The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we got to the point in our esoteric training where we place our doppelganger outside us. It's verily not a pleasant feeling when we see all of what we previously had in us unconsciously objectively before us, which then accompanies us wherever we go. We heard that it's a Luciferic being, Samael, with his hosts who brings the doppelganger out of us. From this, one sees that Luciferic beings also do good things and not always bad ones. If we always carried our defects in us unconsciously, we could never become aware of the destructive, ruinous things that they do in our body and in the whole cosmic substance. As long as Samael hasn't brought our defects out from within us, as long as we don't see them objectively before us as our doppelganger, so long the Gods graciously keep us from seeing the ruinous, destructive force of jealousy, hate, envy and other passions and emotions that we stream out into our environment. A clairvoyant sees that these passions tear something down in our physical body and in the cosmos' substance, whereas the good stimulates upbuilding forces. So basically Samael is a blessing for development. He shows us our inner nature all the more accurately the more seriously we take our training in hand. We then see defects objectively which we hadn't paid any attention to previously. Now we'll become increasingly disgusted with them and they'll spur us on to get rid of them.

An esoteric will then unavoidably have a feeling as if he couldn't get any air, as if he would suffocate. This feeling arises because the pupil begins to pay attention to his subtle soul stirrings, especially to the untruthfulness that slumbers potentially in every man. We don't mean the cruder lies and hypocrisies that lower natures generate, but the finer nuances that we don't notice through our superficiality and which we often do not even acknowledge. As an example, let's assume that someone learns that a theosophical lecture is going to be given someplace. He thinks: That's something good, I'll go there—but at the same time he thinks that he'll meet someone there whom he'd like to be with. Nevertheless, he tells himself that this isn't the main reason so that he imagines he's really going there on account of the lecture.

Such things happen every day; one lies to oneself and doesn't want to notice it. But now the untruths we hadn't noticed crowd into our consciousness so we think that they'll suffocate us.

Another example will show us how much men live on the surface in all of their actions and even in their duties. (Followed by the example of teachers who were supposed to be tested a second time and didn't know what was in the textbooks that they used every day.) This superficiality spreads out over our whole soul life, so that we don't even see the lies that we tell ourselves.

When we first begin to exercise we might not notice much progress; thoughts about daily life stream to us from all sides. It'll take a long time for us to notice any results from our exercises and for a second being called Azazel to begin to draw our attention to our superficiality, Samael and Azazel must both bring something out of us, but a third being must bring us something. He must bring us a longing for a higher, spiritual life. The next example shows us what's meant by this. A scientist who's fired by a desire for knowledge and would like to know everything suddenly finds himself at a wall, so that he can't press on with his intellect. In most cases he'll say: A human intellect can go no further, and he will resign himself to this. But others who feel that their soul is more alive will look further and will be led to spiritual science. There they think they can investigate beyond the limits that materialistic science has set up before them. But as soon as they tread an esoteric path, they'll feel like they're drowning. For as a man presses ever deeper into esotericism, the limits move ever further apart until he gets to a point where everything moves away and he's standing over an abyss. He feels no support anymore, everything disappears under his feet. It's only by going further on the path, by eagerly continuing the meditations that it'll dawn on him that maya must fall away before he can know the truth, spiritual reality; Azazel brings us this knowledge; he preserves man from spiritual or intellectual drowning.

Then there's a fourth being, Mehazael. He awakens the feeling in us and makes us aware that we're bound to time and space. The best way to clarify this is to place a condition before our soul that many of us have experienced. This is when we wake up in the morn and feel burdened by duties and worries that are like chains that the new day brings with it. This goes together with another one of wanting to shake off the chains that hold us fettered to this burden that is all the harder to bear since we know that we are powerless against it, that we must end ourselves. Here Mahazael shows us our karma. We'll be able to bear this burden more easily as soon as we tread the esoteric path. Mehazael shows it to us so that we don't resist it uselessly; for thereby we would only make our karma worse instead o shaking if off. And so in the end, these four Luciferic forces are a blessing for us.

We saw that every time we let our rage and hate run wild and we don't master our passions, we pulverize something in us and in cosmic substance, into which our feelings, sensations and thoughts flow continuously. Thereby we not only harm ourselves—we create karma for our environment. So far we've only studied karma theoretically. We'll now see how much deeper and more complicated karma's action is.

To become aware of the whole action of these four beings in us, we must keep on meditating strongly. In addition to meditating on the rose cross and on other things and esoteric verses that are given us, we should try to meditate on feelings and sensations, which is much harder. For instance, if we meditate on sympathy and immerse ourselves completely in this feeling, warmth will stream through us; meditation on antipathy will arouse a cold feelings in us. For instance, if we first meditate on the rose cross and then on a strong will impulse, an impulse for a good deed, we'll then see an inner light and feel a stream of warmth. Our exercises and meditations aren't successful right away; it goes slower with some and faster with others, depending on development and karma One will succeed after fifty times, another will take a whole lifetime, but we should wait patiently and go forward courageously. Where did the sun get the power to appear at the same place every morn and radiate its light?

An esoteric's life should become quite different from what it was before. He's really leading two lives—one that gradually crumbles and dies, and another one that gives him light out of the spirit from which he came. Wise masters in ancient mysteries expressed the dying of the old man and the flaming up of the new man through the Christ spirit in the words: Ex Deo nascimur, In … morimur, because Christ's name was too sacred to utter. Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

This is the second lecture in the series entitled: Art and the Experiencing of Art. This lecture is also known as: The Being of the Arts.

Let us imagine a great snow-clad plain spread out before us and upon it here and there rivers and lakes hard frozen. The neighboring sea is mostly frozen over close to shore; further out huge floes are drifting; occasional stunted trees and bushes lift heads heavy with snow and icicles. It is evening. The sun has already set, leaving behind the golden splendor of its afterglow.

Before our eyes are two female figures and out of the afterglow is born—we might say is sent forth—a messenger from the higher worlds, who stands before the women and listens with close attention to what they are telling of their inmost feelings and experiences.

One of the two standing there hugs her arms tightly to her body, cowers together, and exclaims: “I am freezing cold.” The eyes of the other woman wander over the snow-clad plain, out to the frozen waters and over the trees thick with hanging icicles, and from her lips burst forth the words “how glorious this whole landscape is.” She is utterly heedless of her own feelings, utterly oblivious to her physical suffering from the cold. We feel warmth streaming into her heart, for she has no attention to spare for her physical bodily discomfort, being inwardly overwhelmed by the wonderful beauty of this chill and frozen scene. Then the sun sinks further and further, the color fades out of the afterglow and the two friends fall into a deep slumber. One of them, the one who had been so acutely conscious of the cold in her bodily self, sinks into a sleep which might easily become fatal; the other sinks into a sleep in which we can recognize the influence of the emotion expressed in the words “How glorious,” which continues to warm her limbs and keep them full of life throughout her slumber. And she hears the youth who, born out of the glory of the afterglow, says to her these words, “Thou art Art”; and then she falls asleep.

With her she took into her slumbers all the results of the impressions made upon her by the landscape which has been described; and a sort of dream mingled with her sleep. And yet it was not a dream, but in a certain way a reality, although of a unique kind akin to dreaming in its form. It was the manifestation of a reality which this woman's soul had barely been able to conceive before. For the experience that befell her was not a dream; it merely resembled one. That which she experienced may be described as “astral imagination.” And if we are to describe her visions we cannot do it otherwise than by setting forth in words the picture by means of which “imaginative” perception speaks.

For the soul of this woman became aware at that moment what the event signalized. By the words of the youth, “Thou art Art,” can be described intimately only by clothing the experiences of the imaginative perceptions in words. Accordingly let us thus clothe the impressions received by the soul of that woman through the channel of this imaginative percept.

The Dance

When her inner senses awoke and she began to take note of her surroundings, she became aware of a remarkable figure—very different in appearance from that which purely physical experience would lead one to anticipate in a spiritual figure, for it was poor in those characteristics which recall the world of the physical senses. The only manner in which it called to mind the world of the physical senses was by its outline, which resembled three interlacing circles. The circles stood one upon another, much as if one were horizontal, another vertical, the third running from right to left; and the currents which flowed through these circles and made their presence known were not reminiscent of any impression received by the physical senses; rather did they recall something purely psychic, something which can only be compared with the impressions and feelings of the soul. But a something streamed out from this figure which can best be described by saying that it was like a deep and repressed inner sorrow concerning some event. When the soul of the woman observed this she made up her mind to enquire “What is the cause of thy sorrow?” and this is the answer which came to her from that figure belonging to the spirit world: “Indeed, I have a real reason for manifesting this emotion, for I belong to a high spiritual race. I appear to thee now just as a human soul would appear, but thou must soar far into the realms of the hierarchies to discover the place whence I come. My sorrow is that mankind on the other side of my life, in the physical world where at present we are not dwelling, has robbed me of the last of my off-spring. I have descended to this level from the higher hierarchies, but men have torn the last of my descendants from me, taken him to live among them and chained him to a rock-like structure, after making him as little as possible.

Thereupon, this woman's soul felt drawn upon to ask, “Who exactly art thou? At this moment I can only describe things with the words which I remember as the result of life on the physical plane. How canst thou make me comprehend thy nature and the nature of thy offspring whom mankind has enchained?”

And the Spirit answered: “Over yonder in the physical world men describe me as one of the senses—as quite a minor sense—which they call equilibrium, which has become quite little, and is composed of three incomplete circles attached to one another in the ear. This is my last tiny offspring. They have torn him from me into the other world, and taken away that which belonged to him here, namely, the power to move freely in any direction. Similarly they have broken each of the circles, and attached him firmly on each side to a base. In this realm—as thou seest me now—I am not attached: I show perfect circles which ever way you look at me; I am complete in every direction. Now for the first time thou seest my real form.”

Thereupon the woman's soul felt compelled to ask, “In what way can I help thee?”

The figure from the spirit world replied, “Thou canst only help me by uniting thy soul with mine, and bringing into me over here all that men learn during physical life yonder through the sense of equilibrium. Thou wilt then grow to be a part of me; thou wilt become as great as I am myself; in this way thou wilt liberate thy sense of equilibrium and raise thyself—a spiritually free being—above thy attachment to the earth!”

And the soul of the woman did so. She became one with that figure of the spirit world. And in becoming one with it she became aware that she must carry out some purpose. So she put one foot in front of the other, changing repose into movement, and changing movement into dance, completed it as a form.

“Now thou hast transformed me!” cried the figure from the spirit world. Now I have become that which I can only become through thy agency if thou continuest to behave as thou hast just been behaving. Now I have become a part of thee, and become so in a manner that men can have only guessed at my real being. Now I have become the art of dance. Because thou hast will to remain a soul and hast not united thyself with physical matter, thou hast been enabled to set me free. And at the same time thou hast, by thine ordered steps, led me up to the spiritual hierarchies to which I belong, to the Spirits of Motion; and thou hast led me to the Spirits of Form by grouping thy steps into a rhythmic pattern. Thou hast brought me myself to Spirits of Form. But at present thou mayest go no further; for wert thou to advance but one step beyond what thou hast already done for me all that thou hast done would become useless. For it is the Spirits of Form who are charged with the bringing about of everything in the earth's evolution. Wert thou to intrude upon the mission of the Spirits of Form thou wouldst destroy everything thou hast accomplished; for thou couldst not help falling into the reign spoken of as the “Furnace of desire” by those who on earth describe the appearance of the spiritual worlds. Thy spiritual dance would be transformed into one arising out of mad passion. So long as men act on their very slightest knowledge of me as exhibited in their dances of today. But by doing only what thou hast just done and by grouping them into form thou makest in thy steps a copy of those mighty measures performed by planets and suns in the sky in order first to create the physical world of the senses!”

The Stage

The soul of the woman continued to live on in this condition of consciousness. And another spirit figure approached her—also very different in appearance from that which men, with their physical sense-perception, usually conceive when they think of a spirit form. The figure which confronted her was so to speak, bounded by a horizontal plane and consisted of only two dimensions, but it presented one unique characteristic. Although it was bounded by a horizontal plane, the soul of the woman, being in the condition of imaginative perception, could behold both sides of it at once, and this figure showed two totally different aspects—one on one side and one on the other.

Again the soul of the woman put a question to the figure, “Who art thou?”

And this figure replied, “My home is in the higher regions. I have come down to the region known to you as the region of the spirit, and which here is called the Region of the Archangels. I have descended to this level and was obliged to do so in order to come into touch with the physical realm of earth. But mankind tore the last of my offspring from me and took him away; and over yonder they have imprisoned him in their own physical form, where they call him one of their senses and describe him as the sense of individual movement—as that living part of themselves by which they move their limbs and other portions of their body.

And the soul of the woman asked, “What can I do for thee?” Thereupon also this figure said, “Make thine own being one with mine, so that thine own being becomes a part of mine!”

The soul of the woman did so. And she became one with this spirit figure and slipped entirely into it. Once more did this woman's soul expand, waxing great and beautiful. And the spirit figure said to her, Behold, by doing this thou has won the ability to endow the souls of men upon the physical plane with a special faculty which is exercised by a part of that nature which the youthful messenger assigned to thee; for by doing this thou hast become what is known as the “Art of pantomime, the art of expression by mimicry.”

And since the soul of this woman still kept a memory of her earthly form, for she had been asleep but a little while, she could pour into that form everything now contained in the figure before her. And she became the archetype of the art of acting.

“But thou must only go a certain distance,” said the figure from the spirit world. “Thou mayest only pour into the form just what thou expressest by movement. As soon as thou pourest in thine own desires, thou wilt distort the form into a grimace, and the destiny of thine art will be cut short. That is what mankind has been doing over there. They have been putting their desires and passions into their mimic pantomime in order to express themselves; But thou must let only selflessness come to expression; thus thou becomest merged with the archetype of the art of acting.”

Sculpture

The soul of the woman continued to live on in this state of consciousness, and another spirit figure drew near which veritably made itself manifest only on one plane, moving only along a line. The soul of the woman observed that this spirit figure also, moving on one plane was sorrowing, and when she enquired ““What can I do for thee?” the figure replied, “My home is in higher regions, in loftier spheres. But I have descended through the realms of the hierarchies to the one known to thee through the care of occult science as the Region of the Spirits of Personality, of which men possess only a copy,” For this figure too had to confess that on coming into touch with humanity it had lost the last of its offspring. And the figure continued, “Men call the last of my offspring their vitality, their sense of being alive, as long as they are on earth, meaning that which makes them aware of their own personalities; that which permeates them in the form of a momentary mood or pleasure, and that which lends energy and persistence to their individual forms. But they have fettered this sense in themselves.”

“What can I do for thee?” asked the soul of the woman. Once more the figure demanded, “Thou must make thyself a part of mine own being. Thou must abandon all human feeling of selfhood and dissolve thyself in my form—thou must merge thyself in me and become one with me!”

And the soul of the woman did so. And she became aware that although the figure had an extension on only one plane, she herself was filled with power radiating in every direction, and that she was now completely occupying the body that she wore on Earth, the body she remembered and which appeared to her here the more radiant and beautiful in consequence. Then the spirit figure said, “By this act of thine thou hast attained to something which endows thee with another individual talent in the great domain after which thou hast been named. At this moment thou hast become that which mankind over yonder possesses, though only as a possibility; thou hast become one with the archetype of the Art of Sculpture”

The soul of the woman became merged with the archetype of sculpture, and could now itself pour out a talent into the souls of men by reason of that which it had taken up into itself. By the aid of that Spirit of Personality she was able to pour this into the souls of men; she could do this in the form of talent. And by doing so she endowed mankind upon the earth with plastic fancy, with the ability to create in plastic outline.

“But thou must not go a step further than thou hast gone! Thou must abide entirely within the limits of thy form. For that which is in thee may only be taken up as far as the Spirits of Form and the regions where they dwell. For if thou goest beyond, thou wilt function as the realm which arouses human passions; if thou dost not stay within the limits of noble form nothing good can possibly be wrought within thy sphere. But if thou abidest within the noble confines of thy form, thou canst pour into that form that which can only be realized in the distant future. And then, although humanity is far from having attained the bodies by means of which they can enact with purity of life that which to-day is given over to quite other forces within them, Thou wilt be allowed to show them what humanity will at some time experience in a purified state, upon the future planet of Venus, when their bodies will have become quite different from what they are now. Thou canst contrast them with the human forms of to-day, and show how pure and chaste the human form of the future is to be.”

And out of the sea of changing figures in the imaginative perception there arose something resembling the archetype of the Venus of Milo.

“Thou mayst go only a certain length in the moulding of form. The instant thou passest the boundaries of form even a little, as soon as thou destroyest the powerful personality whose office it is to hold the human form together, thou standest at the boundary of that which can be beautiful and a work of art.”

And once more a form arose from the tossing waves of the changing sea of astral imaginative world. And it's aspect disclosed that its content had brought the human figure to the edge of the boundary where the form would break the coherence of the personality, where the personality would be lost is a step or two further were taken. And the form of the Laokoon arose out of the picture in the astral world.

Architecture

And the soul of the woman continued to enjoy new experiences in the world of imagination. A figure now drew near concerning which she knew, “This being is not to be found yonder on the physical plane; the physical plane contains nothing capable of manifesting it; I am becoming aware of it for the first time. There are so many things upon the physical plane which distantly recall this figure—but nothing so complete in outline as that which I see here.” It was a strangely austere figure which, in response to an inquiry of the woman's soul, announced that its home was in wide-flung regions, not merely in lofty ones, but that at present it was obliged to function in the realm of the hierarchies known as the Spirits of Form. “Mankind over yonder.” Said this figure to the soul of the woman, “has never been able to give an exact representation of me, or bring anything into being which exactly corresponds to me. For my form, as it appears here, does not exist on the physical plane. Therefore they had to break me into pieces, and only through my having been shattered by them I am able to lend thee certain faculties, if thou accomplishest that which thou canst accomplish by joining thyself to me and becoming one with me. By this means thou canst place a creative picture-making faculty in the souls of men. But because this faculty is torn to bits in the world of men the whole of it can only appear as scattered fragments which come up individually here and there. No part of me can be termed a human sense, and therefore mankind has been unable to bind me. They have only been able to tear me to pieces. From me too have they taken my last offspring; but they have torn him into pieces.”

Once again—not shrinking for the moment from the sacrifice of being torn to pieces—did the soul of this woman unite herself with this spirit being. Thereupon the spirit being said to her, “Now thou hast once more become, through this act of thine, another individual faculty of that which thou hast been called as a whole; thou hast become the archetype of architecture, and of the art of building. Thou canst bestow upon mankind the archetype of architectural fancy, by pouring into their souls that which thou hast just attained. But thou wilt be only able to bestow upon them an architectural fancy showing them single ideas if thou wilt follow up these ideas by which they will be able to build structures having the effect of something spreading downwards from the spiritual world, such as the Pyramids represent.”

“Thou wilt endow men with the ability to make what can only be a copy of what I am, by leading them to devote the science of building to the erection of a spiritual temple and not to the construction of something to be used for earthly purpose, and causing them to impress this character on its very exterior.” And now there appeared—as the pyramid had formerly arisen from the tossing astral sea—the Greek Temple.

And another figure arose out of this tossing astral sea—a figure that did not strive downwards from above, seeking to broaden out below, but one that strove upwards, becoming younger the higher it ascended; a third figure into which architectural fancy had to be born:—the Gothic Cathedral.

Painting

And the soul of this woman continued to live on within the world of the imagination, and another figure came up to her, even stranger and still more remarkable than the preceding. Something streamed out of it which felt like the warmth of love, and something again that produced quite a chilling effect

“Who art thou” said the soul of the woman.

“I have a name rightly applied over yonder among those only on the physical plane who bring men intelligence from the spiritual world. They understand how to apply only my name correctly, for I am called intuition, and I come hither from a wide-flung realm. And inasmuch as I have taken my way from a wide-flung realm to come down into the world I may say that I have come from the realm of Seraphim!”

This figure of intuition was of the nature of the Seraphim. And once more the soul of the woman said, “What dost thou desire me to do?”

“Thou must unite thyself with me! Thou must dare to unite thyself with me! Then wilt thou be able to kindle in the souls of mankind on earth a faculty which again is a part of their inventive activity, and whereby thou wilt become an individual faculty in that whole which the youth earlier described thee as being”

The soul of the woman resolutely undertook this deed, and by so doing she became something which was in actual fact very different and very remote from a human bodily figure, something which could have been appreciated only by one who has looked deep into the soul of man himself. For that into which the soul of the woman had been transformed could only be compared with something purely astral, something etheric within it.

“Because thou didst this,” said the seraphic spirit figure named Intuition, “thou art now capable of endowing men with the faculty which consist of representing ideas in color, and thus hast become the archetype of the art of painting. Thou wilt therefore be able to kindle faculty in men; to bestow it upon one of their senses, the eye, which contains a property that in its thought-activity is not affected by the individual human ego—namely comprehensive outlook upon the outer world—now that thou thyself possessest the painter's gift for visualizing ideas in color. And through this sense men will be able to see, shining through the surface of things which appear lifeless and soulless to ordinary vision, their soul being. Men will be able through this faculty of yours, to animate with soul all the qualities of color and of form. Which they ordinarily discern upon the surface of things. Moreover, they will so make use of their art that soul shall speak through form, and that color shall not convey merely an external sense-impression, but that the color which they spread with magical skill upon their canvas shall relate something about the inner nature of color, just as everything having its origin in me passes outwards from the inmost recesses. Thou wilt be able to give men a faculty by means of which they can, by their own soul-light, carry even into lifeless nature, otherwise regarded as a mere soulless mass of forms and colors, the quality known as soul-motion. And thou wilt be able to give them the means of transforming that motion into repose, and so fixing the changeable aspects of the outer physical world. The fleeting momentary tints down which the glory of the rising sun noiselessly speeds—the colors to be found in lifeless nature—these thou wilt teach them to preserve!”

And a picture rose out of the surging sea of imaginative world, a picture representing a landscape. And another picture rose up representing something else which the spirit figure explained by the following comment: “That which occurs in the experience of human life, whether the time be long or short, whether it takes place in a minute or an hour or in centuries, and which is concentrated into one short moment, that experience thou wilt teach men to record through this faculty which thou art bestowing upon them. Even when the past and the future cross each other with a mighty sweep, even when the two movements of the past and future collide, wilt thou instruct men how to record the instant of the collision as a point of undisturbed rest lying between them.” And out of the tossing world of imagination rose Leonardo da Vinci's picture The Last Supper.

“But thou wilt have difficulties as well. And thy greatest difficulties will occur when thou allowest men to exercise this faculty of thine upon objects already possessed of movement and soul, objects into which they have already sent movement and soul from the physical plane. There it will be the boundary where the copy of the original archetype which thou art, can still be called “Art.” “Yet danger is close at hand. And out of the tossing sea of the imaginative world rose the Portrait.

Music

And the soul of the woman continued to live on in the imaginative world. Another figure approached her—a strange figure once again, and one resembling nothing to be found in the physical world—also one that maybe termed a “heavenly figure” and not to be compared with anything upon the physical plane. The soul of the woman asked, “Who art thou?” and the figure replied, I have on earth a name that is rightly employed by those only who bring messages to men from the spirit world; these people call me Inspiration. I come hither from a wide-flung realm, but my immediate abode is in the region known—where the spiritual world is spoken of among men—as the region of the Cherubim.”

The figure from the realm of the Cherubim freed itself from the embrace of the imaginative world. Again to a question asked by the soul of the woman, “What can I do for thee? What am I to do?” it answered, “Thou must transform thyself into myself. Thou must become one with me!”

Despite the danger attendant on such an action, the soul of the woman dissolved itself into the being of this Cherubim. And when she did this, she became still more unlike all physical forms which are to be found upon earth. While one could say of the former figure, “There is at least something having analogy with it to be found on earth,” one could only describe this figure by saying that it possessed a being utterly foreign to everything earthly and incapable of being compared with anything on earth. The very soul of the woman became quite unlike all earthly things; her appearance became such that one could see that she had herself passed over into a spirit realm, and belonged, with her whole being, to the spirit realm, which is not found in the world of the senses.

“Because thou hast done this, thou canst implant a faculty in the souls of men. And when this faculty is absorbed into the souls of men on earth, it will live in those souls in the form of musical fancy. Men will have nothing they can take from outside, so far has thy faculty estranged them from the earth—they will have nothing external upon which to record the impression received by the soul itself beneath thy inspiring influence. They must fan those impressions into flame in a new manner by means of a sense with which they are familiar in quite a different connection. They will have to give a new form to the sense of tone; they will have to find the musical tone in their own souls, as if they were creating from heavenly heights! And when men create in this fashion, something will flow out of their own individual souls which will be like a human reflection of all that can only grow and blossom imperfectly in external nature. From the human soul will flow reflected forth the murmuring of the brook, the power of the wind, the roll of the thunder. It will not be a copy of these things, but something that will step forth as self-evidently a sister of all these beauties of nature which flow, as it were, out of unknown spirit depths. This is what will surge forth from out of the souls of men. They will be enabled to create something that will enrich the earth, which is new to the earth, that would not have come into existence without this faculty of thine—something that is like a seed for the future of the earth. And thou wilt confer on them the ability to express certain living emotions in their souls which never could be uttered if mankind were confined to their present endowments of thought and conception. All the feelings which cause human language to shrivel up, or which would freeze to death if they were dependent upon verbal conception would be sheer poison, will attain through thee the possibility of breathing out the innermost being of the soul over the circumference of the earth, upon the wings of song and ballad, and the imprinting upon that circumference something that would otherwise not be there. All complicated and profound emotions, all emotions existing like a mighty world itself within the human soul—emotions which could otherwise never come to external expression in such shape and which could only be experienced by exploring, by means of the human soul, universal history and cosmic space and all other realms shut out from external experience (for all the opposing currents flowing through centuries and millennia would have to flow into the picture in order to show what mankind has learned at one time and another)—all this can be compressed by men, through thy faculty and poured into a form which they have made their own—the musical symphony.”

And the soul of the woman understood how one brings down what we call inspiration from the spirit heights of the world, and how this should be expressed by the normal human soul; she understood that this can only be expressed by musical sound. The soul of the woman now knew that if the occult investigator desires to describe the world of inspiration, and if this world is to be reproduced upon the physical plane by physical means so as to be more than a mere copy—if it is to be presented directly to human beings, this can only be accomplished through a musical work of art. And the soul of the woman understood how a musical composition could express such a stupendous event as Ouranos kindling his own emotion in the fire of Gaia's love, or how it could portray what happened when Kronos desired to illuminate his inner spirit nature with the light of Zeus!

Such were the deep experiences attained by the soul of that woman through contact from the Cherubim.

Poetry

And the soul of the woman continued to live on into that which is called the imaginative world. And another figure approached her: once again very different from anything to be found upon earth. To the question of the woman's soul, “Who art thou?” this spirit figure replied, “My name is only used correctly by those in the physical world who declare spiritual events to men. For I am Imagination! My home is in a distant country, but from that far country I have betaken myself to that region of the hierarchies known as the region of the Spirits of Will.”

“What can I to do for thee?” the soul of the woman once more enquired.

This figure also demanded that the soul of the woman should unite its own being with this figure from the Spirits of Will. And once more the soul of the woman became very unlike the ordinary soul figure; she was transformed entirely into a figure of soul.

“By doing this thou hast obtained the ability to breathe into the souls of men that faculty which men on earth know as poetic or lyric fancy. Thou hast become the archetype of poetic fancy. And through thee, men will be able to express in speech something they could never express if they were to cleave to the outer world with a desire to reproduce only what is found in the physical world. Thou wilt endow men with the ability to express through thy fancy all that comes into touch with their own will, and which could not be expressed in any other form or stream out of the human soul through earthly means. Thou wilt enable men to express this. On the wings of thy rhythm and thy meter and all the gifts thou wilt be able to offer to men, they will express things for which speech would otherwise be far too coarse an instrument. Thou wilt enable them to express that which otherwise could not be expressed at all.”

And in the vision of Poetry there appeared the events of the centuries in the history of nations, and its inspiring effect upon entire races.

“Moreover, thou wilt be able to compass something that could never be represented by any outward physical event. Thy messengers will be the skalds and the poets of all the ages. They will put into their epics the compact history of human epochs, and thou wilt be able to lend a magic life upon the stage to the forms assumed by the will when heated passions are arrayed against one another. Thou wilt now show, how men, fighting upon solid earth, would vie in vain, how the shock of conflicting passions brings death to one side and victory to the other. Thou wilt give men the possibility of dramatic art!”

And the soul of the woman became aware at this moment of an inner experience such had only to be described by the use of our earthly expression “an awakening.”

How did she come to awake? She woke up by becoming aware of what we may call reflected images of things not to be found upon the earth itself. She herself had become of one nature with imagination. That which lives on our earth as poetry is a reflection of imagination. The soul of the woman beheld the reflection of imagination in the art of poetry. And through beholding this she awoke. She had to forsake the dreamlike spiritual world, it is true, by reason of her awakening; yet she had come at any rate to a region that resembles—though it be but a lifeless reflection thereof—the spirit life of spiritual imagination. This is how she came to wake.

And when she awoke she observed that the night had passed. Once more the snow-clad landscape lay stretching around her; the drifting icebergs were floating off the shore and the icicles hanging on the trees. But as she awoke she noticed the other woman lying by her side, nearly rigid with the cold she had endured without being inwardly warmed by the impression “Oh! How glorious!” which her companion had received from this snowy scene. The soul of the woman who had encountered all these experiences during the night now became aware that the other woman, who had nearly frozen to death from inability to receive impressions in the spirit world, was Human Knowledge! And she took charge of her in order to be able to bestow upon her some of her own warmth. She comforted and tended her, and the other woman gradually grew warm under the influence of what the soul of her companion had brought back as the result of her night's experiences.

In the east the dawn heralding the sun's approach begins to spread over the landscape, and its glow grows rosier and rosier. And now that she is awake the soul of the woman who had met with these experiences during the night can behold and hear the things that human creatures all the world over speak about when they have had a dim inner intimation of realities that can be experienced in the world of the imagination. She hears amid the chorus of human voices the utterances sung by the noblest among them, representing their conjectures about matters upon which they are in no wise informed by imagination, but which they let pour out of the innermost depths of their soul as a beacon for mankind. She hears the voice of the poet who has apprehended the majesty of the experience that can come into the human soul out of the imaginative world. She understands now that she must act as the savior of what upon earth is half frozen knowledge; she understands that she must warm it and permeate it with her own nature, especially with her art nature, and that she must recount the memories of her dreams during the night to this half frozen knowledge. And she observes how that which was half congealed can thaw into life again with the speed of the wind, so soon as knowledge accepts in the form of perception that which is brought to it in the form of revelation.

Once again she gazes into the dawn which becomes a symbol to her of the state out of which she has awakened, and a symbol also of her own imaginings. And she understands the lines of the poet who has sung so wisely as the outcome of his premonitions. That which her new spiritual powers sang to her now comes ringing from the whole wide earth:—

Only through the dawn of Beauty
Shalt thou reach the realm of Truth!

The following question is asked: “If Theosophy is really to have an impact on our lives today, its teachings must be generally comprehensible. However, it seems that in this respect, the writings and lectures on theosophical topics leave much to be desired. They all presuppose a certain level of training in thinking, and it is difficult to hope that they will find their way into wider circles. Sometimes it seems as if 'Theosophy' requires such a high level of education that it is impossible to make it popular. Or is there a way out of this danger?

It should not be denied that the concerns expressed here seem to have a certain justification. However, on closer inspection they will disappear. Above all, it must be realized that the Theosophical movement has only existed for thirty years. It has therefore not yet been able to do what is needed in all areas. It will find ways and means to speak to every level of education. For it can find a form that is understandable to the simple, naive person, as well as one that satisfies the strictest demands of the scientific thinker. But one thing must not be overlooked. Often, when the difficulty of understanding theosophical teachings is mentioned, it is not because they are intrinsically difficult to understand, but because the present-day world of ideas feels alienated by what the theosophists put forward. And then the listeners or readers do not say to themselves that the things are unusual to them, but they simply claim: we do not understand that. It is not a lack of education, but rather a lack of impartiality that is often the problem in this regard. For Theosophy says nothing that is not fundamentally inscribed in the core of every human being. And to bring this out, it is not scholarship but rather good will that is needed.

In our time, there is often a lack of awareness that one has to work one's way up to knowledge. People want everything to be presented in such a way that they can fit it into what they already think and feel without any effort. To consult with oneself, to do inner spiritual work, to exert oneself in thinking: these things have been forgotten in the broadest circles. The most popular speakers and writers are those from whom one hears or reads what, on superficial hearing or reading, appears to be something more or less familiar. However, it is not always possible for those who speak about spiritual things to respond to this characteristic of the times. They know that it is of no use if someone only makes a superficial acquaintance with what they have to say. As long as one remains in the sphere of the world of sense, it is possible to satisfy every demand for easy comprehensibility. But if one rises into the spiritual sphere, it would mean that one renounces altogether to say things as they must be said according to the truth.

One should not only demand that spiritual teachings be adapted to the understanding that one has at the time, but one should feel the obligation to adapt oneself to these teachings. One should bear in mind that the human soul is capable of development. What it cannot understand today will certainly be accessible to it tomorrow. It would be good if we heard as little as possible the objection to certain presentations of the truth: “This is too high. It should be presented in a more popular way.” It would be more correct to recognize that it is necessary to make the “high” popular as such. Man does not gain very much by simply taking note of this or that; but it is of great use to him if he refines his ideas, if he acquires concepts that he did not have before. It is certainly very desirable that, for example, the teachings of “reincarnation” and “karma”, of the “higher worlds” and so on, should become known in the widest circles. But these teachings can only be seen in the right light when they are illuminated by inner thought work. It should certainly not be believed that there are people who, due to their low level of education, are unsuitable for such thought work. All healthy-minded and sensitive people are capable of it. It would only take a little effort, and even those who have never learned to read or write could be taught the basic tenets of Theosophy. Such people often have a much stronger feeling than those who have forgotten, that they must make an inner effort to understand what leads to the spiritual worlds.

Recently, after a theosophical lecture on Christianity, a clergyman who had been listening said: yes, that is all very well and good; but these teachings can only ever be for a chosen few, whereas we speak of the spiritual worlds in such a way that 'all' can understand us. The theosophical speaker had to reply: “If you were really right, then I would not need to speak at all, and then Theosophy would indeed be the most superfluous thing in the world at the present time. But if you were right, then there could not be so many who turn away from your description of the spiritual world because they feel unsatisfied. It is clear proof of how wrong you are that such a departure is possible. And precisely those who no longer find the path to the spiritual through you, they can find it through Theosophy.” If only people would pay more attention to the “actual” truths and less to the opinions they form without paying much attention to the facts. It is not important that I imagine I have the right way to speak to “everyone”, but it is important that I really observe the facts. The above-mentioned clergyman has disregarded the latter. He is convinced from the outset that “his” way of teaching can be something for “everyone”. A look at the real world could convince him of the opposite. Similar answers can be found wherever doubts like the above are expressed. A precise examination of the nature and purpose of Theosophy will dispel doubts that it can become popular.

Before we begin our actual esoteric study we should say that we in our esoteric stream must separate ourselves completely from the other one that goes through the world and that's promoted by Ms. Besant. For reasons of truthfulness we can separate ourselves from the deeds of a personality, but we must not change our love for the personality and should direct even more sympathy towards her, precisely because we must reject her deeds. As Ms. Besant wrote in 1906: “Judge has fallen on this perilous path of occultism, Leadbeater has fallen on it, very likely I too shall fall ... If the day of my fall should come I ask those who love me not to shrink from condemning my fault, not to attenuate it, or say that black is white; but rather let them lighten my heavy karma as I am trying to lighten that of my friend and brother ...” For occultism is indeed a perilous path, and everyone should consider that forces can slumber in the depths of the human soul that may not appear in ordinary life, but that come to light if one treads the perilous path. That's why one should constantly watch one's own soul and remember the words: “Watch and pray.”

Anyone who wants to enter spiritual worlds must practice strict self-knowledge. The Essene order, whose teachers also taught the Jesus of the Luke Gospel, had two rules that can show us how far away moderns are from spiritual things. One rule said that no Essene should speak about worldly things before the sun rose or after it set. And for those who had gone up to higher grades this rule was reinforced by one that forbade one to even think profane things at the indicated times. Another rule said that before the sun comes up every Essene should ask that this might happen and that the sun's power might shine over mankind every day ... These rules show us how important the connection of our being is with the events in the spiritual world from which we emerge in the morn, and in which we submerge when we go to sleep in the eve.

How little moderns live in accordance with these laws of outer and inner cycles is no doubt shown by an outer cycle like the transition of New Year's Eve into the new year. Everything that people do there and undertake before going to sleep seems to be designed to connect oneself particularly deeply with material things, whereas people should be doing a retrospect at this moment. Corresponding to this outer cycle is an inner one in man: that of waking and sleeping. In the eve a man draws his astral body and ego out of the physical and etheric bodies and lives in a purely spiritual world. Let's take a look at the moment of going to sleep, until unconsciousness gradually sets in. An ordinary man has no consciousness in the spiritual world at night. It may happen that clairvoyant moments occur and he then sees pictures of what he's left lying behind. What he sees will depend on his temperament and character. A man who feels that his stay in his bodies is like living in a house will see the physical and etheric bodies as a house with a portal through which he has to go when he wakes up. A melancholic who experiences the perishable side of earthly existence will see the image of a coffin in which a dead man lies. One who has a strong feeling that Gods built the house of his body during the old Saturn and Sun periods may see an angel or light form that hands him a chalice, representing an ancient, primal word of mankind: We're born from God.

What the Essenes did in the morn before sunrise can't be done any more today, so when a modern esoteric comes back into his physical and etheric bodies he should permeate himself with the holy feeling that sublime Gods prepared and built up these bodies during Saturn and Sun evolution so that we can develop consciousness in them. With this consciousness an esoteric will ask the God—the spiritual sun that the physical sun represents—to maintain and leave him this physical and etheric body each morn when he steps out of the spiritual world, to develop consciousness in the physical world. For where would we be if someone would take away this physical and etheric body overnight? We would then be overpowered by a feeling of unconsciousness. If we permeate ourselves with the fact that the Gods have built us this physical and etheric body we'll then have the experience that our brain, or any other organ, is not just bound to our physical body, but that it expands to a hollow sphere in which stars are imbedded that run in their orbits, and that these stars that are travelling in orbit are our thoughts. Thereby the microcosm becomes the macrocosm. The mighty forces of the whole cosmos are compressed in our brain, and we feel their connection with us. We can describe everything that led us through Saturn, Sun and through the hereditary line to our present birth with the saying: We are born from the Gods.

Just as we would have to remain unconscious if we couldn't dive down into our physical and etheric body in the morning, so passage through the portal of death extinguishes all conscious life. Before the Mystery of Golgotha a man received a consciousness after death from reserve forces that were given to men on their way that gave him consciousness in the spiritual world. But this gift of the Gods had gradually been used up, and a Greek knew that it was his lot to live in the realm of the shades after death. This was in accordance with the will of the Gods. Consciousness was shadowy and dim, and that's why Greeks had one of their greatest men say: Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.

A new substance was created through the Mystery of Golgotha that could give consciousness to men when they were in the spiritual world after death. This substance flowed out of the Mystery of Golgotha. A man can develop consciousness in the spiritual world after death through an immersion in this Christ substance. That's why every evening when we go to sleep and into the spiritual world we should remind ourselves of this and permeate ourselves with the feeling: We die in Christ.—For only the Christ impulse can keep us conscious in the spiritual world after death through its death-overcoming vital force. But there's nothing in the physical world that's great and holy enough to enable one to understand this Mystery that was given through Christ Jesus, so one shouldn't use anything that belongs to the world, not even the words of language in order to refer to this Mystery, the great unfathomable secret that's contained in what flows out from the Mystery of Golgotha. That's why an esoteric is silent in word and thought at the place where the sacred, unspeakable name would have to be said. He just feels the sacredness of this moment: In ... morimur.

But even if a man has consciousness after death, he doesn't have self-consciousness yet, that through which he recognizes himself as an individual being in the spiritual world and finds himself together again with the brothers and sisters he was with in the physical world. The only thing that can help us to find our being again and to awaken with self-consciousness after we were immersed in Christ substance is our experience of our higher I that's given to us by the Holy Spirit, through whom we have to hope: We'll be resurrected in the Holy Spirit and will awaken to self-conscious life.

[ 1 ] In the following is reproduced, in all essentials, what stood as a preface in the first edition of this book. Since it shows the mood of thought out of which I wrote this book twenty-five years ago, rather than having any direct bearing on its contents, I include it here as an appendix. I do not want to omit it altogether, because the opinion keeps cropping up that I need to suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my later ones on spiritual science. Only the very first introductory sentences of this preface (in the first edition) have been altogether omitted here, because today they seem to me quite irrelevant. But the rest of what was said seems to me necessary even today, in spite of, indeed, just because of the natural scientific manner of thinking of our contemporaries.

[ 2 ] Our age can only accept truth from the depths of human nature. Of Schiller's two well-known paths, it is the second that will mostly be chosen at the present time:

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;
I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.
The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;
The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.

(Translation by E. Bulwer Lytton.)

A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.

[ 3 ] Only the truth can give us assurance in developing our individual powers. Whoever is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world full of riddles, he can find no goal for his creative energies.

[ 4 ] We no longer want merely to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not fully comprehend. But things we do not fully comprehend are repugnant to the individual element in us, which wants to experience everything in the depths of its inner being. The only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.

[ 5 ] Again, we do not want any knowledge of the kind that has become frozen once and for all into rigid academic rules, preserved in encyclopedias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.

[ 6 ] Our scientific doctrines, too, should no longer be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte's “A Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand.” Today nobody should be compelled to understand. From anyone who is not driven to a certain view by his own individual needs, we demand no acknowledgment or agreement. Even with the immature human being, the child, we do not nowadays cram knowledge into it, but we try to develop its capacities so that it will no longer need to be compelled to understand, but will want to understand.

[ 7 ] I am under no illusion about these characteristics of my time. I know how much the tendency prevails to make things impersonal and stereotyped. But I know equally well that many of my contemporaries try to order their lives in the kind of way I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It is not meant to give “the only possible” path to the truth, but is meant to describe the path taken by one for whom truth is the main concern.

[ 8 ] The book leads at first into somewhat abstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines if it is to reach clearly defined positions. But the reader will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am indeed fully convinced that one must raise oneself into the ethereal realm of concepts if one would experience every aspect of existence. Whoever appreciates only the pleasures of the senses is unacquainted with life's sweetest savors. The oriental sages make their disciples live a life of renunciation and asceticism for years before they impart to them their own wisdom. The western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic habits as a preparation for science, but it does require the willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.

[ 9 ] The realms of life are many. For each one, special sciences develop. But life itself is a unity, and the more deeply the sciences try to penetrate into their separate realms, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be a knowledge which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading man back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks through his findings to develop awareness of the world and its workings; in this book the aim is a philosophical one—that knowledge itself shall become organically alive. The separate sciences are stages on the way to that knowledge we are here trying to achieve. A similar relationship exists in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. This theory is a collection of rules which one has to know in order to compose. In composing, the rules of the theory become the servants of life itself, of reality. In exactly the same sense, philosophy is an art. All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts. For them, human ideas were their artists' materials and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus takes on concrete individual life. The ideas become powerful forces in life. Then we do not merely have knowledge about things, but have made knowledge into a real self-governing organism; our actual working consciousness has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.

[ 10 ] How philosophy as an art is related to human freedom, what freedom is, and whether we do, or can, participate in it—this is the main theme of my book. All other scientific discussions are included only because they ultimately throw light on these questions, which are, in my opinion, the most immediate concern of mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom”.

[ 11 ] All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to raise the value of existence for the personality of man. The sciences attain their true value only by showing the human significance of their results. The ultimate aim of the individual can never be the cultivation of a single faculty, but only the development of all the capacities that slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.

[ 12 ] This book, therefore, conceives the relationship between science and life, not in such a way that man must bow down before an idea and devote his powers to its service, but in the sense that he masters the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.

[ 13 ] One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage.

It will be nothing strange to many among you that one can find if the word theosophy is pronounced nothing else than a smile with many of our contemporaries. Also it is not unknown to many that just those who demand scholarship or, we say, philosophical education in the present look at theosophy as something that one must call a dilettantish activity, a fantastic belief. One can find in particular in the circles of scholars that the theosophist is regarded as a type of fantastic dreamer who bears witness to his peculiar image worlds because he has never made the acquaintance with the bases of knowledge. You find particularly in the circles which consider themselves as the scientific ones that they presuppose easily that the theosophist is basically without any philosophical education, and even if he has also acquired it or speaks of it, it is a dilettantish, a picked up matter.

These talks should not deal with theosophy directly. There are enough others. It should be a discussion with the western philosophical education, a discussion how the scientific world behaves to theosophy, and how it could behave, actually. They should disprove the prejudice, as if the theosophist is an uneducated, dilettantish person with regard to science. Who has not heard often enough that philosophers of the most different schools—and there are enough philosopher schools—state that mysticism is an unclear view filled with all kinds of allegories and feeling elements, and that theosophy has not achieved a strictly methodical thinking? If it did this, it would see that it walks on nebulous ways. It would see that mysticism could root only in the heads of eccentric people. This is a well-known prejudice.

However, I do not want to begin with a reprimand. Not because it would not correspond to the theosophical conviction, but because I do not consider theosophy as anything dilettantish from my own philosophical education and speak, nevertheless, out of the depths of its conviction. I can understand absolutely that somebody who has taken up the western philosophy in himself and has the whole scientific equipment has it hard to see something else in theosophy than what is just known. For somebody who comes today from philosophy and science it is much more difficult really to familiarise himself with theosophy, than for that who approaches theosophy with a naive human mind, with a natural, maybe religious feeling and with a need to solve certain riddles of life. Because this western philosophy puts so many obstacles to its students, offers them so many judgments which seem to be contradictory to theosophy that it makes it apparently impossible to get involved with theosophy.

Indeed, it is true that the theosophical literature shows little of that which resembles a discussion with our contemporary science and which one could call philosophical. Therefore, I have resolved to hold a series of talks on it. They should be an epistemological basis of theosophy. You will get to know the concepts of the contemporary philosophy and its contents. If you look at this in a real, true and deep sense, you see—but you must really wait till the end—the basis of the theosophical knowledge following from this western philosophy. This should not happen juggling with expert dialectic concepts, but it should happen, as far as I am able to do it in some talks, with any equipment which the knowledge of our contemporaries provides us; it should happen with everything available to give something that can be experienced of a higher world view also to those who do not want to know it.

What I have to explain would not have been possible in another age to explain in the same way. But it has been necessary to look around, maybe just in our time, at Kant, Locke, Schopenhauer or at other writers of the present, we say at Eduard von Hartmann and his disciple Arthur Drews, or the brilliant theorist of knowledge Volkelt or Otto Liebmann, or at the somewhat journalistic, but not less strictly rational Eucken. Who has looked around there who has familiarised himself with this or that of the shadings which the philosophical-scientific views of the present and the latest past took on understands and conceives—this is my innermost conviction—that a real, true understanding of this philosophical development does not lead away from theosophy, but to theosophy. Just somebody who has argued thoroughly with the philosophical doctrines has to come to theosophy.

I would not need to deliver this speech unless the whole thinking of our time were influenced just by a philosopher. One says that the great mental achievement of Immanuel Kant gave philosophy a scientific basis. One says that what he performed to the definition of the knowledge problem is something steadfast. You hear that anybody who has not tackled Kant has no right to have a say in philosophy. You may examine the different currents: Herbart, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, from Schopenhauer up to Eduard von Hartmann—in all these lines of thought only somebody can find the way who orientates himself to Kant. After different matters were striven for in the philosophy of the 19th century, the calling resounds from Zeller in the middle of the seventies, from Liebmann, then from Friedrich Albert Lange: back to Kant!—The lecturers of philosophy are of the opinion that everybody has to orientate himself to Kant, and only somebody who does this can have a say in philosophy.

Kant dominated the philosophy of the 19th century and of the present. However, he caused something else than he himself wanted. He expressed it with the words: he believes to have accomplished a similar action like Copernicus. Copernicus turned around the whole astronomical world view. He removed the earth from the centre and made another body, the sun, to the centre which was once imagined to be movable. However, Kant makes the human being with his cognitive faculties the centre of the physical world view. He really turns around the whole physical world view. It is the opinion of most philosophers of the 19th century that one has to turn around. You can understand this philosophy only if you understand it from its preconditions. One can understand what has flowed from Kant’s philosophy only if one understands it from its bases. Who understands how Kant came to his conviction that we can never recognise the things “by themselves,” because all things we recognise are only phenomena who understands this can also understand the development of the philosophy of the 19th century, he also understands the objections which can be made against theosophy, and also how he has to behave to them.

You know that theosophy rests on a higher experience. The theosophist says that the source of his knowledge is an experience which reaches beyond the sensory experience. You can see that it has the same validity as that of the senses that what the theosophist tells about astral worlds et cetera is as real as the things which we perceive with our senses round us as sensory experience. What the theosophist believes to have as his source of knowledge is a higher experience. If you read Leadbeater’s Astralebene (Astral Plane), you think that the things are as real in the astral world as the cabs and horses in the streets of London. It should be said how real this world is for somebody who knows them. The philosopher of the present argues immediately: yes, but you are mistaken, because you believe that this is a true reality. Has the philosophy of the 19th century not proved to you that our experience is nothing but our idea, and that also the starry heaven is nothing else than our idea in us?—He considers this as the most certain knowledge which there can only be. Eduard von Hartmann considers it as the most natural truth that this is my idea, and that one cannot know what it is also. If you believe that you can call experience “real,” then you are a naive realist. Can you decide anything generally about the value experience has facing the world in this way? This is the great result to which Kantianism has come that the world surrounding us must be our idea.

How did Kant’s world view come to this? It came from the philosophy of the predecessors. At that time when Kant was still young, the philosophy of Christian Wolff had the mastery over all schools. It distinguished the so-called knowledge of experience which we acquire by the sensory impressions and that which comes from pure reason. According to him, we can get to know something of the things of the everyday life only by experience, and from pure reason we have things which are the objects of the highest knowledge. These things are the human souls, the free will of the human being, the questions which refer to immortality and to the divine being.

The so-called empiric sciences deal with that which is offered in natural history, in physics, in history et cetera. How does the astronomer get his knowledge? He directs his eyes to the stars; he finds the laws which are commensurate with the observations. We learn this while opening our senses to the outside world. Nobody can say that this is drawn from mere reason. The human being knows this because he sees it. This is an empiric knowledge which we take up from life, from the experience in ourselves, not caring whether we order them in a scientific system or not; it is knowledge of experience. Nobody can describe a lion from his very reason. However, Wolff supposes that one can draw that which one is from pure reason. Wolff supposes that we have a psychology from pure reason, also that the soul must have free will that it must have reason et cetera. Hence, Wolff calls the sciences which deal with the higher capacities of the soul rational psychology. The question whether the world has a beginning and an end is a question which one should decide only from pure reason. He calls this question an object of rational cosmology. Nobody can decide on the usefulness of the world from experience; nobody can investigate it by observation. These are nothing but questions of the rational cosmology. Then there is a science of God, of a divine plan. This is a science which is also drawn from reason. This is the so-called rational theology, it belongs to metaphysics.

Kant grew up in a time when philosophy was taught in this sense. You find him in his first writings as an adherent of Wolff’s philosophy. You find him convinced that there is a rational psychology, a rational theology et cetera. He gives a proof which he calls the only possible proof of the existence of God. Then he got to know a philosophical current which had a stupefying effect on him. He got to know the philosophy of David Hume. He said that it waked up him from his dogmatic slumber.—What does this philosophy offer? Hume says the following: we see that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. We have seen this many days. We also know that all people have seen sunrises and sunsets that they have experienced the same, and we get used to believing that this must take place forever.

Now another example: we see that the solar heat falls on a stone. We think that it is the solar heat which warms up the stone. What do we see? We perceive solar heat first and then the warmed up stone. What do we perceive there? Only that one fact follows the other. If we experience that the sunbeams warm up the stone, then we have already formed the judgment that the solar heat is the cause that the stone becomes warm. That is why Hume says: there is nothing at all that shows us more than a sequence of facts. We get used to the belief that there a causal relationship exists. But this belief is only a habituation and everything that the human being thinks of causal concepts exists only in that experience. The human being sees a ball pushing the other, he sees that a movement takes place through it, and then he gets used to saying that lawfulness exists in it. In truth we deal with no real insight.

What is the human being considered from the knowledge of pure reason? This is nothing else—Hume says—than a summary of facts. We have to connect the facts of the world. This corresponds to the human way of thinking, to the tendency of the human thinking. We have no right to go beyond this thinking. We are not allowed to say that it is something in the things which has given them lawfulness. We can only say that the things and events flow past us. But the things “in themselves” do not show such a connection.

How can we speak now of the fact that something manifests itself to us in the things that goes beyond experience? How can we speak of a connection in experience that is due to a divine being, that goes beyond experience if we are not inclined to turn to anything other than to the ways of thinking?

This view had the effect on Kant that it waked up him from dogmatic slumber. He asks: can there be something that goes beyond experience? Which knowledge does experience deliver to us? Does it give us sure knowledge? Of course, Kant denied this question immediately. He says: even if you have seen the sun rise hundred thousand times, you cannot infer from it that it also rises tomorrow again. It could also be different. If you inferred only from experience, it could also turn out once that experience convinces you of something different. Experience can never give sure, necessary knowledge.

I know from experience that the sun warms up the stone. However, I am not allowed to state that it has to warm up it. If all our knowledge comes from experience, it can never exceed the condition of uncertainty; then there can be no necessary empiric knowledge. Now Kant tries to find out this matter. He looks for a way out. He had made himself used through his whole youth to believe in knowledge. He could be convinced by Hume’s philosophy that there is nothing sure. Is anywhere anything where one can speak of sure, necessary knowledge? However—he says—there are sure judgments. These are the mathematical judgments. Is the mathematical judgment similar to the judgment: in the morning the sun rises and sets in the evening?

I have the judgment that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. If I have given the proof with one single triangle, it suffices for all triangles. I see from the nature of the proof that it applies to all possible cases. This is the peculiar of mathematical proofs. For everybody it is clear that these must also apply to the inhabitants of Jupiter and Mars if they generally have triangles that also there the sum of the angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees. And then: never can be two times two anything else than four. This is always true. Hence, we have a proof that there is knowledge which is absolutely sure. The question cannot be: do we have such knowledge? But we must think about the possibility of such judgments.

Now there comes the big question of Kant: how are such absolutely necessary judgments possible? How is mathematical knowledge possible?—Kant now calls those judgments and knowledge which are drawn from experience judgments and knowledge a posteriori. The judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees; however, is a judgment which precedes all experience, a judgment a priori. I can simply imagine a triangle and give the proof, and if I see a triangle which I have not yet experienced, I can say that it must have a sum of angles of 180 degrees. Any higher knowledge depends on it that I can make judgments from pure reason.

How are such judgments a priori possible? We have seen that such a judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is equal 180 degrees, applies to any triangles. Experience has to submit to my judgment. If I draw an ellipse and look out into space, I find that a planet describes such an ellipse. The planet follows my judgment formed in pure knowledge. I approach the experience with my purely in the ideal formed judgment. Have I drawn this judgment from experience?—Kant continues asking. There is no doubt, forming such purely ideal judgments, that we have, actually, no reality of experience.

The ellipse, the triangle—they have no reality of experience, but reality submits to such knowledge. If I want to have true reality, I must approach experience. If, however, I know which laws work in it, then I have knowledge before all experience. The law of the ellipse does not come from experience. I myself build it in my mind. Thus a passage begins with Kant with the sentence: “Even if all our knowledge starts from experience, nevertheless, not everything does arise from experience.” I put what I have as knowledge into experience. The human mind is made in such a way that everything of its experience corresponds only to the laws which it has. The human mind is made in such a way that it must develop these laws inevitably. If it moves up to experience, then experience has to submit to these laws.

An example: Imagine that you wear blue glasses. You see everything in blue light; the objects appear to you in blue light. However the things outdoors may be made, this concerns me nothing at all provisionally. At the moment when the laws which my mind develops spread out over the whole world of experience the whole world of experience must fit into it. It is not right that the judgment: two times two is four is taken from experience. It is the condition of my mind that two times two must give always four. My mind is in such a way that the three angles of a triangle are always 180 degrees. Thus Kant justifies the laws out of the human being himself. The sun warms up the stone. Every effect has a cause. This is a law of the mind. If the world is a chaos, I push the lawfulness of my mind toward it. I conceive the world like a string of pearls. I am that who makes the world a knowledge mechanism.—You also see how Kant was induced to find such a particular method of knowledge. As long as the human mind is organised in such a way as it is organised as long everything must submit to this organisation, even if reality changes overnight. For me it could not change if the laws of my mind are the same. The world may be as it wants; we recognise it in such a way as it must appear to us according to the laws of our mind.

Now you see which sense it has, if one says: Kant turned the whole theory of knowledge, the whole epistemology. One assumed before that the human being reads everything from nature. Now, however, he lets the human mind give the laws to nature. He lets everything circle around the human mind like Copernicus let the earth circle around the sun.

Then, however, there is something else that shows that the human being can never go beyond experience. Indeed, it appears as a contradiction, but you will see that it corresponds to Kant’s philosophy. Kant shows that the concepts are empty. Two times two is four is an empty judgment if not peas or beans are filled into it. Any effect has a cause—is a purely formal judgment if it is not filled with particular contents of experience. The judgments are formed before in me to be applied to the observation of the world. “Observations without concepts are blind—concepts without observations are empty.” We can think millions of ellipses; they correspond to no reality if we do not see them in the planetary motion. We have to verify everything by experience. We can gain judgments a priori, but we are allowed to apply them only if they correspond to experience.

God, freedom and immortality are matters about which we can ponder ever so long about which we can get knowledge by no experience. Therefore, it is in vain to find out anything with our reason. The concepts a priori are only valid as far as our experience reaches. Indeed we have a science a priori which only says to us how experience has to be until experience is there. We can catch as it were experience like in a web, but we cannot find out how the law of experience has to be. About the “thing-in-itself” we know nothing, and because God, freedom and immortality must have their origin in the “thing-in-itself,” we can find out nothing about them. We see the things not as they are, but in such a way as we must see them according to our organisation.

With it Kant founded the critical idealism and overcame the naive realism. What submits to causality is not the “thing-in-itself.” What submits to my eye or my ear has to make an impression on my eye, on my ear at first. This is the perception, the sensations. These are the effects of any “thing-in-itself,” of things which are absolutely unknown to me. These produce a lot of effects, and I order them in a lawful world. I form an organism of sensations. But I cannot know what is behind them. It is nothing else than the lawfulness which my mind has put into the sensations. What is behind the sensation, I can know nothing about it. Hence, the world which surrounds me is only subjective. It is only that which I myself build up.

The development of physiology in the 19th century agreed apparently completely with Kant. Take the important knowledge of the great physiologist Johannes Müller. He has put up the law of the specific nerve energy. It consists in the fact that any organ answers in its way. If you let light into the eye, you have a beam of light; if you bump against the eye, you will likewise have a light sensation. Müller concludes that it does not depend on the things outside, but on my eye what I perceive. The eye answers to a process unknown to me with the colour quality, we say: blue. Blue is nowhere outdoors in space. A process has an effect on us, and it produces the sensation “blue.” What you believe that it stands before you, is nothing else than the effect of some unknown processes on a sense. The whole physiology of the 19th century confirmed this law of the specific nerve energy apparently. Kant’s idea seems to be thereby supported.

One can call this world view illusionism in the full sense of the word. Nobody knows anything about what has an effect outside, what produces his sensations. From himself he spins his whole world of experience and builds up it according to the laws of his mind. Nothing else can approach him, as long as his organisation is made in such a way as it is. This is Kant’s doctrine motivated by physiology. Kant calls it critical idealism. This is also that which Schopenhauer develops in his philosophy: people believe that the whole starry heaven and the sun surround them. However, this is only your own mental picture. You create the whole world.—And Eduard von Hartmann says: This is the most certain truth which there can be. No power would be able one day to shake this sentence.—Thus the western philosophy says. It has never pondered how experience basically comes about.

Somebody is only able to stick to realism who knows how experiences come about and then he comes to the true critical idealism. The view of Kant is the transcendental idealism, that is he knows nothing about a true reality, nothing of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of an image world. He says basically: I must refer my image world to something unknown.—This view should be regarded as something steadfast.

Is this transcendental idealism really steadfast? Is the “thing-in-itself” unrecognisable?—If this held true, then could not be spoken of a higher experience at all. If the “thing-in-itself” were only an illusion, we could not speak of any higher beings. Hence, this is also an objection which is raised against theosophy: you have higher beings of which you speak.

We see next time how these views must be deepened.

Fairy tale play by Hermann Sudermann
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

"I raise my head boldly to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging torrent of water and to the crashing clouds swimming in a sea of fire and say: I am eternal and defy your power! Break all down upon me, and you earth and you heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and all you elements, - froth and rage and in wild battle tear apart the last little sun-dust of the body which I call mine: - my will alone with its firm plan shall hover boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more permanent than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal like it." Fichte uttered these sentences in a speech that dealt with the highest goals of the human spirit. Anyone who knows them can recall them when they get to know Sudermann's latest dramatic poem "The Three Heron Feathers". For the tragedy of man, who is driven as far away as possible from the proud consciousness expressed in these sentences by an unfortunate fate, affects us in this thoughtful drama in the shattering way that we always feel when the greatest problems of life are unrolled before us with the playwright's gripping means.

A Hamlet's nature, faced not only with the problem of avenging his criminally murdered father, but with the greater problem of coming to terms with life itself, in all its mysteriousness: that is Sudermann's main character, Prince Witte. Widwolf's nefarious deed has robbed him of his fathers' ancestral heritage, the Duchy of Gorhland. He seems equipped with all his gifts to acquire what he has inherited from his fathers. But like Hamlet's will, his is paralyzed. Fate itself prevents him from earning his freedom and life by having to conquer them every day. The reason for his tragedy is that this fate throws happiness at him without struggle, without striving. But such happiness can never be pious to man.

Prince Witte has gone to a people on a northern island, where a heron is worshipped as a divine being. He has captured three feathers from it. They can bring him the three stages of development of the happiness that can only be bestowed on man. But such happiness could only belong to transient life. The life with which death is inseparably linked. The life that becomes bitter when we think of death. Yes, whose only, futile meaning is death. Sudermann has given symbolic expression to death, which alone can shed light on such transient happiness in life, in "Begräbnisfrau". She interprets the prince's fate in terms of the three heron feathers. If he lets the first one burn in the fire, the woman who makes him happy appears to him as a misty figure in the clouds. If he burns the second, she will stand before him in a dream. He will hold her in his hands and yet strive in vain to possess her. And if the third finally becomes the nourishment of the flame, the woman who represents his happiness will die before his eyes.

Like the will that is paralyzed in the prince himself, his faithful servant Hans Lorbass stands beside him. He tries to lift him up again and again. He is the strength and the fire in Prince White's life. In the first scene of the drama, he reveals his entire life's destiny to us:

"For in every great work,
That is accomplished on earth,
Strength alone shall reign,
He alone shall reign who laughs,
Never shall sorrow reign,
Never he who foams at the mouth in anger,
Never he who needs women to slumber,
And least of all he who dreams,
Therefore how I sweat and steel him
To what he can become,
I sit firmly in his soul -
I, the fighter - I, the man."

Prince Witte embarks on the path of life marked out for him by fate with his servant Lorbass, whom he has found again after capturing the heron feathers. He goes to the court of the Amber Queen of Samland, who is a widow and has a six-year-old son. She wants to give her hand to whoever wins the tournament. Widwolf, who has usurped Witte's throne, meets the robbed man here. Although Witte does not win, the loyal Lorbass stands by his side and drives Widwolf and his men away. Nevertheless, the queen gives Witte her love. She is a woman full of kindness and devotion, but she must give her love away. She can only consider the one who has conquered her heart to be the victor, and that is Prince Witte. He becomes king, even though the Samland Queen's people have grave qualms of conscience because Witte has not won an honest victory - and even though he does not feel happy because he is not keeping and defending the throne for himself, but for the young king from his wife's first marriage. But fate, which decides on the happiness of transient life, has assigned this wife to the prince as his happiness. He cannot understand this fate. The wife he has been given remains a stranger to him, and his longing yearns for the supposed stranger who is to appear to him walking in the night when he burns the second heron feather. Lorbass sees his master gradually withering away at the queen's side. He therefore gives him the idea of burning the second heron feather. And when this becomes a flame, the Amber Queen, his wife, appears "walking in the night". Even now, he cannot recognize her as the wife destined for him. Instead, he sees her as a troublemaker. He thinks that by appearing, she has driven away the unknown woman out of jealousy, who should have appeared when the heron's feather was burned. At this moment, the deeply moving spirit of this drama takes effect from the stage: we do not understand a happiness that we receive effortlessly, as if by magic, as a gift; we can only recognize the happiness we have acquired as the happiness that is due to us. Sudermann conveys this general truth to us through a purely human motif. Witte cannot find the way to his wife's heart because his son, who does not bear the mark of his blood, stands between them. He even gives Lorbass a hint to get this son out of the way. The robber Widwolf appears for the second time to covet the queen. Witte is to fight for himself and his own. He believes he cannot do this as long as he is defending not his own throne, but that of his stepchild. When Lorbass gets to know the boy king in all his excellence, he cannot kill him. And Witte is also glad that this time the faithful servant has broken faith. With all the strength in him, he rushes against the enemy Widwolf and - now really conquers the kingdom, but - to renounce it and move on to seek the woman who is supposed to be destined for him by the firepower of the heron's feathers. He does not find her, of course, but returns fifteen years later to burn the third of the feathers in the presence of the Amber Queen. At this moment, the woman destined for him falls to her death. Only now, as his happiness escapes him, does he realize that it was meant for him. He dies after his wife. Death, in the form of the funeral wife, has had no trouble in capturing the two of them for himself, for it was easy for him to give them a fleeting happiness that neither of them can recognize as their own. He receives happiness as a gift and cannot recognize it because he does not conquer it; and she gives happiness away and cannot be happy about it because she gives it away indiscriminately.

There is no dead end in this Sudermann drama. One sits there and waits for each coming moment with rapt attention. Always the background to a great thought and always a captivating image on the stage. One has the feeling that a serious person wants to communicate with serious people about an important matter in life. Full of gratitude to have seen a piece of life in a poem, we leave the theater, which today is mostly devoid of ideology.

The performance in Berlin's Deutsches Theater was such that it can be described as a dramatic phenomenon of the first rank. Kainz as Prince Witte: one may give the highest praise; Teresina Geßner was an Amber Queen who made the soul tremble, and Nissen's Lorbass should be incorporated into German stage history as soon as possible. The Deutsches Theater has much to make up for after the utterly unsuccessful Cyrano performance; but it knows how to make up for it. And only where there are strong advantages does one make such mistakes as the one severely criticized here.

I believe I am indicating correctly one of the fundamental characteristics of our age when I say that, at the present day, all human interests tend to centre in the cult of human individuality. An energetic effort is being made to shake off every kind of authority. Nothing is accepted as valid, unless it springs from the roots of individuality. Everything which hinders the individual in the full development of his powers is thrust aside. The saying “Each one of us must choose his hero in whose footsteps he toils up to Olympus” no longer holds for us. We allow no ideals to be forced upon us. We are convinced that in each of us, if only we probe deep enough into the very heart of our being, there dwells something noble, something worthy of development. We no longer believe that there is a norm of human life to which we must all strive to conform. We regard the perfection of the whole as depending on the unique perfection of each single individual. We do not want to do what anyone else can do equally well. No, our contribution to the development of the world, however trifling, must be something which, by reason of the uniqueness of our nature, we alone can offer. Never have artists been less concerned about rules and norms in art than today. Each of them asserts his right to express, in the creations of his art, what is unique in him. There are dramatists who write in dialect rather than conform to the standard diction which grammar demands.

No better expression for these phenomena can be found than this, that they result from the individual's striving towards freedom, developed to its highest pitch. We do not want to be dependent in any respect, and where dependence must be, we tolerate it only on condition that it coincides with a vital interest of our individuality.

[ 2 ] Truth, too, will be sought in an age such as ours only in the depths of human nature. Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will today be found most useful:

Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innen
In dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.
Ist das Auge gesund, so begegnet es aussen dem Schöpfer;
Ist es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.

A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.

[ 3 ] Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world of riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.

[ 4 ] We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;
I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.
The healthy eye can through the world the great creator track;
The healthy heart is but the glass which gives creation back.

—Bulwer

[ 5 ] Again, we do not want any knowledge that has encased itself once and for all in hide bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.

[ 6 ] Our scientific doctrines, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte's A Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand. Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement with anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will.

[ 7 ] I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.

[ 8 ] The reader will be led at first into somewhat abstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one's experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.

[ 9 ] The spheres of life are many and for each there develop a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is to be infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similar relationship is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same sense philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.

[ 10 ] How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principle problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom”.

[ 11 ] All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we have shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aim of the individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.

[ 12 ] This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.

[ 13 ] Man must confront ideas as master; lest he become their slave.

In a previous lecture,¹ we discussed spiritual science in relation to religious records. Today we shall attempt to enter more deeply into the Bible, at least in a few instances. The Bible is after all a religious document that today is known to every educated person. From the spiritual scientific point of view, it will be easiest if, in our approach, we start with the New Testament. In the earlier lecture, we discussed how certain critical comments concerning the Bible are to be understood in the light of spiritual science, in particular those concerned with the actual writing of the four Gospels and Scriptures in the Old Testament. Today we shall look at more positive aspects and, while bearing in mind what was dealt with in the previous lecture, go straight to the subject from the spiritual scientific viewpoint.

You will be aware that someone who, out of a heartfelt need of his Christian faith, turns to the four Gospels known as the Gospel according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke and to John, comes up against what appear to be insoluble contradictions. A modern person, however great his faith, can have no notion of how differently one approached the Bible in an earlier more religious age. Nor can a person have any idea of the significance attached to the word Bible or to the expression, the Word of God. We must realize that for centuries the faithful were in no doubt that the writers of the religious records were inspired. Consequently, every word in the Bible was regarded as holy, as from divine inspiration only truth could come. People saw the Bible as dealing with great world questions, and they fastened onto every word, for it was impossible for them to believe that fault could be found in what men of God had written under divine inspiration.

Modern human beings find it difficult to transport themselves into such a mood and attitude. They read the Gospel of Matthew and that of Luke and find two different genealogies of Jesus of Nazareth. Already in the third place, above the name of Joseph, they find in Matthew the name Solomon, in Luke the name Nathan; going further they find many more names that differ, and ask, How is it possible that a document, which for centuries has been considered a source of Truth, can contain such contradictions?

Here we see the seed of all the doubts aroused by disparities in the Gospels and consequently doubt that they were in fact inspired. By subjecting the Gospels to detailed scrutiny we believe to have discovered what can be accepted as more or less genuine. In regard to the fourth Gospel, the conclusion is drawn that as it is so different from the others it cannot be a historical record at all. It is understandable that the modern person becomes critical when faced with contradictions that are impossible to explain away by even the most open-minded individual.

However, we must ask ourselves how it came about that no one for centuries, for millennia, noticed these contradictions that are now criticized. It is difficult to believe that only very stupid people ever handled the Bible. Perhaps it could be argued that only very few people had access to the Bible; before the art of printing, the majority of the faithful did not. Consequently, they could not pass judgment on something about which they were not informed by the leading few who did have access to the Bible. But are we really to believe that those few were all so stupid that they did not notice what is pointed out by today's critics?

Some historians maintain that only slowly, through the power of the church, did these documents come to be appreciated. Reverence for the Bible arose only gradually. It is said that the Bible cannot stand up to close historical investigation. Looking at events that took place in the early Christian centuries, the conclusion is drawn that the Ecumenical Council of Nicea² decided which Gospels were true, and there it was ordained: “These are the true Holy Scripts.” Unprejudiced investigation does not bear this out. Looking back we come to personalities who lived in the early days of Christendom. From them we learn that, for example, in the year A.D. 160 a so-called harmonizing of the Gospels took place. This meant collating the Gospels and bringing them to present a uniform picture, a procedure that was later repeated. And indeed, careful examination of the Gospels as they were in the second century showed that already then they contained what we know as the New Testament. We find that the early Church Fathers in particular spoke with the deepest reverence about the Bible, which suggests that they certainly had the belief that the Bible had been inspired by a higher spiritual source. Already in Origen³ we encounter the same reverent approach to the biblical records as is later to be found in the faithful, whether of learned or of simple faith.

When these things are considered, all prejudice must be set aside. In the early centuries the attitude of learned people towards Christianity was by no means the same as that of modern people. Today one risks being accused of repudiating the true words of the Bible, of being an agnostic and unfit to call himself a Christian by people with orthodox viewpoints. These people should recognize that to interpret the Bible in ways that differ from their own is not the equivalent of doubting its truth. It was the Church Father Augustine⁴ who said: “What is known today as Christian religion is ancient; in fact, what was the true primordial religion is today called Christianity.”

These words are in great contrast to the usual experience of those who interpret the Bible in the light of spiritual science. The hostility, often coming from family and friends, is nothing short of tragic. Spiritual scientific explanations are harshly rejected as having nothing to do with the Bible. Such reactions are based on complete ignorance of the Bible itself. It is also pretentious, for it proclaims an understanding of the Bible that cannot be faulted. If only such people would recognize that their attitude to the spiritual scientific explanations is in effect like saying: “What I find in the Bible is the only truth.”

Spiritual science, far from having a negative approach to the Bible, seeks to unravel its deep truths. The main concern is that these religious records should be properly understood. Those who simply find it more comfortable to remain within views to which they have become accustomed are not in a position to oppose spiritual science. Rejection of true explanations is often based on deep seated hostility, though sometimes it is simply too much effort to learn something new.

No Christian with any understanding of a certain passage from the Sermon on the Mount, often quoted by me, could maintain that attitude. The passage, when rightly translated reads: "Blessed are those who are beggars of the spirit, for within themselves they shall find the Kingdom of Heaven." No words could better or more beautifully express the inner feeling and disposition of the spiritual scientist than this passage from the Sermon on the Mount.

What do we mean by the inner disposition of the spiritual scientist? We mean an inner impulse to strive to develop the deepest kernel of our being, our spirituality. What builds our body comes from substances that surround us; likewise our inner being comes from the spirit that lives, and always did live all about us. Just as it is true that our body is, as it were, a drop from the sea of material reality, so is it true that our soul, our spirit, is a drop from the sea of the all-encompassing Universal Spirit. As the drop of water is of the same substance as the sea from which it is taken, so is that which lives in the deepest recess of the human soul godlike. Human beings are able to recognize God because God lives within them and human beings are themselves spiritual. Furthermore, if a person truly will, he can attain that spiritual world that is all about him. However, for that to come about something is needed—something which can be simply expressed by saying: Do not ever stand still. Human beings must experience progress, must be conscious of evolving, rather than merely having faith that it will happen. It means never to lose sight of the fact that not only have human beings developed to their present stage from inferior levels, but also that at every moment they can develop further.

In this instance we are not concerned with the fact that a person's external being has altered in the course of evolution, but rather with the fact that the human soul can climb upwards from stage to stage. In striving for perfection, a human being's soul is capable of improving from day to day. Today we may learn something new; we inwardly grasp something we did not know before; through our will we become capable of achieving something we could not manage before. If we remain at what we understand today, at what our will is capable of today, then we do not evolve. We must never lose sight of the fact that as well as the forces that are already developed within us, we possess others still slumbering. It is comparable to the seeds of new plants that slumber within the seed that has already become a plant. If we never forget that we possess such forces, our will grows stronger; it reaches higher stages of development and we become aware that our soul begins to evolve spiritual eyes and ears. We must not think of this as something trivial, but recognize that the development of the human soul and spirit is of universal significance.

When we see in the physical world, a relationship between animal forms and the noble human form, it does not justify the assumption that a person has developed from the animal, even if natural science has established that, as regards the physical structure, there is greater similarity between the lowest developed human being and the highest developed ape, than between the lowest and highest developed ape. This observation, however, led natural science to regard human beings as having descended from the ape. The famous natural scientist Thomas Henry Huxley⁵ spoke about it as a great heresy in 1859. This view influenced practically everything he wrote. However, those who recognize spiritual development say: Granted that man, in regard to his external bodily form, is closer to the highest evolved ape, than the latter to the lowest of its own species, it is equally true that a human being who has reached a certain stage in spiritual development is further from the lowest developed human being, than the latter from the highest evolved animal.

When evolution is followed through, the higher stages are seen to continue up into spiritual realms where what is described by spiritual science takes place, and which to spiritual sight is as much a reality as physical evolution is to physical sight. Spiritual knowledge has always existed. Natural science today only acknowledges an evolution that starts with the lowest animal form and continues up to that of man. Spiritual science is in hin agreement with that evolution. It also acknowledges the enormous difference between the lowest form of life, barely visible even through the microscope, and the perfect structure of the human organism. A person's physical structure does indeed pass through innumerable evolutionary stages from the most imperfect to the most perfect.

However, the spiritual scientist sees the evolution of soul and spirit as just as real. The difference he sees is just as great between the highly advanced human being, the initiate, and the person who has barely begun to develop his slumbering forces. An initiate is someone who has attained spiritual faculties by developing to ever greater perfection forces that are inherent in every human soul. The difference between the lower stages of soul development and those attained by an initiate is actually greater than the difference between the lowest living structure and that of human beings. A person who knows that initiates exist also knows that the possibility to develop spiritually is a reality.

With this insight there dawns in the human soul a feeling, an attitude that says: I look up to a godlike ideal of man, the seed of which slumbers within me. I know that in the future it will become reality, though as yet it is only slightly indicated. I know also that I must exert all my powers to attain that ideal. With this insight into spiritual development man becomes a “beggar of the spirit”; he feels himself blessed. In the spiritual scientific sense the passage from the Sermon an the Mount is a truly wonderful saying: “Blessed are those who are beggars of the spirit, for within themselves they shall find the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Those acquainted with old linguistic usage will not imagine that what is here meant by heaven is something existing in an unknown beyond. In those days heaven was understood to be wherever man is. Where we are is where heaven is, that is, the spiritual world. A blind person will see the world full of color when successfully operated upon; likewise a person whose spiritual eyes are opened sees around him a new world. What a person sees was actually always about him, but he sees it in a new way. He sees the way he must be able to see if he is to attain his higher humanity. He will know that heaven is not somewhere else, is not in another place or time. He recognizes the Truth when Christ says: “Heaven is in the midst of you.”

Where we are is the Kingdom of Heaven; it penetrates everything physical. As ice swims in water out of which it has condensed, so does matter swim in a sea of spirit out of which it has condensed. Everything physical is condensed, transformed spirit.

In the animal kingdom we see the physically imperfect side by side with the physically more perfect; in the human kingdom we see all stages of spiritual development: One person has forged ahead, another remained at a lower stage. This indicates how in the spiritual scientific sense, human beings are connected with evolution. One person's interest lies in the realm of modern science, another's in the realm of human cultural development from the savage to the highly advanced individual who has attained insight into the spiritual world around him. The initiates always had insight into all the stages of human spiritual development. One spoke of the initiate as of someone who possessed greater knowledge than anyone else. Such initiates were mentioned in every epoch. Let us make it clear in what sense one spoke of those initiated into the spiritual world.

We have often discussed the fact that in ancient times people had clairvoyant consciousness. The term "clairvoyant" did not refer to clarity, but to the fact that it penetrated through the external to the soul. A residue of this dull, dim consciousness can be seen in today's consciousness in dreams. Our clear waking consciousness developed from it. At the time when in general a person's consciousness was dull and dim, though clairvoyant, a few were initiates. In what sense did this consciousness differ from that of the rest of humanity? It differed because those who were initiates already experienced something of the type of consciousness that mankind in general attained today. They reached at an earlier stage something that belonged to the future. Already they saw the world the way humanity in general sees it today. That is to say, they investigated the world through the physical organs, through sight and hearing, and grasped things through the intellect. That is the sense in which they were initiates. An initiate attained ahead of time something that belonged to the future. There are also initiates today; who have already developed the higher clairvoyant consciousness, that is, the higher perception that mankind in general will possess in the future. The initiate was looked up to in ancient times by those who understood. They said to themselves: The initiate's outlook, his understanding of the would, is the outlook and understanding all human beings will possess in the future. He is the embodiment of a future ideal; through what he is, is revealed what we shall become. In the course of time the initiate will lead a great number of human beings to attain what he has attained.

In this sense, the initiate was a prophet or a messiah. He was also called a “first-born.” But those to be initiated had to pass through many stages. Before the stage of initiation was attained, many different degrees of learning and schooling of the will must be passed through. As a plant must go through many stages from root through leaf and blossom before bearing fruit, so a human being strove upwards in stages of ever greater insight, till finally the pupil became an initiate. He attained progress by going through certain schooling that anyone can adopt. Those who deny that such a schooling is possible do so out of ignorance. They have as yet not discovered that through schooling, a person's spiritual eyes and ears can be opened so that he attains a higher kind of perception. It is the task of spiritual science to provide knowledge of such schooling. In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, you will find this subject is dealt with in great detail. There are many reasons why this knowledge is essential in our time. I will mention just one.

It is a tragedy that because human intellect and reasoning power have progressed too far, he is no longer able to believe in the ancient religious records. He no longer experiences them as the embodiment of the words of God. The fact that the human soul no longer receives the ancient knowledge causes it torment and depression. What is needed is the knowledge presented in a new form, and this is what spiritual science wishes to provide. Those who are initiates today are able—as were initiates in ancient times—to foresee humanity's future evolution. However, human development must follow certain rules. Just as one must adopt a definite method if one wishes to become an astronomer, likewise must a certain method be adopted if one is to develop spiritually. No one should wish to attempt to do so without guidance; that would be like wishing to become a mathematician without consulting any authority. Someone needs show the way, but no other kind of authority is required, and it is nonsense to talk about blind faith and dependence in relation to spiritual science.

Throughout the millennia, right back to antiquity, there were always books in existence, or rather not actual books, but traditions handed down by word of mouth, of the rules of initiation. These rules were not permitted to be written down. They consisted of indications that the candidate for initiation had to follow when setting out to attain all the stages of development that lead to initiation. Even today certain indications are not written down, but imparted directly to those worthy to receive them. These indications the neophyte must observe if he is to attain the highest goal. A principle of initiation was always in existence, that is rules for the birth of the spirit in man. He who dedicated himself to spiritual striving was guided through exercises and conduct of life an ever higher levels. Once the highest was attained, the initiate would reveal to him the deepest secrets.

One word more about this codex for initiation. Today things are different; the procedure of initiation also progresses. In ancient times, the neophyte was brought to a condition of ecstasy. This word had a different meaning; it did not indicate "being out of one's mind" but becoming conscious on a higher level. The spiritual guide led the neophyte to this condition of higher consciousness. Strict rules were observed; the prescribed length for the condition to last was three and one-half days. This procedure is no longer followed; today the consciousness is not subdued. But in ancient times a state of ecstasy, of rapture, was produced during which the neophyte knew nothing of what went on about him; to the external world he was like someone asleep. However, what was experienced in this condition differed considerably from the experiences of a contemporary person when the external objects disappear from his consciousness, on falling asleep. The neophyte experienced a world of spirit; all about him there was light, astral light. This is different from physical light; it appears like a sea of spirituality out of which spiritual beings emerge. If a very high stage had been attained, sound would also be experienced. What in the ancient Pythagorean schools was called “the harmony of the spheres” was heard. (What today we understand intellectually as universal laws are experienced as a kind of spiritual music at this level of consciousness. Spiritual forces are revealed as harmony and rhythm, but must not be thought of as ordinary music. The spiritual world, the heavenly world, resounds in the astral light.) In this world into which the neophyte was led, he learned to know stages of godliness that humanity will attain in a far distant future. During the three and one-half days a person experienced all this as reality, as Truth.

These things may sound extraordinary to many, but there are, and always were people who recognize that a spiritual reality exists that is as real as the one perceived through physical senses. After three and one-half days the initiate was guided back to the sense world enriched with knowledge of spiritual existence, and prepared to bear witness of the spiritual world. All initiates on their return to the ordinary world uttered certain words that were always the same: "Oh my God, how thou has glorified me!" These words expressed the sensation felt by the one just initiated as he set foot again in the everyday world. Those who guided the initiation knew all the stages by heart; later when writing came more into use certain things were written down. But there always existed a typical or standard description of the life of an initiate. One said as it were: "He who is accepted into the cult to be initiated must live according to certain rules and pass through the experience which culminates with the words: "Oh my God, how thou hast glorified me!"

If you could depict the way an initiate necessarily had to live, the way you could depict someone wishing to carry out experiments in a chemical laboratory, then you would obtain a picture typical of someone striving to attain a higher development, typical of someone to be awakened to a higher life. Such a codex of initiation always existed or was at least known by heart by those concerned with initiation. Knowing this, we can understand why the descriptions of different initiates of various people are similar This fact contains a great secret, a great mystery. The people always looked up to their initiates, insofar as they knew of them. What was said about initiates was not the kind of thing modern biographers relate about famous people; what was told was the course of the spiritual life experienced by the initiate. We can therefore understand why descriptions of the life of Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses and Christ are similar It was because they had to experience a certain life if they were to become initiates. Their lives were typical of that of an initiate.

In the outer structure of the spiritual biography we can always see a picture of the initiate. We can now answer the question: Who were the writers of the gospels? In my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, you will find this question answered in greater detail from the viewpoint of spiritual science, and also indications of the spiritual authenticity of the Gospels. Here I can only give a few hints! In my book is explained that what is written in the Gospels is derived from ancient records of initiation. Naturally what initiates wrote differs in regard to incidentals, but all essentials were always the same. We must realize that the writers of the Gospels had no other sources than the ancient codex of initiation. When we look into the details, we recognize in the Gospels different forms of initiation. They differ because the writers knew initiation from different regions. This we shall understand when we consider how the writers of the Gospels were connected with Christ.

The best way to form an idea of this connection is to think of the significant words at the beginning of the Apocalypse.⁶ The One who dictates the content to John is named "The First and the Last, the Alpha and Omega." This refers to that Being who is always present, through all changes from generation to generation, from human race to human race, from planet to planet; the Being that endures through all transformations. If we call this Being God, of whom a particle lives within each of us, then we sense our relationship to this Alpha and Omega. Indeed, we recognize it as the ultimate ideal, the ultimate goal of striving human beings.

At this point we must remind ourselves of a forgotten custom. Nowadays, names are bestowed more or less haphazardly. We do not feel any real connection between a person and his name. The further back we go in human history, the greater the importance and significance of the name. Certain rules were observed when a name was given. Even not so very long ago, it was the custom to consult the calendar, and give the newly born the name mentioned on the day of its birth. It was assumed that the child had sought to be born on the day that bore that name. When someone attained initiation he was given a new name, an initiation name that expressed a person's innermost nature, expressed what the spiritual leader had recognized to be his significance to the world.

As you know, we find in the New Testament many sayings attributed to Jesus. Their deeper meaning can be understood only if approached from the viewpoint of initiation and understanding of the significance of bestowing names. For example, if someone had reached an as yet not so high level spiritually, and one wished to give him a corresponding name, it would be one that expressed characteristics of the astral body. If a person had reached a higher level, the name would express characteristics of the ether body. If it was to express something that was typical, it would be derived from characteristics of the physical body. In ancient times, names were related to the person and expressed his essential nature. You will remember that in the Gospels Jesus often describes what He is in words that refer back to the word “I.” This you find particularly in the Gospel according to John.

We must now bear in mind that we distinguish four members in a person's being: physical body, ether body, astral body and “I.” The “I” will increase more and more. It is inherent in a person's “I” to develop towards initiation. In undeveloped people it is imperfect, in the initiate perfect and powerful. You will now understand from the way names were given that Christ did not refer to Himself as an ordinary human being with an ordinary human “I.” In John's Gospel He often indicates that He is identical with the “I am, as in the sentence, "I and the Father are One." He describes Himself as identical with the human being's deepest nature. This He does because He is the Eternal, the Christ, the Alpha and Omega.

Those who lived at the time of Christ saw Him as a Divine Being who carried about Hirn a physical body, a being in whom the spirit is the all-important, whereas in human beings the physical is the all-important. For human beings the outstanding characteristic was expressed in the name. When we ponder this we find that it opens the door to many of the mysteries contained in the Bible. We shall understand what it means when Moses stands before Jehovah as messenger and asks: “Whom shall I tell the people has sent me?” And we hear the significant words: “Tell the people that the ‘I am’ sent thee.” What does Jehovah refer to? He points to the deepest and most significant aspect of a person's being, to that which lies deeply hidden in every human soul, to the human's “I.” We find that when we come to this fourth member, then the “I” is a name we must bestow an ourselves. The godlike within human beings must speak. It begins to speak in what appears to live in human beings as a mere point , aa a tiny insignificant seed, which can however develop to infinite greatness. It is this aspect of a person's being that gave Moses his task and said: “Tell them that the ‘I am’ sent thee.” A divine seed lies within every human soul enveloped inthe physical, etheric and astral bodies. It appears as a mere point to which we say: “I am. But this member of our being, which appears so insignificant, will become by far the most important. The essence of the human being teils Moses: “I am the I am.”

This illustrates the significance connected with the giving of a name. Whenever a reference is made to the “I am” it is also a reference to a certain moment in humanity's evolution that is indicated in the Bible, and often referred to in my lectures: the moment when physical man became an ensouled being. Physical man, as he is today, has developed from lower stages. Only when the Godhead had endowed him with a soul was man able to develop higher stages of his being. What descended from the bosom of the Godhead sank into the physical body and developed it further. In the Bible this moment is indicated in only a few words; it actually stretched over long epochs. Before that time, the human bodies did not possess what is essential—essential also for physical man today—if the “I” is to develop: the ability to breathe through lungs. A human being's physical ancestors did not originally breathe through lungs, which only developed in the course of time from a bladder-like organ. The human being could receive a soul only when he had learned to breathe through lungs. If this whole event is summed up in one sentence, you have the saying in the Bible: "And the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." In regard to the name Jehovah, we find that it means something like blowing, or rushing wind. The word Jahve expresses the inrush of breath with which the spirit, the “I” drew into man. The physical breath enabled man to receive his soul.

Therefore, in the name Jahve is expressed the nature of the inrushing breath with which the “I am the I am” poured part of its Being into human beings. What we are told in the Bible truly represents a world event depicting the entry into a human being of the eternal aspect of his nature. Whether we think of man as he is today or as he was thousands of years ago, the nature, the “Being of the I” (Ichwesen) always was. Think of the highest revelation of this “Eternal I,” when all external aspects are irrelevant. Think of a human being in whom can be recognized the most inward nature of the “Eternal I” in all its greatness and might, and you have an idea how the first followers of Christ saw Hirn. What in ancient time was revealed on earth only as a spark, was revealed in Jesus of Nazareth in its highest glory. He was the greatest initiate because He was the most Godly, so that He could say: “Before Abraham was, I was.” He incorporated that which existed before Abraham,⁷ Isaac⁸ and Jacob.⁹ He is that to which striving mankind looks up as the greatest ideal. They are those mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount as: “Blessed are those who are beggars of the Spirit, for within themselves they shall find the Kingdom of Heaven.” These words applied to the followers of Christ. But how could they give a description of the life of the highest God incarnated? What description would be worthy of Hirn? Only the one that was contained in the canon of initiation, describing the rules of initiation. There was described the way the one to be initiated must from stage to stage pass through certain experiences which culminated in the words: “Oh my God, how thou hast glorified me!” (The transcript of this lecture ends at this point.)

• 1. unknown reference
• 2. Council of Nicaea was called by Emperor Constantine. It formulated the Nicene Creed in A.D. 325.
• 3. Origen (c. 185–A.D. 254) was an early Christian Church Father and writer.
• 4. Augustine, Saint (354–430) a Christian theologian and writer. The most prominent of the Latin Fathers of the Church.
• 5. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895). He supported Darwin's theory of evolution. He coined the word “agnostic.” He also was a natural scientist.
• 6. Apocalypse was a prophetic revelation about Armageddon. Jewish and Christian writings appeared in Palestine between 200 B.C. and A.D. 1500.
• 7. Abraham, the biblical father of the Hebrew people and first of the patriarchs, was regarded as the founder of the ancient Hebrew nation.
• 8. Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah.
• 9. Jacob of the Old Testament was the son of Isaac and Rebecca and was the father of the twelve patriarchs.

If a school of thought should be successful in the course of human evolution, a school of thought, which does not find acceptance or may even not enjoy the knowledge of the so-called authoritative circles, of the ruling spiritual circles, then it has to fight with the reluctant powers all the time which distinguish themselves within the human civilisation.

We only need to remind of that which happened as Christianity had to assert itself against old ideas, against an old spiritual current in the world. We need only to remind that in the beginning of the new school of thought Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno had to fight against the so-called authoritative circles. We are allowed to suppose that the school of thought inaugurated by Giordano Bruno had to fight against traditions.

In a similar situation is today that school of thought that is represented under the name theosophy in the literature, in talks and the like since several years. If you remember of the destiny of such schools of thought more or less unknown at the moment of their appearance, you find that the way how the ruling circles, the so-called authoritative circles face them, indeed, changes with the fashions of civilisation that, however, the essential part, the lack of understanding, combined with a certain narrow-mindedness, appears over and over again. It is no longer standard today to burn heretics, and in particular liberal circles would protest to be lumped together with such people who burnt heretics. But it may less depend on that. Today the burning of heretics is no longer really trendy. But if we examine the attitude, from which the persecution of heretics arose, and the reasons of such a persecution and compare it with that which takes place in the soul of somebody who fights against the theosophical school of thought more or less today or opposes against it, then we find a similar attitude and similar inner soul processes with the adversaries.

We do not want to enter into discussion with the whole circle of the adversaries of the theosophical world view. We want to confine ourselves rather to that which is connected with our contemporary scholarship; we want to consider the relation of our contemporary scholarship to the theosophical or spiritual-scientific world view as I call it since some time.

Perhaps, it is not meaningless if one starts this consideration with small symptoms. I start with a very widespread small encyclopaedia, a so-called pocket encyclopaedia, which says on its title-page or at least in its preface that it is collated by the best scientific people. If we open it under the catchword “Theosophy,” we find as an explanation only two words: “God-seeker, dreamer.” Such a kind of learnt consideration of the theosophist is now no longer common in all similar reference books, of course. But somebody does probably not become cleverer from this short remark who wants to get to know something about theosophy also not from the other similar reference books.

I have tried to examine in the real philosophical reference books at least externally what is to be found there. I do not want to give an anthology of quotations from such reference books. I would like to give an example only what is to be found in the Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts and Terms, published in Berlin in 1900. In one of the newest works which lists the most of theosophical concepts the following you can read: [Gap in the shorthand notes.] ... these are about three lines with these names. Who wants to get an idea of theosophy from this short representation has to say to himself: also in such philosophical dictionaries we find nothing else than a not correct translation of the term and some names.

Also, otherwise, it does not look especially good if we want to orientate ourselves about that which is represented here as theosophy what the contemporary scholarship knows about that. But the easier this contemporary scholarship wants to condemn theosophy on account of a few little things which it has picked up from any theosophical brochure. We can make the strange experience: a shrug and the remark, “what the theosophical literature spreads is nothing else than warming up a few Buddhist concepts,” or: “it is nothing else than spiritistic superstition expressed somewhat differently.” You can hear such things in abundance. What you hardly hear, however, is a real answer to the question: what is, actually, theosophy? You will find—maybe not only in coffee parties—that which has really happened in a coffee party recently which is, however, not at all so untypical for the standpoint of our contemporaries to theosophy.

There a lady said to another: how is it that you have become a theosophist? This is something terrible, something awful. Take into account what you do to your family; consider how you are in contradiction to that which other people think.—She was silent for a few seconds and said then: what is really theosophy? This did not happen in learnt circles, but you could find something of that kind also in the learnt circles. You can find the judgement again and again that theosophy is nothing scientific at all that it is only enthusiasm of some fantastic people that they bring forward assertions which one cannot prove.

I want to criticise by no means where I want to characterise the relation of our scholarship to theosophy, not even our relation to the circles of scholars. Because nobody else than that who has an overview of our present bringing up of scholars from the theosophical point of view knows better that from this education, from the concepts and ideas of it nothing else can arise than a high-spirited and a somewhat snooty shrug about that which theosophy asserts and which can really appear to that scholarship—because it cannot understand it better—as rapture and as a completely unscientific gossip.

We really want to be fair towards this scholarship. The theosophist stands on a point of view and has to stand on one which I want to show at an example which has not taken place on theosophical ground which could have taken place, however, easily on theosophical ground. The theosophist is in a similar position to the contemporary scholarship rejecting the sneering and the reproach of rapture, as just in the example the recently deceased philosopher Eduard von Hartmann to the materialistic-Darwinist interpretation of nature. I do not want to take sides of the Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann.

But over and over again one would have to point to the way how he faced his adversaries.—In 1869, the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, a book of which the theosophist not needs to take sides exactly, a book which was, however, a courageous action at that time. Just the relation of this book to the scholarship of that time can give an example how today the spiritual scientist or theosophist faces his adversaries. This Philosophy of the Unconscious was a courageous action in a certain way. At that time, the waves of the materialistic science surged when the materialistic science had grown up into a kind of materialistic religion,

Books like Energy and Matter by Büchner, other books by Vogt, Moleschott and the like who considered energy and matter, the purely sensuous existence as the only one, they caused great sensation, have experienced many editions and conquered hearts and souls. In that time, everybody was regarded as being a poor devil and a fool who did not join in this choir of materialism who spoke about a self-creative spirit. In this time, when one was of the opinion that Darwin’s work delivered the scientific way of thinking for materialism, in this time, when philosophy itself was a word which one considered as something that was overcome, in this time, Eduard von Hartmann let his Philosophy of the Unconscious appear, a philosophy which has one advantage in spite of its big shortcomings that it attributes the world directly to something spiritual everywhere, looks for the basis of something spiritual in all phenomena, even if the spiritual is considered as something unconscious, even if it takes a particularly high rank.

One thing is certain: there the spirit offers sharp resistance to the materialistic attitude. While at that time the Darwinist school of thought explained nature completely from energy and matter, Eduard von Hartmann tried to understand it in such a way that the spirit should become evident as the inner effectiveness of a spiritual work.—Then those came who believed to be entitled to look down with a shrug on everything that spoke of spirit and judged: there was never anything dilettantish like this Philosophy of the Unconscious. A man speaks there, actually, who has learnt nothing about all the phenomena which Darwinism now explains so scientifically.

There was a lot of counter writings at that time. One also appeared by an unknown author. Its title was The Unconscious from the Standpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. It was a thorough refutation of the Philosophy of the Unconscious. The author showed that he was familiar with the latest development of natural sciences. Ernst Haeckel said in a brochure that it would be a pity that the author did not call himself, because he himself could have presented nothing better against Eduard von Hartmann than what is in this writing. Oscar Schmidt wrote a brochure and said that no naturalist would have been able to say anything better against the limitless dilettantism of Eduard von Hartmann than the anonymous author of this brochure. “He may reveal his name to us and we consider him as one of ours.”—The brochure was soon out of stock and the second edition appeared with the name of the author. That was enough to silence the people. It was Eduard von Hartmann. Since that time the chorus was silent of those who had written about the dilettantism of the Philosophy of the Unconscious.

You can argue something against such a procedure, but you cannot deny that it was thoroughly effective. Somebody who was regarded at first as a man who knows nothing has shown to the scientific circles that he could be cleverer than they could ever be. Let me use this trivial expression, it would be good even if somewhat anachronistic to do the same. But that who is at the summit of the theosophical world view could also easily, very easily write together all that stuff which one can today produce against theosophy. This has to be emphasised above all: theosophy is nothing that is directed against the real, true science if it is properly understood. Theosophy is able to understand the true, real science any time as Eduard von Hartmann could understand his adversaries. The reverse is not so easy in the one and the other case. However, we have also to understand where from this could come that way.

If I held a lecture only about that which our scholars know about theosophy, then this lecture could have become rather short, and I would have hardly needed to stand before you longer than for a few seconds. But I would like to go deeper; I would like to speak of the reasons why our contemporary scholarship can know so little about theosophy which opens a new way of thinking about the matters of the world.

If we look around today in our contemporary scholarly literature, we find that these considerations differ, already externally, from all the literature about hundred years ago. If we take a book which has, for example, the title: “The Origin of the Human Being, the Human Being and His Position to the World,” we hardly find anything else than that once the human being did not live on earth that he began his existence on earth in a childish, half animal condition. Then we are made aware of the fact that animal ancestors lived before this time on earth and that these developed to the present-day human being.—If we take another book which should inform us about the secrets of the universe, then we find that it deals with that which you can see through the telescope and what you can achieve with mathematics. In other words: everywhere something that I have called factual fanaticism in my book Goethe’s World-View, that factual fanaticism which keeps to the sensuous facts—to the sense-perceptible facts, at most to that which the armed senses can perceive.

Everything belongs to that which is presented today in the most detailed way in any possible popular writing, and what the human being is solely able to provide of the riddles and secrets of the world on account of scientific facts. If we look around in the circles which draw their knowledge only from such books, then we find that there are, actually, all kinds of intermediate stages that, however, these intermediate stages are to be found between two extremes. The one extreme is the sober scholars. They only accept as scientific what they can see and infer with their reason from the seen. There the world is explored with instruments in all directions. There one searches for written documents, there the time and the development of humankind is investigated according to pure facts. The one is said to be natural sciences, the other is said to be history.

In history you find quite strange things sometimes. In particular if one deals with experiences of spiritual science. You find that there are people who write thick books about the old Gnostics, for example, or about any branch of ancient spiritual wisdom who do not want at all to know anything about this spiritual wisdom itself. They look at this purely historically; they only register the written documents and are contented with it. Today one does not need to be a gnostic to write about Gnosticism. Today scholarly circles regard this almost as a principle. And as the best principle is regarded to be possessed as little as possible from the matters about which one writes, actually. If you take this factual fanaticism on one side, you have nearly what induces such scholarly circles to say: we can notice these matters, we know these matters; what goes beyond them is the object of faith. Everybody can believe or not believe what he wants.—The result of this attitude is a certain indifference to all the objects, thoughts and beings which go beyond the only sensuous facts. Then one says: if anybody needs them for his faith, we leave them to him, but science has nothing to do with them.

A thick dividing wall is raised there between science and faith, and science should be nothing else than what can be perceived purely with the eye and with the ear, nothing else than the consideration of facts and what one abstracts from it. Anything else should not be investigated.—Then, however, something else appears which possibly says: it is not right that science stops anywhere, but this is right that the human being develops more and more and that he unfolds more and more forces in his works, so that he can know everything that there are no limits of knowledge. Indeed, the last objects of knowledge are to be attained only in infinite distance, but they are in such a way that we can approach them more and more. Limits must not be raised anywhere. It seems to be a summit of arrogance if such representatives appear who claim that this ability slumbers in every human being. Develop it and you will see that the objects which once were objects of your faith can become objects of your knowledge, of your wisdom. It is not different with the objects which refer to the immortality of the soul, to the spiritual world, to the big and to the small world in space and to the whole development of the human being; it is not different from the matters which we also meet in the usual natural sciences.

Or, what does a human being, who takes a popular book about astronomy, know from own experience about that which the book says to him? I ask you: how many knowing people are among those who believe in the materialistic history of creation? How many are among those who swear on the materialistic spirit who have seen through a microscope and know how to investigate these matters? How many are there who believe in Haeckel and how many who know in this field? Everybody can become a researcher if he has the time and the energy for it. This also applies to the spiritual matters.

It is brainless if one says that the matters come to an end. It is brainless as well if one says that you have to believe what is in Haeckel’s history of creation, that you yourselves cannot investigate this. In no other sense theosophy speaks of objects and matters of the higher world. One has been accustomed to use the term theosophy for this spiritual science. Not because it has God solely as the object of its consideration, but because it makes a distinction between the external sensuous human being who sees, hears, smells, tastes with his five senses, and combines the sense-perception with his reason—and the other human being who lives in this bodily human being who slumbers in it and can be woken and uses such spiritual organs, spiritual sensory tools, as the body has the physical sensory tools. As the body sees with the physical eye, the mind sees with the spiritual eye. Like the body hears with the physical ear, the mind hears with the spiritual ear.

If the human being takes care of his spiritual development himself, these spiritual organs of perception can be trained, so that the inner human being is able to look into a spiritual world. Because one calls such an inner human being the divine one, I make the difference. What the external sensuous human being beholds, gives sensuous wisdom, what the inner divine human being beholds is, in contrast to sensuous wisdom, theosophy, divine wisdom. Thus it is meant if one speaks of theosophy. One does not speak of theosophy, because God is the object of research, because God is something that becomes obvious to the occultist only at the end of the things, on the summit of perfection. The theosophist will dare least of all to investigate God, although we know that we live, work and exist in Him.

Just as little as somebody, who is sitting on the beach and dives his hand in the sea, believes that he can exhaust the whole sea, the theosophist believes just as little that he can embrace God. However, like somebody, who is sitting on the beach and gets out a handful of water, knows that the scooped water is of the same being as the whole big encompassing sea, the theosophist also knows that he carries a divine spark in himself that is of the same kind and being as God. The theosophist does not claim that his being can embrace God, he does also not claim that in his human soul the infinite God lives, or that the human being himself is God.

He will never come up with such a thing. However, what he says, what he can experience and get to know is something different, this is just this that in the human being a part of God lives, which is of the same kind and being as the whole godhead, as well as the handful of water is of the same kind as the whole encompassing ocean. As the water in the hand and the water in the sea are of the same kind and being, also that which lives in the soul is of the same kind and being as God. Therefore, we call heavenly what is inside of the human being, and we call the wisdom divine wisdom or theosophy which the human being can investigate in his innermost core.

This is a thought process which everybody would have to admit if he wanted to think only logically. Often someone objects to theosophy: you demand that the human being goes through a development. However, not everybody is able to verify everything the theosophy maintains.—Somebody who understands the matters will never maintain that any human being if he can have only the necessary patience, force and endurance cannot get to that condition which single human beings have got in the course of human development. But something else is in the so-called proofs of theosophical truths. Something is to be found in the theosophical literature and in theosophical talks or can be heard, otherwise, somewhere within the theosophical movement about which somebody who has a modern education says to himself: these are assertions. One can accept them, but no theosophist does prove them; he just maintains them.—This speaking of proofs is something that appears over and over again that one objects to theosophy over and over again. How is it?—It behaves as follows.

What theosophy spreads as a higher spiritual wisdom can be investigated if those forces which slumber in every human soul are woken. These forces and abilities, which we call the forces and abilities of the seer, of the spiritual beholding, are necessary to investigate the matters. If one wants to investigate, to discover the facts of the spiritual world, these abilities and forces are necessary. However, it is something different to understand what the spiritual researcher has found. Mind you, one needs the forces of the seer to find the spiritual truths, but that one only needs the clear, logical human mind going up to the last consequences to understand them.

That is essential. Someone who states that he cannot understand what theosophy maintains has not yet thought enough about it. On the contrary, we can better understand what science maintains today. Just what we understand, if we stop at true science, about the facts of nature, about the matters of the apparently lifeless and of the living nature—even if we take the facts of the history of civilisation—if we want to understand them, we can never understand them if we approach them only with the materialistic scholarship which is nothing else than materialistic fantasy. We can understand what true science delivers to us if we know the true science of the spiritual world. To somebody who sees deeper science as it is presented by Ernst Haeckel, for example, becomes only understandable if one has theosophy as a precondition, as a basis.

A comparison should make clear what I want to say. Imagine that you have a picture before yourselves which shows any scene, any saint’s legend. You can try to understand this picture in double way. Once you place yourselves before the picture and try to let revive in your soul what has lived in the soul of the painter. You try to rouse in your soul what the picture shows as spiritual contents. Something lives in it that raises your soul, makes it lofty, and invigorates it. However, you can still react differently to this picture. You can go and say that this does not interest you. Also what the painter has imagined does not interest you particularly. However, you want to get to know how he mixed the paints which substances are mixed in the paint which he painted on the canvas. You want to test how this is there on the canvas, how much of the red and green paints were used where straight and where crooked lines were applied.

These are two different approaches to a picture. It would be brainless to say about the one: you look at something that is false.—No, he looks at something that is absolutely true. He looks how the paint sticks to the canvas and how it is composed. He looks whether and how the paints have cracked et cetera. This can be real truth. Then there the other comes and says to the first: this is not the right thing what you think. This is only a thought. You can objectively find what I investigate.

I want to give an additional example, so that we understand each other precisely. Somebody plays a sonata on a piano. You listen to this sonata with musical ear; you indulge in the marvellous realm of sounds which this sonata delivers to you. This is a way how you can investigate what takes place here. However, another way could also be the following. Anybody comes there and says that this does not interest him which one hears with the musical ear. But there stands a piano, in it strings are stretched. These strings move. I want to hang up little paper tabs on these strings. They jump off if the string moves and thereby I can study where the strings move and where they are in rest. I want to completely refrain from that which you hear there with your ear. One cannot prove that objectively.

As well as this second viewer behaves to the first viewer; the characterised scholars behave to the theosophists. No theosophist thinks of denying scholarship. Just as little as that who goes into raptures about the spiritual contents of a picture says that that is not true which the other investigates about the paints, just as little that who has a musical ear will say that that is not true which the other investigates with the little paper tabs—because it is true, it is true what the naturalist investigates about his material. Nothing should be argued against it. But that escapes these natural sciences which is essential in the world process. Just as that which is essential escapes somebody who looks only at the little paper tabs and what also escapes somebody who only investigates the paint and maybe still the material, the canvas.

Then some people come and say: there is something subjective, this lives only in the soul and cannot be proven objectively. One has to investigate what can be really found. Outside only the oscillatory etheric matter, the oscillatory substance exists. Indeed. One answers as a theosophist to such people: if you only investigate the matter, you only find your matter outside, as well as that who blocked his ears can only find what one can see in the little paper tabs.

Still a few years ago one got up the objectivity of science to mischief. It is this the so-called atomistic theory where one calls that subjective which the human being perceives as sensory sensation what he perceives as sound, colour et cetera, and traces it back to objective processes. These processes should be oscillations of any substance. At that time—as an example—one called it always only red. Red, one said, is only in your eye. Outside in space is nothing else than an oscillation of the ether of so and so many millions oscillations.—This pseudoscience, which is no longer science but religion, transformed the world of perception into a huge sum of atoms which are in oscillatory movements.

This nonsense of transforming everything that we experience as colour-fresh and lively contents into abstract processes which are nothing else than calculated things, nothing else than results of brooding and speculation, this nonsense lately withdraws somewhat. We see that already the atom and its oscillatory movement is regarded by reasonable naturalists only as a calculation approach and in the better circles of thinkers one does no longer take care of the inaccuracy of the atomic hypotheses et cetera. But it has collected in the brains of the human beings to look at the world as an objective nothing, as only materialistic oscillation processes, so that it has penetrated the theosophical movement and theosophy itself in the first years. We had to experience that the most spiritual movement was severely infected by materialism. We had to experience that one could read in the most different theosophical books over and over again that this is this or that vibration. In particular the English books did not get tired to talk about vibrations.

It is a characteristic of our time that this materialistic tendency could come into the most spiritual movement. We still have much to do for long time to overcome this childhood disease of theosophy. However, only if the time has come when within theosophy one no longer speaks about moving atoms, then that cleverly thought-out construction of monads has disappeared which whirl down from the heights and take in everything—an absurd materialistic idea.

One has to realise that theosophy concerns the recognition of the spiritual as such and one has to be aware of the fact that one lets the materialistic science have the swinging little paper tabs and lets it investigate the paints and the canvas. Theosophy deals with the development of the higher senses, the knowledge of the higher senses, it includes what the human being sees, summarises, surveys with the higher soul forces, and what he hears with the musical ear—the swinging string expresses it spatially. If you have understood this, you know to some extent what theosophy is.

Hence, we have also to completely renounce to believe that a kind of harmony is possible between the modern scholarship and theosophy. It is not possible.—This harmony only comes if scholarship itself has progressed so far that it can understand theosophy. Indeed, we have to do it with the chemical investigation of the paints, with the investigation of the lines, with the investigation of the canvas, with the investigation of the little paper tabs on the moved strings, but this does not exclude that with the higher development of the spiritual forces the higher spiritual is revealed to us in that which we investigate externally. The modern scholarship is far away from understanding this matter.

One becomes mild towards this scholarship if one sees, for example, that somebody who has been born out of this scholarship cannot understand anything that is scholarly in the deepest sense and has originated from spiritual science at the same time. I know that I say something extremely offensive for many listeners who have learnt physics. But it is something symptomatic about which I have to speak. Which physicist would not disparage what one calls Goethe’s theory of colours. It is a matter of impossibility to speak about it, but times will come—and they are not far , when one recognises the objections against Goethe's theory of colours as outdated prejudices. You can read further details about Goethe’s theory of colours in my book about Goethe’s World View.

Goethe’s theory of colours was born out of a spiritual world view and for that who can understand this, this theory of colours is the proof of Goethe’s deep thinking. But it does not start from the prejudice that colour is an oscillatory ether. It stands rather on a ground which can be circumscribed as I try it now. I ask you to follow me in my subtle thought process. If anybody sees the red colour outside, his eye sees red at first. Now there comes the physicist and says: this red colour is only subjective. This is a process in space or in the brain. However, what is real outside is nothing but an oscillatory movement of the ether.

If now anybody comes who says: what you see there is only an oscillatory movement of the ether, then reply the following: try to imagine this oscillatory movement of the ether. Is this colourless? It must be colourless, because you want to explain the colour from the oscillations. Hence, what is outside must be colourless. Then I ask: does it still have maybe other qualities; does it maybe have the quality of heat? There the physicist answers: heat even comes from oscillatory movement. However, these people are funniest if they say: these oscillations do not have sensory qualities, but only those qualities which we can think.

If one regards now that which the senses say as subjective, one must also regard that which one thinks as subjective. Then one must also say: what you have calculated there as an oscillatory nebulous mass is subjective all the more, is never perceived, but is only calculated. Everything is calculated subjectively. Who realises that that which we experience in ourselves is objective and that the objective can become the most subjective has a right to speak about the fact that also the calculated has an objective existence. He also does not regard red and green, C sharp and G as only subjective phenomena.

Now I have said a number of matters which are dreadful heresies to scientifically thinking people. One talks a lot that times have changed. Yes, times have changed since Giordano Bruno. At his time the dogma of infallibility was not yet valid. Today the dogma of infallibility is valid, as you know, in certain Catholic circles. But this dogma of infallibility is not born only out of Catholicism. It came into being as an external law, as an external dogma. However, the infallibility dogma also lives as an attitude in the minds of the materialistically thinking, monistic freethinkers. They regard themselves—I do not say that everybody regards himself as a little pope—but as so infallible that they regard everything as superstitious that does not come from their circles. If one counters these infallible physicists and psychiatrists—they do not say that they are infallible, but one feels it , then he is dismissed. He is no longer burnt, but he is made a fool with the means which is trendy today.

The theosophist does not necessarily look for approval. Compared with truth approval is something indifferent. Who has understood the truth of a mathematical theorem does not care whether a million people agree or not. Truth is not decided by majority. Someone who has recognised a truth has recognised it and needs no approval. Thus the theosophical movement prefers the careful supporters. It does not want to have children but such human beings who form a judgement, with all care, after the most profound examination. The demand to be careful is something that gives me the deepest sympathy.

From that which I have tried to show you can infer that theosophy is far away to criticise the contemporary scholarship. Should the theosophist fight against it? He would do something very foolish, because it would be as if that who looks at a picture with displeasure wanted to fight against somebody who studies the chemical composition of the paints. If, for example, an appearance like Ernst Haeckel is defended from theosophical side, this does not need to be wrong. One can defend him if one recognises him from a higher point of view sees how he appears there and knows how to classify the matters in the world evolution. The theosophist is able to give the right position to the contemporary development in any field.

Thus the relation of the newly arising spiritual current is which tries to look at the world in such a way as single extraordinary spirits looked always at it. But it was not possible during the last centuries to give this spiritual science as it was given once. What one calls theosophy today is a small part of encompassing world wisdom, of occult science. This is something that has always existed with extraordinary human individualities since millennia, even since there are human beings. In the form, however, as single great spirits have owned it, it could not been given to the big mass. Nevertheless, it was not withheld from the big mass.

If you check the legends and myths of the nations impartially, you see that these legends and myths are the metaphorical expressions of a science which contains more wisdom than the present-day science offers. This science would regard it as fantasy if one said that wisdom is in these fairy tales. This world wisdom has been announced in the most different religions; depending on how the one or the other people needed it according to its temperament and the climate. If we have an overview of everything that was given to humankind in the most different forms, we are led to a common core, to encompassing world wisdom. Today not everything can be already handed over to the bigger part of humankind, because somebody who rises toward this world wisdom has to go through particular inner ordeals. This world wisdom can be handed over only to somebody who goes through these ordeals. In former times also the elementary part was handed over only in the closest circle to well prepared pupils with the corresponding intellectual, moral and mental qualities. There are even today persons who regard it as wrong to deliver the occult profundities by theosophy to the big mass of the human beings. However, the reproach is unfounded because there is no alternative today. Who understands the structure of the spirit of the present age knows that inner truth and wisdom of the religious world view feel alienated because one can no longer understand them.

This was different once. Then the wisdom which is announced today by theosophy was the property of the single human being. One gave the big mass the appropriate wisdom in pictures. The feeling nature of the big mass was suited to take it up in the pictures. The big mass could live with these pictures only. Truth was in the religions, truth was in the basic religious views. Theosophy only makes this clear again to us in the deepest way. The human being could understand it with his feeling in ancient times. Our time demands that he can also understand what is contained in the religions.

Thus occult science is forced to come out a little bit, to contribute something to the verification of the religions, to give the elementary part of spiritual truth at least. A time would be dreary and desolate if humankind were alienated from all knowledge of the spiritual worlds and from any relation to them. Only that who does not understand the case can believe that humankind could exist without relation to the spiritual, without belief in spirit and immortality. Like the plant needs food juices, the soul needs something spiritual that forms its basis. Theosophy does not want to found a new religion. But it wants to bring truth home to the human being again in a form which is suited to the modern human being, in the form of thinking comprehension. Thus theosophy brings the old truth in new form to our contemporaries, unperturbed by those who, going out from the materialistic superstition, turn against this spiritual current.

As well as the external natural science rests upon that which it investigates and calculates with the help of the microscope and telescope, theosophy uses the most significant instrument of which Goethe speaks: what the skilled ear of the musician is, this is the human soul compared with all tools , and further:

Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won’t discover to your understanding
you can’t extort from her with levers and with screws.

Faust I, verses 672–675

Who understands the world is the most perfect instrument, and supported on the spiritual beholding theosophy will produce such instruments more and more.

The answer to the question: what do our scholars know about the real basis of theosophy is: nothing.—They can know nothing because all their ways of thinking can bring them to nothing else than to look at theosophy as a fantastic stuff. Who has understood, however, that scholarship cannot get involved in theosophy, which has gone out from quite different bases, also understands that this scholarship will be in need to illuminate the structure of spirit more intensely. This scholarship provides such flowers. But a real comprehension of the soul only can make such things comprehensible, which the modern scholarship knows.

Or: what has somebody to think who regarded Goethe, Schopenhauer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and others as great spirits if this materialistic scholarship has brought it so far that you can find in a little book about Goethe’s illness, about Schopenhauer’s illness—also in other works—these illnesses considered from the point of view of the materialistic psychiatry? One calls a particular type of insanity manic depression, schizophrenia another, and paranoia a third one. These three forms of insanity are taken to show that one can also find symptoms of insanities with the great spirits who are regarded as leaders of humankind. One found the symptoms of manic depression with Schopenhauer, paranoia with Tasso, Rousseau and others. Indeed, the same author has called an even bigger number of people feeble-minded. He is the author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women which concerns one half of the whole humankind. It would be easy to consider the author from his own viewpoint and to scrutinise him.—However, one must not laugh at these matters. The materialistic science must get to this because these are partial truths. But one can get only to the right insight if one sees the spirit working behind it. Then one sees that often a higher spiritual development must be purchased for the same symptoms, as on the other side health for other symptoms. One is able to do this only if one explains them from the theosophical standpoint.

I would like to tell something else. You know that I have pointed to ancient times of development when our civilisation did not yet exist when there has been a continent between this Europe and America, the continent of the old Atlantis. I have already pointed to the fact that this Atlantis has been found again by the naturalists. In the magazine Kosmos, 10th issue, a naturalist speaks of animals and plants which lived on this Atlantis. Indeed, such a naturalist admits this, but he does not admit that other human beings lived in those days. He does not admit that the old Atlantean land was covered by a wide nebulous sea that the ground was not covered by such an air as it forms our atmosphere today, that the expression which the old Central European peoples have in their myths: Niflheim, nebulous home, means something real that our Atlantean ancestors lived in a nebulous country. I have sometimes pointed to that.

Few days ago a lecture was held in a famous society of naturalists in which was pointed out to the fact that most probably in the time of our Atlantean ancestors on the earth very large land masses were covered with fog. One concludes this speculatively from different other phenomena. Above all, it is pointed out to the fact that the plants, which need sunshine which grow in the desert, are of a later date and did not yet exist at that time, while those, which need little sunshine which could exist at Niflheim, the nebulous home, are the older ones.

Here you see that natural science lagging behind says to you what theosophy has said before. We have a time ahead when also the other matters must be gradually admitted by these natural sciences. Theosophy does not have to get used to the fantastic, objective atomic theories, but the facts which theosophy announces from the higher standpoint will be proven by the external natural sciences. This is the course of the future development. Even if the modern scholars know nothing about it, their own progress leads them to it.—No thinker should doubt that one can see more, can behold more with a developed soul than with mere senses and mere intellect.

It is the recognition of the developed human being as the most perfect instrument to investigate the world—theosophy wants this to be accepted. Everything else results automatically. If you say that the human being has reached the highest levels and will not keep on developing, then you do not need theosophy. If you say, however, the laws which have held sway in the past, will also hold sway in the future, single human beings have always stood higher than others of their surroundings—if you admit this, then you have already a theosophical attitude, in principle. One does not become a theosophist because one uses the words theosophy, brotherliness, unity et cetera. Brotherliness is something that all good people understand.

If I see people always talking about brotherliness and then also behold them feeling an inner lust if they talk about brotherliness, harmony, unity, then I always think of the oven and the first principle of the Theosophical Society which demands to establish the core of a general human fraternisation. It is for nothing if one says to the oven: dear oven, heat the room and make it warm.—If one wants that the oven gives off heat, then one must put heating material into it and kindle it. One must put heating material into it. This is the spiritual force, the ability to behold on account of the development of the higher worlds. By the development of the spiritual world that truth and wisdom in the human souls take place which must lead as wisdom and knowledge automatically to the general human brotherhood. Then we arrive at that which is expressed in the first principle of the theosophical program if the human being can be an instrument to behold into the spiritual worlds. If the organs of perception concealed in the human being are got out of the soul, theosophy is a progress which one is able to pursue. If one compares this theosophical attitude with the attitude of theosophists, of great, lofty personalities who lived in prehistoric time, then we find it also in a sentence from Herder’s pen: our tender, feeling and sensitive nature has developed all senses which God has given it. It cannot do without them, because that which results from the whole use of the organs shines to all. These are the vowels of life and so on.

Even if we only take the external physical senses into consideration, we can say in the theosophical sense, nevertheless: the physical and spiritual senses must be developed, because by the harmony of the spiritual and physical organs of perception the vowels not only of life, but also those of the eternal, infinite, spiritual life are kindled.

You read in Goethe’s poem The Secrets:

From the power which ties all beings
escapes that human being
who overcomes himself.

The human being is neither free nor not free, he is developing.

Notes:

Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher

Eduard Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886), German zoologist. Goethes Verhältnis zu den organischen Wissenschaften (1853), Descendenzlehre und Darwinismus—The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism (1873)

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898)), Swiss poet and historical novelist

manic depression: Steiner uses the obsolete term “zirkuläres Irresein” (circular insanity, French: folie circulaire). This form of insanity is today called manic depression or bipolar disorder.

author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women: Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907), German neurologist. Über das Pathologische bei Goethe (1898). Über Schopenhauer (1899)

Atlantis: cf. R. Steiner CW 11 Cosmic Memory

Kosmos: Theodor Arldt (1878–1960), German geographer. Das Atlantisproblem