The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Whoever turns to the Gospel of St. Luke will, to begin with, only be able to feel dimly something of what it contains; but an inkling will then dawn on him that whole worlds, vast spiritual worlds, are revealed by this Gospel. After what was said in the last lecture, this will be obvious to us, for as we heard, spiritual research shows how the Buddhistic world-conception, with everything it was able to give to mankind, flowed into the Gospel of St. Luke. It may truly be said that Buddhism radiates from this Gospel, but in a special form, comprehensible to the simplest and most unsophisticated mind.

As could be gathered from the last lecture and will become particularly clear to-day, to understand Buddhism as presented to the world in the teachings of the great Buddha demands the application of lofty conceptions and an ascent to the pure, ethereal heights of the Spirit; a very great deal of preparation is required to grasp the essence of Buddhism. Its spiritual substance is contained in the Gospel of St. Luke in a form that can influence everyone who recognizes concepts and ideas that are essential for humanity. This will be readily understood when we get to the root of the mystery underlying the Gospel of St. Luke. Not only are the spiritual attainments of Buddhism presented to us through this Gospel; they come before us in an even nobler form, as though raised to a level higher than when they were a gift to humanity in India some six hundred years before our era.

In the lecture yesterday we spoke of Buddhism as the purest teaching of compassion and love; from the place in the world where Buddha worked a gospel of love and compassion streamed into the whole spiritual evolution of the Earth. The gospel of love and compassion lives in the true Buddhist when his own heart feels the suffering confronting him in the outer world from all living creatures. There we encounter Buddhistic love and compassion in the fullest sense of the words; but from the Gospel of St. Luke there streams to us something that is more than this all-embracing love and compassion. It might be described as the translation of love and compassion into deed. Compassion in the highest sense of the word is the ideal of the Buddhist; the aim of one who lives according to the message of the Gospel of St. Luke is to unfold love that acts. The true Buddhist can himself share in the sufferings of the sick; from the Gospel of St. Luke comes the call to take active steps to do whatever is possible to bring about healing. Buddhism helps us to understand everything that stirs the human soul; the Gospel of St. Luke calls upon us to abstain from passing judgment, to do more than is done to us, to give more than we receive! Although in this Gospel there is the purest, most genuine Buddhism, love translated into deed must be regarded as a progression, a sublimation, of Buddhism.

This aspect of Christianity—Buddhism raised to a higher level—could be truly described only by one possessed of the heart and disposition of the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke. It was eminently possible for him to portray Christ Jesus as the Healer of body and soul because having himself worked as a physician he was able to write in the way that appealed so deeply to the hearts of men. That he recorded what he had to say about Christ Jesus from the standpoint of a physician will become more and more apparent as we penetrate into the depths of the Gospel.

But something else strikes us when we consider what an impression this Gospel can make upon even the most childlike natures. The lofty teachings of Buddhism, to understand which mature intelligence is required, appear to us in the Gospel of St. Luke as though rejuvenated, as though born anew from a fountain of youth. Buddhism is a fruit on the tree of humanity, and when we find it again in this Gospel it seems to be like a rejuvenation of what it had previously been. It is only possible to understand this rejuvenation by paying close attention to the great Buddha's teachings themselves and discerning with spiritual eyes the powers working in Buddha's soul.

In the first place it must be remembered that the Buddha had been a Bodhisattva, that is to say, a very lofty Being able to gaze deeply into the mysteries of existence. As a Bodhisattva, the Buddha had participated in the evolution of humanity throughout the ages. When in the epoch following Atlantis the first post-Atlantean civilization was established and promoted, Buddha was already present as Bodhisattva and, acting as an intermediary, conveyed to man from the spiritual worlds the teachings indicated in the lecture yesterday. He had been present in Atlantean and even in Lemurian times. And because he had reached such a high stage of development, he was also able, during the twenty-nine years of his final existence as Bodhisattva, from his birth to the moment when he became Buddha, to recollect stage by stage all the communities in which he had lived before incarnating for the last time in India. He could look back upon his participation in the labours of humanity, upon his existence in the divine-spiritual worlds in order that he might bring down from there what it was his mission to impart to mankind. It was indicated yesterday that even an Individuality of this lofty rank must live through again, briefly at any rate, what he has already learnt. Thus Buddha describes how while still a Bodhisattva he gradually rose to higher stages of consciousness, how his spiritual vision became ever more perfect and his enlightenment complete.

We are told how he described to his disciples the path his soul had traversed and how he was able by degrees to recollect his experiences in the past. He spoke to them somewhat as follows. ‘There was a time, O ye monks, when an all-pervading light appeared to me from the spiritual world, but as yet I could distinguish nothing in it—neither forms, nor pictures: my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then I began to see not only the light, but single pictures, single forms, within the light; but I could not distinguish what these forms and pictures denoted: my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then I began to realize that spiritual beings were expressing themselves in these forms and pictures; but again I could not distinguish to what kingdoms of the spiritual world these beings belonged: my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then I learnt to know to which of the various kingdoms of the spiritual world these several beings belonged; but I could not yet distinguish through what actions they had acquired their place in the spiritual realms, nor what was their condition of soul: for my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then came the time when I could discern through what actions these spiritual beings had acquired their place in the spiritual realms, and what was their condition of soul; but I could not yet distinguish with which particular spiritual beings I myself had lived in former times, nor how I was related to them: for my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then came the time when I was able to know that I was together with certain beings in particular epochs and was related to them in this way or in that: I knew what my previous lives had been. Now my enlightenment was pure!’

In this way Buddha indicated to his disciples how he had gradually worked his way to knowledge which, although he had already attained it in an earlier epoch, had nevertheless to be freshly acquired in accordance with the conditions prevailing in each successive incarnation. In Buddha's case this knowledge had necessarily to be in a form in keeping with his complete descent into a physical human body. If we enter into these things with the right feeling we shall get an inkling of the greatness and significance of the Individuality who incarnated at that time in the King's son of the family of Sakya. Buddha knew that the world he himself could again experience and behold would be inaccessible to men's ordinary faculty of vision in the immediate present and future. Only ‘Initiates’—and Buddha himself was an Initiate—could gaze into the spiritual world; for normal humanity this was no longer possible. Inherited remains of the old clairvoyance had become increasingly rare. But Buddha had not come to speak to men only of what Initiates had to say; his primary mission was to convey to them knowledge of the forces that must flow out of the human soul itself. Hence he could not speak only of the fruits of his own enlightenment, but he said to himself: ‘I must speak to men of what they can attain through the higher development of their own inner nature and of the faculties belonging to this epoch.

In the course of Earth evolution men will gradually come to recognize the content of Buddha's teaching as something that their own reason, their own soul, tells them. But long, long ages will have to pass before all men are mature enough to produce out of their own souls what Buddha was the first to bring to expression in the form of pure knowledge. For to develop certain faculties in later ages is not the same as to bring them forth for the first time from the depths of the human soul. Let us take another example. To-day, even the young are able to assimiliate the principles of logic and unfold logical thinking. Logical thinking is now one of the general faculties possessed by man and developed from his own inner nature. But it was in Aristotle, the great Greek thinker, that this faculty first arose from a human soul. There is a difference between bringing forth something for the first time from the soul and bringing it forth after it has already been developing for a period in humanity.

Buddha's message to men was among the very greatest of teachings and will remain so for long, long ages. Hence the soul of a Bodhisattva, the soul of one enlightened to such a supreme degree, was needed in order that this teaching should for the first time become a living power in a human being. Only the highest degree of enlightenment could enable the soul to give birth to what was to become a universal endowment of mankind—namely, the lofty doctrine of compassion and love. Buddha's message had to be presented in words familiar to the humanity of that time, especially to the people of his homeland. Reference has already been made to the fact that at the time of Buddha the Sankhya and Yoga philosophies were being taught in India. From them were derived the terminologies and concepts in use at the time. Anyone who brought a new message had necessarily to use current parlance, and Buddha too clothed what was living within him in concepts familiar to his contemporaries. True, he re-cast these concepts into completely new forms but he was obliged to use them. The principle of all evolution must be that the future is based on the past. And so Buddha clothed his sublime wisdom in expressions customary in the Indian teachings of that time.

We must now try to picture what Buddha experienced during the seven-day period of his ‘Enlightenment’ under the Bodhi-tree. This teaching was to become the deepest, most intimate concern of mankind. Let us therefore try to conceive, even if with thoughts only approximately adequate, what profound experiences were undergone by Buddha under the Bodhi-tree and then came to expression in his soul.

He might have said that there were times in the ancient past when many human beings were dimly clairvoyant and that in an even more distant past this was the case with everyone. What does it mean—to be ‘dimly clairvoyant’, or ‘clairvoyant’? To be clairvoyant means to be able to use the organs of the etheric body. When a man is able to use the organs of his astral body only, he can, it is true, inwardly feel and experience profound mysteries, but there can be no actual vision. Clairvoyance cannot arise until what is experienced in the astral body makes its ‘impress’ in the etheric body. Even the old, dim clairvoyance originated from the fact that in the etheric body, which had not yet passed completely into the physical body, there were organs which it was still possible for ancient humanity to use. What, therefore, was it that men lost in the course of time? They lost the capacity to use the organs of the etheric body! They were obliged to make use of the external organs of the physical body only, experiencing in the astral body, in the form of thoughts, feelings and mental pictures, what the physical body transmitted. All this passed through the soul of the great Buddha as the expression of what he experienced. He said to himself: ‘Men have lost the capacity to use the organs of their etheric bodies. They experience in their astral bodies what they learn from the outer world through the instrumentality of their physical bodies.’

Buddha now concerned himself with this significant question: ‘When the eye perceives the colour red, when the ear hears a sound, a tone, when the sense of taste has received some impression, under normal conditions these impressions become concepts and ideas, are inwardly experienced in the astral body. If they were experienced in this way alone, they could not, in normal circumstances, be accompanied by pain and suffering. Were man simply to abandon himself to the impressions of the outer world as the latter with its light, colours, sounds, and so forth, affects his senses, he would pass through the world without experiencing pain and suffering from the impressions made upon him. Only under certain conditions can pain and suffering be experienced by man.’

Hence the great Buddha sought to discover the conditions under which man experiences pain, suffering, cares and afflictions. When and why do the impressions of the outer world become fraught with suffering? Then he said to himself: Looking back into ancient times, it is revealed that in men's earlier incarnations on the Earth certain beings worked into their astral bodies from two sides. In the course of incarnations through the epochs of Lemuria and Atlantis, the Luciferic beings penetrated into human nature, and their influences took actual effect in the human astral body. Then, from the Atlantean epoch onwards, man was also worked upon by beings under the leadership of Ahriman. Thus in the course of his earlier incarnations, man was subjected to the influences of both the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. Had these beings not worked upon him, he could have acquired neither freedom nor the capacity to distinguish between good and evil, nor free will. From a higher point of view, therefore, it is fortunate that these influences were exercised upon him, although it is true that in a certain respect they led him from divine-spiritual heights more deeply into material existence than he would otherwise have descended.

The great Buddha could therefore say that man bears within himself influences due to the invasion of Lucifer on the one side and Ahriman on the other. These influences have remained with him from earlier incarnations. When, with his old clairvoyance, man was still able to gaze into the spiritual world, he perceived the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman and could clearly distinguish them. He could say: This particular influence comes from Lucifer, this other from Ahriman. And inasmuch as with his vision of the astral world he perceived the harmful influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, he could reckon with and protect himself from them. He knew too, how he had come into contact with these Beings. There was a time—so said Buddha—when men knew whence came the influences they had borne within themselves from incarnation to incarnation since bygone ages. But with the loss of the old clairvoyance this knowledge was also lost; man is now ignorant of the influences that have worked upon his soul through the series of incarnations. The earlier clairvoyant knowledge has been replaced by ignorance. Darkness now envelops man; he cannot perceive whence come these influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, but they are there within him! He has within him something of which he knows nothing. It would be folly to deny the reality and effectiveness of something that exists, even though people are ignorant of it. The influences that have penetrated into man from incarnation to incarnation are working in him. They are there and they work through his whole life—only he is unaware of them!

What effect have these influences in man? Although he cannot actually recognize them for what they are, he feels them; there is a power within him that is the expression of what has continued from incarnation to incarnation and has entered into his present form of existence. These forces, the nature of which man cannot recognize, are represented by his desire for external life, for experience in the world, by his thirst and craving for life. Thus the ancient Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences work within man as the thirst, the craving for existence. This ‘thirst for existence’ continues from incarnation to incarnation. This, in effect, is what the great Buddha said. But to his intimate pupils he gave more detailed explanations.

How he presented what he thus felt can be understood only if there has been a certain preparation through Anthroposophy. We know that when a man dies his astral body and his Ego leave the physical and etheric bodies. Then he has before him, for a certain time, the great memory-tableau of his last life in the form of a vast picture. The main part of his etheric body is then cast off as a second corpse and something like an extract or essence of this etheric body remains; he bears this extract with him through the periods of Kamaloka and Devachan and brings it back again into his next incarnation. While he is in Kamaloka there is inscribed into this life-extract everything he has experienced through his deeds, everything that has been incurred in the way of human Karma and for which he has to make compensation. All this unites with the extract of the etheric body which passes on from one incarnation to another and man brings it with him when he again comes into existence through birth. The term in Oriental literature for what we call ‘etheric body’ is ‘Linga Sharira’. Thus it is an extract of Linga Sharira that man takes with him from incarnation to incarnation.

Buddha was able to say: At birth, the human being brings with him, in his Linga Sharira, everything it contains from his former incarnations; it is inscribed there everything of which man, in the present epoch, knows nothing and over which spreads the darkness of ignorance, although it asserts itself as the ‘thirst for existence’, the ‘craving for life’. In what is called the ‘craving for life’, Buddha saw everything that comes from previous incarnations and drives man to long avidly for enjoyment in the world, so that he does not merely move though the world of colours, tones and other impressions, but yearns for this world. This force exists in man from previous incarnations. Buddha's pupils called it ‘Samskara’. Buddha spoke to his intimate pupils to the following effect.—What is characteristic of man is his ignorance, his ‘non-perception’ of something very significant that is in him. Because of this ignorance, this non-perception, everything that confronts man from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings and to which he might otherwise adopt an effective attitude, is transformed into the ‘thirst for existence’, into slumbering forces which rumble darkly within him from previous incarnations. Man's present thinking has developed from ‘Samskara’ and this is why, in the present cycle of human evolution, nobody is able, without further effort, to think objectively.

Mark well the fine distinction made clear by Buddha to his pupils: the distinction between objective thinking which has nothing but the ‘object’ in view, and thinking influenced by the forces arising from the Linga Sharira. Consider how you acquire your ‘opinions’ about things; ask yourselves how much you acquire from these things because they please you and how much because you observe them objectively. Everything acquired as an apparent truth, not as the result of objective thinking, but because old inclinations have been brought from previous incarnations—all this, according to Buddha, forms an ‘inner organ of thought’. This organ of thought comprises the sum-total of what a man thinks because certain experiences in former incarnations remain in his Linga Sharira as a residue. Buddha saw in the inner being of man a kind of inner organ of thought formed from Samskara, and he said: ‘It is this thought-substance that forms in man what is called his ‘present individuality’—in Buddhism, ‘Name and Form’, or ‘Kamarupa’. ‘Ahamkara’ is the term used in another philosophy.

Buddha spoke to his pupils somewhat as follows. In primeval times, when men were still clairvoyant and beheld the world lying behind physical existence, they all, in a certain sense, saw the same, for the objective world is the same for everyone. But when the darkness of ignorance spread over the world, each man brought with him individual capacities which distinguished him from his fellows. This made him into a being best described as having a particular form of soul. Each human being had a name which distinguished him from another—each had an ‘Ahamkara’. What is thus created in man's inner nature under the influence of what he has brought with him from former incarnations and accounts for his ‘Name and Form’, his individuality—this builds in him, from within outwards, Manas and the five sense-organs, the so-called ‘six organs’.

Note well that Buddha did not say: ‘The eye is merely formed from within outwards’; but he said: ‘Something that was in Linga Sharira and has been brought over from previous stages of existence is membered into the eye.’ Hence the eye does not see with pure, unclouded vision; it would look into the world of outer existence quite differently if it were not inwardly permeated with the residue of earlier stages of existence. Hence the ear does not hear with full clarity but everything is dimmed by this residue. The result is that there is mingled into all things the desire to see this or that, to hear this or that, to taste or perceive in one way or another. Into everything man encounters in the present cycle of existence there is insinuated what has remained from earlier incarnations as ‘desire’. If this element of desire were absent—so said Buddha—man would look out into the world as a divine being; he would let the world work upon him and no longer desire anything more than is granted to him, nor wish his knowledge to exceed what was bestowed upon him by the divine Powers; he would make no distinction between himself and the outer world, but would feel himself membered into it. He feels himself separated from the rest of the world only because he craves for more and different enjoyment than the world voluntarily offers him. This leads to the consciousness that he is different from the world. If he were satisfied with what is in the world, he would not distinguish himself from it; he would feel his own existence continuing in the outer world. He would never experience what is called ‘contact’ with the outer world, for, not being separate from it, he could not come into ‘contact’ with it. The forming of the ‘six organs’ was responsible for the gradual establishment of ‘contact with the outer world’; contact gave rise to feeling and feeling to the urge to cling to the outer world. But it is because man tries to cling to the outer world that pain, suffering, cares and afflictions arise.

This is what Buddha taught his pupils regarding the ‘inner man’ as the cause of pain, suffering, cares and afflictions. It was a delicately woven, sublime theory—but a theory that sprang directly from life, for an ‘Enlightened One’ had experienced it as a profound truth concerning the humanity of his time. Having guided humanity as Bodhisattva for thousands and thousands of years in accordance with the principles of love and compassion, there dawned in him when he became Buddha, knowledge of the true nature and the causes of suffering. He was able to know why man suffers, and explained this to his intimate disciples. And when his development was so advanced that he could experience the very essence and meaning of human existence in the present cycle of evolution, he summarized it all in the famous sermon at Benares with which he inaugurated his work as Buddha. There he presented in a popular form what he had previously communicated to his disciples in a more intimate way.

He spoke somewhat as follows.—Whoever knows the causes of human existence, realizes that life, as it is, must be fraught with suffering. The first teaching I have to give you concerns suffering in the world. The second teaching concerns the causes of suffering. Wherein do these causes lie? They lie in the fact that the thirst for existence insinuates itself into man from what has remained in him from previous incarnations. Thirst for existence is the cause of suffering. The third teaching concerns the question: How is suffering eliminated from the world? By eliminating its cause; by extinguishing the thirst for existence proceeding from ignorance! Men have lost their former clairvoyant knowledge, have become ignorant, and it is this ignorance that conceals the spiritual world from them. Ignorance is to blame for the thirst for existence and this in turn is the cause of suffering and pain, cares and afflictions. Thirst for existence must disappear from the world if suffering is to disappear. The old knowledge has passed away from the world; men can no longer use the organs of the etheric body. But a new knowledge is now possible, the knowledge acquired when man immerses himself completely in what his astral body, thanks to its deepest forces, can give him, and with the help of what his outer sense-organs enable him to observe in the external physical world. What is thus kindled in the deepest forces of the astral body and is developed with the co-operation of the physical body—although not actually derived from it—this alone can help man to begin with, and give him knowledge; for this knowledge is at first bestowed upon him as a gift. It was to this effect that Buddha spoke in his great inaugural sermon.

He knew that he must transmit to humanity the kind of knowledge that is attainable through the highest development of the forces of the astral body. Hence he had to teach that through deep and penetrating understanding of the forces of the astral body, man acquires knowledge that is both appropriate and possible for him but is at the same time untouched by influences from earlier incarnations. Buddha wished to impart to men a kind of knowledge that has nothing to do with what slumbers in the darkness of ignorance within the human soul as Samskara. Such knowledge is acquired by waking to life all the forces contained in the astral body in one incarnation. ‘The cause of suffering in the world’—so said Buddha—‘is that something of which man knows nothing has remained behind from earlier incarnations. This legacy from earlier incarnations is the cause of man's ignorance concerning the world; it is the cause of his suffering and pain. But when he becomes conscious of the nature of the forces in his astral body, he can, if he so will, acquire a knowledge that has remained independent of all influences from earlier times—a knowledge that is his very own!’

This was the knowledge that the great Buddha wished to impart to men, and he did so in the form of what is known as the ‘Eightfold Path’. There he indicates the capacities and qualities which man must develop in order to attain, in the present cycle of human evolution, knowledge that is uninfluenced by the ever-recurring births. Thus by the power he had himself acquired, Buddha raised his soul to the heights attainable by means of the strongest forces of the astral body, and in the ‘Eightfold Path’ he showed humanity the way to a kind of knowledge uninfluenced by Samskara. He described the path as follows.—

Man attains this kind of knowledge about the world when he acquires a right view of things, a view that has nothing to do with sympathy or antipathy or preference of any sort. He must strive as best he can to acquire the right view of each thing, purely according to what presents itself to him outwardly. That is the first principle: the right view of things. Secondly, man must become independent of what has remained from earlier incarnations; he must also endeavour to judge in accordance with his right view of a thing and not be swayed by any other influences. Thus right judgment is the second principle. The third is that he must strive to give true expression to what he desires to communicate to the world, having first acquired the right view and right judgment of it; not only his words but every manifestation of his being must express his own right view—that and that alone. This is right speech. The fourth principle is that man must strive to act, not according to his sympathies and antipathies, not according to the dark forces of Samskara within him, but in such a way that he lets his right view, right judgment and right speech become deed. This is right action. The fifth principle, enabling a man to liberate himself from what is within him, is that he should acquire the right vocation and station in the world. We may best understand what Buddha meant by this, if we remember how many people are dissatisfied with the tasks devolving upon them, believing that some other position would be more advantageous. But a man should be able to derive from the situation into which he is born or into which fate has placed him, the best that is possible, i.e. to acquire the right ‘occupation’ or ‘vocation’. Whoever finds no satisfaction in the situation in which he is placed, will not be able to derive from it the power to unfold right activity in the world. This is what Buddha called right vocation. The sixth principle is that a man should make increasing efforts to ensure that what he acquires through right views, right judgment and so forth, shall become habit in him. He is born into the world with certain habits. A child gives evidence of this or that inclination or habit. But man's endeavours should be directed, not towards retaining the habits, proceeding from Samskara but towards acquiring those that gradually become his own as the result of right views, right judgment, right speech, and so on. These are the right habits. The seventh principle is that a man should bring order into his life through not invariably forgetting yesterday when he has to act to-day. He would never accomplish anything if he had to learn his skills anew each time. He must strive to develop recollectedness, mindfulness, regarding everything in his life. He must always turn to account what he has already learnt, he must link the present with the past. Thus along the Eightfold Path man must acquire right mindfulness in the sense of Buddha's teaching. The eighth quality is acquired when, without partiality for one view or another and without being influenced by any element remaining in him from former incarnations, he surrenders himself with pure devotion to the things of the world, immerses himself in them and lets them alone speak to him. This is right contemplation.

This is the Eightfold Path, of which Buddha said to his disciples that if followed it would gradually lead to the extinction of the thirst for existence with its attendant suffering, and impart to the soul something that brings liberation from elements enslaving it from past lives.

We have now been able to grasp something of the spirit and origin of Buddhism. We know too what significance lies in the fact that the Bodhisattva of old became Buddha. The Bodhisattva had always allowed everything connected with his mission to flow into humanity. In very ancient times, before Buddha came into the world, men were not able to apply even their inner forces in such a way that they themselves could have developed the attributes of the Eightfold Path. Influences flowing from the spiritual world were necessary to make this possible, and it was the Bodhisattva of old who enabled these influences to stream down upon mankind. It was therefore an event of unique significance when this Bodhisattva became Buddha and now gave forth in the form of teaching what in earlier times he had caused to flow down upon men from above. He had now brought into the world a physical body able to unfold out of itself, forces that formerly could flow down from higher realms only. The first body of this kind was brought into the world by Gautama Buddha. Everything he had formerly caused to flow down from above became reality in the physical world at that time. It is a happening of great and far-reaching importance for the whole of Earth evolution when forces that have streamed down upon humanity from epoch to epoch are present one day in the bodily nature of a human being on Earth. A power that can pass over into all men is then engendered.

In the body of Gautama Buddha lie the causes enabling men in all ages to develop in their own being the powers of the Eightfold Path. Buddha's existence ensured for men the possibility of right thinking! And whatever comes to pass in the future in this respect, until the principles of the Eightfold Path become reality in the whole of mankind, will all be thanks to that existence. What Buddha bore within himself he surrendered to men for their spiritual nourishment.

Generally speaking, no science to-day perceives these significant facts in the evolution of humanity, but they are often presented in simple fairy-tales and legends. I have emphasized more than once that fairy-tales and legends are often wiser and more truly ‘scientific’ than our objective science itself. In its depths the human soul has always sensed a certain truth connected with the nature of a Being such as a Bodhisattva: that, to begin with, something streams down from above, then becomes by degrees a possession of the soul and thereafter rays back again into the cosmos from the soul itself. Men who were able to feel the significance of this either dimly or clearly said to themselves: like the rays of the sun from the heavens, so did the Bodhisattva once ray down upon the Earth the forces of the doctrine of compassion and love, the forces developed through the principles of the Eightfold Path. But then the Bodhisattva descended into a human body and surrendered to men the power that was once his own possession. This power now lives in humanity and streams back into the cosmos as the rays of the sun are reflected back in the moon's light. This was felt to be of special significance in regions where it was customary to express such a truth in the form of a fairy-tale or legend. Thus the following remarkable legend was narrated in the regions where the Bodhisattva appeared.

Once upon a time the Buddha lived as a hare. It was an age when other creatures of many different species were looking for food, but it had all been consumed. The plant food which the hare itself could eat was not suitable for carnivorous creatures. The hare, who was in reality the Buddha, saw a Brahman passing by and resolved to sacrifice himself in order to provide food. At that moment the God appeared and saw the noble deed. A chasm opened and swallowed the hare. Then the God took a tincture and drew the picture of the hare on the moon. And since that time the picture of Buddha as the hare is to be seen on the face of the moon. In the West we do not speak of the ‘hare in the moon’ but of the ‘man in the moon’.

A Kalmuck fairy-tale expresses this still more cogently. In the moon lives a hare; it came there because once upon a time the Buddha sacrificed himself and the Earth-Spirit drew the picture of the hare on the moon. This expresses the great truth of the Bodhisattva becoming Buddha and sacrificing the substance of his very being to mankind for nourishment, so that his forces now ray out into the world from the hearts of men.

Of a Being such as the Bodhisattva who became Buddha, we said—and this is the teaching of all who know: When a Being passes through this stage he has had his last incarnation on the Earth, for his whole nature is contained within a human body. Such a Being never again incarnates in this sense. Hence when the Buddha became aware of the significance of his present existence, he could say: ‘This is my last incarnation; I shall not again incarnate on the Earth!’—It would however be erroneous to think that such a Being then withdraws altogether from Earth-existence. True, he does not enter directly into a physical body but he assumes another body—of an astral or etheric nature—and so continues to send his influences into the world. The way in which such a Being who has passed through the last incarnation belonging to his own destiny continues to work in the world, may be understood by thinking of the following facts.

An ordinary human being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, can be permeated by such a Being. It is possible for a Being of this rank, who no longer descends into a physical body but still has an astral body, to be membered into the astral body of another human being. This man may well become a personality of importance, for the forces of a Being who has already passed through his last incarnation on the Earth are now working in him. Thus an astral Being unites with the astral nature of some individual on the Earth. Such a union may take place in a most complicated way. When the Buddha appeared to the shepherds in the picture of the ‘heavenly host’, he was not in a physical body but in an astral body. He had assumed a body in which he could still send his influences to the Earth. Thus in the case of a Being who has become a Buddha, we distinguish three bodies:

1. The body he has before he attains Buddhahood, when he is still working from above as a Bodhisattva; it is a body that does not contain in itself all the powers at his command; he still lives in spiritual heights and is linked with his earlier mission as was the Bodhisattva before his mission became the Buddha's mission. As long as such a Being is living in a body of this nature, his body is called a ‘Dharmakaya’;

2. The body which such a Being builds as his own and through which he brings to expression, in the physical body, everything he has within him. This body is called the ‘body of perfection’, ‘Sambhogakaya’.

3. The body which such a Being assumes, after he has passed through the stage of perfection and can work from above in the way described. This body is called a Nirmanakaya’.¹

We can therefore say that the ‘Nirmanakaya’ of Buddha appeared to the shepherds in the picture of the angelic host. Buddha appeared in the radiance of his Nirmanakaya and revealed himself in this way to the shepherds. But he was to find further ways of working into the events in Palestine at this crucial point of time.

To understand this we must briefly recall what is known to us from other lectures about the nature of man. Spiritual science speaks of several ‘births’. At what is called ‘physical birth’ the human being strips off, as it were, the maternal physical sheath; at the seventh year he strips off the etheric sheath which envelops him until the change of teeth just as the maternal physical sheath enveloped him until physical birth. At puberty—about the fourteenth or fifteenth year in the modern epoch—the human being strips off the astral sheath that is around him until then. It is not until the seventh year that the human etheric body is born outwardly as a free body; the astral body is born at puberty, when the outer astral sheath is cast off.

Let us now consider what it is that is discarded at puberty. In Palestine and the neighbouring regions this point of time occurs normally at about the twelfth year—rather earlier than in lands farther to the West. In the ordinary way this protective astral sheath is cast off and given over to the outer astral world. In the case of the child who descended from the priestly line of the House of David, however, something different happened. At the age of twelve the astral sheath was cast off but did not dissolve in the universal astral world. Just as it was, as the protective astral sheath of the young boy, with all the vitalising forces that had streamed into it between the change of teeth and puberty, it now united with the Nirmanakaya of Buddha. The spiritual body that had once appeared to the shepherds as the radiant angelic host united with the astral sheath released from the twelve-year-old Jesus, united with all the forces through which the freshness of youth is maintained during the period between the second dentition and puberty. The Nirmanakaya which shone upon the Nathan Jesus-child from birth onwards united with the astral sheath detached from this child at puberty; it became one with this sheath and was thereby rejuvenated. Through this rejuvenation, what Buddha had formerly given to the world could be manifest again in the Jesus-child. Hence the boy was able to speak with all the simplicity of childhood about the lofty teachings of compassion and love to which we have referred to-day. When Jesus was found in the temple he was speaking in a way that astonished those around him, because he was enveloped by the Nirmanakaya of Buddha, refreshed as from a fountain of youth by the boy's astral sheath.

These are facts which can become known to the spiritual investigator and which the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke has indicated in the remarkable scene when a sudden change came over the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. We must grasp what it was that had happened and then we shall understand why the boy no longer spoke as he had formerly been wont to speak. It so happened that at this very time, King Kanisha of Tibet summoned a Synod in India and proclaimed ancient Buddhism to be the orthodox religion. But in the meantime Buddha himself had advanced! He had absorbed the forces of the protective astral sheath of the Jesus-child and was thereby able to speak in a new way to the hearts and souls of men.

The Gospel of St. Luke contains Buddhism in a new form, as though springing from a fountain of youth; hence it expresses the religion of compassion and love in a form comprehensible to the simplest souls. We can read what the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke has woven into the text of his Gospel, but still more is contained in its depths. Only part of what appertains to the scene of Jesus in the temple could be described to-day and even greater depths of this mystery have still to be explained. Light will then be shed upon the earlier as well as upon the later years of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1. Also referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘the Body of Transformation’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the three talks of this week, I would like to discuss the results of the spiritual-scientific research concerning the human being. In this talk I would like to establish a basis to consider the supersensible human being next time and in the third talk two most significant questions, those of the freedom of will and the immortality of the soul.

Concerning our discussion today I am in a somewhat difficult situation, first because the following will be considered in particular compared with the contents of this talk what I have often brought to your attention in the course of these discussions: the fact that the results of spiritual-scientific research are, indeed, in full harmony with everything that natural sciences have performed as great achievements up to now but that which shall be said from the viewpoint of spiritual science just in harmony with the scientific results is in full contrast to that which the naturalists or those who interpret scientific results today say about these scientific results concerning the human being and his nature. On one side complete harmony with the facts, on the other side almost an unequivocal contradiction compared with those who are used to speak about these facts today—this is one objective difficulty. The other difficulty is that I have this talk only, and that that which we will discuss today would have to be the object of at least thirty talks if it should be treated in detail. Thus, I can represent the results only sketchily and can easily be misunderstood in many respects. However, today I do not intend to inform details, rather I would like to evoke a sensation of the direction which spiritual-scientific thinking has to take if it wants to discuss the question of the nature of the human being with the scientific views of the present.

The scientific views have particularly suggested the question of the relation of the human being to the animal realm and of everything that arises from this relationship to the understanding of the human being. What has worked on this question very suggestively is the form that the wholly scientific theory of evolution assumed in the last time. However, one forms wrong mental pictures of the scope and the real character of this theory of evolution, because one grasps the question always too straight, I would like to say, too trivially. So one has the idea today, as if the relationship of the human being with the animals was determined by “strictly scientific research,” the evolution of the human being from the animal realm and again within the animal realm itself the development from imperfect to more perfect beings.

Now it is not at all right to believe that the view that the human physical organisation is connected with the animals is new. It is not new at all. Even if you disregard the fact that you find the traces of it—or, actually, more than traces—already in the science of Greek antiquity, and basically also already with the Church Fathers, nevertheless, something important is contained in the fact that, for example, already Goethe as a very young person had to work his way through certain fantastic ideas of development which asserted themselves just in his time. Someone who knows Goethe from his own biography knows how he rebelled against the idea: if one only produced certain living conditions, animals could change into other animals, or even into human beings. Goethe rebelled against that, although he stood like Herder on the ground of the emergence of one organism from the other, and although they were followers of the “theory of evolution.” Besides, it is important to consider that not the theory of evolution is new as such, but that an older view was immersed into certain materialistic mental pictures that bring on the human organisation to the animal one in other ways as well. The character of interpretation, the whole way of thinking about the things is, actually, essential which has appeared in modern time. If you consider this, it will not be so difficult to find the transition to those mental pictures of evolution that we have to consider here today.

Someone who believes today to stand with a certain materialistic direction of thought on the firm ground of science and to have to characterise this theory of evolution says at first, the modern view of the origin of the human being from the animals stands in contrast with the superstitious biased way which still goes back anyhow to the Mosaic history of creation.—It cannot be my task today to speak about the Mosaic history of creation. I believe that it has often led to misunderstandings about what forms its basis, and that one deals with it in reality with an ancient human wisdom. That just as a side note. What is important to be considered today is that in an especially significant point the scientific theory of evolution is in full harmony with the Mosaic history of creation. That means this that in the course of the evolution of the living beings the human being appeared as it were as the most perfect animal or anything else when the remaining animals had anticipated their development already before him that he appears as it were as human being after the animals. The modern scientific worldview has this in common with the Mosaic history of creation.

Just the today's consideration must oppose that in particular. Thus, one could say, the novel aspect of this spiritual-scientific history of evolution consists of the fact that it must break just with that what faces it as a quite sure result today. Indeed, some of the mental pictures that can originate only on the ground of spiritual science are necessary if understanding should develop for such things, which are discussed today. It is necessary, for example, that one gets clear about such theoretical disputes, as they are quite usual that they must disappear, however, and will disappear, just if spiritual science settles more in the human souls.

Today you still meet the different worldviews that are apparently contradictory. On the one side, there are those human beings who interpret the world and its phenomena materialistically. One calls them “materialists.” The “spiritualists” are on the other side—not the “spiritists.” are meant, but “spiritualists” in the sense of German philosophy. The former represents the view that only the material is the basis of all being and becoming, and that the spiritual develops as it were from the material and its processes. The spiritualists emphasise, above all, that the “spirit” is to be observed as such in the human being that one has to take the spirit as starting point in case of every world consideration. It is completely irrelevant to spiritual science whether somebody takes materialism or spiritualism as starting point. The only which spiritual science demands from itself and from others is that one thinks the inner contents of thoughts and research through to the end. Let us assume that somebody becomes a materialist by his special disposition: if he really envisages the material and its phenomena and does research until the end, he gets without fail from the material to the spirit. If anybody is a spiritualist and does not deal with the spirit purely theoretically, but grasps it in its reality in such a way that he also grasps the manifestations of the spirit in the material, then the spiritualist also understands the bases and ramifications of the material processes. The starting point of the true spiritual-scientific researcher is quite different. It concerns that one has the inner courage to think the things through to the end really. However, this requires a certain power first which wants to think the things through to the end and secondly the ability to consider the phenomena really which one faces. Concerning the latter one can do strange discoveries. Who believes, actually, today that he stands more on the ground of the facts? This one stresses at every opportunity.

I have repeatedly pointed to an event in the sixties of the last century. However, it is always interesting to point to this fact once again. The philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann attempted to overcome the materialist interpretations of scientific results. When the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, the naturalists agreed that there a completely dilettantish philosopher talked about nature in such a way and knew, nevertheless, nothing right about that. Refutations of the Philosophy of the Unconscious were written. Among these refutations, one appeared by an anonym under the title The Unconscious from the Viewpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. The author of this writing set himself to oppose this dilettantish opponent of Darwinism. Haeckel, Oscar Schmidt, and others said about this writing: it is a pity that this anonymous has not been called; we consider him as one of ours; since nobody can say the truth better than this anonymous against this scientific dilettante Hartmann.—They also contributed to the fact that the writing was quickly out of print. The second edition appeared, now with the name of the author: it was—Eduard von Hartmann!—This was once a lesson which was necessary and by which all those should be lectured who believe that somebody must always be a dilettante who does not speak about scientific results like a scientist.

Those listeners who were present at the former talks know that I have emphasised a book of the last time as an especially valuable one, namely The Origin of Organisms - a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922). I regard this book as especially excellent and especially typical for our time for following reason: Oscar Hertwig, a disciple of Ernst Haeckel, came as a young man from the more or less materialist interpretation of the Darwinist research results.

In his book Oscar Hertwig unravelled—it is a kind of Penelope problem—everything that one regarded as particular achievements of the Darwinist research results. Now from the same Oscar Hertwig a book was published which deals more with other problems; it is called: On the Defence of the Technical, Social, and Political Darwinism. I am in a special position now: I will always regard The Origin of Organisms as one of the best books that was written about these things, and I will have to regard Hertwig's last book as one of the most thoughtless, most impossible products of modern thinking. It shows how clumsy the modern naturalist becomes if he should go over from the accustomed ground to another area. Such a fact is very instructive, and one is in a tragic conflict if one has to admire on one side and to condemn radically on the other side. Now I do not want to speak about this last writing by Hertwig generally and in detail; but I would like to mention one thing only:

I have said just now, every naturalist will stress that he stands on the “ground of facts.” You find a place in this impossible book by Hertwig that one reads possibly in such a way: one has to admire how the modern natural sciences have been initiated by the astronomical researches of Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler. Science has become great because it got used to looking at the things of physics, chemistry and biology just like at the astronomical things. Now I ask you, the consideration of the facts that are immediately round us should take place after the pattern of that area where the facts are so far away from us? I am convinced that most readers overlook such an unbelievable contradiction. It appears just in such a contradiction that a significant researcher cannot think so far that this research can be lifted into the spiritual.

Because of those and similar things it has happened that the whole modern theory of evolution has taken its starting point from too straight, too abstract mental pictures which are not able at all to approach the real facts, in particular not the facts which also refer to the solution of the big riddle of the human being.

This human riddle is to be characterised from the start in such a way that the human being seems to be assigned by his whole position in the world not to know at first what he represents in the world and how he stands there in it to get that only from the depths of his being what can enlighten him about his real being. This is also the sense of spiritual-scientific research that that is brought up from the depths of the human mind by special exercises which slumbers, otherwise, in him, which the usual consciousness does not apply at all, and which enables the human being for the “beholding consciousness.” Not before from the depths of the human soul that is brought up what I have called the beholding consciousness in my book The Riddle of Man where the human being has to deal with that which one can call “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” to have a spiritual world around himself, then only one can generally tackle a solution of the big riddles.

These explanations should confirm it: the human being oversleeps his being. A part of the talks should show that the human being oversleeps a part of his being and continues the sleeping state into the waking state. In the depths of his being, something is perpetually sleeping, and his being must be awakened only. As you need that in the usual day life which sleep gives, you need for the usual knowledge if it should be fertile that which the human being oversleeps in his being perpetually. I said, we have to consider the facts at first that are round us. It matters in particular that you put yourself in the position to consider the difference of human being and animal from the viewpoint of the beholding consciousness; since, otherwise, you cannot attain knowledge of the development and origin of the human being and the animal. Now I want to explain sketchily what one can say from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint about the difference of human being and animal.

The animal realm faces us in most different forms. The animals are variously developed. Hence, one divides them into “genera” and “species.” You know that there have been numerous philosophers who were of the opinion that that which one calls “genus” or “species”—“wolves,” “lions,” “tigers” and so on—are only comprising names. What we meet in reality, is always the “material” which is formed most different by its own configuration only. Against it, one has to observe once impartially what there is, actually. There I have to recall a picture repeatedly which my old friend, Professor Vincenz Knauer (1828-1894, Austrian theologian and philosopher) always used when was talk of these things. He said, nevertheless, those people who state that these are only names that are expressed in these genera and species that it is, however, everywhere the same material they should think about whether it is really the same material that is in a lamb and in a wolf. Indeed, one cannot deny that, scientifically considered, it is the same material. However, one should feed a wolf for longer time with nothing but lambs, and one should try once whether he has assumed something of the lamb nature. There it is quite clear that that which constitutes the “wolf” which determines his configuration is not a mere “name” but something that encloses the material in this configuration.

With which is that associated that develops and configures these different animal species in its way? I have to confess, I touch personal relations very reluctantly, but because I can only outline, it is necessary that I do such a personal remark.

For about thirty years, I look at everything that physiological research produces in relation to these questions and compare it to that which the spiritual-scientific research has to say. It would be very attractive to hold a series of talks by which is proved what I state now. What configures itself in the different animal forms is intimately connected with the correlation of forces in the animal structure. Study the structure of an animal very exactly, but not only in such a way as it presents itself to the outer eye, but study the structure of an animal according to its correlation of forces: how different an animal behaves to gravity and how it overcomes gravity if the hind legs are formed different from the forelegs how different an animal appears according to whether it has hooves or claws and the like.

Study how the animal positions itself with its balance in the given relations, and then you find the most intimate relation between the conditions of earthly balance and the kind how the animal is positioned in these conditions of balance. Just these conditions of balance are radically different with the human being and in the animal realm. The human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance in which the animal is put, by the fact that the line that runs through the spinal cord, runs with the animal in parallel with the earth surface but with the human being, it runs vertically to the earth. I do not mean the wholly outer position, because of course the human being also is in parallel to the earth surface if he sleeps. The human being is organised in such a way that the gravitational direction of the earth coincides with the line of his spinal cord. With the animal, the cerebral line is in parallel to the earth surface. The gravitational line of the human being that runs through his head coincides in certain respect with the main line of the remaining organism. His head rests on the gravitational line of the body; with the animal, it overhangs.

The human being is thereby put in a condition of balance that is different from that of the animal; thereby he is in that condition of balance which he gives himself only during the time of his life, because he is born in a similar condition of balance as the animal. While the human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance that are forced upon the animal, he lifts himself out of all forces, which form the basis of the different genera and species; he becomes a “genus,” a “species.” He gets free from that what is with the remaining animal beings the reason of the manifold creation; he himself creates his figure, while he gets free from this determinative reason by his upright position.

Everything that is expressed in the human language, in the human thinking is intimately connected with these conditions of balance. Indeed, just the materialist research in the second half of the nineteenth century brought this to our attention; however, it could not completely make use of this fact. Since someone who thinks his way into the subtle configuration of the material can realise that one being in another way takes up the material of the outer nature, it is brought in directions quite different from all other beings. The human being thereby towers above the remaining animal realm. With it is connected that the whole human condition of balance comes about in full measure in the organism itself, while that of the animal comes about related to the world.

Take the coarsest only: the animal stands on all fours; the human being is bound to a certain balance that is not determined from without but is formed in his own organism. Now something particular is connected with this other condition of balance. Since the human being has a vague feeling of this equilibrium position that is similar to dream. This feeling is as vague as a dream, sometimes only vague as the sleep. As what does this sensation of resting on the own body live in the usual consciousness? This sensation is identical with the self-consciousness. What we get to know in the next talk as the human “mind,” which reveals itself in the ego at first, seizes itself in the human organisation in these conditions of balance that the animal does not have. I said, the modern theory of evolution-has something suggestive, so that one can believe that everything is dilettantish that is said against it. It has something fascinating if one says that the human being has as many bones and muscles as an animal has, how could he be a different being? However, in that which the human being has as the same with the animal the ego does not at all live. The ego does not live in the bones and muscles, does not intervene there, but seizes itself in the feeling at first that rests in the equilibrium.

However, there is something else. The animal realm has manifold shapes. Is this manifold configuration not significant for the human being? Because the human being separates by his other equilibrium from all conditions of balance in which the animal is forced, he has his own figure that appears like a summary of the animal figures. However, everything that works in the animal figures enjoys life in him. It is in him, but it is spirit. What is spread out as phenomena manifest to the senses about the most different animal figures is spiritual in the human being. What is it in him?

To the Imaginative observation arises that completely the same lives in the human being that gives the sensory figure to the animal, but as a supersensible nimble element. It lives in his thinking. What causes that we can think about the things is—in supersensible way—the same as that what the manifold genera and species of the animals are. Because the human being breaks away from the diversity of the animals and gives himself his independent figure that is the dwelling place of the ego, he appropriates invisibly what is visible in the animal world. This lives in his thinking. In the animal realm is poured out in the most manifold forms what is poured out in us, while we survey the world with thinking. We pursue what we can observe; we form thoughts about that. Of course, I know everything that can be argued against it. I also know the objection: are you able to behold into the animals? May the animal not have a kind of thinking as the human being has? However, someone who can adopt the Goethean principle that the phenomena are the right teaching if one observes them properly knows that that which becomes obvious in the phenomena is also decisive for the observation. One of the most essential signs is that that which is poured out sensorily about the manifold animal forms lives in the human being in extrasensory way.

While he freed his figure from the formative forces of the animals, he can take this in his supersensible. The animals are more advanced in relation to the sensory configuration than the human being is. The human being has an unstable figure. The animal is built according to the whole earth. With the human being, it is different; he has taken it in his figure. That is why he can grasp that spiritually what is expressed in the sensory form of the animal.

Already in this point, one sees what, actually, the modern theory of evolution suffers from. I am allowed to say, just because I have become a follower of the modern theory of evolution but have tried to lead it really to an end, I have found what it suffers from. It represents everything straight: the imperfect animals, then the more perfect ones, the even more perfect ones, up to the human being. However, the matter is not that way. Someone who considers the phenomena independently, gets on that this only ascending development is actually one-sided; since it lacks an essential element, which is considered here and there, indeed, in our time, but is not really investigated to an end and applied to the single one. One has to deal with a perpetually ascending development and with a perpetually descending development. The descending development would signify what is just so important for the understanding of the human being, and also there I advise you again to consider physiological matters, but without prejudice.

If one stops at the general trivial ideas of evolution, one imagines that the human being is the most perfect one of the animals that even his single organs, even if really here and there descending developments are admitted, are basically in ascending development. This is not the case. I could bring in many examples.

I want to mention one thing only. Study the human eye and compare it to the eyes of the vertebrates: if you go down in the animal realm, you find a more complex construction than with the human being. With him, the eye has become simpler again. I only want to mention that the xiphoid process and the pecten that exist with the eyes of lower animals are not to be found with the human being. The development has forced back them again. The human eye is a more imperfect organ than that of lower animals. The complete human organism has not only become more perfect if one studies it really compared with the animal organisms, but it has also receded. What has happened?

Because certain forces have been disabled, the human being could become a bearer of the spiritual-mental, could take up this spiritual-mental. What I have called up to now is nothing but a degeneration, “devolution,” in contrast to “evolution.” Take that which gives the single animal the form, which it has, and another animal another form: this thought completely determines the whole organisation of the animal. The human being, however, forms back his organisation. It does not advance so far to be determined completely, it goes back to a former level. Thereby he can give himself the equilibrium position which nature does not give him; thereby he gets free from that which nature forces upon the other beings. The whole formation of the human being has stayed behind; from it that originated which became an organ of thinking in the human being. What forms the basis of thinking is the organ of thinking because it is formed back because it has not advanced as far as the animal form has advanced, which expresses the figure externally. The human being lives the form back and can live out the form in thinking in supersensible way as the animal lives out it in the sensory realm.

One more point: we deal with the human being not only with evolution, but also with devolution, with involution. Just because the human being is more formed back than the animal, he can become the bearer of something spiritual-mental generally. With everything that I have explained up to now, something else is connected. Someone who can really observe how in the animal is expressed what must be an organ of imagination, of percipience, of feeling, so the anterior parts of the animal organisation, finds out that that which expresses itself in the form expresses itself objectively. He finds that this part has to deal with imagining, perceiving and feeling, and that the posterior part deals with the will element. Of course, both sides are connected. Because the animal is put in its equilibrium, it has that side by side which the human being has on top of each other: the will organisation on the one hand and the intellectual and instinctive organisation, on the other hand. There is another connection in the animal between the intellectual, imaginative and will element. With the human being, the organs of imagination are above the organs of will. An inner contact is thereby created between the organs of will and those of imagination. Someone who knows to observe the soul life realises that this human life of imagining is characterised by the fact that the will extends into it. Study the problems of attention, you will realise that the will works into it. Thereby the ability of abstract thinking originates which the animal cannot have because its imagination originates beside the will and not above it. And vice versa: the will and the imagining life work together, so that also the will is influenced by imagination.

Only because the organs of will belong to the subconscious ones, the will itself is expressed only like in the sleeping consciousness. The human being has the real will process in the sleeping consciousness as the other processes of the sleeping consciousness. The whole connection of imagining and willing which is typical for the human being is thereby emphasised: imagining is lightened by the will which is with the animal always in a vague, dream-like state. Likewise, the will is more intimately connected with imagining with the animal, it feels much more connected with its will. This causes again that with the human being the free emotional life relates different to imagining and will, enjoys life much more intensely than with the animal. With the animal the emotional life rests in the organisation; it is as it were only a formal arrangement of the life of thought. On the other side, the emotional life of the animal is only an inhibited or uninhibited will life, depending on whether it can reach or not reach something. This is expressed in its whole life. Just thereby, it is much more connected with the whole outer world.

If we envisage this, we can understand something else that, however, only a careful observation of the human soul life can give. Spiritual science has to proceed in many a respect different from the other science that takes up the things often from the trivial imagination and rejects them then because it cannot get on how the things are to be explained. The spiritual researcher will aim more at the positive, will not be content to take up, for example, the idea of immortality, of the continuance of the soul being, but will primarily ask, how does the human being generally get around to having the “immortal” as a thought or as a feeling in himself? How does he get around to assuming that the immortal can play a role in his soul life?

One can understand this only if one can expand the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis so far that one can approach the question, to what extent is the human being dependent on his lower nature in relation to his higher nature that is expressed by his head? While we have tried up to now to understand the special connection of thinking and willing with the human being and animal, now one has to go into that what connects the human being with the animal concerning something that is intimately connected with the problem of evolution. This enters in the animal and human life by the two phenomena of conception—I do not say of birth—what one considers as the first origin of the human, the combination of the male and the female elements, and death on the other side. Conception and death are bound to certain parts of the human and animal organism; in case of conception, this is evident from the start.

Now one has to realise that that which appears at one place in any animal form—it is similar with the plants—is also expressed in other organ systems but transformed. I would like to call attention to the following from the start: how does that behave with the human being and with the animal what is connected with conception and death, because one has already found out, nevertheless, one difference that is directly bound to the organisation? There it becomes apparent that the human and animal head is, actually, only a higher organised, transformed abdomen, as strange as it sounds, just as after the worldview of Goethe the bones of the skull are transformed dorsal vertebrae.

With the physical creation one deals with the fact that the single organ systems are real transformations of each other, and the functions of the organ systems are transformations of each other. What is “percipience”? Percipience relating to the outside world with the senses is a higher developed conception, specified by the different senses. Because the head organism stunts certain other organs, forces them into the limbs, the organism of conception develops to the higher sensory organism of the head on the one side, and thus the progressive conception corresponds to the advanced sense perception of the head. Every organic system develops the whole organism in a way; the head everything that the abdomen contains, the abdomen everything that the head contains. Because the formative forces of the limbs have atrophied that is expressed spiritually what belongs to their life in the head. The ability of production changes into the developing of thoughts. In the head, the organ of thinking is developed simply because the conceptual is developed unilaterally and the productive is formed back, but the productive thereby gives again the basis of the thoughts. Since as animal and human being produce their equals by the other organism, the human being produces himself spiritually: just the world of thought. The world of thought is the spiritualised human being.

This thought has a big scope, and only with deep regret, I exhaust such things in one single talk. Since such things are the result of decades of spiritual research. However, they must be pronounced once, because these things have to be popularised, so that someone who can investigate it in the medical centres and laboratories can also investigate the details, as they must be investigated.

In the animal life, conception and death are apart like beginning and end of the animal life. Conception and everything that is connected with it leads to the knowledge of the progressive development. Everything, however, that determines the death of the animal out of the relations of the earthly life is connected with the retrograde development. One gets on only spiritual-scientifically what conception and death are real for the animal, for the whole evolution of the animal. The animal is seized by everything that is associated with conception and production. This evolution is the highest development of the organic life. It is just like with an increase of the organic life, with fever if you like, that the usual state of consciousness, which is right for its being, is forced back. Thus, a reduction of consciousness is connected with the excitement of the organic life, and the consciousness is increased with everything that is connected with a retrograde. The moment of highest clarification, of most intensive consciousness is the moment of death—and as a spiritual researcher, I am allowed to say, a moment where the animal element approaches the human one; try only once to observe animals at death. These two moments of the highest reduction and the greatest increase of consciousness, conception and death, are with the animal like two widely separated points, like beginning and end.

With the human being, it is different. Because the head lifts out itself in the described way from the remaining organisation, the human being is so organised that he experiences the interplay of conception and death perpetually. This happens during the whole life. We are so organised that we experience in the brain which forms the basis of our thinking in its connection between percipience and will perpetually, transferred to the spiritual, with every production of a thought—but like sleeping or even subconsciously—what the animal experiences, otherwise, only once during conception. On the other hand, death is perpetually involved in our consciousness because the organism changed into the head has the head as its spiritual organism. We are dying at every moment. Precisely expressed: whenever we grasp a thought, the human will is born in the thought; whenever we will, the thought dies into the will. Will and thought belong together in such a way, as, for example, the young man and the old man, while the will thereby becomes will that the thought has died down in it, and on the other hand the will goes through its youth while the thought is born in it.

The human being is perpetually experiencing birth and death. I have described the human spatial configuration with the help of the balance relationships. Concerning time, it is in such a way that with the human being that runs through the whole life which the animal can experience only at the beginning and end; in a dreamish way he experiences conception and death perpetually in his subconsciousness. Because this lives below in the depths of the human souls, emerges from there and the human being becomes vaguely aware of that which he carries as conception and death in himself and not beside himself and thereby has the feeling: his being lives after death and birth, it encloses more than that which starts with conception and ends at death. The human being carries conception and death in himself. I pronounce it in short words. However, if you investigate everything that physiology and psychology can give presently, you will find it confirmed. This generates the idea of immortality in the human being. Thereby he carries the sensation, the thought of immortality really in himself. Only then, you can consider the connection of animal and human being if you regard this.

How does the human being stand there finally? He is more retrograde than the animal is, and this just gives him the basis of his spiritual being. If you check him completely, you find the strange: as the eye is retrograde, everything of his appearance is retrograde, is formed back into the spiritual compared with the animal. He unfolds this on the same conditions on which the animal unfolds its being. The same relations work on the animal and the human being. They work on the human being, while they provide him as it were with a “shell.” What I have described now is, actually, the inside of the human being. This is transformed in such a way that he can produce his own equilibrium that he has that, which takes shape with the animal, in the versatile forms of his thoughts. Thereby he faces the outside world like concluded by a shell.

Spiritual science actually is able to discover only what you can discover in the human being. It can penetrate through this shell. However, what turns out then? Something similar as with the memory. We perceive the outside world as it is, and process it. However, we remember in the later life what we have taken up from the outside world. Today I cannot explain what the organism of memory is based on; but it is based of course not on the organisation of the body periphery, but on that of the body inside. If you go with the beholding consciousness into that what the shell conceals, then you bring up what causes everything in the depth of the human nature that I described today.

The shell is evoked by that which determines the today's animal realm. How does that differ from it, which lives in the human inside? This becomes to the seer like an increased, beheld memory; there he gets up something from the human being that becomes vivid. As well that appears to the usual consciousness which the senses have experienced, something presents itself to the beholding consciousness, if one delves into that what is down there. Then one finds that that time of development which the human being spent together with the animals—the time of the earthly evolution—followed another time for the human being in which the today's animals could not yet develop. The human being developed before the animal realm, but in another figure of course; since he assumed the today's figure because he was put in relations that formed the animals. However, what rests in the “shell” leads back to a former creation of the earth, to a state that we do not get to know by geologic conclusions. We recognise that the human being is older than the animals that the animals originated later. They are related with the human beings but they originated later. Since we come back to a form of the planet when the animals did not yet exist. The planet looked in such a way that on the effect of its conditions that could form which must be protected today with the outer shell, which faces the animal world today.

The seer experiences that as vision first which I have explained as a thought today: he looks back at former states of the earth. However, this gives just the impulse to look at the developmental states in such a way as they are as they must be, so that one can see what one finds if one only looks.

However, there are still other relations. Today one agrees in the trivial scientific life completely to consider the phenomena of the earth like the astronomical phenomena; but it has taken some time until this thought asserted within the modern humanity. One can have an experience. If you come to Mülhausen (now: Mulhouse) in Alsace, you find a monument: On top is a celestial sphere, before it a statue of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777, Swiss-Alsatian physicist, philosopher), a contemporary of Kant who invented something similar, but much more brilliant than the so-called Kant-Laplace theory. If one still added something that Lambert thought, one would not be far away from that which spiritual science is today.

However, today one is ready that the monument of that man is erected by the decisions of the city council who has a share of modern astronomy. However, if one goes back hundred years from the erection of the monument, one meets something different. At that time, Lambert was a young son of a poor dressmaker. Few people anticipated what was in him, Kant, for example, called him the “greatest genius of the century,” and his father submitted request about request to the city council that the son could get further. Then there one gave him forty francs, but only on the condition that he should leave the city and not return. This was hundred years ago. After hundred years—the monument was erected! Thus, the human development takes place, one example of many.

I come back to my starting point: The modern scientific way of thinking has the same thought with the Mosaic history of creation in common that the human being appears after the animals. Against it, modern spiritual science has to say that the human being precedes the animals, and that one has to go back to such a state in which the human being could only develop that which he was at that time while he had to expose himself to the outer conditions. There one comes back to developmental states of our life on earth, which look different from what one calls Kant-Laplace theory. Externally a primeval nebula may have developed and conglomerated. Some time ago, I have quoted significant words of Herman Grimm: the fact that once later generations will have a lot of trouble to think about the eccentricity of the present, which believed that from such a primeval nebula everything developed that is there now. However, it will take long time, until humanity will be so ripe for a spiritual understanding of the things that one can consider the riddle of the human being as I have done it today.

Then, however, another idea of development arises, and I do not shy away from repeating something that I have already brought to your attention, because I have to show repeatedly from which side life and movement have to be brought in the scientific thinking of our time.

One can have scientific correct thoughts, but these can be very far away from reality. There I have pointed over and over again to that lecture of Professor James Dewar (1842-1923) in London at the Royal Institution in which he explained how the earth would be after 200,000 years. It is calculated quite correctly and one cannot doubt it, just as one can calculate the Kant-Laplace theory quite correctly. One can also calculate this final state of the earth, cooled down below 200 degrees centigrade. There is no mistake: then our atmosphere is condensed into water. Dewar explains it in all details that then the things on earth have assumed other aggregate states. Milk will be solid of course. Indeed, I do not know how it should be produced then; but it will be solid of course. Certain objects will fluoresce; one will be able to coat the walls with protein so that one can read newspapers at night. There is no mistake. However, the question is whether it is not only “right,” but whether it is also “real” whether the thinking knows where it has to stop because it is no longer in reality. Which methods are used to calculate these things? Methods, as for example the following: anybody studies the stomach of a 30-year-old person; he pursues it for more than 300 years and calculates how after 300 years the stomach of this person would be. He can calculate this as well as Professor Dewar calculates the final state of the earth.

Only that is the mistake that then the human being does no longer live, just as the earth does no longer exist after 200,000 years. Likewise, one could calculate how the earth looked 300,000 years ago, because in the same way one can also calculate the Kant-Laplace theory; but at that time the earth did not yet exist. It concerns that one learns to distinguish realistic thinking and only “correct” thinking.

With it, I have said a lot. Since the thought that one gets by the study of the human being to relations where the earth looked completely different is only to be gained if one applies realistic thinking. Then one can also have a thought about how the human being who is protected with the characterised outer shell from the present earthly conditions—which will be quite different from those which Professor Dewar describes—, so that the human being develops into times when the earth will be very different when the today's animals will no longer exist.

This was a spiritual-scientific discussion about the origin and the development of the human realm and the animal realm. Next time I want to show how the human being returns in repeated lives on earth, so that one can again accept Lessing's view of repeated lives on earth. Today I wanted to create a basis to show that spiritual science gets to quite different initial and final states of our earth, and that, indeed, one has to break with the opinion that the animal realm was there first and the human being could then develop on its basis. The human being precedes with his development. Spiritual science will assert these things. A very spirited and vigorous researcher of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss (1853-1909) had an anticipation of it.

There you find the first beginning of these things, but there everything remains more or less assertion. These things can be investigated first if one penetrates with the beholding consciousness into the spiritual-mental of the human being, about which natural sciences cannot speak at all. Since they can only ask, how is the human being related as a spiritual-mental being to the animal organisation? However, the highest of the spiritual-mental does not relate at all to the animal organisation, but it lifts out the organisation, produces quite different equilibrium relationships, so that the experience of conception and death coincides at one moment, so that in the human being by the continuous perception of conception and death the experience of immortality vaguely lights up.

(At the end, Steiner briefly summarises the contents of this talk.)

Yesterday I tried to show how the confusion in dreams arises from the fact that during sleep a man crosses the so-called Threshold unconsciously or half-consciously. Leaving the physical world of the senses, he enters the spiritual world and there encounters three worlds—a memory of the ordinary physical world, the soul world, and the real world of spirit. Events both inward and outward, experienced in our ordinary earthly life, are gathered together from what these three worlds reveal. But they are split apart when in sleep we enter the super-sensible world, and what we experience is not then related to the world where it belongs. That is why, for the usual memory-consciousness, deceptions and illusions arise in dreams. Imaginative consciousness does not see the dream merely in this way, but makes it an object of observation, just as we look towards a distant point in physical space—though now, with Imagination, we look towards something distant in time. We do not simply remember what is dreamt; we look at it, and so for the first time we arrive at a true conception of what a dream is. Thus we find how a dream is interpreted rightly only when we do not relate it to the physical, naturalistic world, but to the spiritual—above all, in most cases, to the moral world. The dream will never tell what it is expressing if its content is given a physical interpretation, but only when the interpretation is in accordance with the spiritually moral.

To illustrate this, let us turn to the confusion of the dream I told you about yesterday—the dream in which someone going for a walk is suddenly overcome with shame at finding himself without clothes in a crowded street. I remarked how the whole mood of soul in dream-consciousness is due to our confronting three different worlds. Looking at a dream of this kind in the right way, however, we see that although its content appears to belong to the realm of the senses, yet through this medium the spiritual-moral is seeking to reveal itself. Hence, anyone having such a dream ought not to look at the immediate, symbolical course it takes, but should ask himself: Haven't I sometimes had a tendency in daytime consciousness not to be completely truthful about myself with others? Haven't I perhaps been too fond of following the fashion in what I wear—altogether too apt to take refuge in convention? Is it not a characteristic of mine to give people a false impression of what I really am?

When anyone lets his thoughts take this course, he gradually arrives at the moral, spiritual interpretation of the dream. He says to himself: When during sleep I was in the super-sensible world, I met with spiritual beings there—they told me that I should not be present in a cloak of falsehood, but as I really am inwardly, in soul and spirit.

When we interpret dreams in this way, we come to their moral, spiritual truth. A whole host of dreams can be interpreted thus.

People of an older chapter in history, who even in the dreamy symbolism of sleep were conscious of the Guardian of the Threshold, took to heart his warning not to carry with them what belongs to the physical world of the senses when they enter the spiritual world. Had these men dreamt they had no clothes on in the street, it would never have occurred to them that they ought to have been ashamed; this is something that holds good for the physical world, for a man's physical body. They would have given heed to the warning that what holds good for the physical does not hold good in the spiritual world, and that what appears in the spiritual world is being said to human beings by the Gods. A dream, therefore, had to be interpreted as an utterance of the Gods. Only during the course of human evolution have dreams come to be interpreted in a naturalistic sense.

Or let us take another common dream. The dreamer is going along a path that leads him into a wood. After a while he realises that he has lost his way and cannot go any further. He tries to do so, but the path comes to an end and trees block the way. He begins to feel uneasy.

Now in ordinary consciousness this dream is easily taken at its face value. But if on thinking over it we forget all naturalistic associations, the spiritual world will say to us: This confusion you have met with is in your own thoughts. In waking consciousness, however, people are often loath to admit how confused their thinking is and how easily they reach a point where they can make no progress but only go round in a circle. This inclination is particularly characteristic of our present civilisation. People consider themselves enlightened thinkers, but in reality they dance around in a circle with their thoughts—either about conventional trivialities or about atoms, which are intellectual constructions of their own. In ordinary consciousness, naturally, they are not disposed to admit this.

In a series of symbolical pictures the dream brings out a man's true nature, and it is spiritual beings who are speaking through it. When anyone takes his dream experience in the right way, his self-knowledge will be greatly enhanced.

Another common human characteristic is that people allow themselves to be led by their instincts and impulses to do what is most congenial to them. For example, they find pleasure in doing something or other, but they are not ready to admit that they are doing it for their own satisfaction. They invent some way of interpreting it differently for their ordinary consciousness—they say perhaps that they are doing it for anthroposophical or occult or esoteric reasons, connected with a high mission or something of that sort. With this kind of self-justification they cover up—and this occurs with extraordinary frequency—an endless amount of all that rules and rages in the depths of our animal life. A dream—which wishes to reveal through symbolical pictures the forces which really hold sway even in the soul and spirit of the dreamer—may present a picture of the man pursued by wild beasts and trying vainly to escape. We shall interpret truly the moral significance of such a dream, not by looking at its outward events, but by accepting the self-knowledge it offers us. We have to recognise it as a warning to search for the inner truth about our own nature and to consider whether this does not resemble—if only slightly—animal instinct rather than what we ideally conjure up.

Hence it is possible for dreams to warn people in countless ways and to set them right. When a dream is related in the true way to the higher world, it can have a guiding influence on a man's life, and then, when the stage of conscious Imagination is reached, one can see how the dream, which at first naturally offers even to Imaginative knowledge pictures drawn from the sense-world, is metamorphosed entirely into moral-spiritual happenings.

Thus we see how the dream can be said to lead ordinary consciousness into the spiritual world, if only it is taken in the right way. But I have said also that on raising ourselves through Imagination to the spiritual world, we are not in the same state of soul as during our life here on Earth. In this life, I stand here, the table is there outside me; there is a physical gap between me and the table. The moment I enter the spiritual world, this separation ceases. I no longer stand here with the table over there; it is as if my whole being were spreading out over the table and the table were taking me into itself. In the spiritual world we sink right into whatever we perceive. Hence our experience, either in dreams or consciously in Imagination, should not be related merely to our inner life, but we can speak in a spiritual-scientific sense if we say with the poet that the whole world is woven out of dreams. It is certainly not woven out of the play of atoms, which is a dream of the scientists, but out of what I have described as the “chaos” of the Greeks, out of the weaving of our dreams and of our conscious Imagination. I have called it both subjective and objective, for the world is not woven purely subjectively; but we have to explain certain aspects of the world as being woven out of dreams.

For example, if we are looking at a seed, we should not be content to explain it by the laws of physics and chemistry. A scientist who sees nothing more than those laws in a seed, or in an embryo, cannot possibly explain them; for nature is dreaming in seed and embryo—their very essence is the weaving life of a dream. Take the seed of a plant—in it a dream is living and weaving. You can never enter into this with the intellect, for that is limited to nature's laws; you must approach it with the human faculty which lives otherwise in a dream or in conscious Imagination.

The same kind of dreaming that lives thus in the seed is active also in our whole organism throughout our life on Earth. Hence we should not look in our organism merely for the working of chemical and physical forces. When a man is there before us physically, we have to look upon him in his external physical form as a being who is living just for a time in the physical world of the senses. Behind him lives something else, invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, in so far as these are physical. But it can be perceived in Imagination, and also in what can be experienced in the unconscious Imagination of a dream. In the whole of a man's body nature is dreaming. Nature's way of thinking is not like man's intellectual thinking—it is a dreaming. Out of this dreaming the forces of our digestion and of our growth are guided, and everything is given form.

When we look back in earthly existence we generally start from this age—what shall we call this age of ours? We could take one of its symptoms and call it the age of the typewriter. Thus we go back from this age of the typewriter to the time when printing was first introduced; and going still further back we come perhaps to the time of the Romans, to the time of the Greeks, and then we arrive at the age in the East from which the Vedic records come. We are then left with no external documents. Many treasures have been excavated from the tombs of the Egyptian kings, but we still come at last to a time with no records, where we have to rely on Imaginative and Inspired spiritual knowledge. There we meet with a frontier beyond which, for ordinary consciousness, the past is vague, very much as sleep lies beyond the dream. By going back in this way through the temporal evolution of the world, we come in fact to that dream-veil we can experience every night.

If we reach that point with conscious Imagination, the further past lights up in a spiritual way. But it appears different from the world we learn about intellectually and from ancient records. This remote past in world-evolution, lying behind a veil of dreams, reveals man in direct connection with divine Spirits. He is himself still a divine soul-being; and the divine-spiritual Beings, whose destiny does not include entering an earthly body, meet together with him while he awaits his incarnation on earth.

When, therefore, we look back through history to this veil of chaos, to the dream-veil of which we have been speaking during the last few days, we see the divine Spirits foregathering with the still spiritual souls of men destined to dwell on Earth.

Moreover, we shall see how these things, connected as they are with human evolution, are at the same time connected with cosmic evolution. Where in a remote past this veil appears to Inspired Imagination, we see, too, how within cosmic evolution—of which we shall have to speak more precisely—the Moon, previously united with the Earth, detaches itself and goes out into cosmic space, there to circle the Earth. Thus we gaze back on a dream-veil, a veil of Imagination, and looking through it we find the Earth united with the Moon, and human beings in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. When this dream-veil appears to the retrospective gaze of Imagination, we perceive the momentous cosmic event of the Moon, in a quite different form, sliding out of the Earth and going forth into cosmic space as a separate body. So we look further back to the evolution of the Earth, of mankind, and of the world, when these were all united with the Moon. Man was already there, but as a being of soul and spirit only.

As we gaze further and further back, we find no epoch in cosmic evolution when man was not there, at least in some primal form. So that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we cannot say that for millions of years the Earth was evolving merely inorganically or with creatures of a lower order, with man emerging only after that. We find man in a different form connected at every stage with that cosmic evolution to which we look back when, behind the veil of chaos and the dream, we can rise through conscious Imagination to that which appears to us as the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

As I have said, when we look at a seed or anything in an embryonic state, Imaginative cognition reveals in it the weaving of a dream. We see how something real, though expressed in dream-pictures, holds sway over the material part of the seed. Anyone able to perceive the spiritual in the world will find it everywhere, though in a great variety of forms. It is precisely the spiritual that goes through the most varied metamorphoses. And when we have thoroughly grasped how in the seed of a plant, in the embryo of an animal, this real dream-weaving prevails, we are justified in asking: How is it, then, with the apparently dead world of the minerals? If here we look out of the window or go along the street, we see the bare hills, a world that seems entirely lifeless, and the question at once arises: If in any plant seed we pick up there is a dream-picture ruling, how is it with these rocky mountainous masses, and with all the lifeless substance that forms the ground we tread on in the physical world? If in the plants we see the ruling of spirit, which in the weaving of a dream seizes with comparative ease upon the material element, so in the same way through Imaginative cognition we find the spiritual in these rocky masses, but here the spiritual consists of individual spiritual beings.

These spiritual beings, however, are in a state not of dreaming but of deep sleep. When you look at these rocks and hills you must not think of them as permeated by a slumbering amorphous mist; you should think of individual spiritual beings sleeping there. Presently we shall see how these spiritual beings have come into existence through having been split off from higher beings with a higher consciousness. We shall see how they themselves, having in their present state only a sleep-consciousness, are the result of that separation, and how these elemental beings are asleep everywhere out there in the inanimate world. When we walk over this mountainous mass of rock, we should be aware that all around us there slumbers the creative weaving of the spirit in concrete form. And when we enter further into the sleeping of the spirit-weaving forms in the lifeless world, we become aware in these elemental beings of a certain mood. Imagination shows us these beings, but it is Inspiration that teaches us about their mood. In these elementals of the mountains, the rocks, and the soil, there lives what we can discover in ourselves when we are waiting for something with justified expectation. The weaving and creating of soul and spirit in the seemingly lifeless rocks is permeated by this same expectant mood.

In fact, these beings are waiting to awake from deep sleep into a state of dreaming. We learn this through Inspiration, and more particularly when we enter right into these beings through Intuition. All that confronts us out there, in those hills, is expecting that one day it will be able to dream, and so with dream-consciousness to take hold of earthly substance that is ground down into lifeless matter, and from these rocks and hills to conjure forth once more as embryos, as seeds, living plants. It is indeed these beings who bring before our souls a wonderful magic of nature, a creating from out of the spirit.

And so, as we go about here among these rocks and look at them in the physical light they reflect, they can reveal to us, not in any symbolical sense but as real knowledge, how they are now sleeping, how in the future they will be dreaming, and how, later still, they will come to the fully awake life of elemental nature-beings, who will one day become beings of pure spirit.

The physical material in a plant is still in a condition accessible to the dream-weaving of the spirit. In the rocks, matter is crumbling away. Looking back with Imagination and Inspiration, we realise how everything lifeless has arisen from the living. It is when the living becomes lifeless that the sleeping spirituality can sink into it. This sleeping spirit waits in the lifeless until it can wake into dreams and lead over the lifeless into cosmic embryonic life.

Now the various parts of the Earth show in different ways this sleep of spiritual beings in the mountains, in the firm crust of the Earth. It might be said: The sleep of beings awaiting their future is different in regions such as this from their sleep in other parts of the Earth. Here in Penmaenmawr we find that the particular configuration of the Earth, and the historical character of the rocks, enable these sleeping beings to rise to the aeriform, to interweave even with the light, while in other parts of the Earth this has long ceased to be so. Thus it is that here, if we look on the weaving as due not to the aerial atmosphere alone, but to the prevailing soul-atmosphere, which permeates the air just as the human soul permeates a man's body, then in Penmaenmawr we find that this soul-element in the atmosphere is different from elsewhere. I will give just one example to make this clear.

Suppose that in a certain region Imaginative cognition exerts itself to call up an Imagination of what is really going on there. This Imagination may be more or less easy or difficult to hold on to, for the possibility of retaining an Imagination in consciousness varies in different regions. Here we are in a region where Imaginations continue for a remarkably long time and so are able to become very vivid.

The wise men of the Druids, or others of that kind, sought out regions for their temples and sanctuaries where the conditions were such as to allow Imaginations to remain and not immediately to vanish away like clouds. Hence we can understand how it was that such centres for the holy places of the Druids were still sought for up to comparatively recent times. In this region it has always been felt that the difficulty of holding an Imagination is not so great as in other places. Everything, of course, has a light side and a shadow side. When an Imagination remains, Inspiration is made harder, though it gains in strength. Because of that, whatever the spiritual world has to say in this place streams down with—one might say—greater intensity, but in words which are weightier and more difficult.

Therefore, even where the spiritual is in question, differentiations are to be found throughout the Earth. A map might be drawn indicating the places where, for Imaginative consciousness, there is no difficulty in holding Imaginations. Those regions where they soon pass away could be given a different colour, and we should get an extraordinarily interesting map of the Earth. For the prevailing character of soul-atmosphere here, we should need a particularly strong colour—a sparkling, shining colour, full of life.

Hence I fully believe that those taking part in this lecture-course will be able to perceive here something of what I would call the esoteric mood of the elementals. It looks in at the windows, meets us on our walks, in fact is present everywhere in a quite special way. I am particularly grateful to the organisers of the course for having thus chosen a spot where the esoteric may be said to meet one at every turn. It does so indeed in other places, but not with the same ease and directness. So I am especially thankful for the choice of this place, out of many possible for the holding of a course such as this. From the point of view of the subjects discussed, this course may be said to take its place, in a wonderfully beautiful way, in the whole evolution of the Anthroposophical Movement.

It will be clear from the descriptions I have been giving you that between the physical world of the senses and the spiritual, super-sensible world, there is a barrier which with a certain rightness we call the Threshold of the spiritual world.

I have already pointed out in various ways how necessary it is that we should be able to cross this Threshold, and we have still to speak about it in greater detail. But you will have gathered already from my lectures that in older periods of human evolution this crossing of the Threshold was a rather different matter from what it is at the present day. In those ancient times people were able to cross in another way because even by day their consciousness was dreamlike, but for that very reason more alive to the super-sensible. Thus, in the way I have pictured, they passed the Guardian of the Threshold half-consciously, dreamily, both on going to sleep and on waking.

Here we can see a transition from men of an older type, with little freedom, to those who were becoming increasingly free. This former determinism was bound up with the fact that on going to sleep, and on awaking, men had some perception of the Guardian of the Threshold, who stood there giving warning. Now, in place of this unfree situation, we have the incapacity of present-day consciousness to see into the spiritual world, which signifies an increasing freedom: herein lies a principle of human progress.

Hence we can say that, looked at from the spiritual world, people have lost a great deal precisely because in the course of their evolution they have had to be led towards freedom. What has been lost, however, must be regained, in the way that Anthroposophy, for example, would show. And now is the historical point of time when a striving to regain what has been lost must begin.

But everywhere, among people of very various kinds, there still rises up something inherited from an earlier age, when man's relation to the spiritual world was different. So that to-day, in the consciousness of those given up to intellectualism, there is a strict frontier set up, as a rule, between what they experience in the world of the senses and what lies beyond in the spiritual world. The frontier is in fact so rigorously maintained that even enlightened spirits are unwilling to admit the possibility of crossing it.

In my brief sketch of the way into the super-sensible world, I have indicated that it is possible to cross the frontier and to enter that world in full consciousness. But as a relic from the time when a man entered the spiritual world in a more instinctive, unconscious way, and even in his day-consciousness had more in him of the spiritual world, there still rises up into his evolution to-day a certain heritage from the past. And this is something we must imperatively understand through conscious spiritual cognition. For, if not rightly understood, it manifests itself in many deceptive ways, and in these matters such errors can become very dangerous. Hence in the course of these lectures, intended to describe the evolution of man and of the world, I must speak about this question of a boundary, where what was natural and taken for granted among the people of former epochs re-appears to-day, and can lead to dangerous illusions in those who have not the requisite clear knowledge for dealing with it.

Among these phenomena, situated for ordinary consciousness at the frontier between the sense-world and the super-sensible, are visions. I mean the visions where, in a state of hallucination more or less controlled by the person concerned, pictures arise which have quite definite forms and colours—they may even seem to speak—but correspond to nothing external. For normal perception, the object is outside; the image, in a shadowy way within; and a person is perfectly conscious of how the shadowy, conceptual image is related to the external world. The vision arises of itself, claiming to be a reality on its own account. A person subject to such visions becomes incapable of estimating rightly what reality there is in the pictures which appear before him without his initiative.

How, then do visions come about? They come about because the human being still possesses the capacity for carrying over into his waking world what he experiences during sleep, and of bringing it into conceptual form just as he does with his sense-perceptions. Whether, after perceiving a clock that exists physically for the senses, I make an inner picture of it, or whether, after experiencing in a dream the form and inner reality of an external object, I wake up and make a picture of my experience, the only difference between the two processes is that I am in control of one of them—hence the image of it is more shadowy and flat—while the other process is outside my control. In the latter case I carry nothing of the real present into my conceptual life, but something experienced when the soul was outside in a past—perhaps long past—sleep, and out of this dream-experience I build up a vision.

In an earlier age of human evolution, when the relation of people both to the physical world and to the spiritual world was ruled by instinct, such visions were perfectly natural; it is human progress that has made them the uncontrolled, illusory things they are to-day. We must therefore be quite clear that modern man lacks something: when he has some experience in the spiritual world during sleep and is returning to the physical world, he no longer hears the warning of the Guardian of the Threshold: “All that you have experienced in the spiritual world you should note well and carry back to the physical world.” If he does carry it back, he will know what is contained in the vision. But if the vision appears to him only in the physical world, without his realising that he has brought it back from the spiritual world, so that he fails to understand what it really is, then he is without guidance, and at the mercy of illusion where his visionary experience is concerned. So we can say: Visions come about because a man carries over unawares his sleep-experience into his waking life, and in his waking life he then forms conceptions of the experiences—conceptions which are much richer in content than the ordinary shadowy ones, and these he builds up into vivid visions complete with colour and sound.

Another thing that comes about is this. A man carries over into his life of sleep the feelings and perceptions of the kind he has in physical life. Then, when he is in the act of carrying this over into the open sea of sleep-life, he is warned to be careful not to do anything foolish. If the sleep is very light—a far more common condition in ordinary life than is realised, for we are often just a little asleep when walking about quite normally, and we ought to be more aware of this—we may then, without noticing it, carry over the Threshold our everyday faculty of perception. Then arise those obscure feelings, as if one were inwardly watching something happening in the future, either to oneself or to someone else, and we have a premonition. Thus, whereas a vision comes about when experience during sleep is carried down into waking life and the threshold is crossed unconsciously, premonition comes about when we are in a light sleep without realising it and, thinking we are awake, carry over the Threshold, again ignoring the Guardian, our daytime experience. This, however, lies so deep down in the subconscious that it is not noticed. We are, of course, at all times connected with the whole world; and if we could draw this knowledge up out of the subconscious, we should be able to draw up much else also.

You will now see how, because these legacies from the evolutionary past can still be experienced, visions arise on one side of the Threshold, premonitions on the other. But a man may also halt at the Threshold and still not notice the Guardian. There may then be moments when inwardly, in his soul, he is as if he were enchanted. But the word “enchanted” does not quite meet the case, for he is not enchanted in the sense we generally associate with the term—it is rather that his attitude of soul undergoes a change. When he comes to the Threshold in such a way that he still perceives what is in the physical world while already perceiving what is in the super-sensible, he experiences something which is widespread in certain regions of the Earth—second sight, a half-conscious experience at the Threshold. Hence to sum up these legacies from the past, these phenomena in a man's life when his consciousness is dimmed, we have those appearing on this side of the Threshold as visions; those appearing beyond the Threshold as premonitions; those actually at the Threshold as second sight.

To-morrow I shall have to speak in greater detail of the characteristics of these three regions, going on from these to describe the worlds dimly indicated by vision, premonition and second sight—worlds which new knowledge will have to bring into the full clarity of enhanced consciousness.

Conditions

[ 1 ] There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists—all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands. At every moment the listener may say to himself: that, of which they speak, I too can learn, if I develop within myself certain powers which today still slumber within me. There remains only one question—how to set to work to develop such faculties. For this purpose, they only can give advice who already possess such powers. As long as the human race has existed there has always been a method of training, in the course of which individuals possessing these higher faculties gave instruction to others who were in search of them. Such a training is called occult (esoteric) training, and the instruction received therefrom is called occult (esoteric) teaching, or spiritual science. This designation naturally awakens misunderstanding. The one who hears it may very easily be misled into the belief that this training is the concern of a special, privileged class, withholding its knowledge arbitrarily from its fellow-creatures. He may even think that nothing of real importance lies behind such knowledge, for if it were a true knowledge—he is tempted to think—there would be no need of making a secret of it; it might be publicly imparted and its advantages made accessible to all. [ 2 ] Those who have been initiated into the nature of this higher knowledge are not in the least surprised that the uninitiated should so think, for the secret of initiation can only be understood by those who have to a certain degree experienced this initiation into the higher knowledge of existence. The question may be raised: how, then, under these circumstances, are the uninitiated to develop any human interest in this so-called esoteric knowledge? How and why are they to seek for something of whose nature they can form no idea? Such a question is based upon an entirely erroneous conception of the real nature of esoteric knowledge. There is, in truth, no difference between esoteric knowledge and all the rest of man's knowledge and proficiency. This esoteric knowledge is no more of a secret for the average human being than writing is a secret for those who have never learned it. And just as all can learn to write who choose the correct method, so, too, can all who seek the right way become esoteric students and even teachers. In one respect only do the conditions here differ from those that apply to external knowledge and proficiency. The possibility of acquiring the art of writing may be withheld from someone through poverty, or through the conditions of civilization into which he is born; but for the attainment of knowledge and proficiency in the higher worlds, there is no obstacle for those who earnestly seek them.

[ 3 ] Many believe that they must seek, at one place or another, the masters of higher knowledge in order to receive enlightenment. Now in the first place, whoever strives earnestly after higher knowledge will shun no exertion and fear no obstacle in his search for an initiate who can lead him to the higher knowledge of the world. On the other hand, everyone may be certain that initiation will find him under all circumstances if he gives proof of an earnest and worthy endeavor to attain this knowledge. It is a natural law among all initiates to withhold from no man the knowledge that is due him but there is an equally natural law which lays down that no word of esoteric knowledge shall be imparted to anyone not qualified to receive it. And the more strictly he observes these laws, the more perfect is an initiate. The bond of union embracing all initiates is spiritual and not external, but the two laws here mentioned form, as it were, strong clasps by which the component parts of this bond are held together. You may live in intimate friendship with an initiate, and yet a gap severs you from his essential self, so long as you have not become an initiate yourself. You may enjoy in the fullest sense the heart, the love of an initiate, yet he will only confide his knowledge to you when you are ripe for it. You may flatter him; you may torture him; nothing can induce him to betray anything to you as long as you, at the present stage of your evolution, are not competent to receive it into your soul in the right way.

[ 4 ] The methods by which a student is prepared for the reception of higher knowledge are minutely prescribed. The direction he is to take is traced with unfading, everlasting letters in the worlds of the spirit where the initiates guard the higher secrets. In ancient times, anterior to our history, the temples of the spirit were also outwardly visible; today, because our life has become so unspiritual, they are not to be found in the world visible to external sight; yet they are present spiritually everywhere, and all who seek may find them.

[ 5 ] Only within his own soul can a man find the means to unseal the lips of an initiate. He must develop within himself certain faculties to a definite degree, and then the highest treasures of the spirit can become his own.

[ 6 ] He must begin with a certain fundamental attitude of soul. In spiritual science this fundamental attitude is called the path of veneration, of devotion to truth and knowledge. Without this attitude no one can become a student. The disposition shown in their childhood by subsequent students of higher knowledge is well known to the experienced in these matters. There are children who look up with religious awe to those whom they venerate. For such people they have a respect which forbids them, even in the deepest recess of their heart, to harbor any thought of criticism or opposition. Such children grow up into young men and women who feel happy when they are able to look up to anything that fills them with veneration. From the ranks of such children are recruited many students of higher knowledge. Have you ever paused outside the door of some venerated person, and have you, on this your first visit, felt a religious awe as you pressed on the handle to enter the room which for you is a holy place? If so, a feeling has been manifested within you which may be the germ of your future adherence to the path of knowledge. It is a blessing for every human being in process of development to have such feelings upon which to build. Only it must not be thought that this disposition leads to submissiveness and slavery. What was once a childlike veneration for persons becomes, later, a veneration for truth and knowledge. Experience teaches that they can best hold their heads erect who have learnt to venerate where veneration is due; and veneration is always fitting when it flows from the depths of the heart.

[ 7 ] If we do not develop within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve to something higher. The initiate has only acquired the strength to lift his head to the heights of knowledge by guiding his heart to the depths of veneration and devotion. The heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it. Man has certainly the right to turn his eyes to the light, but he must first acquire this right. There are laws in the spiritual life, as in the physical life. Rub a glass rod with an appropriate material and it will become electric, that is, it will receive the power of attracting small bodies. This is in keeping with a law of nature. It is known to all who have learnt a little physics. Similarly, acquaintance with the first principles of spiritual science shows that every feeling of true devotion harbored in the soul develops a power which may, sooner or later, lead further on the path of knowledge.

[ 8 ] The student who is gifted with this feeling, or who is fortunate enough to have had it inculcated in a suitable education, brings a great deal along with him when, later in life, he seeks admittance to higher knowledge. Failing such preparation, he will encounter difficulties at the very first step, unless he undertakes, by rigorous self-education, to create within himself this inner life of devotion. In our time it is especially important that full attention be paid to this point. Our civilization tends more toward critical judgment and condemnation than toward devotion and selfless veneration. Our children already criticize far more than they worship. But every criticism, every adverse judgment passed, disperses the powers of the soul for the attainment of higher knowledge in the same measure that all veneration and reverence develops them. In this we do not wish to say anything against our civilization. There is no question here of leveling criticism against it. To this critical faculty, this self-conscious human judgment, this “test all things and hold fast what is best,” we owe the greatness of our civilization. Man could never have attained to the science, the industry, the commerce, the rights relationships of our time, had he not applied to all things the standard of his critical judgment. But what we have thereby gained in external culture we have had to pay for with a corresponding loss of higher knowledge of spiritual life. It must be emphasized that higher knowledge is not concerned with the veneration of persons but the veneration of truth and knowledge.

[ 9 ] Now, the one thing that everyone must acknowledge is the difficulty for those involved in the external civilization of our time to advance to the knowledge of the higher worlds. They can only do so if they work energetically at themselves. At a time when the conditions of material life were simpler, the attainment of spiritual knowledge was also easier. Objects of veneration and worship stood out in clearer relief from the ordinary things of the world. In an epoch of criticism ideals are lowered; other feelings take the place of veneration, respect, adoration, and wonder. Our own age thrusts these feelings further and further into the background, so that they can only be conveyed to man through his every-day life in a very small degree. Whoever seeks higher knowledge must create it for himself. He must instill it into his soul. It cannot be done by study; it can only be done through life. Whoever, therefore, wishes to become a student of higher knowledge must assiduously cultivate this inner life of devotion. Everywhere in his environment and his experiences he must seek motives of admiration and homage. If I meet a man and blame him for his shortcomings, I rob myself of power to attain higher knowledge; but if I try to enter lovingly into his merits, I gather such power. The student must continually be intent upon following this advice. The spiritually experienced know how much they owe to the circumstance that in face of all things they ever again turn to the good, and withhold adverse judgement. But this must not remain an external rule of life; rather it must take possession of our innermost soul. Man has it in his power to perfect himself and, in time, completely to transform himself. But this transformation must take place in his innermost self, in his thought-life. It is not enough that I show respect only in my outward bearing; I must have this respect in my thoughts. The student must begin by absorbing this devotion into this thought-life. He must be wary of thoughts of disrespect, of adverse criticism, existing in his consciousness, and he must endeavor straightaway to cultivate thoughts of devotion.

[ 10 ] Every moment that we set ourselves to discover in our consciousness whatever there remains in it of adverse, disparaging and critical judgement of the world and of life; every such moment brings us nearer to higher knowledge. And we rise rapidly when we fill our consciousness in such moments with thoughts evoking in us admiration, respect and veneration for the world and for life. It is well known to those experienced in these matters that in every such moment powers are awakened which otherwise remain dormant. In this way the spiritual eyes of man are opened. He begins to see things around him which he could not have seen before. He begins to understand that hitherto he had only seen a part of the world around him. A human being standing before him now presents a new and different aspect. Of course, this rule of life alone will not yet enable him to see, for instance, what is described as the human aura, because for this still higher training is necessary. But he can rise to this higher training if he has previously undergone a rigorous training in devotion. (In the last chapter of his book Theosophy, the author describes fully the Path of Knowledge; here it is intended to give some practical details.)

[ 11 ] Noiseless and unnoticed by the outer world is the treading of the Path of Knowledge. No change need be noticed in the student. He performs his duties as hitherto; he attends to his business as before. The transformation goes on only in the inner part of the soul hidden from outward sight. At first his entire inner life is flooded by this basic feeling of devotion for everything which is truly venerable. His entire soul-life finds in this fundamental feeling its pivot. Just as the sun's rays vivify everything living, so does reverence in the student vivify all feelings of the soul.

[ 12 ] It is not easy, at first, to believe that feelings like reverence and respect have anything to do with cognition. This is due to the fact that we are inclined to set cognition aside as a faculty by itself—one that stands in no relation to what otherwise occurs in the soul. In so thinking we do not bear in mind that it is the soul which exercises the faculty of cognition; and feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. If we give the body stones in place of bread, its activity will cease. It is the same with the soul. Veneration, homage, devotion are like nutriment making it healthy and strong, especially strong for the activity of cognition. Disrespect, antipathy, underestimation of what deserves recognition, all exert a paralyzing and withering effect on this faculty of cognition. For the spiritually experienced this fact is visible in the aura. A soul which harbors feelings of reverence and devotion produces a change in its aura. Certain spiritual colorings, as they may be called, yellow-red and brown-red in tone, vanish and are replaced by blue-red tints. Thereby the cognitional faculty is ripened; it receives intelligence of facts in its environment of which it had hitherto no idea. Reverence awakens in the soul a sympathetic power through which we attract qualities in the beings around us, which would otherwise remain concealed.

[ 13 ] The power obtained through devotion can be rendered still more effective when the life of feeling is enriched by yet another quality. This consists in giving oneself up less and less to impressions of the outer world, and to develop instead a vivid inner life. A person who darts from one impression of the outer world to another, who constantly seeks distraction, cannot find the way to higher knowledge. The student must not blunt himself to the outer world, but while lending himself to its impressions, he should be directed by his rich inner life. When passing through a beautiful mountain district, the traveler with depth of soul and wealth of feeling has different experiences from one who is poor in feeling. Only what we experience within ourselves unlocks for us the beauties of the outer world. One person sails across the ocean, and only a few inward experiences pass through his soul; another will hear the eternal language of the cosmic spirit; for him are unveiled the mysterious riddles of existence. We must learn to remain in touch with our own feelings and ideas if we wish to develop any intimate relationship with the outer world. The outer world with all its phenomena is filled with splendor, but we must have experienced the divine within ourselves before we can hope to discover it in our environment.

The student is told to set apart moments in his daily life in which to withdraw into himself, quietly and alone. He is not to occupy himself at such moments with the affairs of his own ego. This would result in the contrary of what is intended. He should rather let his experiences and the messages from the outer world re-echo within his own completely silent self. At such silent moments every flower, every animal, every action will unveil to him secrets undreamt of. And thus he will prepare himself to receive quite new impressions of the outer world through quite different eyes. The desire to enjoy impression after impression merely blunts the faculty of cognition; the latter, however, is nurtured and cultivated if the enjoyment once experienced is allowed to reveal its message. Thus the student must accustom himself not merely to let the enjoyment reverberate, as it were, but rather to renounce any further enjoyment, and work upon the past experience. The peril here is very great. Instead of working inwardly, it is very easy to fall into the opposite habit of trying to exploit the enjoyment. Let no one underestimate the fact that immense sources of error here confront the student. He must pass through a host of tempters of his soul. They would all harden his ego and imprison it within itself. He should rather open it wide to all the world. It is necessary that he should seek enjoyment, for only through enjoyment can the outer world reach him. If he blunts himself to enjoyment he is like a plant which cannot any longer draw nourishment from its environment. Yet if he stops short at the enjoyment he shuts himself up within himself. He will only be something to himself and nothing to the world. However much he may live within himself, however intensely he may cultivate his ego—the world will reject him. To the world he is dead. The student of higher knowledge considers enjoyment only as a means of ennobling himself for the world. Enjoyment is to him like a scout informing him about the world; but once instructed by enjoyment, he passes on to work. He does not learn in order to accumulate learning as his own treasure, but in order that he may devote his learning to the service of the world.

[ 15 ] In all spiritual science there is a fundamental principle which cannot be transgressed without sacrificing success, and it should be impressed on the student in every form of esoteric training. It runs as follows: All knowledge pursued merely for the enrichment of personal learning and the accumulation of personal treasure leads you away from the path; but all knowledge pursued for growth to ripeness within the process of human ennoblement and cosmic development brings you a step forward. This law must be strictly observed, and no student is genuine until he has adopted it as a guide for his whole life. This truth can be expressed in the following short sentence: Every idea which does not become your ideal slays a force in your soul; every idea which becomes your ideal creates within you life-forces.

Inner Tranquility

[ 15 ] At the very beginning of his course, the student is directed to the path of veneration and the development of the inner life. Spiritual science now also gives him practical rules by observing which he may tread that path and develop that inner life. These practical rules have no arbitrary origin. They rest upon ancient experience and ancient wisdom, and are given out in the same manner, wheresoever the ways to higher knowledge are indicated. All true teachers of the spiritual life are in agreement as to the substance of these rules, even though they do not always clothe them in the same words. This difference, which is of a minor character and is more apparent than real, is due to circumstances which need not be dwelt upon here.

[ 16 ] No teacher of the spiritual life wishes to establish a mastery over other persons by means of such rules. He would not tamper with anyone's independence. Indeed, none respect and cherish human independence more than the spiritually experienced. It was stated in the preceding pages that the bond of union embracing all initiates is spiritual, and that two laws form, as it were, clasps by which the component parts of this bond are held together. Whenever the initiate leaves his enclosed spiritual sphere and steps forth before the world, he must immediately take a third law into account. It is this: Adapt each one of your actions, and frame each one of your words in such a way that you infringe upon no one's free-will.

[ 17 ] The recognition that all true teachers of the spiritual life are permeated through and through with this principle will convince all who follow the practical rules proffered to them that they need sacrifice none of their independence.

[ 18 ] One of the first of these rules can be expressed somewhat in the following words of our language: Provide for yourself moments of inner tranquility, and in these moments learn to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential. It is said advisedly: “expressed in the words of our language.” Originally all rules and teachings of spiritual science were expressed in a symbolical sign-language, some understanding of which must be acquired before its whole meaning and scope can be realized. This understanding is dependent on the first steps toward higher knowledge, and these steps result from the exact observation of such rules as are here given. For all who earnestly will, the path stands open to tread.

[ 19 ] Simple, in truth, is the above rule concerning moments of inner tranquility; equally simple is its observation. But it only achieves its purpose when it is observed in as earnest and strict a manner as it is, in itself, simple. How this rule is to be observed will, therefore, be explained without digression.

[ 20 ] The student must set aside a small part of his daily life in which to concern himself with something quite different from the objects of his daily occupation. The way, also, in which he occupies himself at such a time must differ entirely from the way in which he performs the rest of his daily duties. But this does not mean that what he does in the time thus set apart has no connection with his daily work. On the contrary, he will soon find that just these secluded moments, when sought in the right way, give him full power to perform his daily task[s]. Nor must it be supposed that the observance of this rule will really encroach upon the time needed for the performance of his duties. Should anyone really have no more time at his disposal, five minutes a day will suffice. It all depends on the manner in which these five minutes are spent.

[ 21 ] During these periods the student should wrest himself entirely free from his work-a-day life. His thoughts and feelings should take on a different coloring. His joys and sorrows, his cares, experiences and actions must pass in review before his soul; and he must adopt such a position that he may regard all his sundry experiences from a higher point of view.

We need only bear in mind how, in ordinary life, we regard the experiences and actions of others quite differently from our own. This cannot be otherwise, for we are interwoven with our own actions and experiences, whereas those of others we only contemplate. Our aim in these moments of seclusion must be so to contemplate and judge our own actions and experiences as though they applied not to ourselves but to some other person. Suppose, for example, a heavy misfortune befalls us. How different would be our attitude toward a similar misfortune had it befallen our neighbor. This attitude cannot be blamed as unjustifiable; it is part of human nature, and applies equally to exceptional circumstances and to the daily affairs of life. The student must seek the power of confronting himself, at certain times, as a stranger. He must stand before himself with the inner tranquility of a judge. When this is attained, our own experiences present themselves in a new light. As long as we are interwoven with them and stand, as it were, within them, we cling to the non-essential just as much as to the essential. If we attain the calm inner survey, the essential is severed from the non-essential. Sorrow and joy, every thought, every resolve, appear different when we confront ourselves in this way. It is as though we had spent the whole day in a place where we beheld the smallest objects at the same close range as the largest, and in the evening climbed a neighboring hill and surveyed the whole scene at a glance. Then the various parts appear related to each other in different proportions from those they bore when seen from within. This exercise will not and need not succeed with present occurrences of destiny, but it should be attempted by the student in connection with the events of destiny already experienced in the past. The value of such inner tranquil self-contemplation depends far less on what is actually contemplated than on our finding within ourselves the power which such inner tranquility develops.

[ 22 ] For every human being bears a higher man within himself besides what we may call the work-a-day man. This higher man remains hidden until he is awakened. And each human being can himself alone awaken this higher being within himself. As long as this higher being is not awakened, the higher faculties slumbering in every human being, and leading to supersensible knowledge, will remain concealed. [ 23 ] The student must resolve to persevere in the strict and earnest observation of the rule here given, so long as he does not feel within himself the fruits of this inner tranquility. To all who thus persevere the day will come when spiritual light will envelop them, and a new world will be revealed to an organ of sight of whose presence within them they were never aware.

[ 24 ] And no change need take place in the outward life of the student in consequence of this new rule. He performs his duties and, at first, feels the same joys, sorrows, and experiences as before. In no way can it estrange him from life; he can rather devote himself the more thoroughly to this life for the remainder of the day, having gained a higher life in the moments set apart. Little by little this higher life will make its influence felt on his ordinary life. The tranquility of the moments set apart will also affect everyday existence. In his whole being he will grow calmer; he will attain firm assurance in all his actions, and cease to be put out of countenance by all manner of incidents. By thus advancing he will gradually become more and more his own guide, and allow himself less and less to be led by circumstances and external influences. He will soon discover how great a source of strength is available to him in these moments thus set apart. He will begin no longer to get angry at things which formerly annoyed him; countless things he formerly feared cease to alarm him. He acquires a new outlook on life. Formerly he may have approached some occupation in a fainthearted way. He would say: “Oh, I lack the power to do this as well as I could wish.” Now this thought does not occur to him, but rather a quite different thought. Henceforth he says to himself: “I will summon all my strength to do my work as well as I possibly can.” And he suppresses the thought which makes him faint-hearted; for he knows that this very thought might be the cause of a worse performance on his part, and that in any case it cannot contribute to the improvement of his work. And thus thought after thought, each fraught with advantage to his whole life, flows into the student's outlook. They take the place of those that had a hampering, weakening effect. He begins to steer his own ship on a secure course through the waves of life, whereas it was formerly battered to and fro by these waves.

[ 25 ] This calm and serenity react on the whole being. They assist the growth of the inner man, and, with the inner man, those faculties also grow which lead to higher knowledge. For it is by his progress in this direction that the student gradually reaches the point where he himself determines the manner in which the impressions of the outer world shall affect him. Thus he may hear a word spoken with the object of wounding or vexing him. Formerly it would indeed have wounded or vexed him, but now that he treads the path to higher knowledge, he is able—before the word has found its way to his inner self—to take from it the sting which gives it the power to wound or vex. Take another example. We easily become impatient when we are kept waiting, but—if we tread the path to higher knowledge—we so steep ourselves in our moments of calm with the feeling of the uselessness of impatience that henceforth, on every occasion of impatience, this feeling is immediately present within us. The impatience that was about to make itself felt vanishes, and an interval which would otherwise have been wasted in expressions of impatience will be filled by useful observations, which can be made while waiting.

[ 26 ] Now, the scope and significance of these facts must be realized. We must bear in mind that the higher man within us is in constant development. But only the state of calm and serenity here described renders an orderly development possible. The waves of outward life constrain the inner man from all sides if, instead of mastering this outward life, it masters him. Such a man is like a plant which tries to expand in a cleft in the rock and is stunted in growth until new space is given it. No outward forces can supply space to the inner man. It can only be supplied by the inner calm which man himself gives to his soul. Outward circumstances can only alter the course of his outward life; they can never awaken the inner spiritual man. The student must himself give birth to a new and higher man within himself.

[ 27 ] This higher man now becomes the inner ruler who directs the circumstances of the outer man with sure guidance. As long as the outer man has the upper hand and control, this inner man is his slave and therefore cannot unfold his powers. If it depends on something other than myself whether I should get angry or not, I am not master of myself, or, to put it better, I have not yet found the ruler within myself. I must develop the faculty of letting the impressions of the outer world approach me only in the way in which I myself determine; then only do I become in the real sense a student. And only in as far as the student earnestly seeks this power can he reach the goal. It is of no importance how far anyone can go in a given time; the point is that he should earnestly seek. Many have striven for years without noticing any appreciable progress; but many of those who did not despair, but remained unshaken, have then quite suddenly achieved the inner victory.

[ 28 ] No doubt a great effort is required in many stations of life to provide these moments of inner calm; but the greater the effort needed, the more important is the achievement. In spiritual science everything depends upon energy, inward truthfulness, and uncompromising sincerity with which we confront our own selves, with all our deeds and actions, as a complete stranger.

[ 29 ] But only one side of the student's inner activity is characterized by this birth of his own higher being. Something else is needed in addition. Even if he confronts himself as a stranger it is only himself that he contemplates; he looks on those experiences and actions with which he is connected through his particular station of life. He must now disengage himself from it and rise beyond to a purely human level, which no longer has anything to do with his own special situation. He must pass on to the contemplation of those things which would concern him as a human being, even if he lived under quite different circumstances and in quite a different situation. In this way something begins to live within him which ranges above the purely personal. His gaze is directed to worlds higher than those with which every-day life connects him. And thus he begins to feel and realize, as an inner experience, that he belongs to those higher worlds. These are worlds concerning which his senses and his daily occupation can tell him nothing. Thus he now shifts the central point of his being to the inner part of his nature. He listens to the voices within him which speak to him in his moments of tranquility; he cultivates an intercourse with the spiritual world. He is removed from the every-day world. Its noise is silenced. All around him there is silence. He puts away everything that reminds him of such impressions from without. Calm inward contemplation and converse with the purely spiritual world fill his soul.—Such tranquil contemplation must become a natural necessity in the life of the student. He is now plunged in a world of thought. He must develop a living feeling for this silent thought-activity. He must learn to love what the spirit pours into him. He will soon cease to feel that this thought-world is less real than the every-day things which surround him. He begins to deal with his thoughts as with things in space, and the moment approaches when he begins to feel that which reveals itself in the silent inward thought-work to be much higher, much more real, than the things in space. He discovers that something living expresses itself in this thought-world. He sees that his thoughts do not merely harbor shadow-pictures, but that through them hidden beings speak to him. Out of the silence, speech becomes audible to him. Formerly sound only reached him through his ear; now it resounds through his soul. An inner language, an inner word is revealed to him. This moment, when first experienced, is one of greatest rapture for the student. An inner light is shed over the whole external world, and a second life begins for him. Through his being there pours a divine stream from a world of divine rapture.

[ 30 ] This life of the soul in thought, which gradually widens into a life in spiritual being, is called by Gnosis, and by Spiritual Science, Meditation (contemplative reflection). This meditation is the means to supersensible knowledge. But the student in such moments must not merely indulge in feelings; he must not have indefinite sensations in his soul. That would only hinder him from reaching true spiritual knowledge. His thoughts must be clear, sharp and definite, and he will be helped in this if he does not cling blindly to the thoughts that rise within him. Rather must he permeate himself with the lofty thoughts by which men already advanced and possessed of the spirit were inspired at such moments. He should start with the writings which themselves had their origin in just such revelation during meditation. In the mystic, gnostic and spiritual scientific literature of today the student will find such writings, and in them the material for his meditation. The seekers of the spirit have themselves set down in such writings the thoughts of the divine science which the Spirit has directed his messengers to proclaim to the world.

[ 31 ] Through such meditation a complete transformation takes place in the student. He begins to form quite new conceptions of reality. All things acquire a fresh value for him. It cannot be repeated too often that this transformation does not alienate him from the world. He will in no way be estranged from his daily tasks and duties, for he comes to realize that the most insignificant action he has to accomplish, the most insignificant experience which offers itself to him, stands in connection with cosmic beings and cosmic events. When once this connection is revealed to him in his moments of contemplation, he comes to his daily activities with a new, fuller power. For now he knows that his labor and his suffering are given and endured for the sake of a great, spiritual, cosmic whole. Not weariness, but strength to live springs from meditation.

[ 32 ] With firm step the student passes through life. No matter what it may bring him, he goes forward erect. In the past he knew not why he labored and suffered, but now he knows. It is obvious that such meditation leads more surely to the goal if conducted under the direction of experienced persons who know of themselves how everything may best be done; and their advice and guidance should be sought. Truly, no one loses his freedom thereby. What would otherwise be mere uncertain groping in the dark becomes under this direction purposeful work. All who apply to those possessing knowledge and experience in these matters will never apply in vain, only they must realize that what they seek is the advice of a friend, not the domination of a would-be ruler. It will always be found that they who really know are the most modest of men, and that nothing is further from their nature than what is called the lust for power.

[ 33 ] When, by means of meditation, a man rises to union with the spirit, he brings to life the eternal in him, which is limited by neither birth nor death. The existence of this eternal being can only be doubted by those who have not themselves experienced it. Thus meditation is the way which also leads man to the knowledge, to the contemplation of his eternal, indestructible, essential being; and it is only through meditation that man can attain to such knowledge. Gnosis and Spiritual Science tell of the eternal nature of this being and of its reincarnation. The question is often asked: Why does a man know nothing of his experiences beyond the borders of life and death? Not thus should we ask, but rather: How can we attain such knowledge? In right meditation the path is opened. This alone can revive the memory of experiences beyond the border of life and death. Everyone can attain this knowledge; in each one of us lies the faculty of recognizing and contemplating for ourselves what genuine Mysticism, Spiritual Science, Anthroposophy, and Gnosis teach. Only the right means must be chosen. Only a being with ears and eyes can apprehend sounds and colors; nor can the eye perceive if the light which makes things visible is wanting. Spiritual Science gives the means of developing the spiritual ears and eyes, and of kindling the spiritual light; and this method of spiritual training: (1) Preparation; this develops the spiritual senses. (2) Enlightenment; this kindles the spiritual light. (3) Initiation; this establishes intercourse with the higher spiritual beings.

When Plato, the great Greek philosopher, wanted to define or characterize the divine, he called it “good”. And Schopenhauer, who in many respects strove to emulate Plato, once said in his writings that he could call his philosophical view an “ethics” much more than Spinoza was allowed to do, because he, Schopenhauer, had based his entire world view on the primal power of will and thus made something that is connected with the innermost moral impulses of the human soul the fundamental power of the universe; while Spinoza, according to Schopenhauer, had constructed his system in such a way that the highest principles of the universe did not yet contain morality, ethics, as such.

Schopenhauer wanted to imply, as did Plato – and many philosophical worldviews have done the same – that everything we call moral in the development of mankind is so intimately and deeply rooted in this development of mankind that one could not even think that the realm of the moral does not ultimately include all purely natural events, that the realm of the moral does not underlie everything that man can fathom in the natural or spiritual world as the fundamental principle and the fundamental essence of things. Thus, in the sense of such philosophers, the moral in man would be an inclusion and illumination of the divine-moral that permeates the whole world. And this would already indicate that any elevation in the sense of a world view to the very foundations of existence would naturally always bring man ever closer and closer to the sources of the moral world impulses.

Even if one does not completely agree with such philosophical world views, one can still say that such world views, precisely to such an opinion, to such a view, as it Plato and Schopenhauer is arrived at by their perceiving the full dignity and significance of the moral in the development of humanity and not wanting to lose the moral impulses in the depths of the existence of the world. Even if one does not completely agree with such world views in theory, one can still learn from them and find it justified that any world view that is to have an impact on human life and action must, so to speak, appear justified before the judgment seat of morality, must appear in such a way that morality can say an unconditional yes to it. Therefore, it is a necessity for every worldview to come to terms with the moral impulses of existence. The theme of today's reflection has been chosen from such foundations and will deal with the relationship of what is meant here as spiritual science to the moral principles and impulses of the human soul.

Now, when approaching moral matters, a certain, one might say sacred awe for the field one is entering is necessary from the outset for a reasonably sensible approach to things. For one enters the field of speculation that seeks to make the most profound judgments about the worth or unworthiness of the human soul, and one immediately senses when entering this field that one is reaching into the unfathomable depths of the human soul, into such unfathomable depths that one would not want to be light-hearted in this field and have some final judgment at hand. In this respect, too, Schopenhauer made a significant and often quoted remark: “It is easy to preach morals, but difficult to explain them.” What did Schopenhauer mean by this saying?

That it is easy to preach morals is something that is obvious as soon as you take even a brief look at human life. For there is hardly anything else that is preached so much in this human life as morals. Nothing is more often judged than the moral worth or unworthiness of the soul. And if you look at this human life thoroughly, you have to say again: how little the actual sermons are suited to really reach into the souls, so that they would grasp these souls in such a way that the moral principles that one or the other means, even if they are clearly understood, can also be real moral impulses in the souls! Yes, how easily some people preach morality to themselves when it is very difficult for them to follow truly moral impulses. Schopenhauer says that everything that can be preached in terms of principles, moral formulas or moral prescriptions is actually meaningless. In his view, it is only meaningful if one can show a soul force in the human soul, a spiritual impulse that is precisely a reality in the soul and from which moral action arises. Then one would be able to say that one had pointed to something in the human soul that, if one only leaves it to itself, pushes one to moral action; then one would have found the reason for moral action in the soul. Then you have established morality, because you have clearly explained the real impulse in the soul. Then you have not just preached morality.

Now, with such a demand, which is as justified as possible, one realizes how difficult it is to penetrate into those depths of the human soul where the moral impulses really lie dormant, where those impulses reside from which the moral or immoral arises. It is difficult for our judgment to penetrate into these depths. Let us consider a specific case, a case that can teach us how difficult it is for a conscientious soul to reach a judgment about the moral worth or unworthiness of a human act. Let us assume that some important personage gets on a horse and rides out. On the way, this important person finds a poor woman squatting by the side of the road. This person, galloping along on horseback, sees the woman, reaches into his pocket, takes out a full purse, and throws it to the woman.

Now we have an action before us. The question now is: How do we want to judge such an action in the light of morality? Herman Grimm, whom I have already mentioned, says the following about this act, which really did occur once upon a time with a world-famous personality: Let us assume that the woman was superstitious and that the case was such that the woman had just intended to commit a theft in the near future for her children, who are in the most bitter need. The fact that the man's purse fell into her hands saved her from committing theft and from bringing even greater misery upon her family. But she is superstitious, says Herman Grimm. Why shouldn't the woman say: Through this man, an angel from the higher worlds has appeared to me, and thereby I have been saved from the abyss.

Here we have a kind of moral treatment through these things, which could well have happened in this woman's soul. But let us suppose, says Herman Grimm, that the person who threw the full purse to the woman later comes into the company of various people. The first person to hear from this person himself that he has done this thinks: Well, I have always heard that this person is extremely stingy; now I see how unimportant such judgments are everywhere! And now, says Herman Grimm, such a personality could go the extra mile for this man and could, as it were, contribute to a rectification of the rumor about the stinginess of that superior personality by spreading the word about the generosity of this personality. But suppose, says Herman Grimm, a second person heard the same thing related and felt quite peculiarly affected by it; for this person, suppose, had only recently wanted to borrow a much smaller sum from that man than was in his purse, and the man had not lent him the sum. Will this person not judge quite differently? Or a third person — says Herman Grimm — might be present who, on hearing this, would be prompted to say: Yes, I am in a fix; can't I get something myself? Such a person might now again come to a judgment that would be quite different from that of the woman, as well as from that of the other persons. A fourth personality might perhaps know, when the incident is related, that the man in question had an enormous amount of debt at that particular time, and this personality will see the act in a completely different moral light. He might say that it is a great wrong to throw the purse away like that without further ado when one is obliged to pay one's debts, which creditors are always waiting for. Another person might know, says Herman Grimm, that the purse did not belong to the man himself, but to his wife, and that the man had carelessly thrown his wife's purse away, and the woman might complain of her husband's carelessness. And still other points of view would be possible.

Thus we see how people who start from different points of view could judge such an act quite differently and would not need to meet what lived in the soul as the true impulse. Herman Grimm is particularly concerned with this case because he wants to show how much moral judgments are to be received with a certain reserve when they come to us through such an important personality, for example in memoirs. All such judgments could come to us in memoirs, because the whole thing I am presenting here really happened in a similar situation, namely with the great poet Lord Byron. And in his discussion of one of his biographers who was acquainted with Byron, Herman Grimm comes to speak of the case. He is mentioned here because it is a very good illustration of the whole range of life judgments that we have gained in very different ways when we set out to judge some moral act of a human being. Thus, it must indeed be said that, while it is difficult, in the general sense of Schopenhauer, to establish morality, it becomes downright impossible, in the individual case, to approach a person's inner life with a conclusive moral judgment in such a way that this conclusive moral judgment would truly apply to the facts of the case. But one should not, on the basis of these premises, arrive at a judgment oneself, as if one had to be indifferent to morality. On the contrary! Those who grasp life in its entirety will nevertheless regard morality as the most sacred thing in human life and thereby come to the conclusion that the most sacred thing in human life must at the same time be treated with a holy awe. For it is in many respects presumptuous to confront another person with a moral judgment, considering how much separates one soul from another. Having made these assumptions, let us now consider what has been said about the nature of spiritual science in these various lectures. On the one hand, spiritual science leads us deeper into the spiritual foundations of things. But at the same time we have seen how it is able to do this: it is possible because we expose deeper forces of our soul life, so that we grasp the spiritual foundations of the world only by bringing up the forces slumbering in the depths of the human soul. Thus, it is precisely by means of the methods of spiritual research that we approach the deeper foundations of the human soul, those foundations from which moral impulses often arise in such mysterious ways. And the question must be: What happens when, in the depths of the soul, those researches that seek to bring these depths to light encounter the moral impulses? After all, in the ordinary everyday life of the physical world, it is the case that the moral impulses can speak with great certainty from the depths to the simplest human soul, to the most uneducated human soul. And many a highly educated person, many a person who perhaps counts himself among the philosophers or is a scientist, can be put to shame in the moral realm by a simple personality who does not call much of her own in terms of knowledge, and who, nevertheless, is able to perform the most self-sacrificing acts of genuine human love in the most difficult cases, from the depths of her soul. Ordinary knowledge, outer physical cognition, certainly does not need to lead down into the depths from which the moral impulses arise, the impulses from which morality is to be established.

But now it immediately becomes apparent when spiritual science wants to ascend to the spiritual sources of existence, that then, in a certain way, when the human soul wants to become a spiritual researcher, it must develop three things. This threefold nature has been presented in the course of these winter lectures as the three stages of supersensible knowledge. First, we have mentioned what we call imaginative knowledge, that is, the knowledge that arises in the human soul when it has completely freed itself from all sense observation and all intellectual activity that is bound to the instrument of the brain. When the soul has reached the point where it feels a world of images emerging from its depths, then, with further training of the spiritual researcher, these images will become images of the real spiritual realities that exist behind the external sense world. Imaginary knowledge is the first. These stages of supersensible knowledge are also discussed in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.”

The second stage that the human soul must reach — such things can only be expressed in a pictorial way, and all this has already been said, but to avoid misunderstandings it will be briefly repeated today , consists in the fact that what first appeared in images, but which cannot be compared with the images of a single sense, appears as it were of itself through a “language of the world” as inspired knowledge. This means that when the spiritual researcher's capacity for inspiration is awakened, the spiritual beings and facts that lie beyond the world of the senses speak to him.

The third stage, by which the spiritual researcher truly penetrates into the essence of spiritual facts and entities, is called intuition. Not the intuition that is sometimes referred to by this word in trivial language is meant, but something that is a real stepping over of one's own soul life into the nature of something foreign, whereby the person, by connecting his being with a foreign being, becomes able to penetrate into the inner being of spiritual beings outside of himself. Thus, on other levels of knowledge, imagination, inspiration and intuition are juxtaposed to what is sensory knowledge and intellectual knowledge.

Through these three stages of knowledge, the human soul penetrates into the spiritual world. The powers of imagination, that is, of seeing images from the supersensible world, as well as the powers of inspiration, that is, of hearing what the spiritual facts and spiritual beings of the supersensible have to reveal to us, and the powers of intuition, they slumber in every human soul. They are brought to light by the methods also described here. The human soul must therefore penetrate into its depths as a spiritual researcher in order to arrive at the very foundations of existence.

Now, as already pointed out, especially when the “Fallacies of Spirit Research” were discussed, the starting point from which the soul reaches those levels of its existence at which it can look into the spiritual world is of great importance. It was particularly emphasized that a kind of powerlessness occurs in relation to the knowledge of the spiritual world in the case of that soul which does not take its starting-point from moral excellence, from moral mood. Such a soul will show a certain stupor for the higher worlds and will only be able to reveal that which has been seen as if through a kind of stupor, and thus it will be falsified. The connection between the moral state of mind at the starting point and what the soul can attain when it really enters the spiritual worlds through imagination, inspiration and intuition has already been pointed out. But we can characterize the significance of the moral state of mind for the higher levels of knowledge even more precisely.

For the spiritual researcher, imagination arises in such a way that images emerge, as it were, on the horizon of his consciousness, first from his own soul life and then from the general spiritual life. These images, which arise in this way and whose significance we have already described, must differ depending on whether the person starts from this or that soul disposition, which he already has here in the physical world. A soul that develops a sense of the right, true connection between facts here in the physical world will, when it ascends to imagination through the methods described, carry the inner constitution for the true connection of things with it into the higher worlds. Therefore we can say that a soul that truly knows how to live within the facts of the physical, sensory world carries its truthfulness with it into the spiritual worlds. But a soul that is characterized by inaccuracy — and, as already mentioned, there is only a small step from inaccuracy to error, and even to mendacity —, a soul that is characterized by inaccuracy , in regard to the sense data of the physical world, brings with it into the world of emerging images from the mind an inner disposition of untruthfulness. And the consequence of this is that out of their untruthfulness, which does not agree with the world but arises only from their own inner being, they build up a world of images that is itself only an emanation of the personality concerned.

Thus, where the soul ascends to the realm of imagination, untruthfulness will cause such a soul to reveal nothing from the spiritual worlds but what is only a reflection of its own untruthfulness. Therefore, it is valid, in spite of all training in the spiritual world, that the soul, before entering the imaginative world, must, in preparation for imaginative knowledge, already strengthen itself here in the physical world through what may be called a sense of fact. And it must be emphasized, sharply emphasized, that anything that detracts from the sense of fact cannot provide proper preparation for the contemplation of the spiritual world. It will be a good preparation for anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher to hold back as much as possible from all merely personal and subjective criticism, from judging things only “from his point of view”, from asserting: “I think that is right”, “I think that is wrong”. Rather, a good preparation for spiritual knowledge is to try, as much as possible and as much as one can, to let go of judging everything only from one's personal point of view, to let go of asserting one's personal subjective point of view; to endeavor to let only the facts of life speak when faced with them. Therefore, we will find that the one who is on the right path to the spiritual world does not present his judgments on things in everything he tells or describes, but lets the things speak for themselves, in that he will endeavor to put together only the facts.

Therefore, when we meet someone who says at every opportunity: This or that has happened here or there, I find it distasteful; something has happened there or there, I do not like it; this or that has occurred, I find it ugly, I find it beautiful – and whatever the gradations may be, such a person is not on the right path to penetrating the spiritual worlds. He is much more on the right path when he endeavors to suppress such judgment and simply tells the facts, when he looks at the facts and lets them speak for themselves and makes it his principle: If I impose my judgment on someone, then it is just my judgment. Then he is not only instructed to believe me that what I say is the truth, but also that I have a judgment. But if I set out to tell someone what I have encountered here and there, then he can form his own judgment. The more we force ourselves to look at the world and tell things the way we found them, the more we equip ourselves with a sense of fact and prepare ourselves for imaginative insight. Those who want to prepare themselves for imaginative knowledge should, above all, get out of the habit of thinking that they have to say, “I see things this way or that way” with every experience. They should consider it unimportant what they can find about things and should endeavor to be only the tool through which things or facts speak.

If we bear this in mind, we shall realize that one essential virtue, truthfulness, is one of the right preliminary means for a methodical training for the knowledge of the higher worlds. We shall not be in the least embarrassed to doubt that a proper training for the knowledge of higher worlds is morally beneficial, or at least must be. Indeed, the matter can be presented from yet another point of view. One can assume the case of someone who does not prepare himself for the higher worlds through the truthfulness just described. Then, if he only undergoes the appropriate soul training, the appropriate exercises, the slumbering powers of his soul can indeed be awakened, and in the end he can be brought before an imaginative world. But what is this world then? This world is then nothing other than the mirror image of his own being. And because the moment you look away from the sensory world, when you also look away from the mind that is tied to the brain, you have this imaginative world as something real in front of you, regardless of whether it expresses something real or whether it is only the mirror image of the nature of the person who has it, then anyone who is not properly prepared by truthfulness will also have an “imaginative world” in front of them, because it pretends to be a real one and yet is only the mirror image of one's own soul, of one's own inner being. This world is then a constant temptress of untruthfulness. Therefore, one can say that someone who does not penetrate the spiritual world through the practice of truthfulness puts himself in a situation where temptations to untruthfulness and lies are constantly present in his surroundings when he perceives in the supersensible world. From this the conclusion must be drawn that every ascent into the supersensible world must be connected with the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness, with the cultivation of the sense of fact above all. For only when we have a sense of fact, a sense of the context of facts in the physical world outside us, can we educate ourselves to be truthful.

In a similar way, the same thing applies to inspiration, only in this area it becomes even more vivid and meaningful. Through inspiration, the spiritual realities that are present in our environment begin to speak to us, as it were; they reveal their essence to us. We do not hear them through voices and sounds similar to those of the external world, but we hear them spiritually.

Now another preparation is necessary so that the person does not merely perceive what his own being reveals to him, but so that he gets to know an objective, real world. For this, it is necessary to enhance a very special virtue of the soul. Such things can only be ascertained through experience. Anyone who wants to attain inspiration must develop the virtue of moral courage, steadfastness, and fortitude, in a higher way than is necessary for the ordinary world. For only someone who has moral courage, who does not shy away from anything that may endanger his own personality under certain circumstances, will be able to withstand what speaks to him through inspiration from the spiritual realities. And anyone who has developed too little strength of mind and moral courage before entering the spiritual worlds will very soon notice – or rather, he will not notice it so easily, but others who understand something of the matter will notice it – that although certain things from the spiritual world speak to him, all that speaks to him is only an echo of his own being. Because his soul is not strong enough, because it does not have full support in itself, it cannot keep what it is, but radiates it, and what it itself is comes back to it. A soul that is not prepared for inspiration by moral courage will very soon present itself as one that hears something like 'spiritual voices', but these spiritual voices will be nothing other than what it carries within itself, which is only an echo of its own being. When such a soul then comes up with the fact that it is so, then it will be all the more depressed by what comes to it from the spiritual world. So we see that again an essential quality of the soul, a quality which cannot be denied the moral character, must be strengthened and fortified if this soul wants to penetrate into the supersensible world: moral courage, fortitude. This is necessary as a preparation for real inspiration. From this it can easily be deduced that it is above all necessary to strengthen one's moral courage in the physical world before one wants to become a spiritual researcher, so that the soul can really perceive the revelations of that which is given through imagination, also through inspiration.

Many a person who did not understand the matter thoroughly enough believed he could rely on the moral courage of this or that soul, and then gave the soul the means to ascend into the supersensible world. After some time, they met the soul — and it betrayed nothing but that it reflected only its own nature, which it interpreted as “sounds” and “words”.

Thus, spiritual training is intimately connected with the increase of moral strength, and therefore every correctly imparted spiritual training will, above all, work towards strengthening and stabilizing the moral strength. Therefore, wherever you find a description of the methods by which one can penetrate into the higher worlds, for example in my writing “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” you can also find indications of the necessity of strengthening the moral power. For the moral power must not remain as it is in the ordinary life of the physical world, but it must be increased and strengthened.

What is necessary in this respect becomes particularly evident to us when we turn to intuition, through which the soul of one who has become a spiritual researcher is able to empathize with the innermost being of another spiritual being or another spiritual fact. We shall find that it becomes almost impossible to really put oneself in the place of other beings after the spiritual training if one has not already taken care here in the physical world to increase what one might call one's open interest in everything that surrounds us, free, open interest. All narrow-minded closed-mindedness of the soul, all hiding of the soul within itself, everything that does not want to direct the attention of the soul to compassion and sharing in the joys of fellow creatures and of everything that already surrounds us in the sense world, all this keeps the soul from coming to true intuition, to true knowledge of higher beings when it has ascended into the spiritual world. And here we are in the realm where our considerations touch on what Schopenhauer calls his “Foundations of Morality”.

Schopenhauer was by no means a spiritual scientist in the sense in which spiritual science is meant here. Therefore, for him too, the soul, when it descends into its depths, does not separate in such a way that it develops a trinity of powers corresponding to the three stages of knowledge — imagination, inspiration, intuition — but rather everything merges for him. The “soul” is a nebulousness of all the powers living in its depths. Thus Schopenhauer cannot dissect the moral virtues, either, the development of which must be the preparation for a spiritual education: a sense of fact as the basis of the virtue of truthfulness for the imagination, fortitude as the basis for what leads to inspiration, and the third - which Schopenhauer thoroughly discusses - that slumbers in the depths of the soul and that one can call general interest in the environment and surroundings. But Schopenhauer draws attention to something else, and here he is, in a sense, deeply ingenious. He draws attention to what is in fact one of the few soul qualities and soul impulses that already show in the physical world how an underground connection, as it were, exists directly between soul and soul. Schopenhauer draws attention to compassion, one could better say to sympathy. One need only mention the word compassion, compassion, of which Schopenhauer says that it must be present in every soul that can be called moral, and one will feel, firstly, that compassion touches something that is in fact connected to the innermost moral impulse, to that which can really establish morality. On the other hand, one will feel that with the word compassion one has touched something that is an intuition already present in the physical world, a putting oneself into the other soul. For anyone who can look at the world sensibly, proof that there is a physical connection between soul and soul, proof that the spirit with its powers exists between soul and soul, is what can be designated by the word compassion.

Schopenhauer is right to call compassion – and many others who have looked into these things have done the same – the real mystery of the human soul, which can already be observed here in the physical world. For there is something infinitely profound when a soul, enclosed in a body, feels something that makes another soul rejoice or causes another soul to suffer, so that in the passing of the forces of one soul to another, a kind of spiritual mystery is already present here in the physical world. That is why Schopenhauer says: No matter how much morality is preached, it is based on the life of one soul in another soul. Morality is only based on compassion or pity. Therefore, it is quite true to say that there is as much morality in the world as there is compassion. Schopenhauer was right to point out that it would be unbearable to hear the sentence: “This person is virtuous, but he has no compassion.” Schopenhauer means: Everyone will feel the impossibility that such a sentence could be pronounced, that virtuousness and lack of compassion could be combined in one soul. So Schopenhauer thinks it is unbearable to hear the sentence: “He is an unjust and malicious man, yet he is very compassionate,” although one can say that the inner workings of the human soul are sometimes so confused that one can also experience this, how someone can undoubtedly perform very bad, unvirtuous deeds and yet develop a certain feeling, for example, for pigeons and similar animals. On the whole, however, it can be said that Schopenhauer touches on the depths of the moral justification here when he speaks of compassion.

If one speaks in terms of spiritual science, then one must expand the principle of compassion somewhat, and then what appears before our soul is what can be described as sympathetic interest, as sympathetic attention for everything that happens in the environment around us. For true, inner interest in a joy that is experienced is not felt by a person who cannot experience this joy, and true, deep interest in the suffering of another being is not felt by a person who cannot suffer with it. In many respects, compassion, empathy and interest coincide. To have real, true interest is to have love. Because you cannot have interest without having love in the true sense of the word, without having compassion.

Now the right preparation for intuitive knowledge here in the physical world is the one that aims to strengthen the soul by getting the soul used to taking an interest in everything that lives, breathes and is, to being able to pay attention to everything that surrounds the soul. The deeper our interest can be, the better we prepare ourselves as spiritual researchers for the intuition of the higher worlds. Therefore, it can be said that, especially for spiritual science, the radiance of compassion in the physical world appears as a reflection of the fact that the deep forces of the soul that lead to intuition can only develop truly and correctly if the soul prepares itself for this through a real interest in the world around it, that is, through love and compassion.

Thus we see everywhere that the right way to train the mind is inseparable from that which is at the same time the most important moral virtue of man. For in loving with interest, in attentively looking at all suffering and all joy, at all being in general, in the soul's steadfastness of character and in truthfulness, lie, so to speak, the most significant, indeed the most fundamental moral virtues. Anyone who wants to understand any virtue, for example a virtue such as loyalty undoubtedly is, will easily be able to get to know it as a special form of steadfastness. A person who is steadfast will also know how to be loyal in the appropriate way. All virtues, one might say the scope of virtues, will be traceable in a certain principled way to these three qualities of the soul.

Now, if the relationship between spiritual science and morality is to be described, it must also be pointed out how man, when he really arrives at the contemplation of the spiritual world, whether through spiritual training or whether he merely accepts what spiritual research offers him, comes face to face with a world that makes very special demands on him, demands that will certainly encompass what the soul needs in terms of confidence, hopes, strength and so on. But there comes a point when the soul is face to face with itself, when, in full self-awareness, it has stepped out of its personality, as it were, and entered a world that no longer contains only its personal interests and intentions. On the path to spiritual research, our soul comes to the point where it faces its personality, where it faces the being that it has been up to now. It has already been pointed out that in spiritual research, this confrontation with the being that one has been up to now is referred to as the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, the threshold that separates the supersensible world from the ordinary physical world. It is only with this Dweller of the Threshold that one realizes what one is, what one has hitherto called one's personality, one's interests, what one has willed, what one has felt as something connected with sympathy or antipathy. All this confronts one like an alien being, emerges from within. One looks at it like an alien being and learns to say: “You have spoken all this so far. Now you have it before you, and it shows itself to you as a different being; you are beside yourself. It is the same with the feelings, with the will of the human being in the moment of meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. When one experiences this, one also knows how strong all the magnetizing forces are that draw one to the personality that one was and that one must actually leave.

That is the significant experience, here earlier called distressing, that one realizes: Yes, one must let go of oneself, but this being that one was, that one is facing, does not want to let go of one, it draws one to itself with a hundred and a hundred forces. And if you succumb to these forces, you cannot free yourself from what you have previously called “yourself”, and so you cannot enter the spiritual world. By getting to know yourself, you get to know the bond between the higher world, between the higher powers of knowledge that are always dormant in man, and between what you are in the physical world. Theoretically speaking, this breaking away from oneself could appear easy. When this event is experienced, not only experienced through schooling of the mind, but experienced through what man can recognize through schooling of the mind, then it becomes apparent that these magnetically acting forces cannot be overcome so absolutely by judgment, but that with the breaking away from oneself, the strength of the fettering forces also grows, so that one feels: Everything that wants to pull one back becomes stronger the more one breaks away from oneself. One notices more and more what draws one to the ordinary personality, and one also notices more and more how necessary it is to have gained strength beforehand to resist these magnetic forces. That is to say, one must actually precede the actual entry into the spiritual world with such a strengthening of the soul's powers in the good, in the moral, such a leaning towards what the spirit demands of us, that one can resist the temptations of the lower personality with a stronger power than is necessary in the physical world.

Thus one becomes aware only when one stands before the characterized harrowing event, how every approach to the spirit is at the same time an approach to moral demands. Thus one has again through experience something that justifies Plato, the great Greek philosopher, when he calls the divine “the good”. When we are confronted with natural phenomena, we will gain a more accurate judgment of them the more we refrain from moral judgment of them. Who would want to judge a salt crystal or a plant that is stunted in its development morally because of that? In the ordinary physical world, the natural and moral world order converge, so that one only senses the depth of the moral world order when one realizes that one is only really admitted to the spiritual world with moral strength. Therefore, it is considered a principle of the spiritual world, and this is again an experience: anyone can come to the Guardian of the Threshold; only those who pass him through their moral strength can pass him. But anyone who only gets as far as the Guardian of the Threshold and then has to go back, will then have a spiritual world before him that is only the mirror image of his own inner world. So someone can believe that he has a whole spiritual world before him, and can also fool other people with what he thinks he has before him as a spiritual world. And other people can believe that it is a spiritual world that corresponds to the truth. If he has not been able to pass the Guardian of the Threshold through his moral strength and through his moral state of soul, then his spiritual world is not permeated by truth, not by objectivity. Therefore, it will be self-evident that every real knowledge of the spiritual world will give such a presentation of the spiritual conditions that, through the way it is presented, not only preaches morality in the soul, but also justifies morality.

This is especially evident when we consider what has been frequently presented here from the most diverse points of view as a necessary insight of spiritual science: the life of the human soul through repeated earthly lives. Everything we are in one life forms the causes for the qualities we have in the next life. And the way we are in one life is determined by the qualities we carry within us, the effects of previous earthly lives. A soul that does not develop a sense of fact will, through this lack of sense of fact, prepare such causes that in the next life form the predispositions for a soul that shows a predisposition for untruthfulness from the outset. Untruthfulness, so to speak, practised by such a soul life, produces predispositions for untruthfulness for a next life on earth. Truthfulness alone, practiced in a soul life, produces the ability for the next earthly life, in the external talent for truthfulness, so that if one shows truthfulness as a necessary preparation for spiritual training, at the same time one points to something that, beyond death, for the next earthly life, makes the soul more moral than it was before.

If, instead of fortitude, instead of moral courage, a certain inner indifference develops in the soul, a certain inner lightness, a certain shrinking from the need to face the truth in the soul, from the need to assert what one has recognized as true and right , then, because this affects inspiration, a soul in which this education to fortitude is neglected will, through this very life, as it were, create causes that have an inspiring effect in the next life and make the soul there a self-seeker, an egoist. Selfishness in one's life is, as it were, inspired by the previous life, in that moral courage did not prevail in the soul in the latter life. And practicing indifference to the outside world, lack of interest, inattention, selfishness, has the effect of sending, as it were, an intuition of this present being to the next embodiment , into the next incarnation, and intuit this in such a way that the next life bears the fruits of it, that is, that it then already produces an alienation from the environment in its predispositions, a disconnection from the environment.

But what does it mean in the human soul to be 'alienated from the environment'? Oh, it means a great deal. Those who are alienated from their environment, who are not adapted to it, are affected by it in such a way that it makes them constantly ill, and this then affects not only the soul but also the body. Pathological, unhealthy tendencies are sent into a following life, as if by intuition from a previous life on earth, because the soul goes through life without interest and inattentively. Whatever is more soulless in an embodiment - a lack of interest, a lack of compassion for the world around us - goes deeper into the next incarnation, into the physical being, and appears as unhealthiness.

Thus, when we consider the moral foundations of the human soul in a spiritual sense, we see that we are actually touching on what is active in this human soul, what is present in it as impulses, in that the soul lives its way from one life to the next and builds up the new life according to what it has brought with it as causes from the previous one. Thus morality becomes the formative power from one life to the next, and we preach not only morality, but we show what morality does, how it works as a power in the human soul, and then indeed all those objections that are sometimes raised with an apparent right against spiritual science fall away. It is often said that when spiritual science speaks of repeated lives on earth in the sense that karma will balance out in a future life the joy or suffering a person has experienced, it is based on a certain selfishness. But if we do not quibble over words, but look at the essential point, if we do not merely want to preach morality but to found morality, then it must be said that in order to become ever more moral, the soul must become ever more perfect, that is, the inner impulses for its perfection must be shown. It must therefore be shown how moral impulses are related to the perfection or imperfection of the soul. If, then, the aim is to show the relationship between spiritual science and morality, then we can say: this spiritual science is most certainly justified before the justified demands of morality, because it must incorporate the moral demands into its most significant demands. Indeed, it justifies in a certain way those impulses that prevailed with a thinker such as Plato, who designated the divine-spiritual as the “good”, by showing how the spiritual can only endure what is good, that is, it must be intimately related to what is good.

Thus spiritual science may be regarded as something that contains within itself, not in an external way, but in an internal way, the principles on which morality is based. And in addition to much else that we shall have to speak of in the next lecture, spiritual science has much to give to man for the inner support of his soul, for the health of his soul, for all the strength he needs for work, for the security to hold one's own in the outer life and to penetrate to what one's task is, to all this spiritual science can add something that is an important addition to the conception of human life, that is to satisfy the human soul. At the beginning of this lecture, we pointed out how morality and moral judgment point to those depths of the human soul where the soul stands in holy awe of the other soul because it is aware of the difficulty of penetrating to where the moral impulses lie in the soul. If we have seen, then, that he who speaks of moral principles in life touches those unknown depths of the human soul, before which we must stand with the highest respect, then we must say that any unauthorized intrusion into this human soul is itself immoral. If morality presents us with each of our fellow human beings in such a way that we immediately sense that we we stand with the moral judgment before the depths of his soul — so spiritual science shows us that these depths of the human soul, when they are strengthened, when they are strengthened and made firm, do indeed lead up into the objective spiritual world, only then making the soul a fellow citizen of the spiritual worlds.

That, then, which we regard with awe in our moral judgment, proves at the same time to be the only thing that actually has the “passport” to cross the threshold behind which the spirit rules with its secrets. But that draws our attention to the nature of the human soul, to the kinship of the human soul, where it takes hold of itself in its depths, with the good spirit. And this is something that life makes understandable to us in that deep sense, that we must then say to ourselves – even where we cannot agree with the moral behavior of a human soul that comes to meet us, even where we must harshly condemn its behavior – that we may say to ourselves, by looking at the human soul's passage through repeated lives: Yes, even in the depths of the human soul, which we may even, justifiably, morally condemn, there lives something that makes it akin to the spiritual world, if only it wants to penetrate into its depths and become aware of the sources of morality in its depths!

Thus, the spiritual-scientific view of morality reconciles us with what we can call the true value of the human soul. It puts the words into our mouths that allow us to accept, in the face of much that we need – in the strength of joy and abundance, in the strength of spirit and soul, in the consolation for many of life's sufferings – that there is much in every situation of the human soul, even if this soul is not aware of this or that, where the soul may say of itself: However hidden it may be, there is something in me that professes good! And this contributes most when the soul needs strength to sustain itself, contributes most to the strength of life and to the strength of work, when the human soul, despite many aberrations in the moral realm, can still say to itself – and it can say this to itself when it recognizes itself through spiritual science – what Theone says in the drama 'Helena' by the Greek poet Euripides:

I want the good of nature, and love it,
because I must respect myself.

I would like to finish the course of these winter talks today with a consideration about the significance of the spiritual science for the human life.

I have pointed many a time to the fact that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory of the world that one accepts or refuses like other theories. No, spiritual science hopes to be able to be a real new element of life, something that can penetrate into the whole human being, and that the human being thereby gets a real treasure for life. What I have suggested in this respect already at the suitable places of the single talks I do summarise not only today, but I will also explain it somewhat more in detail.

In the course of these talks, I have pointed repeatedly to the fact that spiritual research is based on something quite different from any other research in our time. I have mentioned that with any other research it matters, above all, that the human being unfolds his faculty of judgement, his willpower, as well as he has them, and that he applies them immediately. If we face life, we are forced to appeal to our judgement immediately to make a decision in this or that sense. On the other hand, we face life in such a way that our will should be used, we can only seek to apply that willpower which we have unfolded with our normal education.

Briefly, we are forced at any moment of the usual life, but also in the usual science, to accept ourselves as we are anyway.

On the other hand, the position of spiritual science is quite different, actually. Just this fact brings it adversaries and opponents in abundance. The spiritual researcher cannot take himself in such a way as he is. With the portrayal of the life between death and a new birth, I have especially emphasised this. What we apply, otherwise, in life directly to the outer world the spiritual researchers uses it first as preparation for the level of knowledge which he should attain only after this preparation. The maturity of judgment and willpower are not applied to the outside, not in such a way that we make decisions directly or put acts of volition in scene. Nevertheless, they are applied in a spiritual process so that the spiritual researcher uses the techniques, the inner handling of the faculty of judgement to further his soul to make it riper and riper. The will is practiced in such a way that a development of the soul from another viewpoint is possible than that he has already.

That is why one could say: what one applies usually directly to the world—one applies in spiritual research for the preparation of that what one should only attain after this preparation. That is the point that the soul transforms itself into another instrument of knowledge and willing than it is at first. Hence, that mood also comes which the spiritual researcher has compared with knowledge that he has, actually, always the feeling: what you have applied usually directly to judge the things—now you must withdraw it from the outer world to further yourself; now you must wait, until your soul has become ripe to let the knowledge of truth approach you. What flows out, otherwise, from our soul is used first to the work on the soul. However, thereby the human being experiences a mood of inner activity, not that mood of simply accepting the world.

Then we have realised that all outer sense perceptions or thoughts and mental pictures, bound to the brain, cannot supply any cognitive force to spiritual research, but that it must appeal to the stimulation of forces that are slumbering, otherwise, in the soul. I draw your attention to the fact that the real clairvoyant knowledge is based on the fact that at every moment the spiritual-scientific researcher must submerge in the processes and things which he wants to recognise, and that that which he wants to perceive and recognise is extinguished at once if he does not submerge with his whole active soul. We abandon ourselves to an outer colour or an outer tone passively; they have an effect on us. We have to be active if we want to recognise anything in the spiritual world. If we faced the things and beings passively in the spiritual world, the recognised would be extinguished or would change into hallucinations or illusions if it is still there. No moment the soul is allowed to rest in the spiritual world.

If we consider that the soul can ascend to the levels of Imaginative, Inspirative, and Intuitive knowledge only, while it is internally active continuously, then we realise that the spiritual-scientific research can deliver knowledge to the human beings only, which also necessitates a particular kind of understanding. I have pointed already repeatedly to the fact that one has not to be a spiritual researcher to understand what the spiritual researcher explores in the spiritual worlds. Since there is in every soul an immediate, secret language by which it can understand, what the spiritual researcher says, even if it cannot be active spiritual-scientifically, as one can understand a picture, even if one is not a painter. However, the human being of the present has also to fight for it; since nothing is more obvious to him to say: truth must get at me; I must behave passively to it, it has to be given to me! One feels insecure if one shall do anything if one shall first develop the soul to recognise truth. Hence, one can object to the spiritual researcher very easily: you put up concepts of truth which are not in such a way, as the concepts of truth of the outer life or the outer science; and these truth concepts say: I believe what is confirmed to me by facts what can be revealed, so to speak, by facts.

Many years ago, I called this attitude concerning knowledge and life facts fanaticism, on one side. On the other side, one dedicates himself to a certain dogmatism of facts. It signifies the same like any other dogmatism for the soul. One feels, so to speak, that one has no inner power to grasp truth if one is no longer kept to the apron strings of the outer facts or the outer science. However, spiritual science necessitates—because it has to speak about matters and processes which do not belong to the field of usual life—that you bring yourself to an understanding that is not kept tied to the apron strings of the outer facts and that also does not submit to any dogmatism of facts, but feels the light of truth shining in an inner, mental experience. The modern human being must get used only to the inner conception of the living truth. One can almost say, the modern soul is not able to bring itself to develop those strong inner forces that are necessary not to let dictate the truth, but to experience it immediately. However, this feeling is necessary if the human beings should check and understand the spiritual-scientific results. If one brings himself to experience truth in such a way, spiritual science is clear for any soul immediately. Since that does not speak against spiritual science what some people argue that anywhere in the field of the natural sciences or history anything would be that could persuade anybody that the so-called spiritual-scientific truths would be errors or pipe dreams.

Not a single scientific or historical truth contradicts the knowledge of spiritual science. I have often emphasised this in these talks. Nevertheless, those who get used to the scientific thinking at first absorb prejudice with it that one only must overcome. The opposition does not arise from the judgements of science, but from the prejudice against spiritual science. Spiritual science creates cognitive forces that have to become active if the soul wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. Therefore, one understands spiritual science only if the human beings get used gradually to bringing up the active forces from their soul depths that must be animated as free inner activities in the soul.

I have almost avoided out of this attitude using illustrations or photos for these talks. The modern human being is inclined very much to look at something passively. However, one has to grasp internally what spiritual science brings to light; one has to think, to feel, and often to want with it. While spiritual science appeals to this what exists, indeed, in any soul, but slumbers in the souls, it calls forces in the soul for the spiritual life which—if they are used for it—represent a high treasure for life which the human beings need more and more.

Only somebody who is short-sighted can deny that this human life becomes more and more complex, that our development runs in such a way that inner forces of orientation will be more and more necessary to cope with life in any direction. Except various other reasons that speak for the emergence of spiritual science in the present culture, it is also valid above all that the human souls must use these stronger forces to orientate themselves in the outer life, the more we settle in the future. Life itself requires these stronger forces from the human souls.

Of course, we cannot bring everything forward in a short talk that spiritual science—I do not say spiritual research now—has to offer as treasures for life by the living understanding of that what spiritual research brings to light. We can only characterise the single categories, overall. There I would like to start from that what is connected directly with the single human being.

I have repeatedly pointed in other contexts to the rhythmical change that happens in the human life in the course of 24 hours, waking and sleeping. I have partly mentioned in the various talks what is one can say about it from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I want only to suggest today that the human being has the sleep as a means of recovery of particular kind beside that what he has for his immediate mood from sleep and can feel immediately subjectively. Today you have only to listen to the outer medical science; it is of the opinion that the healthy sleep is a remedy. Since sleep unfolds such forces in the human being which compensate a certain daily consumption of forces. Whereas the awake life weakens the body in a way, we are mainly concerned with the development of the forces of recovery. In sleep, healthy forces have an effect on the human being. One of the best remedies for some illnesses is that one causes a healthy sleep. I cannot speak, of course, in this talk how one causes a healthy sleep. I explain on a separate occasion whether spiritual science has to say anything particular about that.

Now the human being can recover by that what develops in sleep only what we have consumed. In sleep the soul withdraws from the physical body; the spiritual-mental is in its own world, in the spiritual world. This different relation of the soul to the body when it is awake is connected with the stimulation of recovering forces. Now spiritual research appeals—as we have seen—the spiritual-mental of the human being to become free from the bodily, from the physical—for one cannot investigate the spiritual-mental in another way. Everything that the spiritual researcher investigates he investigates outside of his physical body. If he expresses the investigated in concepts and words, and if the human soul attains an understanding of this what he has to say, then that makes a particular influence on this human being who is no spiritual researcher, but only faces the communications with understanding. This soul takes care to develop understanding forces for the results of spiritual research. These forces are more or less independent of the physical body. While we understand that what the senses and the reason offer, we remain dependent with this understanding on our physical body, we wear out it, let our activity run in the whole sphere from which diseases come. If we put ourselves with our lively understanding in that what spiritual science offers, we live in the sphere of the healthy forces.

One can deny this easily, saying that one knows many people who deal with the results of spiritual science and do not at all make such an impression, as if they live in the field of the recovering forces. This may be completely entitled. However, if one deals with the results of spiritual science in the same way, as one deals with other sciences or the usual life, one does not penetrate into it. What I have called “Homunculism” in the last talk, one can unfold as well as in other sciences in spiritual science.

If one wants to understand spiritual science in the same way as one wants to understand the results of the usual sciences, then one is not correctly related to it. Spiritual science comes from spiritual research, from the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher, from a perpetual activity; and the understanding, which it gets, appeals at least to tiring the physical body, that means to what the common cognitive forces of the usual life appeal.

However, truth itself must thereby become something like a living being for the spiritual researcher as well as for the supporter of spiritual science. It will also become this. While one receives the truth, otherwise, like a sum of judgements, like something that one just thinks only, one receives spiritual science like something that pulsates through the soul like spiritual blood that animates it internally. One receives the truth like a sum of spiritual living beings; one feels penetrated with living existence by spiritual science if one meets it with understanding. Then, however, it has a recovering effect up into the physical body. As sleep, during which the soul is also beyond the physical body, is a remedy against some illnesses in the true sense of the word, spiritual science can also be such a remedy. However, only those can regard it as a remedy who want to understand the following important matter. It is comprehensible that one approaches spiritual science as one approaches the outer medicine or art because one maintains the same habitual ways of thinking. If one wants to penetrate into it, one often asks, which remedy do you have for this illness, which for that? The information of remedies is often demanded from spiritual science. Indeed, spiritual science will also give real concrete remedies; but one has to understand that it wants to give not only this or that remedy, but that it presents itself, above all. Nevertheless, one does not always accept it with understanding. Spiritual science can answer if one asks for a remedial method, take me, and then you feel my curative forces! However, this is uncomfortable for some people who often look for something completely different.

Of course, it is trivial to object that spiritual science could not help somebody who dealt with spiritual science and died early or fell ill by this or that disease. Since one would have to issue a rebuttal first whether somebody who has survived with the help of spiritual science up to his forty-fifth year had become without it maybe thirty-five or forty years old only. The methods of disproof are not often so simple.

Above all, I must draw your attention to the fact that sleep can compensate only what is used in the physical body, can take forces only from the spiritual worlds as far as the borders of the spiritual predisposition reach which the human being brings by birth in his existence. Spiritual science gets its forces from that world with which the human being is connected spiritually. Therefore, one can say that sleep is a remedy in this respect that it can compensate spent forces. Spiritual science supplies forces to the human being, which he has not yet in himself, either by what it is as such, or by what it can give. It opens a higher source of recovery for the human being as the usual life can also supply to him with the best sleep. One can compare what can work recovering from the soul by lively acceptance of spiritual science with that of which usual medical art is capable. Since also the usual medical art is able only to call those healing forces for the recovery of the human being that are already in him that are only suppressed by opposing forces. Spiritual science, however, brings new forces in the human being to effectiveness, which only develop, which are not innate. It appeals not only to the human being as a microcosm but also to the connection of the human being as a microcosm with the big spiritual world.

In order to make this clearer, I would like to point to something that already is on the border of physical and spiritual. Although it is correct that spiritual science gives the human being a treasure for life by which he can prevent illnesses in a certain respect, a much more important treasure for life strikes us for the life of the soul itself; I mean the memory. Who has not to complain of decline in memory when he becomes older? The forces with which we are equipped for our memory become exhausted. One could live ever so healthily, nevertheless, they become exhausted; even if with some outer means something may be improved, the innate forces become exhausted.

However, if one grasps spiritual science internally and if one appropriates habitual ways of thinking and imagining that are quite different from the usual ones, one notes that, indeed, the retentive power decreases that it is substituted, however, with something that is a much better memory. This appears gradually from the spiritual undergrounds of the soul what one can call retrospect of events. As we look, otherwise, at the things in space, we learn gradually to look at the things in time. The forces which memory does not develop, otherwise, because it has a reserve usually in the bodily which remain hidden, until this slumbering retentiveness is brought out of the soul and becomes retrospective forces of the past. With correctly settling in spiritual science, we instil something in the course of life that continues our usual, instilled memory by which a human being, who grasps spiritual science vividly, can survey the past much longer than someone who does not want to get involved with spiritual science. These forces become also forces directing to the future. Someone who goes into such things and their subtler differentiations notes that memory becomes something different, but something that works more reliably than that memory which is innate by the bodily forces.

This shows us with a careful observation of life how refreshing and strengthening the treasures for life are which spiritual science can give beside other things. Of course, spiritual science cannot heal spiritually what is destroyed physically in the body. Spiritual science never turns in a fanatical opposition against the outer scientific medicine as it happens with similar directions in these fields sometimes; it draws attention to the fact that that what one has to cure physically one has to cure physically. What the forces of a reinforced spiritual life can pour into us gives an inexhaustible treasure for life.

How has that become gradually mere dry knowledge with the materialistic attitude what is good for health or furthers life! Not in order to prove something, but only in order to explain something, I would like to show how we can observe the remedial instincts with animals. However, we can find the tendency with the human being to leave the healthy life more and more, and thereby he would want to change everything that is good for him into outer, dry knowledge. Today one already sees people who can no longer develop their instincts completely which say to them while eating: now you have enough. Beside their plate are scales and now they weigh how much the piece of meat weighs they eat. I expressed that only somewhat radically; but he who pursues the things realises that the sensations of life change slowly more and more into abstract knowledge. This also expresses itself in the fact that people cannot act out of their feeling concerning health or illness, but like to hand over the care for it to others.

In this respect spiritual science will be an exceptionally significant treasure for life, while it strives for penetrating a world from which the human being, indeed, only seems to be descended in which he stands, however, still inside. Since in truth his mental and physical being have arisen from the spirit. While someone goes away from the life instincts with that part of his being that is bound to the brain and nervous system, he approaches the active life again by understanding settling in spiritual science. Therefore, he does not return, indeed, to the animal desires. He will penetrate them from the mind in such a way that an abstract knowledge cannot dictate what he has to eat and to drink, how long he has to walk, to do gymnastics and so on. However, it will happen that he spiritualises his desires immediately that he lets the spiritual treasure he got from spiritual science flow into his desires and thereby knows: you should do this so and so in life. One could almost say, the human being has gone away from life by that knowledge which is bound to the brain and nervous system; however, he penetrates life again with new contents by spiritual science, and thereby he knows again immediately what is good for him, what is advantageous to him, what is not good for him. He will go with certainty through life; he will firmly stand in life because he builds a bridge between the deepest grounds of life and his existence. This will apply not only to health and illness, but also to the whole life.

It is necessary if we want to be healthy to appeal to spiritual forces that are active that ascend in lively direction. If we judge, otherwise, in life, it happens in the way that we make our judgement dependent on that what we have seen; we remain quite passive with our own soul. Just the usual science is proud if it should make judgements without taking the forces of judging from the own soul. This is the one treasure for life that spiritual science enlivens the forces of truth, of judgement. The soul has to get used more and more not to accepting judgements but to judging actively, to opening an inner source of judging. Thereby it attains skill of judging, inner freedom to handle the power of judgement, presence of mind that arises directly from the soul if it has to orientate itself in the world or to deal with the world. One could foresee a treasure for life of spiritual science that one can characterise in the following way.

Let us suppose that we have to educate, and we perform the development of the young human being spiritual-scientifically. The human being thereby grows up in such a way that he is inclined more and more to appeal to the power of inner judgement, to develop presence of mind, to experience truth. The human beings who were educated in the sense of spiritual science stand up in life quite different from those who have experienced another education. They feel instinctively because their thinking will not be an abstract one, but goes into the feelings that it is good to begin this or that. How some people stand there today within our materialistic civilisation with their lives, with their thinking and judgments and do not know what they are good for and what they should do. This will happen less and less if the souls known with spiritual science come in situations where they must decide. They will feel in such a way that their spiritualised instincts give pleasure to them. This pleasure will not deceive them; it will be the right one, and they properly familiarise themselves with life.

Somebody who represents spiritual science today relates to it in another way than one relates to another spiritual current. However, thereby one does not have the right attitude to it that one is inspired by the results of spiritual science subjectively, and that one feels the urge to inform these results to his fellow. There many a man would maybe restrain with this or that today, because it does not belong to the conveniences of life to represent spiritual science, if one arrived at the aims of spiritual science in such a way as one arrives at the aims of other sciences. However, one arrives at that what induces one to talk about the knowledge of spiritual science if one recognises that a civilisation which has become materialistic penetrates into the souls and makes them more and more passive and that spiritual science is necessary for the progressive life while the human being learns more and more to orient himself in life. If one recognises that those forces must die down, which put the human beings firmly in life in natural way, then one is urged to proclaim the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Then one would like to have more than the human language—unmanageable in certain respects—offers to show how necessary the treasure for life is in the further human progress which spiritual science can only give in our time.

If one notes less what it means to be completely subject to a dogmatism of facts, to the specialisation in science caused by fact fanaticism, one maybe understands why spiritual science can only induce that human being to become internally free and to get inner mobility who can put himself in life in such a way that he understands the basic source of life, because his soul is connected with the primordial forces of existence. More and more humanity will need to develop inner elasticity of the power of judgement in subtle activity. Spiritual science has to bring this as a treasure for life to humanity. A thinking that bears the force of truth in itself that the human being needs in the more complex future is a treasure for life which spiritual science can give humanity.

One will have to get used to developing understanding for what one can grasp only internally, because one allies with the internally living truth by spiritual science that cannot be forced to judging from the outside. As the organism is invigorated with the living force of blood and breathes in the right relation to the outside world, spiritual science invigorates us with the internally living truth. It is like a spiritual-mental heart that breathes in the surroundings where one has to inhale something spiritual to make the soul healthy so that it can oppose the inner breathing air what it makes a free inner organic force.

One would like to say that one cannot believe in this spiritual breathing today. In the future one will be able to believe in the inner heart of spiritual breathing. The soul thereby develops human freedom. As the human being can develop as a living being only because he can inhale not only the breathing air vividly, but transforms it vividly and develops a separate living physical organism in a subtle way, he will spiritually develop inner mental blood more and more which enlivens him and makes him a really free being, while he is active and transforms the outer knowledge.

If we go from knowledge to will, we have to remember that spiritual science brings the human beings mental pictures,, concepts, ideas, and results of spiritual research which live as it were so freely in the soul that they are independent of the mental, of the externally bodily, also of desires and outer impressions.

How does the human being act under usual circumstances? He acts based on outer impressions or impulses. Spiritual science is not concerned with that what is connected with the outer organism. It fulfils the human being with that what only lives in the organism what comes from the spiritual world and not directly from the organism. More and more the possibility is omitted for the human being to act from outer impulses and sensations; but what comes up to him from spiritual science supplies inner forces to him, so that he comes to action from the inside. This gives a significant impact for the human life.

Which force comes up to action if the outer world does not supply the impulses? Which impulses can work then?

One will realise by a simple consideration that it must be a comprehensive impulse, so that it fulfils the soul with a comprehensively working force. This is the impulse of love which pours out of the soul directly, but only if it is driven by inner impulses. Spiritual science supplies a treasure for life to the human being that is of unlimited value: a freer and freer incline to his action what can invigorate the power of action if the impulses are spiritual and with it to the power of love.

I have pronounced in these talks more often that spiritual science is the big school of love for life. That does not mean that spiritual science wants to talk about love at every opportunity. This talking of love reminds of a saying of Schopenhauer: “preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard,” but still of something else. If one always hears talking love, love, love, then it is similar as with the good Gothamites who wanted to catch the light in bags and to empty them in their houses. One cannot empty love in the soul that way. It is with the human soul similar as with an oven that one has not to persuade to make the room warm, because this is its task as an oven. It does it by itself if we put wood into it and kindle it. Somebody maybe could say that the wood does not look at all that it delivers warmth. Nevertheless, there is warmth! While we put the quite different looking wood into the oven and kindle it, we bring warmth in our house. While we get used to the spiritual-scientific concepts, we get used to a free judgement, to a free orientation in the world. While we thereby fertilise our memory, we bring the impulses of the human ability of love in our souls and we get used to them. As certain it is that warmth originates in a house if the wood is properly used, it is as certain that active love that can really help is kindled by those impulses, which enter with spiritual science in the souls. Spiritual-scientific concepts are the heating material of the soul for love.

Indeed, one can also object much. Above all, it one could object that some do not find enough love with those who deal with spiritual science. However, the human being has to finally manage to regard something that seems to be unloving there or there is perhaps rather loving. For example, if anybody causes this or that less nice thing from a wrong instinct or from pure egoism, and one bawls him out of a healthy instinct, that can be a better activity of love than some words which could be quite “loving” at such moment, but would aggravate the condition from which the person concerned made this or that mistake.—The right, true experience will show that nobody who penetrates himself with spiritual science remains without its influence concerning the development of love.

Spiritual science will work as a strange treasure for life just in moral fields. It will not work like outer means, which should deter from doing this or that. It will work quietly in the soul of any human being, so that he finds the right ways of the activity of love. Spiritual science works as the inner voice of conscience which does not punish outwardly but is a more certain leader of the soul. Someone who settles in the spiritual-scientific concepts experiences that where he does wrong spiritual science has put a force in him which works like a strengthening of conscience, like correcting, giving life a direction. Thus, spiritual science will not work best by programs and outer associations in moral fields; but it will work, while it incorporates itself in the civilisation, as the moral conscience developing in humanity. With the increase of moral conscientiousness, a treasure for life is given to the modern civilisation if spiritual science finds understanding.

If one considers it in such a way, one can get a concept of that what it can be for the physical and moral healthy stimulation of the human soul. One will no longer deny that it can be an unlimited treasure for life in physical and moral respect. It can be a treasure for life which one needs very much in the future which can invigorate the human being because it wants to be recognised because it does not approach the human being from without but unites internally with his soul. Internally,one realises this: spiritual science arouses hostility much less. Today one can still understand if people come with their materialistically coloured knowledge and say that one attains knowledge which invigorates the human being also if one looks at the outside world; there one attains right knowledge. This is indeed right. However, we look once, now not only in theory, but lively, and we realise that spiritual science just gives lively knowledge everywhere; and we compare that with what a materialistically coloured worldview gives the human being.

Those persons who still build up such materialistic atomistic world edifice who are still, so to speak, at its origin are still active with theirsouls. Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834-1919, German naturalist) himself, Ostwald (Wilhelm O., 1854-1932, chemist, philosopher), his next pupils and others, they are still involved actively; they can still develop inner forces, and one could still compare that what they work with their science internally with that what spiritual science attains appealing to the inner soul forces.

With those, however, who are not in the first row with the realisation of the materialistic worldviews, or where one absorbs such a worldview passively the materialistic worldview corresponds to a food that one does not digest which cannot develop the forces for what the soul really starve. One can expel hunger, without eating really. It is possible. However, what the hunger indicates cannot be expelled for the outer organism without food. Thus, one can also suppress the hunger of the soul for the spiritual treasure for life, while one ruins the appetite for the spiritual life by a materialistic worldview. Nevertheless, the human does not stand that in the long run.

I would not like to speak here about truth and error of spiritualism. Indeed, it contains some grains of truth, not only error or fraud and the like. I would only like to point out that those who stand on the ground of a materialistic worldview do not approve spiritualism apparently. If one thinks about it with a thinking that does not invigorate itself internally, one can only say that the materialistic worldview is the same far away from spiritualism as from spiritual science. However, if one really looks into the becoming of the world, one knows something quite different. Then one knows that the hunger of the soul for a spiritual treasure for life cannot be suppressed, and that the materialists themselves produce spiritualism! One fights from materialistic side against spiritual science. However, one will realise that everywhere where spiritual science does not succeed spiritualistic associations and circles form. The representatives of a materialist worldview are the fathers of spiritualism. With an abstract thinking, one does not figure this connection out. There one makes the same error in reasoning as that who says, I plan to build up a rather good son from the child that has been born now; I prepare everything for it. However, the son does not always turn out as the father has supposed; he may become possibly a rather bad brat. That has nothing to do with lively life which ideas the materialists have of the world connections. Thus, it can happen that they produce the “son,” the brat, which they do not recognise as their son. For spiritualism is the son of materialism. Why that? Because the appetite of the soul cannot satisfy the hunger for spiritual life, and it finally happens as the physicist or chemist does that the outer events of life are demonstrated where the “spirit” is presented without inner cooperation. This is more comfortable than to have to exert oneself internally at every moment when one should climb up to the spirit. Nevertheless, this is also nothing but searching for the same worldview which materialism produces.

I want to bring in this only as an example how an abstract thinking positions itself in life. Such thinking will regard it as natural that materialism cannot produce spiritualism. How should it do it! However, a thinking that has inner power in the sphere of truth will figure the world out in quite different sense, and with such thinking the human being can position himself quite different than with an abstract, dead thinking which is “Homunculism” too.

Thus, we can regard spiritual science as a sum of life goods. Indeed, someone does not regard the said as especially valuable who thinks that life consists of outer goods only. Indeed, someone who knows that even the outer goods are dependent on the inner sense of direction in the world and on the recovering forces of the soul does not regard the idea as bold—with reference to all social conditions and what is today an occasion for so many “cures”—that such conditions can be seen correctly and that one can find the right remedies only if the human beings soar up towards spiritual science. One must really say that something is included in all that what pushes the words onto the lips of someone speaking about spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds much opposition still today. I have repeatedly pointed in the course of this winter to the fact that there must be such opponents. Their reasons are apparently striking because one can find them so easily, and because they are so extremely evident. One can understand any opponent of spiritual science very well, and, besides, he does not say something wrong; he may even say something completely right. Let me mention finally that he may say something right.

Suppose that a quite clever human being says, a spiritual researcher comes here and talks about all kinds of wrong stuff that Kant disproved for a long time, because Kant proved that the faculty of the human being is not sufficient to penetrate into the spiritual world. If this spiritual researcher had studied Kant, he would soon be quiet about that.

It is not quite wrong what the clever man says. It can be quite right. If anybody said in the time when there was not yet a microscope so that one could find macroscopic things only because the human eye cannot look into smaller things, this was quite astute. Nevertheless, what does it benefit the further progress of human thinking and life? Although it is right that the human eye cannot see down into the cells of organisms because the eyesight is limited, the human beings constructed the microscope, and the telescope and see now where the eyesight of the human eye does not reach.

As it can be very astute that somebody proves that the human eye can see no cells and the like, it can be very right what those human beings argue who speak of the limitations of the human cognitive faculties. However, does it matter whether it is right or not? As it is right that the human eye can see no cells, but that civilisation led to sharpening the eye, there are spiritual methods that strengthen the soul life, so that the human being can behold into the spiritual world. One has to understand this and other things that somebody states as an opponent of spiritual.

Actually not to boast but to inform something, I would like to mention that, nevertheless, more and more human beings note the fertile impulse of spiritual science also in the present. One can prove this by the fact that we are able to build a college of spiritual science in Dornach near Basel. One does not intend to concentrate spiritual science upon one place; I would like to stress this. However, we want to prove that we can show how spiritual science can be creative in the fields of architecture, sculpture, and painting. With this building, only a model should be given that spiritual science is able to deal with life directly. The fact that friends of spiritual science were found who donated the relatively big means that were necessary to create this college building is already a proof that this spiritual science is partly rooted in the souls of the present.

Only by the way, I would like to mention that about this building for spiritual science in Dornach all possible fairy tales are put in the world. For example, in the newest fairy tale that was put to me on the table you can read that the college that should be once built, indeed, in Munich, could not be built because we would have been rejected there. In truth, we were not rejected but certain circles in Munich, which must be asked, could not cope with their expert judgement. They let us wait for ten years; however, we could not wait with the building for ten years!

Another fairy tale tells that because of the building among various cities a kind of competition had originated, and that these would have triumphed over Munich. I would not like to say anything against the artistic Munich. Even if the inhabitants of Munich regret that the college of spiritual science is built now somewhere else, nevertheless, not so many cities scrambled to get it! Besides, the concerning newspaper is not informed especially well if it writes that Basel seems to emerge as the most favourable city from this competition.

I want to mention this only because now also more opponents appear due to this building. For it can be an outer sign that spiritual science finds already understanding that the building can be started, that such an artistic landmark can show the significance of spiritual science in the world. The opponents always ask, who are these supporters of spiritual science? They must be people without judgement, people who easily listen in good faith! However, usually those who talk in such a way would prefer that one listens to their authority or to that what they regard as authority. Those people are opponents because the supporters of spiritual science do not do this and have advanced to be unbiased in a way. However, being unbiased of a materialistically coloured or any dogmatic worldview is necessary if one wants to understand spiritual science. With this understanding one calls the life goods in the soul—as I have suggested it today—with those who get involved with spiritual science more intimately.

Someone who notes and understands their lively life, realises more and more, that this spiritual science is connected with that what must give the necessary new spiritual life blood to the future of humanity. Even if that what is connected with spiritual science may cause some childhood diseases, not everything should be justified that appears where one believes that it works correctly. I allow myself to express something just today at the end. Something that could entice us from the outside that could induce us internally in the same way to present spiritual science does not exist. But it is solely the knowledge that with spiritual science the true and fertile life goods for which any soul must be hungry enter in this human soul, and that this soul, even if it does not know it today, craves these life goods if it should not become empty. This sensation forces itself on the representative of spiritual science that lives in him, while he represents it. With this confession, I would like to close these winter talks:

This science faces the representative of spiritual science as if the real of a fertile future culture demands from him that he represents it. What gives him hope and confidence for life and for the salutary of spiritual science in future crowds together in a sensation of something real. He must develop the confidence that comes from true knowledge, which also knows in a certain respect that spiritual science has to work, even if so many opponents arise; it must be victorious. As it appears to the supporter who has a real attitude, it is the real of the future development of humanity.

I finish these winter talks expressing confidence in spiritual science.

When the words “health issues” are spoken, many of our contemporaries may reflect on how our views, our opinions of everyday life, of life in general, of all its blessings and woe; when the words “health issues” are spoken, however, it is particularly a feeling that may be evoked here that slumbers more or less consciously or unconsciously in every human soul: that man rightly regards health as a precious possession in this physical life.

Not only those who are completely absorbed in this physical life, with all their thoughts and interests, regard health as a precious thing, but also those who focus their minds on the highest ideals of humanity, who focus their minds on the spiritual, must also recognize what a precious thing health is, and even if he says to himself: Above all, this health is valuable to me because it enables me to fulfill my tasks in the world when I have it, because it prevents me from fulfilling these duties, these tasks in life when it is in any way damaged.

What the word “health” encompasses is directly or indirectly related to our highest destiny, to our human goals. Therefore, it may well depress some who reflect on how health and illness are always viewed differently in a certain way, depending on how human views and opinions change; and those who are attentive observers of life in its depths may well have seen many changes in this regard, especially in recent decades.

But what underlies all striving in relation to health and illness, in relation to the healing of the human being, is in turn only that which we must call the science of life, the knowledge of life. What transformations have taken place in relation to the knowledge of life in these last decades, much greater ones than one would usually assume! It could tell the observer of life a great deal if he observed the way in which currents arise from the scientific foundation, from the scientific knowledge of the world, and lead to this or that view health, if he compares these currents and this foundation [with that] of 20, 30, 40 years ago, how it was then and how it presents itself to us today.

What has often been emphasized here in relation to many other areas, namely that our age has taken a significant step towards materialism, can be observed particularly in the area to which our present consideration is devoted.

Those who are able to look back on the scientific knowledge that underlies today's discussion, as it was formed 20, 30, 40 years ago, may come across a venerable personality when they happen to encounter this phenomenon. I myself once encountered this honorable personality, and I may well refer to the character of this personality because it seems symptomatic to me of what has changed over the past few decades.

Those who were lucky enough to study in Vienna quite a long time ago were able to get to know the scientific basis of our current field of study at the medical faculty in Vienna. They got to know the then famous and widely significant anatomist Hyrtl, the man who provided the basis for hundreds and hundreds of young doctors at the time, the basis that every doctor needs, the anatomical foundations... When he stood before his audience and built up the human being from the components of the human organism, which seemingly can only be expressed in the driest of terms for scientific observation, when he built the human being out of anatomical parts, then, listening to him, you had the feeling that behind this description, this explanation of the structure of the human organism, something else was still alive, something lived from a deep understanding of the spiritual, which builds the wonderful structure of the human organism... there was just something... something... there was something in Hyrtl's presentation that can only be expressed as follows: just as the creative power of nature itself, as the spirit of nature, allows the individual structures to sprout and grow into the entire structure of the human organism, so this human organism was anatomically built up before the audience.

Those of you who have often attended these lectures here know that spiritual science tells us that what we call the outer physical body, what the eyes see, what the hands touch and what the ears and the lower senses of the human being can perceive, that this is only part of the human being, only the outer sensual part, that everything that external science can only deal with this outer limb. They also know that the first higher limb in human nature, which truly and really lives for those who can observe human beings with higher abilities, is what we call the etheric or life body in spiritual science: the mysterious master builder who is there and builds up this human organism.

This etheric or life body is something that cannot be seen by the physical eye, but what the open “spiritual eye” of the seer can see as a fact just as much as the external sensual facts can be seen by the physical eye.

One would like to say: Hyrtl stood there as a chaste scientist, as a chaste physician; he said nothing about this etheric or life body, but how he spoke of it,

how the one developed from the other, it was as if that principle of the life body lived in his words; and that was enough, it had an enormous stimulating effect, he influenced his listeners so that something of the mysterious depths of the whole of human nature was awakened in them, that something of that striving was kindled in them, which wants to take hold of man ever more deeply and which does not remain on the surface...

Soon afterwards, one could see that these times were passing, in which this scientific foundation was considered in this way...

Let me make this clear from the outset: it was not just because Hyrtl was a particularly great genius, but because he had grown out of a time that, if not precisely cognizant of the spiritual world, at least had a feeling for it. Anyone who observes life knows that today everything is pieced together, that such a representation no longer exists in broad circles of science... therefore, we must emphasize all the more that it is precisely spiritual science that goes back to the whole, to the spiritual-living behind the sensual, that it has the task of fertilizing and illuminating that which can be offered in the external, sensory realm for the horizons that interest us today, for it is in the external, sensory realm that our admirable science has achieved the most extraordinary things... for there is no lack of individual research, no lack of methods by which one can gain insight into the individual external facts of natural existence and its interrelationships...

But what spiritual science will have to bring to this individual research... that is the overarching spirit of the matter...

Now, the very same Hyrtl made a remarkable statement, a statement that may be our guiding principle today and from which we can start today. It may sound strange to many today, and yet it was made by a brilliant anatomist and physician:

Only a physician can recognize illnesses, but anyone who knows what help is can heal them.

A seemingly rather strange saying; now, let us see how spiritual science can relate to this...

Above all, we must be clear about one thing, because of the brevity that must characterize today's lecture – its subject could take up 20 to 40 lectures without exhausting everything – with this brevity, it is necessary that what is said is understood in such a way that one recognizes the attitude from which it is said. This attitude is basically the same as that on which all spiritual science is based; it can be briefly characterized by saying that spiritual science does not have the vocation of proving one or the other party line right, it has to stand on a higher vantage point and, precisely because it looks into the depths of existence, of life, has to gain a point of view that can have a unifying effect... Those who look around at life know that the shades of opinion that fight each other on the... are not usually so that one can say that one is absolutely right and the other wrong...

As a rule, one must say: Those who fight with slogans, who carry a flag, have gained their views and opinions in very specific areas of life; these areas of life have, so to speak, had a suggestive effect on them, and they actually only say what can be naturally gained as a one-sided view of life from their area of life...

But theosophy is not supposed to agitate for this or that direction, not even in the area that interests us today, in the area of illness and health and healing... Perhaps the humanities scholar in particular might feel tempted to advocate for one or the other... because in how many party divisions do we see today the very area in which the human heart would perhaps most like to sense unity.

Theosophy has the task of saying what is, how things are in life... and then the theosophist has the confidence that man, when he knows through his knowledge what is, will then come to realize through himself what he should. The point of view has not yet become theosophical, which appears and says: I also want to persuade that this or that should be done, and not...

Theosophy or spiritual science should never have anything to do with “should” or demands. It should objectively tell what is and have confidence in the human being that if he knows what is, he will find the guiding principle for his “should” in his own soul...

Now, who could deny that the most diverse, the most varied, the seemingly most opposing party lines confront us precisely in the area of health issues... and with what conviction and sharpness is fought for one's own conviction and with what bitterness is the other conviction fought against! And it should also be mentioned at the outset that Theosophy in particular never wants to do anything against the sciences, against the true scientific work. To put it bluntly: spiritual science or Theosophy must not go along with dilettantism in this field; it would prefer to work in harmony with those who at least have the opportunity to be experts in this field...

Of course, it is impossible to list all the shades of parties in this field here, but even if that is not possible, at least some of them should be roughly characterized. First of all, there is the allopathic healing method, the one that is so heavily opposed by so-called natural healing and what is called homeopathy... Much more could be said, but we have to draw in broad strokes... Not so much should be said for the time being about what the concepts of spiritual science could achieve, but rather what is said, so to speak, in a popular or scientific way as a characteristic of the individual shades of the parties. There we hear that the medical healing method is based on the fact that there are illnesses, damage to health, and that there are specific remedies from certain realms of nature that counteract certain damage that we call illnesses in a certain way . For each disease, this or that remedy is indicated, and science works in a careful and conscientious manner to find the specific remedies for this or that form of disease through experience in the sensory realm...

Naturally, we cannot go into detail here; as I said, we should only point out the characteristic features. But now we hear from many others, who take the same so-called natural healing approach, that everything the so-called allopathic healing approach says is fundamentally based on error... Because it takes too little account of the deeper causes of the disease; it looks at the way the disease manifests itself, but one must go deeper, assume that the causes lie deeper, that where a form of disease occurs, there are deeper disturbances in the organism that can only be remedied by intervening in this organism in the way that nature itself would intervene if it were to direct and guide the organism in a completely normal way.

We hear that, above all, it is not so much a matter of combating the individual diseases, but of investigating those activities in the organism, those functions that have been undermined and as a result of which the disease occurs, and which in turn are to be put back on the right track through appropriate measures, and now various healing methods are indicated, various physical and other remedies...

Above all, the specific remedy is opposed here, which, as experience has shown, is there to combat this or that disease. With bitterness, one side fights against the other.

Now, regardless of how one or the other or I myself think about it, let us briefly characterize how, for example, the homeopathic healing method thinks in turn in its main features; it says: In what we initially encounter in the disease, we do not have what appears to be the primary damage, what appears to be the primary unhealthiness, but we have before us in the phenomena that present themselves to us a kind of force that is called upon in the organism to fight the actual damage that lies deeper. Thus, in what presents itself to us as the symptom of the disease, we have something that the organism brings into the field in order to bring out the actual, deeper damage. We must therefore pay attention to what causes the very symptoms that appear in the disease. We must investigate which remedy we can find in the natural kingdom that causes exactly the same symptoms in a healthy person as we see in the sick person. We then support what nature has initiated...

What appears to us as illness has been initiated by nature, and we should help it by applying the means that cause the same symptoms in a healthy person, in order to support the fight against the actual damage.

One would like to say that with all these party shades, as far as the theories are concerned, on what is given as a logical basis, one would like to say that one can go along a long, long way everywhere and one soon recognizes , after a little insight into the matter, how little the objections of the respective opponents actually apply. And we can actually say that in all these fields, the supporters put forward weighty arguments in favor of their convictions. Or is it not true when today scientific medicine points out, by means of easily compiled statistics, the great successes, especially in external health care, and the improvement in the health situation in cities under the influence of precisely this medical healing method... and how then it is pointed out how much good has been done in this very respect by the research of many a specific remedy in recent decades... Great successes can be pointed out; those who would compare the health conditions in cities about a century ago with today's would be unjust if they did not recognize what medical science has achieved here. On the other hand, however, we hear, and we certainly have to admit it, that even if these conditions have improved, on the other hand it cannot be denied that certain types of disease, heart disease, nervous disorders and the like are increasing at an alarming rate... and that must also be admitted...

And should not the layman sometimes use this or that word, saying that, even if it is correct in a certain respect, that many conditions have improved, many worrying social consequences are emerging...

One need only think, for example, of the fact that in the case of a disease that was only discovered in the last few decades, namely tetanus, attention is drawn to a germ that is rightly said to be carried by people who remain healthy and others then become ill from it...

... Where would it end...

It is, for example, quite possible and a fact that entire schools have been infected with this or that communicable disease and it has been found that teachers who remained healthy were the carriers of the germs; they themselves were not infected by it. What tyranny would result if one were to build dogmatic legislation on such cases?

... How does that grow, what one could call the fear of illness, the fear of the mysterious sources of illness, through a way of thinking that can be very easily based on such attempts that cannot be doubted at all...

You really have to be a party man if you want to fight this or that with certain buzzwords...

Some of the watchwords of natural healing, for example, are as if all specific remedies had to be eradicated, as if one could only go back to the basics of the disease through physical or other methods, and support the functions... one hears the same watchword over and over again: poison; all specific remedies are poisons, but a poison could never be anything useful under any circumstances. And you can see how the word “poison” can have an enormous suggestive effect on entire gatherings. You only have to let these suggestions work and thereby create convictions that are extraordinarily effective. But anyone who knows what poison really is knows that those who use such buzzwords are the ones who are least accountable for what poison is. What is poison? The phenomena, the facts of nature, especially those in human life, are so tremendously complicated that answering this question is not so easy. What is poison in nature?

Belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans; the rabbit can eat it quite well.

Hemlock... Socrates had to drink from the hemlock cup to carry out his death sentence, but for the goat, hemlock is not a poison at all.

Hydrogen sulfide is certainly very toxic to the organism in certain respects; but there are small organisms, so-called sulfur bacteria, a type of split algae, that live almost exclusively on this substance: they build their organism in a very strange way from the sulfur... and if you deprive them of the hydrogen sulfide, they die. This fact provides an example of how the material can be incorporated into the phenomena of life...

So the keyword “poison” should not be the only one that tells us what we are actually fighting...

We will only make progress if we try to approach the whole consideration more and more from the perspective of spiritual science...

What is the actual difference between medical healing methods and naturopathy... in principle? We see a big difference that the spiritual scientist can characterize quite accurately from his point of view without taking sides for one or the other direction...

For those who know the facts, it is simply nonsense to say that there are no specific remedies for this or that disease. But what is healing with such remedies based on?

The fact that there is damage in the disease and the remedy combats this damage, that this can happen, is not disputed. To dispute the positive, that which is gained from experience, is narrow-minded and would not be spiritual science. But what are we dealing with in the human being when we heal by combating some kind of health disorder with external means? We are dealing with the physical human body, the external aspect of human nature. Since the human being has this physical human body, there is no doubt that it can also be treated with such an external remedy.

Natural healing has a certain idea that there is something mysterious and supernatural behind the physical human body, that what makes up the physical body is governed by the etheric or life body... The doctor does not need to believe it, but he does take the view that there is something that lives and moves behind the physical apparatus. The naturopath has an inkling of this etheric or life body and tries, so to speak, not to give so much to what can only be externally determined by physical means, but goes back to what lies behind the physical, what can be determined. This is very important, but the pressure of the materialistic way of thinking is far too strong for him to be able to move towards real spiritual knowledge of human nature. It would be horrifying if anyone who claimed to be a scientist were to speak of the visible having its basis in the invisible, the sensual in the supersensible.

Therefore, one can at most suspect that there is such a thing, but one cannot speak of it as a reality. If one speaks of it and has gained conviction from spiritual science, if one has recognized the inner reasons that lead to this supersensible link of human nature, then one cannot stop there, then one also proceeds to other links of human nature... then one enters with purest spiritual science into the secrets of the invisible, but which is nevertheless very real and real for that reason.

Then you go further and learn that in this physical human body there is not only an ether or life body that distinguishes humans from everything that surrounds us as seemingly inanimate... This ether or life body is a constant fighter against the physical body following its physical substances and chemical forces during life. Because when this life body withdraws from the physical body, then the physical body of the person follows the physical substances and forces, but then it is a corpse. During life, however, the etheric or life body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body...

Thus, in the etheric body, we have the creator, the builder of the physical body of man or any living being, who stands behind this physical body.

Then we proceed to what we call the astral body. This is the carrier of lust and suffering, joy and pain, of all the surging feelings and ideas, of everything that is instinct, desire and passion, that is, the instincts. But beyond that, we then also come to a fourth link, the carrier of the actual self-awareness, the carrier of the ego.

These four members make up the whole human being, and if we want to consider the whole human being, we must consider that the higher, the supersensible members are the actual creators of the lower, the more sensual members. Everything that happens in the lower members arises from what happens in the upper members...

Therefore, one should not only proceed to the idea of an etheric or life body, but one must consider that deeper causes, much deeper causes must lie precisely in the astral body and in the soul-spiritual of the human being, if one wants to come to an understanding of illness and health. Here the causes of the illnesses are not so easy to find. This vehicle of pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passions, expresses that which is within it in the etheric body and in the physical body. If something unhealthy lives in the astral body, consisting of wrong passions, drives and instincts, then this must have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body:

But, someone might say, let us look at a person; what contradictions can prevail between their healthy perceptions and healthy urges and the illnesses they nevertheless have! In this case, we must fully embrace spiritual science and be clear that what we call the innermost essence of man, the actual individuality of man, is something that is only just enveloped by the physical shell, and that it takes completely different paths in its development than this physical shell. When we look at the core of a person, we say: this person consists of two currents...

The person who comes to us in life, let us look at him. He is first a result of heredity, a result of what comes from father, mother and the ancestors before them...

But in all that continues through the generations, in all that lives something completely different, something that now has to do with the astral body and I. And when we meet a person, we see not only what we have inherited from previous generations, but also what has descended from the spiritual world as the spiritual core of our being. We look at what is called re-embodiment or reincarnation, at the innermost core of our being, which carries over from life to life. This unites with what lies in the line of inheritance, permeating and energizing what is inherited from father and mother. And even if we do not see today how the instincts and drives of individuality affect the physical body in a way that makes us ill or healthy, we would see this if we looked at what the person has been in his or her previous life.

If we recognize this, we can learn to see the passions and instincts and desires in the present life that originate from what we brought with us from these previous lives and that act as causes of illness in this present life, even if they were not acquired in this life.

And this is where the knowledge of the essence of the human being begins, as a proper basis for assessing the healing method.

Can we somehow see how the astral body indicates what it has to say in relation to what makes the physical body healthy or sick?

For example, someone has to raise a child... according to the child's nature, this or that is good, one has the stereotyped view. Instead of strict individualization, also with regard to health, one has the opinion: there are many illnesses, but only one health. But in truth, there are as many healths as there are people. Every person has their own health, their own conditions of being healthy. But with stereotyped concepts, you can ruin everything possible with the child. For example, the child does not want to eat this or that food. This is, of course, naughtiness, one thinks. But it would be much more correct to say: This is proof that sympathy and antipathy is nothing more than the astral body feeling: I must have this if I am to work in the right way on my physical body, and what the child rejects, it cannot use.

What the child's palate rejects or craves expresses what is healthy for it. It is therefore right to observe carefully what the child demands, what it is keen on. When does the astral body perceive something as pleasure, especially in childhood? When what it enjoys has in itself, as it were, the potential to be incorporated into the organism in a beneficial way. Only when something is already corrupted in the order of healthy human nature, then enjoyment is no longer a true guide... That what is healthy for him, he also likes, and what makes him sick, he does not like, that is the only measure of health, that there is an appropriate sense for everything we take into our organism. So it is a matter of making the consciousness of what is good for us as alive as possible within us, of making our astral body, the carrier of pleasure and desire, lively for what is healthy for our organism...

There are now means to achieve a great deal in this regard... Human nature differs from person to person because a different individuality permeates and energizes the exterior.

A case that occurred: there was a person who, from early childhood, had a terrible aversion to all meat; he could not smell meat, so to speak. He could not smell it, so he did not eat it. At first he was in a tolerant environment. But there were aunts and uncles who thought that not eating meat was completely perverse... And so the good man allowed himself to be persuaded to at least start with a little broth, then move on to veal and so on... But he also came to mutton... and he soon ended up with

severe encephalitis because it was absolutely impossible for this person's body to do what was necessary to digest meat using the powers within it. He was so constituted that he knew very well what was healthy for him from an early age...

But if the same food, which was the only right food for this person, were given to another, the latter could suffer the greatest harm from it...

All people must be considered as individuals. And there are countless people who, if they want to continue living as they are living, can no longer possibly become vegetarians without further ado.

It has been said that human nature is not capable of doing the work necessary to convert what we take in from plants into what the human organism needs. With plant-based nutrition, a kind of work must be done internally by the human being that he is unable to muster. The work that has to be done there is partly taken off his hands by the fact that he takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, where some of this work has already been done and he now has less work to do. However, this does not apply to everyone, only to many people. For many, it would be unhealthy if they could not apply the strong forces of digestion and processing that are necessary to digest plant food...

To understand this, one has to embrace the radical difference between the plant and human kingdoms... the animal kingdom lies in the middle.

It is a contrast between humans and plants... we can characterize this contrast first by saying that something that is purely present in physical nature...

A human being breathes, he inhales the oxygen in the air and exhales carbon dioxide. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, breaks down the compound, takes the carbon it contains and uses it to build its organism out of inanimate, purely physical carbon and releases the oxygen again. This is the interaction between humans and plants. This expresses a spiritual interaction in an external parable. Behind the plant stands its spiritual, behind the human being his spiritual. You know that a plant cannot flourish when it is deprived of light. Look at it, how it withers away. That which the plant builds up from inanimate substances, it builds up under the influence of light... Light! How much we owe to it... we take from it as much as we need...

But we must not only see, also in the light, not only pay attention to the physical. In that which is physical in the light, there is also a spiritual element. Behind physical light there is also a spiritual element. This spiritual element, which flows towards us from the sun to the earth in the rays of light, is the same as that which lives in our astral body, that inner light that works and creates in us — in the spiritual light, the spiritual aura. They are nothing other than the spirit of the physical body, the invisible light that works in us as the astral body. And that is what is at work in us! Outside, the physical light of the sun is at work on the plants. And that is the peculiar relationship between the physical light outside, which works on the plants, causing them to grow and flourish... and the spiritual light that is in us as our astral body. That is the relationship, that they are opposed to each other...

That which builds up the plants is removed, decomposed, destroyed by the process that the spiritual light ignites in us. And our life in the physical body as a spiritual being could not exist if we did not, so to speak, set up processes of destruction in everything we take in. We remove what the plants have built up. We continue in the opposite way to what the plants have begun... Thus we are spiritually opposed to the plant. And what is given to us as food from the plant kingdom, that we in truth destroy...

Our thinking is in its physical expression a process of destruction. What we take in must be worn away again, must be shattered again. This is how we maintain an inner life...

What is given to us from the plant kingdom as food is given to us in a virgin state. What is given to us from the animal kingdom is not given to us in such a virgin state... Because the animal stands in between the plant and the human, the animal fulfills that which the human has to fulfill to a certain extent... ... already accomplishes to a certain extent what man would otherwise have to accomplish within himself... and man can only begin his own activity where that which he has received is located. He only gets what the animal has already made out of it...

Let us look at man; he is truly a microcosm, a summary of everything that is going on outside...

His nutritional process is what the expansive plant kingdom elevates and transforms so that this human body can become an instrument of consciousness. In this respect, it is a totality. For the spiritual scientist, the animal is nothing more than a one-sided development of human characteristics. Each animal, each animal species represents certain characteristics for the spiritual scientist, developed in a particular way...

All these characteristics, combined in harmony – the one diminished by the other, the one balanced by the other – give us the human being...

The animal performs the natural process to a certain one-sidedness... We acquire this one-sidedness when we take the no longer virgin food from the animal kingdom...

Now let's assume that we are really organized in such a way that we can muster the necessary strength to process plant food. We have this strong reservoir of strength within us, which is only used when we take plant food. What happens if we don't do it, if we don't carry out this transformation from the vegetable to the human level? Then the unused forces seek other outlets in our organism.

The French abbé I told you about had precisely such forces within him. They are there and they have to work, and if they cannot find a healthy outlet, they will eventually throw themselves at another field of activity. The abbé then died from the effects of the large forces that arose in this improper way.

Let us take, on the other hand, a different person, such as a bank manager, who knows nothing but his profession. If we were to expect him to eat a vegetarian diet, he would not be able to do so. He will not be able to sustain it. He cannot process the plant substances to the point where they can serve him for the functioning of his organism; he must let some of the work be done for him.

We can therefore also see an important difference and contrast between the way plant food and animal food affect people. What does a person who wants to digest plant food have to develop in themselves? What do they do when they eat plant food? They have to muster certain forces that work from below, from the plant. These are forces that are more at the center of his being than those he needs to process animal food. These are forces within him that no one can do for him. By accomplishing this internally, he also has an inner source of independence and strength. His inner life becomes more active and intense as a result. What he consumes from the plant kingdom does indeed make his inner life more active. However, this requires a more comprehensive spiritual life, one that is directed towards contemplation, towards an understanding of the great interrelationships of life... If a person then takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, then this is only right if he does not have these independent powers. For the nourishment that a person takes from the animal kingdom, he will use inner powers that make him less independent, since he has some of the work done for him...

In spiritual terms, what comes from the animal kingdom stimulates what makes man strong and vigorous without his intervention.

For those who cannot draw strength and energy for life from within themselves, a plant-based diet will be of no use; they will only be weakened by it. They need to have their strength and powers given to them, so to speak, prepared by animal food.

From such contexts, we can easily understand how it comes about that peoples who live on a plant-based diet lead a life more devoted to contemplation... while those who eat animal products show more warlike qualities.

Thus, what must be considered a health issue and a nutritional issue at the same time is definitely linked to the individuality of the person, to what the person can muster internally. And we see in the person whether the person does not partly acquire strong powers of independence in his inner being through a plant-based diet...

Through plant nutrition, we see him acquiring all the forces he needs to become, so to speak, a comprehensive human being, to become a human being who can see the big picture of life. Through what he acquires from animal nutrition, we see him being led to the specialties...

Thus we see from the interaction... through what... the great questions of existence for all details of life are regulated... There we see, so to speak, man's inner nature expressing itself in such a way that there are strong forces within him... or that he must have these strong forces given to him... We see, so to speak, the astral body at work in him... and how this work must be if the balance in the human organism is to be restored...

And once we have understood this, we will no longer doubt that much, much depends on how we are able to act on the astral body... but not only on this, but also how we can act physically on the physical body and ethereally on the ethereal body...

A materialistic view will only want to have an effect on the physical... Let us take the case of a sick person. The materialistically thinking person will look at these symptoms of illness and he will count on this: in this or that area, there is this or that air, there are these or those conditions, which, like one physical on another physical, affect the sick organism...

Those who are grounded in spiritual science will know that in many cases this is a very erroneous conclusion. They will know that it must work more radically and thoroughly if the human being is placed where his inner experiences can be stimulated in the appropriate way, where he can be truly happy, can become truly harmonious within himself. In particular, with certain forms of illness, namely nervous disorders, it will be most important that we work directly on the astral body and through that which can stimulate strong forces in the astral body...

Thus, if someone develops those strong forces within themselves that are developed through plant nutrition, it can be a good remedy for even severe damage to the organism. What works internally, when the inner forces that... must process the virgin plant food, can eliminate serious damage.

You can see from a person whether he also takes the trouble to convert the plant nutrients, in which there is little fat, into fat through his own inner powers, or whether he prefers to have it taken from him by enjoying animal fat... to develop those strong powers within him that make him independent... in other words, whether the person is not too lazy to contribute a little to his own fattening... this looks out of the eye whether it happens or not...

The one who does not overfeed himself with animal fat will also find within himself the possibility of developing the strong forces within him, and these are more and more inclined towards the spiritual...

And now there is a great, comprehensive law... that says: Everything that a person enjoys and looks at only as sensuality, that affects the withering, dying forces within him... and everything that he looks at as spiritual, that affects the invigorating, healing powers of a person... And vice versa, anyone who wants to help themselves in this direction can do so by eating enough plant-based food in addition to meat, and this can help in terms of awakening interest in the supernatural world...

Anyone who is willing to do something to prepare his own fat from low-fat plant foods will be able to become much more spiritual than someone who gets all his fat from animals...

A grotesque confirmation arises from the following incident. There is a so-called nudist culture in Berlin. Someone went there initially out of purely artistic interest, wanted to see what it was like and let the audience and what was presented there take effect on them. Then this person quickly ran away. It was a strange audience, almost all old men...

Where one actually assumes that the sensual has an effect on the sensual, there is an attraction to what is dying in life. And those who merely seek the sensual as sensual will be able to see that the dying parts of their being are particularly affected... whereas the spiritual interest... will particularly affect the germinating, growing parts of the human being.

Spiritual research begins to give people something that is certainly not as comfortable as just describing something... and also not as comfortable as listening to a lecture where images are projected onto a screen. You don't need to do much inwardly.

Spiritual science speaks of the supernatural, and that cannot be taken in as comfortably. It appeals to something in human nature, to which he must work, to which he must put the most active forces within him into cooperation... This spiritual science thus goes directly to the spiritual... to the paths of the soul... It is not there for the eyes... And no one claims that the concepts and ideas of spiritual science are real in the sense that they are tangible. In this sense, they are not supposed to be true. But what is hardly known today in wide circles, these so-called unreal ideas, what are they? These are precisely the healthy, the strong ideas, which, if they only work sufficiently in human nature, are at the same time the strong, the vigorous and effective ideas that make us healthy right into the etheric body.

When spiritual science guides us... it evokes ideas in us that have a healing effect from within in the most eminent sense... organic substance in such a way that it has already left its origins, so to speak, and cannot be repaired by itself again... The higher we ascend in the hierarchy of organisms...

Where internal forces are to be developed for recovery, the strongest force is that which flows out of the spirit of the human being, which is directed towards rejuvenation and growth, and the one who appeals to these forces also has a good foundation in the sense of health... the strong forces within are unleashed up to the higher realms of the health issue... Hardly a beginning has been made though...

We understand little more than a physical effect on the person... Here spiritual science is called upon to address the issue of health in such a way that remedies are found and are available that do not just work on the physical level but directly on the spiritual, that is, on the astral; and that work to restore physical health indirectly through the astral. Here indeed Theosophy has a great task. It will be able to solve it, because it can penetrate deeply into the life that surrounds us daily, into the life of the healthy and the sick person.

And here it is truly to be welcomed with great satisfaction that a good start has been made on the basis of the theosophical research, in that Dr. Peipers in Munich is applying a kind of color therapy that is thoroughly based on the theosophical view, on spiritual science... the secrets of color, its deeper spiritual foundations, have been divined.

Here one does not think of the physical effects... not the light works in these things, the color must first become an idea, must first shine and light up in the astral body... as a color idea, via the detour of the astral body, they work out into the periphery... Even if this can initially only be used for certain forms of illness, a start has been made...

And this theosophical current will, in these and many other things, by penetrating into the depths of things, still create many things of which today's materialistic mind has no dreams. Whatever one may say... the truth, the truth of the spiritual, will prevail. So... few points of view that are connected with this subject. It will have been shown to you how, on the one hand, spiritual science can never be one-sided...

Let us assume that someone has a migraine. What does he take? Migränin, for example. That is nothing! Or some other remedy is prescribed for him. But perhaps he does not have time to do everything that is prescribed for him... It is quite possible for a person to be so strong that he can bear it well if his physical organism is treated physically in certain areas.

But the problem can only be solved on an individual basis. Through a deeper knowledge of human nature, we will come to realize that there is a basis in spiritual science itself for evoking healthy urges and healthy instincts... that spiritual life is what...

Behind all matter lies spirit... and that which shows itself as content... in matter is only an expression of spiritual processes... The same applies to food: it should taste good, because the fact that it tastes good is an expression of the fact that it fits into the organism in a healthy and harmonious way.

In this way, spiritual science will enable you to stimulate feelings and instincts in a healthy way, and the result will be that those who study the spiritual wisdom will become healthy...

Just as the animals graze outside in the meadow and find the right thing in their instincts... so will spirituality and spiritual science, on a higher level, once again implant in man that which shows him, in full consciousness, what serves him, what is healthy for him... so that spiritual science itself is a great healing agent, a great healing agent... because it brings him the right knowledge for what is individually necessary for him in one case or another.

Recognizing illness in its relationship to the human being as a whole will help to bring about knowledge in this field too, and so Hyrtl, who... something very beautiful when he said from his experience:... Only the doctor can recognize illnesses... and he meant: The other is more difficult, he meant: You can't always help if you can recognize illnesses, only the one who knows what helps can heal... Only the one who is able to look deeply, very deeply into the foundations of human nature, can know what helps.

Answering questions [excerpts]

Question: [Not reported.]

Answer: It is important to distinguish between the irregularities that have arisen from external damage and against which he has at most the means to correct through the inner powers within the person, and between internal diseases... an external damage, a broken leg for example... But it is the same if, for example, any harm is done inside the stomach by unsuitable food.... just as little as with a broken leg can such external damage be treated from the astral body... It is nevertheless important that more is said about recovery from within the person than about forms of illness... more about the ways to recovery than about diseases.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Answer: [...] Feuerbach said: Man is what he eats. This is true if he uses the means to get higher by the nature of his food ... He should eat so that he is not what he eats.

If I have taken the liberty of claiming your interest today for a question that is currently stirring up a great deal of emotion and seems to urgently require an answer, and if I have set myself the goal of putting this question in the light of Goethe's world view, is not intended as a lecture on literary history. Rather, I hope that my remarks will awaken in you the conviction that has been deeply rooted in me for years: that this question can only be properly appreciated from this point of view, from the point of view of Goethe's world view. We Germans have a twofold task in relation to Goethe. One of these was once described by Berthold Auerbach, the much-loved storyteller of village tales, with the witty saying: We must be Goethe-ready. That is to say, we must be able to completely immerse ourselves in the lofty realm of ideas and the incomparably intimate content of feelings of the greatest German genius. We must feel what he felt and think what he thought. But that is only one aspect of our relationship with Goethe. For Goethe marks the beginning of a completely new cultural epoch in the Western world. He has shed new light on all of European culture. He has opened up new senses for us, taught us new ways of looking at things. These senses must soon arise in us, we must rise to these views, in order to continue the cultural work of our people in the direction - of course, as far as this is in the power of each of us - that has been indicated by Goethe. Anyone who does not see in Goethe this beginning of culture, from which everyone must start, who wants to somehow relate to the education of the present, simply does not understand his time. And I must unfortunately confess to you that your brothers in the heart of Europe, especially the younger generation, have by no means grasped their task in relation to Goethe. On the contrary, a certain frivolous way of thinking is asserting itself, one that turns up its nose at Goethe and believes that it has long since progressed beyond him, while in fact it still has a long way to go before it fully grasps him. Goethe is dismissed as an old man who is no longer sufficient for our new times. A new generation believes it has new ideals. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, these ideals usually prove to be quite immature products, which are miles away from the true needs of the time, while they seem to have been born of the time. And this our time, this our living present, is more, than one can believe with superficial observation, a child of Goethe, a child of our classical spirits. Our time is the time in which the individual asserts in every direction the original sovereign rights that divine power has placed in his soul. Man no longer wants to be patronized; no, he wants to be completely dependent on himself, on his insight, on his will. He no longer wants to seek the sacred, the divine self in the outside world, but delves into the depths of his own breast to get the God, to get the strength and courage of life from there.

From this urge of the individual to cast off all fetters and assert his inalienable rights of sovereignty, then also arises the movement that I have placed at the top of my remarks today: the question of the liberation of women from the supposed fetters that, according to the beliefs of certain people, their gender has so far imposed on a prejudiced world. Women no longer want to be tied to the family home, to the house; they want to step out into the open world and be on an equal footing with men in every activity. They want to take on the competition for existence with the male world, they demand a profession like the ones men have. It is an undeniable fact that the German people have so far participated the least in the extensive emancipation efforts of women. While in Russia, Switzerland, England and France, but especially in America, hundreds and hundreds of women have already entered the learned professions, the German people still stubbornly close the doors to higher learned professions to women. Is this just stubbornness or the conservative sense that suits the German so well, which has always been averse to any violent revolution because it did not want to admit that something so unreasonable could arise in history that it had to be overthrown at a stroke? Or is there perhaps a higher realization in this – even if many are completely unaware of it – that full equality for women does not even require complete assimilation, and that the latter contradicts the role and nature of women? That is the big question: are we dealing with a prejudice that must be eradicated over time, or are we dealing with a justified insight that has a right to resist the other peoples of Europe in this movement? Let us now let Goethe be our lodestar! He will guide us safely; for in him, all the depth of the German character is embodied in a single individual. Whatever has emerged in the German people as lofty and great comes to us in a personal unity in Goethe; we are all the more German the more Goethean we are. Wherever we need light, we look up to him with confidence. The turbulent life of the present casts disharmony into our hearts, we are overcome by dark moods, whole crowds of contemporaries fall prey to the gloomy world view of pessimism; we find release from all this only in the blissful calm of Goethe's harmonious world view. And what a deeply satisfying consciousness lies in this absorption in the world of ideas and will of our greatest national poet, when we consider it in the sense of Schiller's saying: And if you yourself cannot be whole, then join yourself to a whole! For man is nothing as an individual, his whole strength is rooted in the nation from which he comes, in the time to which he belongs.

Those who succumb to loneliness soon feel alone,

as Goethe himself says. We can add: They must soon succumb to a spiritual death in their sad, isolated spiritual wasteland. Think with your people, with your time! That is what we must call out to every human being. And we think most harmoniously with our people when we think and feel with Goethe, the full and complete embodiment of all our national and contemporary strength. We have no right to complain that we thereby lose our independence in order to bow completely to a foreign authority; for man can only be free when he rises to the higher ideals of culture, where all the light of education is to be sought. Only then will he consciously participate in the development of his race, only then will he independently determine his goal with great ideals, while otherwise he will only grope blindly below and be dragged along with the others, a serving and certainly unfree member of the body of humanity.

Only by seeking the human perfection of Goethe and, where we find it, joining it, can we work on our great work of liberation. We can only become free with our people and in our time, not individually. To bow down under Goethe's authority when we have recognized its height is not servitude, but the Goethean form of freedom. And it is precisely by taking our lead from Goethe that we can best further this great work of our liberation. For in the great scheme of things, Goethe stands for nothing more than a newer process of purification and liberation from self-imposed fetters. What were these fetters? They were the fetters of unnaturalness, of the desire to imitate what was foreign, of the unfree, over-tender sensitivity from which the Germans languished before his time. He strives back to nature, to direct feeling and thinking. Man has an addiction to remove himself further and further from nature. We know that the only completely naive-natural people in Europe were the Greeks. When Goethe became acquainted with their magnificent works of art in Italy, he fell into a kind of rapture. For these immortal creations had an effect on him like the magnificent works of nature itself. In them, he saw the world spirit at work. The Greeks, as he felt vividly here, had overheard the laws from the creator of the world, according to which he had created the magnificent, sublime works of nature, and had formed their works of art in the manner of men in this Goethean sense. The Romans did not understand how to penetrate into the mysterious portals of the divine world workshop, and they simply imitated the Greeks. This is remoteness from nature, which, as humanity developed further, became ever more pronounced. It may be said that when Goethe appeared on the scene in Germany, very little of what prevailed in poetry, indeed in the emotional and intellectual life of the Germans, bore the stamp of original naive truth. Everything was contrived, everything assumed, everything a cliché. Goethe was the first to seek a direct contact with the spirit of the world. And therein lies the greatness of his mission. But he owes this greatness to a circumstance that we must consider if we want to properly appreciate his relationship to women and his relation to the female nature. This is his deeply ingrained religious trait, a trait that always manifests itself in him through an idealistic belief in the divine in all that is natural and human. From his youth he was dominated by a fundamental trait that is only innate in deeper minds: belief in the supernatural in nature, the presentiment of a higher being, which later became the quest for the idea, for the spirit in all things. The mysterious, this genuine child of science as well as of religion, was what always attracted him. In everything that came his way in life and in history, he sought the point where he could perceive the workings of a higher power. And that is what he always sought in woman, and often found. Man distances himself from nature, from the immediacy of feeling, when he must exhaust his spirit in a one-sided life's work: He becomes dry, pedantic, unnatural. He loses that freshness and naturalness from which all the magic of an unmediated nature emanates. But these are precisely the qualities that women retain, of course only where they remain completely women and do not strive to be like men. For women, it is not one mental or physical quality that comes to the fore, but rather they all develop in beautiful harmony and remain in full force. Thus nature appears purer, fuller, more divine in woman than in man, who has been made one-sided by nature. Thus women are our true messengers from God, in whom man finds what he has lost himself. And herein lies what man seeks; he must seek it with particular longing because he lacks it in himself and can only do without it with difficulty.

And that is what Goethe seeks above all. For him, being with a woman always means a spiritual rejuvenation, a renewed sense of brotherhood with nature, which repeatedly invigorates and fuels his poetic power. Delving into feminine values and female essence always generates renewed artistic ability in him. When he seems to distance himself from nature in a manly way, when the full force of naturalness seems to fade from his heart, then it is always love that envelops him in that mysterious magic that makes him capable of new creativity. In the face of this trait in Goethe's nature, all the reservations that arise again and again against the purity and nobility of Goethe's treatment of female nature must fade. Unfortunately, these reservations are still frequently enough encountered. An unnatural distinction is made between the poet and the man, and only the former is allowed, while so much is desired to attach some human failing to Goethe. But in this mind everything is in undivided unity. Goethe's poetic mission is directly connected with his human mission. And his poems are nothing but direct revelations of his most intimate and purest human nature. Yes, here and there in Goethe's work we can also find individual cynical, seemingly frivolous verses. But this speaks for nothing other than the infinite love of truth that always dominated him. He never wanted to appear as an angel, always as a human being, yes, as a human being with all faults. He preferred an open confession before the whole world. But that is not the point. The main thing is that there is never a frivolous or mean streak in his love, nothing of the bon vivant. It always emanates from the mind, and it is always connected with a deep appreciation of true feminine value. His love never demeans women. He always looks up reverently to feminine value. And that is the very Germanic way. We know from Tacitus that even our ancestors in ancient times revered something in women that foreshadowed the future, and that they honored wise women at springs and in groves. That is the essence of truly religious feeling: it always commands reverence from its bearer. And Goethe worshiped in the dust before the divine in woman. Women, above all, must recognize this. And then the gloomy shadows that still cling to Goethe's lofty personality will dissolve.

It has a powerful effect on Goethe's imagination when a new female figure enters the circles of his activity. His rich inner world then surrounds the revered being with all the magic of which his rich imagination is capable. For him, the beloved is more than another mortal can see in her, because the imagination sees deeper than the mind. It is a kind of halo with which the poet's imagination surrounds her. Then, always, an ideal figure detaches itself from reality. Love becomes a lofty love intoxication, and a new poem struggles from Goethe's breast. This was the case with Friederike in Sesenheim, with Lili in Frankfurt, with Frau von Stein, with Christiane, his wife, and finally with the women who entered his life late in life: Marianne Willemer and Ulrike von Levetzow. In each case, it is the love of a noble, idealistic person, not that of a bon vivant. My esteemed and beloved teacher, Professor Karl Julius Schröer in Vienna, rightly says:

There is a piety in love again, as there was among the Greeks, and thus it is free of frivolity. If that de-divinized love is selfish, then this love, which is based on devotion, is the only passion that is free of selfishness.

To understand the truly spiritual nature of Goethe's love, one need only take a look at his often-challenged relationship with Frau von Stein. How did he see this woman, who led a life of renunciation, who did not want to be taken into account by anyone, who demanded nothing for herself but bestowed benefits on all around her? He writes about her, she appears to him

like a goddess ascending to heaven. In vain that a human being stretches out his arms to her, that his eye craves a glance. She floats, lost in the heavenly radiance that surrounds her, to heaven.

And when we see the calming and blissful effect that this woman has on the young man, who enters Weimar's life full of the most furious passions in his chest, full of high spirits and excessive joy, then we can well understand his devotion to her exalted femininity. Who does not know the follies, the high-spirited pranks that Goethe and his ducal friend played in Weimar, but who does not also know the deep need in both of them to break out of this high-spiritedness and move on to a higher life! It was in such moods that Goethe wrote verses like these:

What is the use of all the pain and pleasure? Sweet peace, come, oh come into my heart!

The sweet peace is brought to him by “the soother”, as he called his wife von Stein. Goethe's relationship with Christiane was also pure and noble. How tender is the following gesture: when he once finds her asleep in the room, he sits down very quietly beside her, lays a fruit and a flower in front of her and is enchanted by the thought that when she wakes up, she will immediately direct her gaze to the things that his loving hand has placed there. And how deeply his words touch our hearts when he speaks them as the one he loves is snatched from him by death: “The only gain of my life now is to mourn her death.” Marianne Willemer is the figure to whom we owe the most magnificent songs in the “Diwan”. Again, we have here the stirring of the poetic mood through the power of love. Even in his eighties, he writes his “Elegy” in the “Trilogy of Passion” out of the glow of passion and the imagination refreshed by the source of holy love, in which, so to speak, an apotheosis of love in the truly Goethean sense is contained. If we understand this magnificent poem, addressed to Ulrike von Levetzow, then we have the key to Goethe's love life in general. Ulrike von Levetzow was a young woman at the time, who was with her mother in Marienbad, where the poet was also staying. He was enchanted by her grace. Once again he was to feel all the bliss and sorrow of love, once again he was to heap the joys and sorrows of the earth on his bosom. The elegy contains the following: The poet has said goodbye; the bliss of the last kiss is still in his heart, and he finds the farewell difficult, he looks up at the sky, from which the star of day, the sun, has also already said goodbye. He sees clouds passing by, and his imagination transforms them into figures, changing figures of his beloved. He wants to hold on to her for a moment; but soon he remembers that the true image of his beloved can only be in his heart. And now he revives this image.

The rift with nature, as it occurs and must occur in man, can lead to bitter degeneration. That which he has lost slumbers in him as an irrepressible yearning, like a homeland that we have lost. Only love can bridge this yearning, only love can balance the conflict of nature that has been touched. If this love does not occur, then man remains for life a renegade, a being who has become estranged from his primal power and wanders a wrong path through life. Blind, selfish passions will then take the place of love. He who at first consumed himself in longing will seek to deaden himself in the frenzy of degrading sensual pleasure. He will never be able to see what is excellent, because, as Schiller said, there is only one power in the face of excellence: love. There you have the necessity of love derived from human nature. If we abolish love, we have done away with the divine self, or, because we cannot do that, we have turned away from the divine. But we carry out this apostasy when we alienate woman from her true nature, when we deprive her of her destiny of being the mediator of the divine, of nature, which appears directly naive. It is no coincidence that the emancipation movement first emerged in those European countries where love in the noble sense, as understood by the Germanic peoples, never took root. Where woman knows that she has her part to play in the whole process of human development in a way that corresponds to her nature rather than to his, and where she knows that she will be recognized and honored by the male world for her work, she does not strive beyond what is allotted to her in the plan of the world. It is a higher vision that seeks satisfaction in the harmony of different forces of action, and a lower one that would like to make everything the same. It is preferably the ideal side of culture that woman is the bearer and propagator of. What can be the reasons that should push woman out of her present position, out of the boundaries that history has drawn for her?

Firstly, the urge not to lag behind man in intellectual education and insight. Secondly, the urge not to be indebted to man for what provides her with the real basis for life.

When I consider that it was so often sensible, imaginative mothers who stood at the cradle of great men, when I look at the old woman Rat herself, Goethe's mother, who first stimulated the poetic sense of young Wolfgang by telling her fairy tales, it seems to me that this can easily be explained by the idea I have just developed about women's nature. If the divine power of nature is more purely and unadulteratedly expressed in women than in men, then it is plausible that the living influence of the mother on a person must be most fruitful at that age where everything is is still nature, everything is still naive, the heart is still whole and the head is not yet at all, the spirit has not yet broken away from its source, from nature, the division between idea and reality has not yet taken place, in a word: in childhood. Here lies a tremendous cultural influence that women have on the development of humanity, an influence that is more valuable than that which they can ever exert as doctors, civil servants or writers.

If you board the tram here at Aeschenplatz in Basel and travel to Dornach, then take the small path through Dornach, you will come to a hill on which stands the Goetheanum, which is to become a School of Spiritual Science. Although it has been encouraging to note that an extraordinarily large number of visitors have been coming to see this building day after day, it must be said that, whenever the outside world world, for instance in newspaper articles, answers are given to the question of what is actually to be done inside this building once it is finished, these answers generally present the opposite of the truth, with a few exceptions of course. All sorts of things are said about what is to be done there in the past or present in this Dornach building. In any case, the answers given to the questioners are very far removed from what those involved in the spiritual current on which the Dornach building is based actually set as their goal. For this goal emerges from a careful consideration and observation of what I would call the cultural conditions for humanity in the present and future. And out of all the various presuppositions, which I shall venture to speak about this evening, this spiritual movement, which is to find expression in the Dornach building, is based on the conviction that the longings of wide circles of people today contain the realization that a complete recovery, a healthy further development of our human culture must come from the soul of the human being, from that which the human being can grasp in his soul as his connection with the spiritual world. It is based on the conviction that, in the face of the demands and difficulties that arise in our social life, we must try to find the impulses that correspond to the longings of a large number of people – and this number is growing ever larger and larger – from the spirit and soul.

Now, one can see – I would just like to mention in passing that now on Sundays and other days quite a few people come from Basel and the surrounding area to see what we call our eurythmy performances in the provisional hall of our carpentry workshop, where we have to hold these events for the time being until we can open the Goetheanum itself. , and it is reasonable to believe that a large number of those who have already made the pilgrimage to Dornach for these eurythmy performances have come to the conclusion that, in this particular area, too, an attempt is being made to spiritualize something, to raise something into the sphere of the spirit, which, under the influence of materialism of the last centuries, is still practised today by our culture in a more or less materialistic, physiological and similar way.

In this eurythmy, there is an art of movement of the human organism itself, which is taken from the organizational structures of the whole human being, the whole human being, who encompasses body, soul and spirit. And quite apart from the fact that this eurythmy aspires to a special new art form that cannot really be compared with what are often perceived as neighboring arts, it can also be said that these efforts to the spirit is based on what I would call the inspiration of the human organism's possibilities of movement, which, for example, in gymnastics, are understood only in an external physiological way, in a purely material way. The human being is meant to carry out movements, and that is why this eurythmy will also have a spiritual-educational value at some point. In addition to artistic movements, the human being should carry out movements that are not merely taken from anatomy and physiology, as in gymnastics, but that are taken from what can live in the moving human being: spirit and soul.

Now, it is difficult not to be misunderstood when you go out into the world with a thorough spiritual or soul current today. One would like to say that misunderstandings are coming from all sides. And so it may happen that in some places some misunderstandings regarding spiritual science itself have already been cleared away, to the extent that this spiritual science is even allowed to speak on social issues. But we have committed what we believe to be the right thing to do, but what others have thought of as ineptitude: in some places where I have had to speak about spiritual science and social issues, I have also given eurythmy performances at the same time. And lo and behold, the judgment was immediately made: how can a spiritual endeavor be of any value that also includes dance performances?

Well, I could easily add to the list of misunderstandings that come from all quarters, because the world still judges in many ways today as if everything that is to be done in the Dornach building is something obscure, something dark and mystical. So often today, when spiritual endeavors are mentioned, one hears that all sorts of mystical things are being done here or there, even in many places. The fact that the movement that is to be linked to the Dornach building has nothing to do with such obscure mystical movements could be taught to those who seek to see clearly and truthfully in such matters by the fact that one who stands before you and speaks to you about his cause, the cause of this building at Dornach, this Goetheanum, can point to a book written as early as 1894, The Philosophy of Freedom. And if anyone reads this 'Philosophy of Freedom', I think they will not get the impression that this 'Philosophy of Freedom' is intended to bring anything of obscure mysticism, enthusiasm or the like into the world. And I may say that, after all, everything that is to form the main content, the main impulse of this spiritual scientific movement, of which I am speaking, is permeated by that longing of present-day humanity, which expresses itself in the urge for such a way of life within which the individual human being can, on the one hand, fulfill his social duties, but on the other hand, can still be a free being as an individual human being.

I would like to begin by pointing out a phenomenon that is connected to something that is very familiar to you. And although I take as my starting point in today's reflections a politician, you should not think that I am going to devote myself even remotely to the political culture of the present day. I would like to speak about the cultural conditions of the present and the future in a much broader sense; but I would like to mention a characteristic that can show us how the call for freedom is, so to speak, emerging from the cultural aspirations and ideals of the present, only emerging in such a way that it is truly not taken deeply enough. And to take it deeply enough, to deepen what humanity's longing for freedom is, that is intimately connected with the view that spiritual science has of the cultural conditions of the present and future.

Those who have heard my lectures this year and in previous years, this visitors who remember how I spoke at that time, when Woodrow Wilson was, one might say, seen as a man honored throughout the world, to whom people looked up and to whom they attached great hopes for the future, these honored visitors will not hold it against me if I, who in the days when this man had many supporters freely expressed my opposition from a certain point of view, if I today take as my starting point the special conception of freedom, the special call for freedom, that resounds from the political world view of Woodrow Wilson. One must believe that the strong, otherwise, in my opinion, quite incomprehensible impression that Woodrow Wilson has made on the world so far, where the matter stops, is based precisely on the fact that all the program points, everything that has come from this man into the world, is ultimately based in a certain way on the impulse of human freedom. Let us see what this man did before he became President of the United States, let us see what made him great as President of the United States. We will find that it is his conception of a possible social organization of human coexistence in which man can have his freedom in a democratic way. Woodrow Wilson saw how, in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century, large accumulations of capital had come to be concentrated in the hands of a few people in the course of the life of America. He saw how trusts and the like had been formed. And he saw how a few wealthy people had gained control over other people as a result. This is where he began his reflection and his work. He first of all asserted the impulse of freedom. He demanded a complete democratization of human political life in the face of the accumulation of economic and political power in the hands of a few. He wanted every single person to have the opportunity to make use of their abilities in human coexistence. He did not want those who had established themselves in any branch of industry or trade to be able to have monopolies that the legitimate abilities of the weak could not compete against. He wanted us to look for the causes of what happens in social life in every single human situation, even the simplest. And he often expressed this. And it is characteristic of him that he has based his political aspirations on precisely this goal of freedom.

We need only consider his extraordinarily significant writing “The New Freedom”. One might say that on every page one finds the truth of what I have just said. I will quote just one of his most remarkable sayings. He said: There is only one way to create a free life, and that is to ensure that under every garment beats a free and hopeful heart. I truly believe that what had such a strong effect was this call for freedom.

Now, this call for freedom always resonated in the practical political and social effectiveness. The writing “The New Freedom” is actually just a collection of election speeches. There is no talk of a freedom that is only philosophically speculated, there is no talk of any abstract mere freedom of consciousness, there is talk of a freedom that is to be realized and realized in life .

Now, I also tried to grasp such a freedom, which should be realized and actualized in life, through my book “The Philosophy of Freedom,” which I wrote at the beginning of the 1990s. But now, after much hesitation, I have published a new edition of this book, and I can now openly express the belief that freedom can only be truly and practically lived out if we seek it not only in the outer social and political life, but if we seek it in the depths of the human soul itself. And it is in the depths of the human soul itself that freedom should be sought through my “Philosophy of Freedom.” If one stops at the surface of mere social and political life or of external social life, one will very soon see that the realization of freedom is not at all possible if one grasps it only in that sense. For freedom is something that must arise from the individual human being, something that cannot exist if individuals are not able to realize it, if individuals do not first pour it into the social life that they lead together. But if we wish to appreciate the full significance of what is suggested here for the culture of the present day, then we must overlook much of the mere phraseology of the present, and we must try for once to speak seriously and honestly and truthfully about many things. The call for freedom is, I would say, present throughout the entire educated world. Today it is there for those who want to hear it, for the American, the European, and the Asian world. And the only question is: how can the awareness of freedom be realized in the life of the present?

To answer this question, we must take a closer look at how a man inspired by the impulse of freedom, such as Woodrow Wilson, talks about freedom today, and how others talk about freedom today. It will sound strange to you, and I must confess that I hesitated for a long time about expressing the truth I have to say here as bluntly as I will, because such things still shock many people today, because people still take such things far too much at face value, far too little in terms of what is actually behind them. Read Woodrow Wilson's book 'The New Freedom'. Listen to how he talks about the social conditions in America and, ultimately, about the social conditions of contemporary civilization in general. What do you find in it? Actually, only criticism, criticism of how this freedom is not realized within today's civilization, how one must strive to realize this freedom within today's culture and civilization. There are sharp words in this direction of criticism in Woodrow Wilson's book 'The New Freedom'. And if you stop at the criticism - and there is not much else in this book except criticism - and now really seriously and honestly ask yourself: How does this criticism of freedom or social criticism by Woodrow Wilson relate to the criticism that is asserted from another side? you come to a strange result. For example, I have tried to examine Lenin's and Tyotzki's criticism of freedom in terms of how this criticism of freedom and social conditions relates to Woodrow Wilson's criticism in The New Freedom, and I believe that anyone who makes such a comparison honestly and truthfully can say nothing other than: With regard to the criticism of social conditions and the realization of freedom in them today, Woodrow Wilson agrees with Lenin and Trotsky, however different the conclusions they draw.

One must be able to admit such a truth to oneself, even if one finds it quite understandable that despite this criticism, Woodrow Wilson naturally comes to the opposite conclusions from Lenin and Trotsky. And even if one, like the person standing before you, is convinced that Lenin and Trotsky are the gravediggers, not the founders, of a social life, that hardly anything worse could happen to humanity than if the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky were to be realized - but an important, an important fact is expressed in what must be set apart right now; the fact is expressed that from the most opposing party standpoints, from the most opposing social passions, people today come to similar criticisms of the existing cultural conditions and finally also to the abstract call for freedom. Only they understand this freedom in very, very different senses.

If one penetrates to the fact that ultimately the true impulse of freedom can only come from the depths of the human soul itself, then one may well also ask: Why is it that despite all the politicking and calling for freedom in his book, and in his other books as well, there is so much that one must say are abstract, impractical truths that can never penetrate into reality? I believe that precisely what Woodrow Wilson thinks of as freedom is precisely what prevents him from being a truly practical person for the spiritual life of the present. It is very characteristic how Woodrow Wilson explains freedom. He explains it, one might say, as if he had absorbed the whole sum of his concepts from the art of machines. For example, he says: A ship moves freely when it is so equipped that its apparatus is precisely adapted to the movements of the wind and waves, when it experiences no obstacles or hindrances from the movements of the wind and waves, when it is, as it were, carried along freely, without resisting what carries it. And so a person would be free in the sense of Woodrow Wilson, who would be so adapted to the external social conditions that nothing in him would give rise to obstacles and inhibitions, so that he would feel nowhere, as it were, dependent, constrained, disturbed in any direction. If we take seriously only one sentence, we shall see what significance this statement by Woodrow Wilson has for the concept of freedom. If we compare seriously and honestly the human being who is to act freely from the innermost impulse of his soul in some humane social order with a ship that offers as little resistance as possible to the forces of wind and waves, then we completely ignore the fact that the ship must be held still by another force must be held still against wind and waves, cannot hold itself still, but that if man is to be free, he should certainly not be carried along by social forces, but that under certain circumstances he must be able to stop and also to oppose the forces that affect him. The opposite of this would have been the result for a real idea of freedom, which is found as a kind of definition of freedom in Woodrow Wilson. And we will find that the vague call for freedom sits in many human souls today, but that what they consciously connect with the impulse of freedom is different from what they unconsciously really strive for. This was already before my soul's eye when I conceived my “Philosophy of Freedom” out of the human spirit in the 1880s. I saw how the question, “Can man be inwardly free or unfree at all?” occupied philosophy and worldviews and religious convictions throughout the entire civilized development of mankind. If man is a being, a natural being, that is driven purely by natural causes, then he is not free. Or does a being live in man that possesses and uses what he is as an external physical being only like an apparatus out of his own innermost impulses? If he were that, then it could be said that he, this man, is a truly free being. Is man free or is he not free? Is he one or the other by virtue of his nature and being? These questions were before me. And anyone within today's scientific community who wants to tackle these questions must, however, give an account of how he deals with the various views that have been expressed here and there in the whole of civilized human development on the question of freedom

Now it seemed to me that the main thing was that the question is usually asked quite wrongly: the question is, “Is man by his own nature and essence a free being or is he not?” It is wrongly formulated. And as a wrongly formulated question, it can never be answered with a simple yes or no. And so you will find that my 'Philosophy of Freedom' is based on putting the whole question on a different footing. However, what I am going to explain now lies more than the foundation under what is presented in my 'Philosophy of Freedom' itself. The way modern man is, in whom the true consciousness of freedom has actually only awakened, is the way this modern man has developed out of earlier states of the human being. Today, far too little consideration is given to the fact that one should seriously and honestly apply the principle of development to humanity. Although it is thought that in the very, very distant past, man was once a kind of ape-like creature; then it is said: It is not yet scientifically time to talk about how today's man has become from this ape-like creature, from this animal-like ape that once climbed around in the trees. One leaves a long, wide desert between the ape-like man and today's man. But even if this is not admitted, essentially one does have the idea that once man has become man, his soul and spirit have not changed particularly radically. I know that this is a debatable statement. But anyone who allows the history of the development of humanity, as it is usually viewed, to take effect on them, will find this statement justified. And anyone who delves more deeply into this history of human development will find that, as man has developed, consciousness of freedom has awakened in him, so that from the depths of human souls the call wells up: First of all, you must be able to act freely out of your own passions, emotions, sensations and feelings; you must live in a social condition in which you can be free. But on the other hand, this call actually exists only as such. Today, there is also no human consciousness that would allow this call to come to its full meaning in man himself. That is to say, man does not find enough of his own being within himself, so that he could say of this within himself: yes, there is something in me that is a free being. In the course of human development, we have advanced to a magnificent development of scientific knowledge, and the last one will be the one who represents the spiritual science meant here, who - as I have often discussed here - would somehow like to deny the magnificent scientific progress or would like to object to the justified scientific views. But the way in which we have developed natural science in modern times means that the human being of modern times, of the last three to four centuries, can actually only understand himself as a physical being. From the depths of the human being, from the human consciousness that is given according to nature, it does not rise at all: you are just as much a real soul, you are just as much a real spirit – as it rises from the depths of the human being: there you have your arm, there you have your hand, they are made of flesh and blood and bone.

This is not just, I would say, a carelessness of worldview. One completely misunderstands what is actually at the root of it if one merely criticizes what I have just said and sees only a carelessness of world view in it, if one merely says: People today are so comfortable that they believe that the human being is only a material being, and that nothing of the soul and spirit is expressed in him. No, my dear audience, with such a criticism one does not get anywhere. One must rather recognize that, as man has developed, he is initially forced to see himself only as a material being if he takes in nothing into his soul but what today's external view of nature and external natural science and the consciousness of the times can offer. In other words, if we allow contemporary culture, which particularly loves time, to be what contemporary culture produces as time, as science, as art, as religious conviction, and also allows it to influence schools, if we allow this to influence today's man to such an extent that he is permeated by it, then, if he is honest, he will have to become a materialist. That is a harsh word. But I believe it is a true word. Today, in a certain respect, one can be dishonest, can say out of some prejudice: “I do believe in spirit and soul.” Then one is not serious about what has actually been produced by the consciousness of the times and by scientific convictions. And if you take these convictions seriously, there is no other option than for man to feel like a material being. He once developed in such a way that if he merely abandons himself to the conditions of life he has created for himself today, he can only come to believe that he is a physical being. A physical being, no more than any other natural being, can be a free being. Therefore, one can say: If the present consciousness is taken seriously, then nowhere does something like the impulse of freedom arise from this present consciousness. One can sound the call for freedom out of subconscious instincts, as Woodrow Wilson does. But if you become absorbed in the time consciousness of the present, you will arrive at false concepts of freedom, at a definition of freedom that says nothing about freedom and a free being, as Woodrow Wilson does. You have to have the courage to step outside of this time consciousness, which has taken hold of the widest circles, which has become popular. And one can say that, especially at the time when I wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom,” one could feel quite alone within contemporary culture with such ideas, no matter where one lived on earth. One can understand that Woodrow Wilson's particular views grew out of America's young life in terms of world history. And when I look at my “Philosophy of Freedom” today - I may also speak frankly about it - I know how justified those criticisms are that may strike today's reader of this “Philosophy of Freedom”. I know very well that if anyone reads the first thirty or forty pages of this book today, they will say: Well, this clearly bears the eggshells of German philosophy, professorial concepts, university concepts, school concepts.

Nevertheless, I have to stick to the form of this book and appeal to the present in such a way that I say: Just as one should not take the essence of man from his clothing, so one should not take my philosophy from its clothing in concepts, which had to serve as such a clothing for it for reasons of time and education, for reasons of the intellectual life within which this philosophy originated. Rather, something else seems important to me, which, I would say, has symbolically confronted me during the elaboration of my “Philosophy of Freedom”. At that time, while working on this philosophy, I was also working at the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar. For some time, an American scholar worked with me there. He was preparing a literary-historical treatise on Goethe's “Faust”. It was very interesting to talk with him, and anyone who can see reality in symptoms had American intellectual life in the midst of Central European intellectual life, so to speak, in the form of the excellent American literary historian Calvin Thomas. But you see, I felt as if I were working in a typical Central European office in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive, with all kinds of scholars, including American scholars. I could only use my leisure time to work on my “Philosophy of Freedom” after office hours. But I often had to ask myself: How close is what is in Calvin Thomas's mind American knowledge, American insight, to what European scholars are writing on the same subject, and how alone one is in the face of this cultural formation, in the face of the whole world, with what can be conceived as a real idea of freedom from an independent intellectual life. To a certain extent, one also felt isolated when it came to what could be derived from the young sense of freedom in America, in terms of world history, in terms of an idea about the impulse of freedom. And at that time it was important to me to put the whole question of freedom, as I said, on a different footing. I had to say to myself: the way man is, if he leaves himself to himself, if he only takes what can first fill his soul out of the consciousness of the time, then he cannot know himself as a free being. Therefore, I put the question differently. And this other way of posing the question permeates what I recognize as the idea of freedom. I cannot ask: Is man free or is he not free? but rather: Can man, in the depths of his soul, after he has gone through what arises from himself, as it were, from nature and from his being, continue to develop his soul by taking his soul's development into his own hands, and can he then awaken something in him that is dormant in such a way that this actually deeper being in him comes into its own, so that only through this awakening of a second man in him does he become a free being? Can man educate himself to freedom, or cannot he? Can man become a free being or not? How does he become a free being? That was the new question that had to be raised.

But this pointed out that the present-day human being, if he wants to come at all to the consciousness of the full human being, must not stop at what arises of its own accord in the human being in his development, but that he must take his development into his own hands. Admittedly, this is a point of view that is highly inconvenient for a great many people today. For in order to make it plausible, one must say the following to people: Take a look at a five-year-old child. Let us imagine that this five-year-old child is standing in front of a volume of Goethe's lyrical poems. This five-year-old child standing in front of the volume of Goethe's lyric poems will do something with this volume of lyric poems; he will tear it up, perhaps bite it, or something else, but one cannot assume that this five-year-old child will do the right thing with the volume of Goethe's lyric poems. But the child can develop, the child can be educated so that later he will learn to do the right thing with this volume of Goethe's lyric poems. Now, what would it be like if we were to say to people today: Just surrender to what time consciousness itself gives you, and then you will relate to the actual secrets of nature, to the actual secrets of the world around you, as the five-year-old child relates to Goethe's lyrisches Band. It has the whole of Goethe's Iyrisches Band before it like a fully understanding human being, but of course it does not penetrate into that which one can penetrate into as a fully understanding human being. It must first be educated. Now the call for freedom actually presupposes that the human being has the great intellectual modesty to say to himself: perhaps I stand before nature, before the essence of the world, as the five-year-old child stands before the first volume of Goethe's lyrische Gedichte. I must first take the development of my soul into my own hands, and then, just as Goethe's volume of lyric poetry will mean something completely different to a five-year-old child after five or seven years, so the world will mean something completely different to me. While before, when I just leave myself to what comes naturally, I am a fettered being, a different person awakens in me when I take my development into my own hands. And as this other man glows through me, warms me, permeates me, I become a free being.

Yes, that was the foundation of a human conception of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” and it was not intended merely as a philosophical truth, but to show that through what man awakens in himself by advancing himself – as if he only achieves what is given to him of its own accord – by developing himself in this way, he develops, as it were, a previously dormant, hidden reality within himself. He creates something in himself that brings him to freedom. As long as one theorizes, as long as one thinks up abstract ideas, these will be a matter for the human mind. They will not particularly take hold of the whole person. Anyone who has dealt with such things could actually know how shadowy the most beautiful, the most ideal abstract ideas live in people. It is different when not abstract ideas but life itself is to be awakened in the human being, when the human being is to go through something vividly, through which something awakens in him that was not there before. This is something alive that takes hold of the whole human being, that is not just a matter of the head, that is a matter of the soul and spirit of the whole human being. Here all feelings and impulses, the whole human life of will, are brought together; freedom becomes a real force in the human being, freedom becomes something that is experienced. But then, when it becomes something experienced, then the human being also wants to develop it in the external life together, then, by living with other people, he comes from his experience of freedom to an idea of such a social structure of human life together, in which only can be realized.

Therefore, in the second part of my philosophy, I tried to establish a moral teaching for people, to establish a social outlook that, I would say, must then naturally arise from the awakened sense of freedom. If we take the impulse of freedom as something that is vividly grasped in the deepest essence of man, then freedom is not an abstract idea, then the philosophy of freedom is not a mere philosophy, then what is expressed by such a view of freedom is something that merges into all of man's actions, into all of man's objectives. Then it contains something that others long for when they speak of freedom, but that can only be found by those who, if they want to understand freedom, do not stop at the world views of the present, but ascend to what lies dormant in man and can be awakened. What I would call a language of freedom that can be spoken to humanity in such a way that it is intimately connected with the cultural conditions of the present and future human being, still needed another thing in its further development.

And here is the reason why we had to move on from the foundation of a philosophy of freedom to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Take one of the main books of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a detailed description of the paths that a person must take inwardly, in soul and spirit, in order to awaken in him the consciousness of the other person, of the truly free person. There you will find how it is possible for a person to truly come to such an understanding of his own being that the true form of thinking and also of willing appears before his soul. And here I may refer to something I already mentioned in one of the last lectures I gave here: thinking and willing becomes something different for the human being than it is for ordinary consciousness, which, as described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', penetrates the human being. By thinking one learns to recognize how the being, which one then grasps as the higher human being, was already there before man entered into physical existence through birth or conception. By thinking one learns to recognize the true form of the human will, how man carries his nature through the gate of death into the spiritual world. One learns to recognize by truly rising, by developing to the truer essence of man, to the eternal in man.

But this only properly sketches out the paths that lead people to, I would like to say, regard the “Philosophy of Freedom” as something self-evident; the paths to finding the truly free human being. But at the same time, this serves the deeper cultural conditions of the present and the future, which express themselves precisely in such calls for freedom as I characterized in the introduction to my lecture today.

What does a human being need when he feels intensely about a dignified existence, what does a human being need for the content of his innermost human consciousness? What I want to say here can perhaps be best illustrated by referring you back to the starting point of spiritual human culture in the last three to four centuries. For it was a great thing when, at the dawn of the newer development of humanity, minds such as Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and so on appeared. What did they do, basically? They broke with the knowledge and worldviews of the old days and directed human attention to the unbiased observation of the external world. They wanted to dispel prejudices. They wanted to make clear what man can gain by observing the external world. But little by little something else has occurred, something that I have already partially characterized. What has occurred is that an old awareness of what man is in his innermost being has been destroyed by more recent observation. If today, in accordance with our newer natural science, we look at the starry sky, what is this starry sky? Something that we want to understand through mathematics and mechanics, something that we only feel related to – this abstract product of our minds, mathematics and mechanics. And if we compare this with the consciousness that people in older times had when they looked up at the starry sky, He did not have the abstract scientific consciousness: up there the stars revolve according to mathematical-mechanical laws, but you, earthworm, stand here on this earth, are born with birth and perish with death, and that which you are has nothing to do with the course of the stars. If we go back to the earlier stages of human consciousness, we find that this earlier human consciousness held the view that you, human being, as you stand here on this earth, you are not merely attached to this earth; that which lives and works in you is connected with that which circles up there in the stars. And when you perfect your knowledge, when you become aware of yourself as a complete human being, then you know yourself as being related to the animals and plants and stones of the earth, and thus to the entire cosmic space of the stars. We have paid for what we have learned mathematically and mechanically about the stars by cutting ourselves off from the cosmos, from the world. If one now walks the path to higher knowledge in the way I have described, and comes to recognize that human being that did not begin with birth or conception, but that was there in spiritual worlds before birth and conception, and that also lives in us now and which penetrates through the portal of death into the spiritual world, then one does indeed learn anew, with this human being, only in a new form, not in an old, worn-out form, one's kinship with the whole cosmos; then the human being is again imbued with world consciousness. His mere earthly consciousness is transformed into world consciousness. But then man has something that he needs precisely as a cultural condition of the spirit in the present and for the future. Humanity could never experience the moment without the deepest damage to its essence, where reference would be made to new external observations, and the old spiritual life would gradually be extinguished. Man needs faith, the reference to the realization of a permanent, that can withstand, as well as the outer observation of the world expands.

Thus it is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that shows man himself in such a way that he can in turn tie his world consciousness to the whole cosmos, that he in turn knows himself in connection with the world spirit. This is not just a theoretical idea, but something that comes to life in the whole human being, and what makes him, this human being, a different being. In the present and in the future, there will be much speculation about what social institutions are needed so that people can find a dignified existence within them. In recent times, people have even deluded themselves into believing that such institutions can be invented. We shall only arrive at institutions that give man a dignified existence when man is able to create such institutions from his deepest spiritual and soul life. But for that we do not need to dream of a transformation of the external social conditions; for that we need to seriously tackle a new spiritual culture, to awaken that which slumbers and sleeps in the human soul, and which must first be awakened so that man may know of himself that he is a free being. Today we completely overlook the deep rift in our spiritual culture. For many centuries, certain social powers have ensured that external science does not speak of the spiritual and the soul. That should be the concern of dogmatism. One was to experience it through mere belief, to let mere authorities dictate what one should think about spirit and soul; because certain social powers claimed a monopoly on dictating what should be recognized about spirit and soul, science was pushed aside to the merely material. It makes a very peculiar impression on the one who looks deeper into the development of humanity when he hears today how official science believes that it is pursuing the truths without prejudice and that through this unprejudiced pursuit of the truths it will find something that is today called science and that basically only wants to deal with sensual facts. In truth, it has become a developmental process, in truth, it is human research that has capitulated to the monopoly of certain social circles that alone wanted to deal with what people have to think about spirit and soul. A science such as I have characterized, such as leads to freedom, it leads at the same time to man not only being able to investigate the physical, his bodily nature, it leads to man also learning to investigate the spiritual and the soul. And when he learns to investigate the spiritual and the soul, he absorbs stronger, more realistic concepts than those he absorbs when he has to limit himself to mere external material. And so they have tried to allow only that into social thinking which arises out of the present-day consciousness. And from this point of view they believe that human ideas cannot actually penetrate into social conditions, or they fashion for themselves most perverted social ideas. In my book Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the Soul) — one of the last that I wrote and which, like the others, is only a continuation of what you will find in my book The Philosophy of Freedom — in this book Von Seelenrätseln, I have shown how truly anthroposophically oriented spiritual science not only capable of speaking abstractly about all kinds of spiritual and psychological phenomena, but that by grasping the reality of the spirit it is at the same time able to comprehend the human being, which is body, soul and spirit, in its wholeness. And so, for example, in these “Puzzles of the Soul” I was able to point out how it is a great error in present-day scientific physiology to speak of the fact that man has sensitive nerves that go from the sensory organ to the central organ, while the motor nerves go from the central organ to the muscles. An abstract science that speaks only abstractly of spirit and soul will never dare, and will never find the method, to say anything about the senses that cannot be proven merely by the senses. One can prove by stating that there is only one kind of nerve, that there is no difference between sensitive and motor nerves, that such phenomena as tabes dorsalis, which are cited in support of the opinion that motor nerves exist, actually prove the opposite proves the opposite of what is believed to be proven by them.

Thus, in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, something is created that in turn penetrates all of nature, that has enough impact to penetrate all of nature. But this also allows this spiritual science to penetrate into that which must be of particular interest to contemporary culture. This spiritual science is allowed to penetrate into the structure of social life. And it is only through those experiences that people have with the higher human being that truly social concepts can be gained. That is why we live in such a confusing time today, why we live in such confusion and such chaos today, because people who deal with the solutions of various social issues are not able to dig deep enough into the human being itself to find the ideas that can truly govern social life. And so we are at a loss when faced with the most pressing and burning questions of the present day, and we are left standing before these most searing and burning questions in such a way that no answer comes from the depths of human nature as an echo.

We have seen how great transformations have taken place in the course of human history. Or was not one of the greatest transformations that have taken place in the course of human development that through which Christianity arose? Christianity, which has given the evolution of the earth its true meaning, has emerged through a mighty transformation. It left many things behind. Not all people recognized the truths of Christianity; but on the whole, Christianity was the one thing that worked transformatively in the old cultural element, and basically brought forth the whole of European civilization with its American civilization appendix. Later, something like the French Revolution was experienced. While Christianity was a purely spiritual transformation and has achieved its goal to the greatest extent, it can be said of the French Revolution, which was a political one, that it has achieved some of its political goals, but that important and essential things have been left behind, which have not been achieved of the goals that were set. And now in our time we are experiencing the longing of many people for a new transformation, for new revolutions. And we already see these revolutions at work in many ways. Mankind has had sad experiences. If it wants to be unbiased enough, it should also recognize this in proletarian circles. Mankind has had sad experiences with the extreme social revolutions in Eastern Europe, in Hungary, and a great lesson of world history should be the failure of these social revolutions. And an even greater lesson could be learned if people are at all capable of learning from world-historical events, namely the sad fate of the German revolution of November 9, 1918, a revolution that fizzled out. And if we take a comprehensive view of all that follows from such facts, from the failed revolutions in Hungary and Eastern Europe, from the sadly abortive German Revolution, then we see: spiritual transformations, such as those brought about by Christianity, can take place in the course of the development of humanity; political revolutions, such as the French Revolution, only in part; economic revolutions, such as are being attempted now, are doomed to failure, can only destroy, can bring forth nothing new, if they do not transform themselves into spiritual impulses for progress. One of the most important and essential cultural conditions of the present time is that, out of the correctly grasped impulses of freedom, people come to realize that all the questions that are being addressed today must be considered in the context of the whole spiritual development of humanity, with a renewal of the human spiritual life. And mankind must realize this clearly before the sad and terrible lesson of necessity can occur, which would occur if what is happening to the downfall of human culture in the east of Europe, what has happened in Hungary under such sad circumstances, what is happening in Germany, if what is happening in the way it is grasped by those , who have no conception of the real impulse of the spirit, takes its course, which is now regarded by many as appropriate for the times.

Even what is done economically is only done correctly out of the human spirit, and we live in an age where the old concepts no longer suffice, where we must find new concepts that can create a new economic culture for the present and for the future. Woodrow Wilson is right when he says: We have new economic conditions, people could not shut themselves out from the new economic institutions; but we think about this economic life with the old legal concepts, with the old traditional spiritual ideas. But then, nothing will sprout from that which is rooted in the soul that could now master the new economic life.

What is sought here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in what is communicated here, will on the one hand reach up to the highest heights of human spiritual and soul life, but on the other hand will also be strong enough to reach down to where the most everyday aspects of life need to be grasped. What is the situation today? Intellectual life has gradually taken on a very abstract character. Think about how the religious, aesthetic, artistic, and ideological convictions of, say, a merchant or an industrialist or a civil servant are formed. This is a matter for himself, which he experiences in his soul. It has nothing to do with the account book or with what he does in his office. In the realm where he generates his spiritual ideas, the ideas and impulses that are then expressed in his account book are not created at the same time. At most, it says “With God”; but that is also all that connects the activity that is expressed there with what he carries through the world as an abstract spiritual and soul life. But that is why it was said when people with good social ideas arose in modern times, such as Saint-Simon, Blanc, Fourier: These are good moral ideas, but good ideas alone will not transform social conditions. This can be heard everywhere today where the socialist point of view is discussed. And they are right. With such social ideas as Saint-Simon, Blanc, Fourier and so on had, you do not transform social life, because they arose from the consciousness of people that, when you think and reflect on the spiritual, this spiritual is a thing in itself, that should not grasp the world at the same time. In the end, all spiritual life has become abstract. On the one hand, man takes the upward surge religiously or artistically or ideologically to spiritual heights, if he takes it at all. On the other hand, he abandons himself, I might say, to the hazards of life; in natural science, by working in laboratories, in the observatory and the like, and what he brings out of it, whether in the social or in the scientific field, has no connection with the abstract spiritual life. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to pour out a unity of spiritual and material life over all of human civilization. And from that which is developed in the human being, through beholding the higher human being within himself, ascending to the eternal, the possibility should follow of grasping that which lies beyond birth and death for the human being, but at the same time to make the ideas so strong that they can intervene in everyday life. For it is not the person who speaks of the spirit who is serious and true about the spirit, but the person who is serious and true about the spirit who pursues the spirit to its last involvement in material existence, for whom nothing at all remains of spiritless matter even in the practical conception of life. That is what could be called the cultural conditions of the present and the future, that such spiritual and mental consciousness should be in people.

Then people who are imbued with such consciousness will also create social and political conditions that are desired by people like Woodrow Wilson. Today, however, the situation is such that people only criticize, that productive ideas are not yet there, because they do not want to descend to the spirit or want to ascend. Today we see how, starting from America – we have given the example of Woodrow Wilson himself, certainly a decisive personality – how, starting from America, there is criticism of contemporary social life, and the call for freedom is heard. But one does not want to decide to properly ascend to the real impulse of freedom. And we have seen how truly beautiful, ingenious ideas about freedom and social conditions have emerged in Europe. But it is characteristic of us in European civilization that we are incapable of bringing down from the abstractions, from the philosophical heights, what we conceive and feel so beautifully and introducing it into direct life. And we still do not understand it when there is talk of such an introduction of real, not merely imagined ideas into political life. And when we look across to Asia, we are confronted with a different civilization that criticizes the social and freedom life of the present just as aptly as America and Europe. One only has to read the beautiful arguments of Rabindranath Tagore to see how far the one who stands at the forefront of Asian culture can go in criticism. He does not achieve this in the productive sphere because he is not able to say to himself: if we are to speak of spiritual life again, we must strive for something new. He wants to preserve an old spiritual life, but only to be effective in it.

Now, unfortunately, we have seen in Europe that people have finally lost the direct connection between what they strive for in spirit and what everyday life, so that we now see numerous societies engaged in shaping Europe according to purely external economic aspects and trying to satisfy the needs of the soul, since the Christian religion no longer satisfies one in Europe, from Asia, through all sorts of theories and so on. Such relationships are not suitable for bringing about a new spiritual life; they are the last decadent shadows of an old one.

What is meant here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science takes all this into account. It is pretty much the opposite of what is said about it. And the building in Dornach, which is so often said to be symbolic, does not have a single symbol. Rather, it is said to be built, I would say, purely naturally, in such a way that it is envisaged that one day this and that will be , just as one learns to recognize the nut within its shell, and when one looks at the shell around the nut, one finds that it is naturally shaped to fit the nut. In the same way, we wanted to create a new shell for a new spiritual life, in architectural, artistic and pictorial terms. The building was not constructed out of abstract ideas or out of a complicated aesthetic view. I have often used a rather trivial comparison to try to express what I actually mean by this Dornach building. I am sure many of you know that in Germany, Austria or here, certain cakes are called Gugelhupf, and then the form in which the Gugelhupf is baked is called the Gugelhupf pan. Now, I said, if we imagine that what is to be done in this building is a Gugelhupf, a cake, then, if the cake is to be right, the Gugelhupf pan must be right. In the same way, the spiritual life that is to be cultivated there must have the right shell, just as the nut in the nut shell has the right shell. Except for this basic principle of the building, everything is still fundamentally misunderstood in wide circles today.

Now, as in other numerous lectures that I have already given here at the same place, I wanted to point out once again how the things that are really involved in the Dornach building and what is to be done in it for the civilized development of humanity, in contrast to the numerous misunderstandings that arise, that must arise very naturally. Perhaps it is possible to see from the few suggestions I have been able to make, but which are intimately connected with the most important human longings for the renewal of culture in the present and for the future, what is meant and wanted by this building and its purpose. When the call for freedom rings out from America, as I characterized it with Woodrow Wilson: the goal is to find humanity, a dignified existence, through a spiritual and soulful understanding that can meet this call as its realization, as the right answer to the question that is being asked. Some people today still avoid it. Out of dark, vague feelings, demands are made. The answers must be given out of a clear spiritual insight. I have to think how right Woodrow Wilson is in a certain respect when he points out that secret consortia should not decide on the affairs of the people, of humanity. Woodrow Wilson wants decisions to be made in every family home, be it in the country or in the city, but he wants people to come together in the schoolhouse in particular. It is a beautiful idea that the place of nurturing the spirit should be the place of origin for the formation of contemporary ideas. And it is a beautiful saying of Woodrow Wilson's when he says: Our goal is the reality of freedom. We want to work towards preventing private capital accumulation by law and to make the system by which private capital accumulation was created legally impossible. And another very nice saying is: Inside the country, on the farms, in the shops, in the villages, in the apartments of the big city, in the school buildings, everywhere where people meet and are true to each other , that is where the streams and rivers rise from their source, to form the mighty force of that stream that carries and drives all human endeavors on its journey to the great common sea of humanity. It is a fine idea to call people together in such a way that the stream can form from all the individual sources for the liberation of humanity, and it is a fine idea to let the goals that are to carry humanity forward be set precisely in the places where the spirit is cultivated, in the school buildings.

But if you take what I have tried to explain today, then perhaps Woodrow Wilson's call for schoolhouses will have to be different after all. For I believe that only when a cultural life is cultivated in these school buildings, permeated by a realistic, humane understanding of the free human spirit and the human soul, only then will the right current of human freedom come from the school building. Until we can implant in the human soul a correct understanding of freedom, we may gather in schools, but they will hardly find realistic goals there either. These will only be found when we have the courage to bring into the schools a spiritual, realistic worldview, an artistic outlook, and a religious confession. For what will come out of the schools for the future of humanity will be more important than what people in general decide on the basis of what they have learned at school.