his best to observe. But he can only do so according to the measure of his own elementary conceptions. He has not yet worked his way through to any kind of perspective or observation of the laws of space.

Observe these little hills,—and yet the picture does not really recede towards the background. You will realise the immense progress that has been made by the time of Dürer and Holbein. And yet how short was the intervening time! This alter-piece was done in the first half of the 15th century. How strongly the forces must have worked, overcoming the artistic traditions imported from the South (for these they did not want) and bringing forth a new stream out of an independent elemental impulse. They rebelled against the Southern tradition and tended to overcome it, and to find for themselves what they required. And you have seen how far they got in a comparatively short time.

We will now show another picture by the same artist.

47. Lucas Moser. Saints Asleep. (Marseilles. From the Altar of Tiefenbronn.)

Look at this creation! It shows how the artist combines a clear vision of Nature with an absolute disregard of some of the simplest natural facts. The tiled roof and the church tower—the whole ensemble is such that the artist cannot possibly have seen it anywhere. He just puts it together, having learned certain rules about the distribution of figures in space. Yet look how he brings out the single items according to his own vision. There is a decided beginning of Naturalism. He tries to be naturalistic and yet to express what he feels should be. His subject is "Sleeping Saints," but he conceives that they must appear worthy and dignified. Look at the figure of St. Cedonius (?) here, with his mitre.

48. Lucas Moser. Saints Asleep. (Detail)

49. Lucas Moser. Self Portrait. (Detail)

Once more the whole thing seems on the flat. But you will already observe the first attempt to bring out of the spatial effects by the strong shadows thrown. His relations to the laws of perspective are very strained, to say the least. But he contrives to get the effect of space by the strong shadows, and altogether by the distribution of light and dark.

This, as we saw in former lectures, is a peculiar characteristic of the German stream,—to feel the quality of space by catching the light, using the spatial virtue of the light itself. Here we do not take our start from the laws of lineal perspective—laws of perspective drawing. We extend the surface forward and backward by discovering the hidden effects of light itself.

We can see this most significantly in another artist, who already seeks for truth of Nature, but can still be characterised fundamentally in the same way as the former one. I refer to Multscher.

50. Multscher. The Nativity. (Berlin.)

Here is a representation of the Birth of Christ. Once again there is really nothing of those Laws of Space that came from the South. But you see the beginnings of the spatial working of the light itself. Space is born, as it were, out of the activity of light, and in this element the artist works with keen attention. This picture dates from 1437.

In Moser's and Multscher's works we have a true artistic impulse, born out of the very nature of the German South. Here is the element that afterwards rose to its height in Dürer, Holbein and the rest, though the latter were also influenced from Flanders and the Netherlands. The Cologne Masters, too, are rooted in these same impulses. Again and again we see how wonderfully the characteristics emerge even at the very beginning of the evolution of such an impulse. Observe in this picture the striving to express the inner quality of soul of every single person. And yet the artist's relation to certain other truths of Nature is very strained; Imagine you were in this crowd of people standing in the background. Look at the faces. Considering how near some of them are, they could not be standing side by side in that way unless their arms were chopped off, right and left; the artist pays no heed to these elementary matters of spatial distribution. One person is dovetailed into the other. The next is another picture by Multscher.

51. Multscher. Christ in Gethsemane. (Town Hall. Sterzing.)

The artist tries to find his way into the representation of landscape. Note how deeply he has felt the three figures of the apostles, left behind. Yet how little he succeeds in making any real distinction between foreground and background. He seems almost unable to follow any of the laws of space. But he tries once more to express the spatial by the effects of light. Here once again we see the element which afterwards became so great in German Art.

52. Multscher. The Entombment. (Stuttgart. Museum.)

In Lucas Moser and in Multscher we see the actual beginnings of German Art. There are others, too, but very little has been preserved; most of it is to be found in the churches. With all their primitive unskilfulness, we have here the beginning of what emerged with real greatness in the pictures of a later date, that we have seen. They paint out of a primitive feeling, while they simply cannot find their way into the traditions that come to them from the South. Their inwardness is in opposition to these laws in which they are instructed. One more picture by Multscher.

53. Multscher. The Resurrection. (Berlin.)

All that we have said of the two artists comes out very prominently in this picture. If you look for a point from which these figures with the sarcophagus (for so we might call it) are seen, you have to look high up above. We are looking down on the whole scene. And yet if you look at the trees you will see, they are seen from a frontal aspect. There is no single visual point for the picture as a whole. The trees are seen from in front; the picture as a whole, from above. There is no single point of vision according to the laws of space. Indeed, whatever of perspective you do see in the pictures would largely be eliminated were it not for the strong differentiation of the space through the effects of the light itself. In this respect, our eyes will easily deceive us. You would look in vain for line perspective in this picture. You would find mistakes everywhere. I do not mean naturally admissible mistakes, but errors which by themselves would make the picture quite impossible. We see once more the striving to get beyond the mere linear perspective by means of a spatial depth and quality which the light itself begets.

We see how these artists of Middle Europe have to feel their own way towards a totality of composition. There is another interesting point,—less evident in these pictures, but you will find it in other works by Multscher belonging to the same altar-piece. His fine feeling for light enables him to bring out the facial expression beautifully. But he is scarcely able to do the eyes with artistic truth. You can see it here to some extent, though it is less evident than on other pictures. And as for the ears—he does them just as he has been taught. Here he does not yet possess a free and independent feeling. Thus on the one hand he observes what he has been told, but without much artistic understanding. The things he does according to tradition he does badly. On the other hand, we see in him, in a primitive form, what was only afterwards able to appear more perfectly in German Art.

It is, indeed, remarkable how all these things, which we find in the German Art, emerge already in a highly perfect form in the Hamburg Master, Meister Francke, who was practically a contemporary of Moser and Multscher.

54. Meister Francke. The Man of Sorrow. (Hamburg.)

In this Ecce Homo, this Man of Sorrows, you see how high a degree of perfection the expression of the Head of Christ, which was elaborated by and by in the course of time, had already reached. Compare this Head of Christ with the one by Multscher which we saw just now. You will recognise a great advance. Likewise, in the whole forming of the figures. Of course, the peculiar quality which afterwards came out through greater skill and variety of technique in Dürer's work,—in his paintings, etchings and woodcuts,—is lacking still.

55. Meister Francke. The Resurrection. (Schwerin.)

All in all, considering the artistic developments that are potentially there in these first beginnings, and that produced Dürer and Holbein and the others, we must admit that the thread is broken. For afterwards there came a break; they turned back again to the Roman, Latin principle. And in the 19th century, artistic evolution was decidedly on a retrogressive path. There can, however, be no doubt that this fact is connected with deep and significant laws of human evolution. This stream of evolution in Art works out of the element of light and dark, and discovers—as I tried to explain in the lecture on Rembrandt—the inner connection of the world of color with the light and dark. Through the historic necessity of the time, it could not but tend towards a certain Naturalism; but it can never find its culmination in Naturalism. For in this peculiar talent to perceive the inwardness of things, the possibility to paint, to represent the spiritual Mysteries, still lies inherent. When I say “inwardness of things,” I mean not merely inwardness of soul, but the inwardness of things themselves, expressed in the spatial laws of light and darkness which also contain the mysteries of color. Goethe, as you know, tried to express this systematically in his Theory of Color. This possibility, therefore, still lies open and unrealised in evolution. The possibility to paint the spiritual Mysteries out of the inner virtues of the world of color, out of the inner essence of the light and dark. And the possibilities in this direction can be extended also to the other Arts.

But such a thing can only be brought about through the inspiration of Spiritual Science, of the anthroposophical conception of the world. In the none too distant future, the possibilities that lie inherent in the beginnings of this stream of Art must all be brought together. To create out of the inner light—out of the forming and shaping power of the light—will at the same time be to create out of the inner source of being, and that, I need not say, can only be the Spiritual. In the portrayal of the sacred History, this stream in Art could not, in the nature of the case, attain the high perfection which Raphael attained, for instance. (Nevertheless, in some respects it attained a perfection of its own—notably in the great artists whose works we have seen again today.) But the Spiritual that pervades the works of this Art is still alive. We must only find the connection of what surges through these works of Art, with the underlying laws of the spiritual life. Then will spiritual Imagination and artistic fancy join together and create a true Imaginative Art.

To some extent, as a first beginning, this has been attempted in our (Goetheanum) Building. For this is, after all, a beginning of new artistic impulses. Naturally, there is something primitive about every new beginning; but we have ventured, none the less, to strive for something new and in a grander style. The time may come when people will understand what we have been striving for in this Building. Then it will be realised why certain occult impulses that came already to expression in this art which we have seen today and in the preceding and contemporary sculpture (examples of which we have also seen) remained to this day unrealised. It will be understood why a certain break was inevitable in the evolution of this art. How remote, after all, is that which emerges in the 19th century in the art of a Kaulbach or a Cornelius from what is living in this art which we have seen today! In Kaulbach, Cornelius, Overbeck and the rest, we see a mere repeat of the Southern element. In this art, on the other hand, we see on all hands a radical rebellion and revolution against the Latin and Roman.

He who is prepared to look more closely, will find still deeper connections. Think of the four pictures by Multscher which we have shown today. They represent, if I may say so, the native Swabian tendencies in the realm of Art. Here we find a certain native talent for a flat surface with the help of light. Anyone who has a feeling for finer, more intimate relationships will perceive a similar quality in the Philosophy of Hegel—likewise a product of the Swabian talent, and in that of Schelling, of whom the same thing may be said, and in the poetry of Holderlin.

This grasp of the flat surface, but working forth from the flat surface with the help of light,—we find it not only in the primitive beginnings of this art; we find it again even in Hegel's Philosophy. Hence Hegel's Philosophy, if I may say so, makes such a ‘flat’ impression on us. It is like a great canvas, like an ideal painting of the world. It works from the surface; and in its turn, after all, it can but be the philosophic beginnings of what will now work its way—not merely into this projection of Reality on the flat—but into the full Reality itself. And this “Reality,” I need not say, can be none other than the Spiritual.

These things are interrelated in all truth. What I have lately been trying to describe to you for other realms of life, with regard to the history and civilisation of Europe, is wonderfully confirmed, in all detail, in the sphere of Art. All that we recognised in the lecture the day before yesterday—the impulses working in the different regions of Europe—you can trace it again in the life of Art. Bring before your minds again the art of the Netherlands which we have seen,—coming from thence into Western Germany. Then consider what we have studied today—as something growing absolutely and originally out of the German spirit itself. For the country of which we have spoken today, the soil on which Lucas Moser and Multscher worked, is, after all, the central region of the German Spirit. It is here that the German Spirit has evolved most originally and most truly. Here, too, Christianity was inwardly absorbed, as though by an inner kinship with the spiritual nature of the German heart and mind. The absorption of Christianity was a far more inward process in these districts; and here the original and elemental gifts of the German nature came forth in the realms of Art. They did not accept what brought Christianity to them from the South in a form already marred by Rome; they tried to recreate Christianity themselves artistically out of their inner heart and feeling.

Such a thing could not emerge in the same measure in the more Northern regions of Germany without the coming of an impulse from the South. We see the same thing once more in the fact that Hegel's philosophy received its quickening from the Southern region, and Schelling's too; while, on the other hand, the philosophy of Kant reveals itself quite evidently as a North German product. The peculiar quality of the Kantian philosophy is not unconnected with the fact that the originally Prussian districts remained Heathen for comparatively long. They were brought over to Christianity at a later period and by a rather external process—a conversion far more external than in the Southern German districts. Prussia, properly speaking, remained Heathen till a very late period.

The things we otherwise recognise in historic evolution—we can find them confirmed in the evolution of Art and in the evolution of the life of Thought. For this very reason I wanted to place Moser and Multscher before you at the close of our considerations for today.