The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The idea of the “deed body” (Volume 2, pages 131ff.) is particularly characteristic of Bruno Wille's “Revelations of the Juniper Tree”. It shows how strongly the longing lives in the best of our minds to deepen present-day scientific thought in a way that corresponds to a more fundamental human urge for knowledge; but on the other hand, it also shows how powerless this longing proves to be when one recoils at the gates of what the theosophical current asserts itself to be today. It is the question of what is lasting, what is immortal in the human being, which the will approaches with its “deed body”. First of all, it should be made clear what this idea of the “deed body” means if it is isolated from the magnificent poetic description of Brunno W ille. The human being, like every other being, is the center of effects that can be regarded as his “deeds”. What I do makes an impression on my environment; it continues my existence beyond the limits of my form, as it were. What I add to the world in this way cannot be lost. For every effect becomes the cause of a new effect. And all these effects bear the stamp, the seal of my personality. They are only there because I am there. And they will be there in all eternity because I once was there. And just as the power of the All-Soul lives in my physical form and shapes me, so it forms the sum of my imperishable “deeds” and my “deed body” through me. Schön executes this will in the most diverse ways. He lets his hero say to the disbelieving friend: “When you speak, you like to move your hand and arm. In fact, on closer inspection, every one of your movements is characteristic. But every movement shakes the air. So your individuality is expressed in all possible air tracks.” And when the friend objects later: ‘Without a body should I live on? To believe that, I think too materialistically. Without a body, no spirit!’ the ‘All-seeing One’ replies: ”Agreed! But there is no lack of a body for your survival! The world offers you material for an immeasurably richer embodiment. Not in the sense that the old soul slips out of the old body into a new one. That is dualistic thinking. For me, body and soul are one – only viewed from different sides, one time from the outside, with the senses – the other time from the inside, directly. So body and soul can never separate. ... “Around the old body ‘the new one has developed out of it—just as a moth develops out of a caterpillar...’—”Your individuality may renounce a certain sphere of activity, this sensual manifestation, but that doesn't mean that it ceases to be effective altogether. No, it continues to work busily—and so it lives! Or do you want to call someone destroyed who continues to exercise his individuality in the same vigorous way, only in a slightly different field?” What Wille says here is, of course, all correct. But it is equally correct for the stone, the plant, the animal and the human being. The deeds of a worm do not differ essentially from those of a human being in the relationships that Wille cites. In the sum of the worm's actions, “individuality” is in the same sense as in the sum of human actions, if one goes no further than will. And this stems from the fact that he attributes soul and soul and soul again to everything, without distinguishing in the realm of the soul as one distinguishes things and beings in the realm of the senses. The question of the eternal in man is not exhausted if I merely show the eternity of his actions. For what matters in the case of man is not merely that he should exercise these actions, but that he should know them to be connected with his self, with his soul being. So the question must be: Do I know the eternal effects of my individuality as mine? Are the members of my “body of deeds” held together by my ego in some way? As long as I live physically, I recognize my physical head as mine. When its parts have decomposed in the earth, I can no longer do that. But will I do that with my “deed body”? There is no answer to this question if one is content with Willes's path. To get an answer, one must not only ask about the eternity of the effects, but also about the eternity of the cause. A comparison should clarify what is to be said here. I went to bed yesterday and got up today. I do not claim that I have survived the night because I believe that my actions of yesterday still express their effects today, but because I know that the cause of these effects will attach my actions today to those of yesterday. I cannot let my actions of yesterday speak for my continued existence, but I must find them again myself and connect them with my actions today. These effects of yesterday must be my destiny today if they are to have any significance for my permanent personal being. — In this sense, the eternal in man is only grasped when one acknowledges what the “All-Seer” clearly rejects with the words: “I do not assume re-embodiment, but always-embodiment.” This eternal embodiment of the “body of action” contradicts clear observation when one focuses one's eye on the specific human being, not on an indefinite soul. With regard to the human soul, one can only speak of duration if it can remember the cause of its actions. And it knows itself to be gone if it remains as if from yesterday to today. Only those who have allowed themselves to call death a brother of sleep have grasped this in the right way. The will shrinks from re-embodiment. It says to itself: “Body and soul are one to me... They can never separate” (page 163). But he himself said before: ”What is so peculiar about this hand - or my facial features - or even my shape? Is it the substances that compose them? These atoms will be discarded in a few years and replaced by new ones. Several times already, my body has been rebuilt with completely new building blocks. I now ask, can such a metabolism affect my characteristic essence? Can this essence be the mere product of substances combining? No! The material composition is only an external representation of the deeper essence” (page 151, volume 2). Certainly: body and soul are one; but only at a particular time. Just as little as this contradicts their unity, which is emphasized by the fact that the atoms of matter are discarded after a few years and replaced by new ones: just as little does it contradict it when the “deeper being,” which discards its atoms of matter at death, surrounds itself with new ones again after a time. It will then be one with them again. When one sees as clearly as Bruno Wille, then only a hindrance can be invented that makes one shrink from re-embodiment, and this hindrance lies merely in the unfamiliarity of the idea. — Well, this hindrance will gradually fade away. Without the idea of re-embodiment, Bruno Wille's expositions are an organism without a head. — The minds of our time have only one thing to get used to. They must learn to perceive that which they are compelled to assume. If one says that the material composition is only the outer representation of the deeper being, then one must not limit oneself to characterizing only this material composition and its similar continuation in the “body of action”, but one must progress to pursuing the deeper being itself. But for this the mode of thinking is not sufficient, which, despite all higher impulses, remains attached to material processes. For this, higher soul powers must be awakened, which slumber in man under ordinary circumstances, and which must then be applied to supersensible facts just as surely and consistently as the natural scientist applies his to the sensory facts. We act in the spirit of natural science only when we confront the whole of reality with all the powers of knowledge within our reach, but not when we allow our knowledge to be limited by the prejudices of our current natural science. Only when we recognize the permanence of the cause in the human being, and know that this being finds itself in ever new embodiments, and that the deeds of the previous embodiments are the fate for the subsequent ones: then we think in the realm of the human soul life as we think today as confessors of the scientific world view already in relation to the facts of material transformations. The great laws of reincarnation (re-embodiment) and karma (the interweaving of fate through re-embodiments) are concepts in the spiritual realm that are completely in line with all our present-day scientific concepts. (An in-depth discussion of reincarnation and karma will soon be given in this journal).

Thus, it is necessary to awaken the soul abilities that lie dormant in ordinary life, which make it possible to perceive the “deeper being” that finds its “external representation” in the material composition. A recently published booklet by the English theosophist C.W. Leadbeater, translated into German by Günther Wagner, deals with this “deeper essence”: “The Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants, and Phenomena” (Leipzig, Th.Griebens Verlag, L.Fernau). It deals with the states that the “deeper being” of man undergoes when it is not externally represented in “material composition”, and with the things and beings that we get to know when we have awakened our dormant powers of perception to such states. I can already see in my mind's eye the sneer of all those who, in the arrogance of their “sober way of thinking,” look down mockingly on those who speak of an “astral world” and yet want to strictly adhere to a “scientific way of thinking.” For them it is clear that such a thing leads into the deepest abysses of superstition and obscurantism, which in their “enlightened” opinion dare to “cheerfully come out into the sunlight” again in our time, even though “sober thinking” has “come so gloriously far”. Well, today such uncomfortable “obscurants” have to console themselves with Voltaire's beautiful words: “Every new truth is like the ambassadors of civilized states at the courts of barbarians; they only find the recognition they deserve after many obstacles and insults.” — However, we should not be under any illusion: works such as Leadbeater's “Astral Plane” are difficult to understand at all within the currently prevailing modes of thought. They are misunderstood not only by those who dismiss them with a sneer as belonging to the realm of the darkest superstition, but often also by those who profess belief in them. Anyone who has no personal experience where the realm of sensory facts ends easily forms a completely false idea of the kind of reality that prevails in the regions Leadbeater speaks of. Where our sense organs receive no impressions, behind the threshold where gross material life ends, things look quite different from the way they do in our sensory world. But if an observer of supersensible realms wants to make himself understood, he has to speak in images taken from the sensory world. This is easily misinterpreted. People believe that the supersensible world really looks as the images taken from the sensory world, which the speaker must use, express it literally. Everything we know about the regions we are talking about here looks like the silhouettes of a real process on a wall. Leadbeater expresses this (page 4) clearly enough: “... it is easy to understand that an inexperienced visitor to this new world has great difficulty understanding what he sees in reality, and an even greater difficulty in expressing what he has seen in the very inadequate language of the ordinary world.” — Even greater obstacles stand in the way of proper understanding here, of course, if one wants to judge such things without having any inclination to engage at all with what is actually meant. In this case, our “sober” thinkers are those who proudly call themselves “enlightened.” In order to be constantly present, the deeper human being must be somewhere in the time when it is not present in “material composition”. Well, in this time it wanders through two regions of the world that do not belong to the sensual ones in the usual way. These are the so-called astral and devachan regions. Leadbeater's writing speaks of the former. These regions are always and everywhere present. We also live in them when our deeper being is represented in 'material composition'. They are just not sensually perceptible. Nevertheless, important things happen there that extend their effects into our sensory world. The mere sensual observer of the world can then only perceive these effects and knows nothing of their causes. But the one who has awakened the powers of knowledge for the processes in these regions in his “material” presentation hears these causes, and he alone can therefore find an explanation for the corresponding effects in the sense world. Certain higher insights are therefore only possible when these powers of knowledge are awakened, that is, for the one who can see into these regions. In Leadbeater's booklet, for example, there is an account of the communication between those initiated into higher knowledge — the so-called adepts — and their disciples. The results of such communication naturally extend into the sensory world. Those who have never heard of astral processes know nothing of the sources of such results. This applies especially to those who speak of the uselessness of supersensible research. A person must seek and investigate the world as much as possible if he wants to work in it. Otherwise he will grope in the dark in a world of effects whose causes remain incomprehensible to him. Those who are not concerned with the supersensible also do not understand the sensible; they know only a part of the full reality. It should also be emphasized here that Leadbeater's writing is not meant to tempt anyone to “swear by the master's words.” The author strongly objects to accepting the information as infallible dogma. Unconditional authority must be claimed least of all in these matters, especially when it comes to the characteristics of the individual observations. For, it must be frankly admitted, in these supersensible regions everyone brings with him his prepossessions from the sense world, and these affect and color his observations in a way that makes our illusions in the sense world seem quite insignificant by comparison. This goes so far that, for example, in the astral region one sees things that are not there at all and does not see other things that are there. No one has the right to speak specifically about individual exhibitions, because it may be your own fault if you cannot find something that someone else has seen. But what is there and has been observed can be talked about, even if someone else has not found it. Leadbeater's account, as he himself admits, cannot claim to be complete. His view is by no means unbiased. In his writing, one finds a preference for the state after death, while the phenomena before and during the birth of a human being have not been given the attention they deserve. Even if the former are perhaps closer to the interest of people, for the research and enlightenment of the supersensible phenomena, the highly interesting astral processes before and during the incarnation of a human being are incomparably more important. Likewise, Leadbeater leaves untouched an area in the astral region that corresponds to what we call “history” in our sensory field. For the astral region also has its history. For example, this “history” provides one of the reasons why the Theosophical movement emerged in the world in the last third of the nineteenth century. Only in the astral can the deeper reasons for this be found. Some of the complexities are presented by Leadbeater too simply and too clearly. Important insights into the connections between living beings that we can gain are completely missing. And what is said about the treatment of the so-called humors, the “fiery and watery temperaments” by medieval researchers (page 65), is incorrect. Every observer of these things in the supersensible region knows that important sources for the knowledge of what we call “temperament” are opened here. I need hardly say that I warmly recommend the writing to all who want to enter this field, although I could still greatly increase the list of what is missing. It is the clearest and, in some respects, best writing on this subject. (For my listeners in Berlin, I might mention that I will be giving a series of lectures on the “astral world” this fall. The time and place will be announced later.) — For us Germans, I would just like to add that we should finally replace the term “astral world” with another, since it is generally admitted that it is as misleading as possible.

What we are about to consider now is completely outside the scope of anthroposophical considerations. It is only indirectly related to it, and is intended to be a purely philosophical consideration. The direct connection is that it is often claimed that anthroposophical spiritual science cannot stand up in the forum of science, that it appears like pure dilettantism that a serious philosopher should not engage with. It will now be shown that it is not anthroposophy that is amateurish, but philosophy.

At present, philosophy is a wholly unsuitable instrument for elevating oneself to anthroposophy. Let us first orient ourselves in philosophy. Let us see how philosophy has developed historically. Then we want to subject the hereditary evil to a certain consideration. We want to show how philosophy today suffers from the fact that at a certain time all philosophical thinking became entangled in a spider's web, and is therefore incapable of gaining a broader perspective in relation to reality.

We must face the fact that all the history of philosophy begins with Thales. In more recent times, attempts have been made to extend philosophy backwards, that is, to go beyond Greek philosophy. People speak of Indian and Egyptian philosophy. Those who do not construct an arbitrary concept of philosophy say that an important period did indeed begin with Thales. If we ask what it is that intervenes in human evolution, what was not there before, we must say: it is conceptual thinking. It was not present before. This is characteristically different from everything that was there earlier. In the past, only what the seer had seen was said. In Plato, the gift of prophecy still predominates. The first conceptual thinker, whose system is no longer based on the old gift of prophecy, is Aristotle. In him we have the purely intellectual system. Everything else was preparation. The gift of living and thinking in pure concepts begins to find its most outstanding expression in Aristotle. It is no mere coincidence that Aristotle is called the “father of logic”. To the seer, logic is revealed at the same time as seeing. But to form concepts, one needed not only his logic, but also the fact that in the following period the revelations of Christianity were re-shaped into thought formations with Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian thinking spread both to the Arab cultural area in Asia, to Spain and to Western Europe, as well as to the south of Europe, where Christianity was influenced by Aristotelian thinking. Anyone observing the 7th to 9th centuries can see that Christian teachers, like anti-Christian elements, expressed their teachings in Aristotelian form, and this remained so until the 13th century.

We will see in a moment what the focus of Aristotelian thought is. In the middle of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas spread the so-called Thomistic philosophy; it is based on Christian revelation and Aristotelian logic. The Christian teachings were not taught in a strictly adhered form of thought, but it was intended to show that these teachings could also be defended in Aristotelian forms of thought, against the Arabs and their students, such as Averroes, who also thought in these forms of thought. They wanted to show how one could use the correctly understood Aristotle not for Arab teachings, but for Christianity. They wanted to refute the objections of the Arab thinkers; hence the zealous study of Thomas Aquinas. At that time, Aristotle dominated all of science, including, for example, medicine.

Now we have to characterize what the earlier scholasticism had of Aristotle. The thinking at that time was quite different from today's. If you compare it with what was done at that time, you have to say: in terms of content, life was poor then. The tremendous inventions were only made later. The essential thing about that time is the strictly trained thinking. Today people laugh at the strict definitions of scholasticism. But when you compare it to today's arbitrary understanding of all concepts, then you first feel the benefit of that view that there must be an understanding of the concepts. It takes a long time to define the concepts, but then you are working on solid ground.

In order to be able to orient ourselves further, we have to go into a few of Aristotle's concepts. He was a good interpreter for Christianity, even from the point of view of anthroposophy. A few concepts should show how sharply Aristotle thought. Aristotle distinguishes knowledge according to sense and intellect. The senses perceive this rose, this person, this stone. Then the intellect enters. It breaks down into an understanding of matter and form. All things contain matter and form. These two concepts take us a long way. Aristotle sees matter and form in every single natural thing that the senses perceive: consider a wolf. It eats nothing but lambs; then it consists of the same matter as the lambs, but a wolf will never become a lamb. What makes the two different is the form. We have the form of the lamb and the wolf. He identifies the underlying form with the genus lamb and the genus wolf. Aristotle makes a clear distinction between the genus and the generic concept. When we are confronted with a flock of lambs, we form the generic concept. What our concept determines in its form is an objective thing outside us, just as if we were to imagine the prototypes of the forms spreading invisibly throughout the world, spurting out the individual genera into which the indifferent matter is poured. Everything around us is based on the generic; for Aristotle, the material is indifferent.¹

With the scholastics, Albertus Magnus, we find what underlies the external entities. The earlier scholastic distinguishes universals before things, in things and after things. Albertus Magnus says about this: the universals before the thing are the thoughts of the divine entities. There we have the genus. These thoughts have flowed into the things. When man encounters things, he forms the universals according to the thing, which is the conceptual form. In this whole description of the development of thinking, there is only talk of sensible things. He identifies the outer sense with the “sense”. Everything else that is there is a concept to him. The generic concept is not identical to the genus. The whole thing is because people had lost the ancient gift of seeing, so that a philosophy could arise.

An old sage would not have understood at all how to make distinctions in this way, because he would have said: With the gift of prophecy, one can perceive the genus. It was only when the gift of prophecy dried up that the actual science emerged. It was only when man was left to his own devices that the necessity arose to develop a thinking art. Scholasticism arose under the influence of this important principle. In ancient times, the spiritual worlds were still accessible to man. Now the scholastics could refer all the more to Aristotle, because he spoke of the gift of prophecy: Ancient reports tell us that the stars are gods, but the human intellect can no longer make anything out of them. But we have no reason to doubt it.

Scholasticism replaced what was seen with revelation. It placed what was to be taught in the once inspired word. At first, humanity must become accustomed to developing the theory of thought in relation to external things. Where would it end if it were to roam into all possible supersensible things? We want to deny ourselves that; we want to educate ourselves in the things that are around us. So says Thomas Aquinas. When objects come to us, they are given to us for the senses. Then we are compelled to form concepts of them. Behind the things, divine powers rest, which we do not dare approach. We want to educate ourselves from thing to thing. Then, by strictly adhering to the sensual, we finally come to the highest concepts. So we adhered to two things: to the revealed teaching material, which is given in the scriptures, to which thinking does not approach. It has been taken over by the seers. Furthermore, they adhered to what was being worked out in the sensory reality. With this, we only just reach the Bible and Revelation. For a time, the higher world is withdrawn from human thought. But there is no final renunciation of the supersensible worlds. When man has conquered the sensual world, he can get a presentiment of the supersensible worlds. Man can free himself from the physical body and have revelation directly. But first the intellect must be trained. When the human being forms concepts about external things, these concepts depend on the human organization in form, but not in content. In scholastic epistemology, it is never considered that something unrecognized may remain. The objective enters into knowledge; only the form in which concepts are formed depends on the organization of the human mind.

This earlier scholasticism is called realism. It believed in the reality of content. Scholasticism then became nominalistic. People have lost touch with the objective external world. They said: the mind forms concepts; they are not real. The concepts became mere names; they were only abstractions. What is to be achieved with the concept is lost. Therefore, the nominalists had to say to themselves: Sensual reality is spreading before us. We summarize it as our minds will. Nothing real corresponds to our concepts. One must guard the actual revelation against human thinking and renounce all understanding. This view reached its climax in Zuther's saying that human reason is powerless, the deaf, blind, foolish fool who should not presume to approach the teaching material.

This is an important turning point. Luther condemns Aristotle. From this point on, the suggestion that gave birth to Kantianism goes. Kant was a Wolffian until the end of the sixties, like almost all philosophers at the time. Wolff taught: Reason is able to make something out about the supernatural worlds. He distinguishes between rational and empirical science. It is possible to gain a certain amount of human knowledge. The a posteriori knowledge has only relative validity.

[Gaps and deficiencies in the transcript. For a description of Wolff's philosophy, see the lecture of March 14, 1908 in this volume.]

At first, Kant also followed in Wolff's footsteps. Hume disturbed him. Hume developed skepticism. He said that no wall should be built between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. All knowledge is knowledge of habit; there is no rational knowledge. Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber. But he could not completely go along with it. He said: Hume is right; we gain everything from experience. Only mathematics is an exception; what it says has absolute validity. He therefore advocates two things. First, there are absolutely certain judgments a priori. Second, all knowledge must be gained from experience. But experience is governed by our judgments. We ourselves give laws to experience. Man confronts the world with his organization of thought. All experience is governed by our form of knowledge. Thus Kant linked Hume with Wolff.

Now man is ensnared in this philosophical web. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are exceptions. Individual natural scientists also follow this path. Helmholtz says: What man has before him is spun out of his organization. What we perceive of the thing is not even an image, but only a sign. The eye makes only perceptions on the surface. Man is completely ensnared in his subjectivity. The thing in itself remains unknown. – It had to be so. Nominalism has lost the spiritual behind the surface. The human interior has been enervated. The inner working becomes purely formal. If man wants to penetrate behind reality, his inner being gives him no answer. The whole of 19th-century philosophical thinking does not find its way out of this. Hartmann, for example, does not go beyond the idea. A simple comparison can clarify this. A seal contains the name Müller. Nothing, not even the smallest material thing, can come from the brass of the seal into the sealing wax. Consequently, nothing objective can come from the seal; the name Müller must form itself out of the sealing wax. The thinker is the sealing wax. Nothing passes from the object to the thinker. And yet the name Müller is in the sealing-wax. Thus we take the content out of the objective world, and yet it is the true content that we take out. If one takes only the material, it is true: nothing passes from the seal to the stamp and vice versa. But as soon as one sees the spirit, the higher principle, which can embrace the objective and the subjective, then the spirit passes in and out into the subjective and the objective. The spirit carries everything over from objectivity into subjectivity. The ego is objective and subjective in itself. Fichte showed that. -²

The entire epistemology of the 19th century resembles a dog chasing its own tail. You end up with: I have created everything. The world is my imagination. Everything has spurted out of my inner being. I also have the right to kill everything.

Kant uses very convoluted terms. Kant says: I have destroyed knowledge to make room for faith. He has limited knowledge and established a practical faith because everything is spun out of the subjective.

Kantianism is the last result of nominalism. Today the time for it has expired. Man must train his thinking again in reality in order to form real concepts; then we can recognize the supersensible truths again. The scholastic attitude is time-bound, the spiritual had to be withdrawn from thinking for a time. Now the revealed teaching material must again become teaching material to be examined. We must again examine everything with reason. It is a light with which one can penetrate everywhere. One can investigate, understand, grasp everything. Reason is the lowest form of clairvoyance, but it is a seeing, hearing, and intelligent power. Thus we extricate ourselves from the net. Philosophy must free itself from this net and allow itself to be fertilized by logic to achieve true thinking.

• 1. See note
• 2. The rest of the lecture was only recorded by the transcriber in fragmentary notes, as the following sentences show.

When speaking of the paths and goals of spiritual man, the question will arise again and again: Why should one think of going such special ways? Why are we being pointed to the fact that we should set ourselves such goals through spiritual science? - What we have to give as an answer must be transformed into feeling and sentiment for us. It has been pointed out time and again that forces lie dormant in the human being and in nature, striving to develop, which can be unfolded. In addition to the human being who sees and hears in the physical world, every human being has a higher human being within him. This is present as a kind of seed, germinating. Spiritual science brings this to our attention more and more urgently. It is a human being of whom ordinary consciousness does not know much.

We must be clear about the following: what we can see now is our ordinary everyday human being. But the one who slumbers in us, who is in us as a seed, is a spiritual human being. Whether this seed develops or not depends on our ordinary human being. We can prepare the ground with the powers of our ordinary self, but we can also leave it uncultivated and not take care of it. Then we fail in our duty to our spiritual self. Through spiritual science itself, through what it can give us as teachings and messages, we can prepare the ground for this higher self. If we transform this insight into feeling and sentiment, it will give us the answer to the question: Is it not a higher selfishness to occupy ourselves with ourselves in this way? — As long as we have not learned anything from spiritual science, it is our karma to wait. But once we have heard about the higher human being slumbering within us, it is our duty to do what can develop its powers in order to better fulfill our tasks in the world. We cannot speak of selfishness here, but only of our obligation to our spiritual self.

This is the right point of view for a Theosophist to take in relation to the outer life. Theosophy gives us a number of communications that have been obtained through spiritual research. However, not everyone who wants to live theosophy needs to be a spiritual researcher. The more we are able to follow the path of our inner development, the better. But before we ourselves can achieve results in the field of spiritual research, we must have its contents related to us by others. When we have presented the question to ourselves long enough, the outer life will confirm the communications of the spiritual researchers. If we have grasped these communications through sound logic, we are given the opportunity to ascend to higher worlds. Reason and logic are the surest guides for this.

The question may arise: How should we use these messages? How should we relate to them? — Let us take the truth that we call the law of karma. It states that in later lives on earth we find events that point back to previous incarnations. The more we apply such a law of spiritual research in life, the more we will see how true it is. Just as we never find a triangle in the sense world whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees, so the circumstances of life must always confirm what is recognized as a law in spiritual research. And if the karmic effects do not appear to us to be consistent, this will at most correspond to the slight deviation that may occur when measuring a circle with the help of the planimeter. The result may be 361 degrees one time and 359 the next, but that does not negate the law itself. Nor is the law of gravity overthrown because a push causes the plumb line of a falling machine to swing to the side. This only proves that a different result is achieved when a new force is added.

Spiritual research also shows how we encounter repetitions of previous periods of time within our lives between birth and death. For example, what we acquire between the ages of three and seven in our first childhood will come back to us in its karmic effect in our old age. If you examine how someone was allowed to spend their first childhood, you will discover a remarkable connection with those childhood years in their old age. If, instead of being subject to the external constraints of certain rules, he has developed healthy needs, his old age will take a different shape. In many cases, however, what is considered right is implanted and crammed into the child's soul. However, it is not what is implanted that matters, but that the child must have the need to do this or that of his own free will. It turns out that people can maintain their health in old age, that they retain freshness and inner strength until the last stage of their lives.

However, there are even more significant connections. From people's writing, you can learn a lot about how their past has shaped them.

During the age of seven to fourteen years, it is necessary that man not be educated to premature use of his reason. Authority must cause truth to appear to us as such. If we can admire the people who surround us during this period of our lives, it will serve us well in the penultimate stage of our lives. Devoutly looking up at natural wonders and being in the mood for prayer are beneficial factors for later on. Happy recognition of authority comes back, transformed in a way that makes it self-evident that such a person has authority. The devotion that children are able to develop during this period results in them becoming people who, without having to do anything, merely need to be in the company of others to have a blessing effect. The hand that has never been able to fold in devotion with the other will never be able to bless. Those who have never learned to bend their knees will never be able to bless. If you have penetrated such a law, you will find it confirmed. In this way, the effect of the law of karma can be seen in the course of a single human life. Thus, life everywhere provides us with evidence of a lawfulness that is effective in all fields.

Of course, circumstances can arise that conceal the law. In physics, for example, we know the law of gravity. Imagine an object that is moving through space at any given moment without support, completely left to its own devices. According to the law of gravity, this object will approach the earth with increasing speed until it hits the earth. The object will move in the direction of the center of the earth according to very definite laws; it will fall. Let us further imagine that the falling object is suddenly hit by a horizontally directed blow. The naive observer, who expects the object, falling vertically due to the law of gravity, to arrive at the relevant point on the earth, will in this case wait in vain. The object stays away. Does that mean that the law of fall is repealed? Not at all. Through the horizontally guided blow, only a new force has been added, and the object now moves under its effect in a curve that corresponds quite lawfully to the result of gravity and the later added force, towards the earth. At the point where the object hits the ground under these circumstances, its fall will be seen by any observer as something quite random and unpredictable. But this is not the case. The lawfulness is complete and incorruptible.

The same applies in full to the law of karma, although we can rarely follow it in all its composite and intricate effects. That is why man is always inclined to doubt his karma. But however confused we may be by the outer Maja, we should only let ourselves be guided by what has become law in our soul. Many who wish to develop the powers of the spirit within themselves will not find it easy, for the physical life is always intruding. There but for the grace of something in our existence, how easily we are carried away by wrong judgment, for instance, to insults, without thinking of the consequences of our actions. We strike a blow at a person and do not know that we have raised our hand against ourselves, because this blow will strike us again in our own hour. The law of karma is at work everywhere. Everything that happens to us in life happens under the law of karma. But merely considering this law as a doctrine, as a theory, does not make us theosophists.

There are two feelings that we must acquire if we want to work on our spiritual development. On the one hand, we must say to ourselves: There is nothing about us that can be perfected, nowhere is there a limit to our ascent. At every moment, the feeling of imperfection should urge us to climb higher and higher on the ladder of perfection, which knows no highest rung. We must keep reminding ourselves of this, otherwise we will not make any progress in our work on our spiritual self. On the other hand, we should say to ourselves: a second step is necessary. In every moment we must feel that there is an infinite possibility for perfection within us. We must make our hidden self as great as possible. This is an apparent contradiction, and the human being must feel it as such. Between these two points, the feeling of one's own imperfection and the striving to make the hidden self as great as possible, development is included.

The one who strives as a mystic, who descends into his own inner being, who wants to advance through an inner deepening, must pass through the first point. He must acquire humility. The best rule a mystic can set for himself is this: to think of everything that arises within him as imperfect as possible, to detach himself completely from his own personality. For anyone who enters into his own inner being must be prepared to experience terrible things. Stories of tragic experiences take place in the inner world of the person who dares to venture into the depths of his own being. A Tauler, a Eckhart, a Paulus can tell of it. And how was the help that these sought against the dangers? Paul says: Not I, but the Christ in me wants to act. Take with you the Master, the Ideal, but feel with it that the ego must be driven out. Not from your own ego should all feeling, all willing, all thinking be done. Your unworthy ego had to be driven out. This feeling is very similar to the sense of shame in the ordinary man. Wanting to be another, wanting to organize another into your own soul, that is the way of mysticism.

And what belongs to the path of occultism? The path of the occultists leads into the outer world. If a person wants to follow the occult path, he must live in such a way that he gradually learns to bear the higher world when he has left his body during sleep. He must develop a feeling for perfecting himself in the Infinite. But here too a danger lies in wait for him, as it does for the mystic when he descends into his own inner being. We have been permitted to mention the dangers that beset the mystic; the mystic himself reports about them. The dangers that beset the occultist are not mentioned. Each one must acquaint himself with this danger.

When we look into our own inner being, it would be bad if we had not learned to feel ourselves as a unity that is poured out over our entire being. This ability to hold on to a unity is disrupted by every passion that overcomes us. Anger, envy, hatred destroy our power to focus on unity. And worst of all is when we have not learned to concentrate, when we are driven hither and thither. Firm and uninfluenced, we must learn to feel as one.

But if we, as occultists, seek the way into the outer world, we must eliminate our personality, as it has just been characterized. Here one must not seek a unity underlying the whole outer world. For when we turn to the spiritual world, we encounter an infinite variety of beings and conditions. If the occultist were to attempt to penetrate the unity that underlies the entire manifested world, he would perish. Imagine a drop of red liquid being poured into a large basin of water. Liquid as the drop is, it would immediately dissolve in the mass of water, it would melt away. This is what happens to the unstable ego when it wants to enter the world of the All-One. We dare not venture to penetrate there alone, for we will lose ourselves as the red drop loses itself in the mass of water. If we want to enter the astral realm, we are pointed to a multiplicity. We must ask about the multiplicity, from the beings who stand higher than we do, from those who have themselves gradually gone through a higher development, from the hierarchies of that world. We must not want to skip anything, for it would be presumptuous to want to go straight to the highest. We must gradually learn to study with the help of the higher beings if we want to grasp the unity. The arrogance of wanting to reach the highest level will surely lead to failure. We must not let ourselves be tempted by our monotheistic ideas into believing that when the veil that separates us from the spiritual world slides aside, we will see only a single divine oneness. It is the multiplicity that we look into, and it is on the multiplicity that we must focus our gaze.

But how are we to find our way? Pythagoras said: “Seek not the manifold with your eyes, ears and senses, seek it through number!” Equipped with number, we are to approach the manifold. Just as the mystic must pour the ideal of higher perfection into his inner being, so the occultist must appeal to number. And here one quality is absolutely essential, namely certainty. We must feel secure. For if man wavers, what is he? A will-o'-the-wisp, a flickering light, and the world is a labyrinth. We need an Ariadne's thread to find our way back. The number makes us firm, we must keep it in mind. If you want to enter the spiritual world, you have to step out of yourself, you have to enter the chaos of the many first. How do we find this factor? Where is the organizing principle? We find it through the number, through the lawfulness of the number. We have to penetrate into the essence of the number and get to know its real value. The number alone can become our guide in the labyrinth. The number can teach us a great deal, and certain numbers are based on profound secrets.

Take the number two, for example. Everything that comes into being manifests itself in twos. There is no right without left, no light without darkness. Everything that manifests itself outwardly is subject to the number two. The number two is the number of revelation, the number of manifestation.

The number three is the number of the conformity to law of the soul: thinking, feeling and willing. Insofar as something is organized and structured in the soul, it is subject to the number three. Where the number three reveals itself as a conformity to law, something soul-like underlies it. We can find the number three in countless relationships. In the three logoi we have the three fundamental powers, which point back to something divinely soul-impregnated.

In relation to all that is temporal, the number seven applies: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, which denote the seven successive states of evolution.

Where we see something interacting simultaneously, we get the number twelve: the twelve gods, the twelve apostles, and so on. The reduction of the fixed stars to the twelve signs of the zodiac is also connected with this. The number twelve teaches us yet another law. Let us think of materialism. Is materialism wrong? It does not have to be, as long as man does not carry it into the soul. If one wants to be a materialist, then one must pay homage to vitalism, then one learns to understand material life. But one must choose a different point of view for the soul and for the spiritual. If we want to understand the world in its fullness, then we must be able to place ourselves in different points of view. We must take the practical spiritual path.

Now one may well hear a person express the principle: You must make a certain system for yourself if you want to penetrate into the higher worlds. But that is the worst way to go. Instead, one should first step out of one's own personality: from the center that this personality occupies in its existence, to the horizon of our physical existence. Only here in the horizon should we place ourselves on a certain point of view, first the materialistic one, and look at it from the inside out, from the one point of view through which, as already mentioned, we get to know the material life. Only then can we walk around the horizon and choose twelve different points of view. This is the only way that can lead to real knowledge. The practical occultist must become very selfless before he can walk around the horizon in a circle. By having to forget his personal self twelve times, he maintains uniformity in both the external and the internal.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

In the order of the talks on the relation of the universities to the theosophical movement it is the fourth about theosophy and its relation to the arts faculty (in Germany: faculty of philosophy). We have to consider the fact that this is possibly of more significance to our education and culture than the three other faculties, because the arts faculty encloses the scientific disciplines which extend about the whole field of research. That is why somebody who wants to become engrossed in wisdom and world view without certain trend simply for the sake of knowledge and education has to direct his looks at it. The arts faculty has experienced big changes; however, it has grown out of an educational institution to a sophisticating one. It was once the arts faculty a very typical name that had to prepare for the study of theology, philosophy, and medicine.

You know that the university originated in the 12th and 13th centuries, and we can still observe up to the 18th century how somebody who wanted to climb up to the heights by studying had to go through a philosophical preparatory study. This was arranged in such a way that one did not aim at any certain professional education, but at a formal education which should form the spiritual training of a human being in a formal way. Among other things, rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy and music were taught. The latter was understood as an understanding of the harmonies in the universe and in the smaller phenomena which surround us. One appreciated it to make only the mind ripe. The feature of our time is to set little store by the formal education.

Besides, I must touch something that looks very heretical in our time. Today a big tendency exists to underestimate everything formal compared with the material. One makes a point conceiving the matters rationally, bundling together as much knowledge as possible. Who looks at the matters in such a way as it is usual today, does not understand me. Who would not side immediately if anybody said the following: there are two methods to learn languages. A method, which is regarded as ridiculous, is that by which the human being is tormented with pointless exercises, as such as: today, my father has become fifty years old. Tomorrow, my aunt travels to Paris. One smiles at such things and it is still the question whether one has any cause of it.

One thinks today that one could better take sentences from any great classic. Thus it has come to avoid such banal sentences at school; one prefers sentences of the classics who are then shredded and analysed and become thereby unenjoyable for the pupil. On one side, we find the pointless, on the other side, the picking to pieces. There one hardly finds anybody today who sides the first way. Nevertheless, it is for the psychologist no question that the first way is the right one. He is clear in his mind that the human being must remain at the formal very long, that his reason is invoked very late, and that we learn best of all if the things leave us very uninterested as regards contents. During the years in which the mind is most receptive, one has to develop it rightly at first. We have to learn to talk fairly, before our thoughts are transformed with it; one lets the reason mature in the subsoil, lets it develop the ability of logic formally, then this precious good of humankind slowly matures. It is clear that nobody can apply his reason to a problem without further ado. So at first formal education, before that matures which can appear as the best fruit in the human being.

The faculty of philosophy was called arts faculty in the Middle Ages. It was an artistic mastery of the mental material, and it contained an overwhelming quantity of thoughts. Later on, the lower subjects of the arts faculty were assigned for the high school. The modern arts faculty is unworthy of its name; it is an aggregate.

This is not always the case. The philosopher Fichte (1762–1814) headed the Berlin university when it was founded (1810). At that time, any single scientific discipline was integrated into a big organism. Fichte was convinced that the world is a unity, and that any knowledge is a patchwork that is not steeped in it. Why does one study botany, mathematics, history, for example? We study these sciences because we want to obtain an insight into the construction of the universe. In other times, the penetration in the scientific disciplines would not have been so fateful. But the picture of the unity of the world has disappeared. The arts faculty should pursue science on its own sake. It did this once, but thereby it has collided with the cultural life. Already Friedrich Schiller spoke in a talk at the Jena university of the difference between the philosophical head and the bread-and-butter scholar. At that time, it was not yet so bad. Who is a philosophical head can study everything; the biggest points of view present themselves to him from every science. He sees the biggest world secrets in the plant as the psychologist realises them in the human soul. Specialisation had to take place. We know too much today to master everything. Great spirits like Leibniz, Leonardo da Vinci and others could control the knowledge of their times. This is rare today. We can only hope that the scientific disciplines get new life. However, to the bread-and-butter scholar science is nothing but a cow that gives him milk.

One would object nothing if professional schools were established for studies that provide well-paid jobs. However, this has no other value than learning any other trade. From the point of view of world knowledge it is quite irrelevant whether I become a shoemaker or a chemist. The consciousness should become general that the professional study is not more valuable than any other study in life. The chemist, botanist et etcetera is compared with the great philosopher in the same position as the businessman. Who realises, however, what it means to acquire philosophical education knows that there must be sites where one pursues science for its own sake. In this respect, it is not good that the university split up into scientific disciplines, in particular in a time in which materialism has seized everything. Nowadays, the arts faculty is nothing else than a preparatory site for the grammar school teacher. Actually nothing at all would objected if philosophy devoted itself to the task to train educated teachers. Training the human soul belongs to the highest tasks of life. However, only someone can solve them who is an artist of psychology and can undertake the task to guide the souls. The human being was called a microcosm by the great spirits of the world not without reason. There is no branch of knowledge that one could not use to train a human soul. Hence, the pedagogues do not want to cram the young human being with knowledge only, and he will get to the formal quite naturally. Science takes a particular position if one looks at it as a pedagogue. If anyone studies painting or music, he is not yet a painter or a musician. That also applies to the pedagogue. All knowledge is nothing to the pedagogue if it has not proceeded to art as with the painter or musician, so that his mind, like physical organs, has immediately absorbed what he knows, so that knowledge is, as it were, completely digested. The human soul should be an organism in which the soul food is transformed, is assimilated. Only then the human being is a philosophical spirit. It is right that the universities teach the scientific disciplines. However, another human being should arise from them, a human being who has become an artist.

If one really applies the theosophical way of thinking there, it does not depend on scientific exams. As well as anyone does not own the quality of an artist who has only scholarship, also anyone does also never become an artist who has passed the necessary exams only. The problem of examinations must also be seen in a new light. The examiner has not only to examine knowledge, but also which kind of human being the examinee is, whether he has the right philosophy of life, how much of it he has made his own, to which extent he has become a new human being. This has gone unregarded in our materialistic age. When the external appearance to the senses became decisive, the modern arts faculty originated. All the other sciences originated from philosophy. Once one had the consciousness of the connection of all knowledge; but if one does not brand the Middle Ages as heretical, one does rouse prejudices. However, in those days one felt on what it depended for the world and for the human beings.

In 1388, a person was appointed professor of theology and of mathematics in Vienna. Today, a professor would faint about that. However, we know that mathematical thinking can serve well for that where to theology leads us. Who learns to think in the way that he exercises some mathematics, learns to think quite differently, can also be a mystic without becoming a romanticist. Who has not acquired a comprehensive knowledge, can abandon himself only to a suggestion. With this he enters in a professional study. What can he know if he has experienced a purely philosophical higher education, what can he know about mathematics? Only mathematical concepts, having no inkling of the fact that mathematics introduces in the great principles of the universe.

It is not long ago when one still knew this. In the Middle Ages, this view was not dangerous, because it is not true that the iron theology of the Middle Ages put everybody in irons. The best proof is that at the Paris university one argued, for example, about such subject like: The Speeches of Theology Are Founded on Fables or The Christian Religion Prevents from Adding Something Superficial to Theology. It was possible at that time to argue about these subjects. One argues differently today. Once arguing was fertile because one had acquired formal education. Today one can prove errors in reasoning very easily. But any arguing that is based on errors in reasoning is infertile because one is not clear in his mind that someone who argues has only to understand the technique of arguing. In the Middle Ages, mathematics was regarded as the basis of any knowledge, even of art. There could be the great idealism of which our time cannot have any idea. A typical remark by Leonardo da Vinci (1459–1519), this representative of the great idealism, is that the mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences. He was an artist and mathematician at the same time. The physical education of his time lived in his soul. The way of thinking and the knowledge of his time also speak to us from his paintings. He called the external world the paradise of mathematics! Where he built bridges, thoughts about the spirit of humankind flowed to him... [Gap].

The “sacrifice of the world” means theosophically: the less someone acts for himself, the more he is capable to put something of himself into the culture of his time. It is not so important what we develop from ourselves, as what we implant in the world. Not what we perfect in ourselves, but what we give to the world is the pledge and the pound which is imperishable. Leonardo da Vinci got thoughts about the spirit of humankind as thoughts of mathematics from bridge building. The gods want free beings, they do not want a thing in nature. What the human being creates consciously in the world is an execution of the divine world plan. Something common can become something sacred if it is for the benefit of humankind. If we take this point of view, we have taken up the great idealism in ourselves, and this idealism would have to flow through the whole arts faculty. Within the frame of our arts faculty all scientific disciplines can be probably placed. But it had to be the headquarters of the world view as a core in the centre instead of taking the second place behind the single scientific disciplines.

With the help of this central philosophical science we would come to the artistic view. Only that should receive the doctorate who has absorbed this central attitude of having life in himself. The last exam of the philosopher would have to be an examination of his life forms; the only honorary title of the philosophical doctor would have to be founded on the fact that in the human being the life contents of this life form is included. Otherwise, the philosophical doctor is an arabesque, a pretension, a social form. Not only knowledge belongs to the philosophical doctor, but a knowledge transformed into art of living. One already had such consciousness. Thus a philosophical doctor will have only the maturity as it is commensurate with the philosophical head. A large dissemination of theosophy would bring it about by itself, for it wants to develop the forces that slumber in the human being. The theosophist is aware that the human being is capable of development that like the child must develop also mind and soul are capable to develop to higher stages. The human being is not yet complete when he leaves the high school and the universities. Theosophy asserts more and more that the human being is only in the beginning of his development. The arts faculty should have the greatest say. It should develop from the mathematical attitude into a spiritual direction; everything should run up to this point. Theosophy is not so difficult. It would be bound to occur that if there were a theosophical faculty all sciences would become theosophical in the end.

Physiology is the science of the phenomena in plants, animals and human beings. If in physiology the equipment of the eye is considered et etcetera, these are pictures to take the knowledge that the human being sees. Physiology teaches us that basically all our sense impressions depend on our senses; it teaches the subjective. In the end, it says that we know nothing about that which is beyond our sense impressions. If we consider this, and do not remain unthinking, but keep on investigating spiritually, we get exactly to the same teachings which occultism gives us that everything sensory is illusion and that the theory of sense energy, theosophically treated, leads into big depths. One needs physiology; one must study it and then top it with philosophy. One has no other choice. The philosophy in the arts faculty is only a piece. It does no longer have any strength; it is a discipline like other disciplines. This should not be; it had to give the strength to the other disciplines. Instead of this, it has received for its part the colouring from single professional disciplines.

The fact that one thinks substantially materially results from the fact that philosophy and the great world view do not have the saying, but rather psychology, which came from other disciplines, has become an experimental science. If one believes that psychology is done precisely only if one experiments around with the human being like with an unliving crystal, one considers the human being as something that has neither life nor soul. Psychology can recognise nothing but the material expression. Theosophy would realise that the studies of physiology and psychology are one and the same in certain way and would integrate both into the big framework of knowledge. The modern universities cannot do that and, therefore, they cannot carry any idealistic world view into the world. The arts faculty is not able to be the standard bearer of a philosophical attitude. The faculty should not be an aggregate of the various disciplines, but allow them to grow together to a common soul. Then it is taught theosophically without transplanting theosophy to the universities. Otherwise, the arts faculty remains an aggregate without spiritual bond. Knowledge should become a living whole from whose single parts the spirit shines. It satisfies us as theosophists if the prerogative belongs only to this philosophical study and if it develops on this basis. Then it is well rescued in theosophy. We want only what everybody wants for the welfare of the single sciences. Should theosophy fulfil its task, it must not be a doctrine but life. We have to be theosophists with every step, we have to impregnate everything that we do in life with this living theosophical attitude. Then the theosophical movement is more; it is like one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. However, it has to win influence on those who are selected to lead our culture. We have to confess and represent theosophy where we want to work in life. The world process is not anything dead, but something living. The beings and not the relations cause the development of the human mind. If theosophy is a world of the spirit, then theosophy is one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. It does not depend on the reading of theosophical writings, but on the attitude so that the human being is seized in the everyday life.

In our consideration the day before yesterday, we arrived at the conclusion that the Gospel of John contains many great aspects. Today we want to talk about the relationship between man and the world that surrounds us here on this earth. Man usually sees himself as a much too simple being. In reality, however, he is a very complicated entity. One of the characteristics of the modern human being is their laziness, which extends to our way of thinking. The truth is simple only for those who have first made their way through the complexity. It is like a thread with many, many pearls strung on it.

From the public lectures, we have already seen how man is related to the cosmos that surrounds him, to the earthly nature that surrounds him. Through his physical body, he is related to the mineral, so-called inanimate world; through his etheric body, to the whole world of plants, to vegetation; and through his astral body, to all animal beings. It is only through self-awareness that he rises above the other three realms. Without a thorough understanding of this development, and without understanding what an initiation or awakening is, we cannot penetrate the depths of the Gospel of John.

Consider the three kingdoms of nature around us. The crystal has no self-consciousness, no ego in the physical world. This assertion is based on clear insights that come from occult research. But only here on this earth do the stone, the plant, and the animal have no self-consciousness. The question arises: are they not conscious? How this is to be understood can only become clear to us through occult study. Let us start with the consciousness of the human being. The nature of the human being in his fourfold nature is based on the fact that he has his consciousness in this physical world, that he has his four members in this world. Let us make this clear with a diagram:

The animal has its three bodies here, its I in the astral world; therefore the animal has no individual soul, but a group soul. If you look at a person's ten fingers, they are all animated, but not independent - they are only one part of the whole body. Just as we have to search for the ego of the fingers within us, so we have to go up into the astral world to find the common soul of the animals. The individual lions are members of the Lion-I, the Lion-Soul. All lions are connected in the astral, a thread goes from each of them into the astral world, where the ego is.

For the materialist this is incredible; but the spiritual researcher must say: it is true! One can ascribe exactly the same evolution to the group soul of animals as to the human ego in the physical world. When we follow groups of animals on the astral plane, we see their development taking place there in the same way as that of human beings on the physical plane as individuals.

The plant has its astral body in the astral world, its physical and etheric body in the physical world and its I in the lower devachan. But what is the entity of such a group of plants? Similar plants have their I, their group soul in the devachan. A human being in dreamless sleep is in exactly the same situation as a plant throughout its entire life. The entire plant world on earth is a sleeping being; the plant leads a dream life.

Let us consider the sleeping human being: the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed, the astral body is on the astral plane and the I in dreamless sleep in Devachan. Let us now turn to the mineral. Its physical body is in the physical world, its etheric body in the astral world, its astral body in Rupa-Devachan, and the I at the very top in Arupa-Devachan.

Lower Devachan, Rupa: the world of spiritual forms
Upper Devachan, Arupa: the world that has not yet been formed.

The mineral thinks, feels and wills like a human being, not on the physical plane, but in Devachan. It extends only its inanimate parts into the physical world. The mineral's relationship to its soul is the same as a human being's relationship to its nails and bones to its self. An insect crawling over a finger nail and mistaking it for inanimate because it does not see the whole individual, would be comparable to a person mistaking a crystal for inanimate. The crystal is therefore an object that belongs to a being that reaches up into the spiritual world; so is the connection of its physical appearance with the spiritual world.

Man has his four essential elements on the physical plane. What is physical in man remains a physical body, but in Devachan it has a consciousness of its own, of which man knows nothing, though it haunts his limbs. The etheric body has a different consciousness, which is realized in the lower devachan. Finally, the astral body also has its own consciousness on the astral plane. So man is a very complicated being. The following scheme may serve as an explanation:

Upper Devachan: physical body
Lower Devachan: etheric body
Astral plane: astral body
Physical plane: self.

His ego is at home in the physical world; no one can dispute that. Furthermore, that part of his astral body lives in man and belongs to him, which has an unconscious consciousness and is at home on the astral plane. Furthermore, an unconscious consciousness of the etheric body exists on the lower devachan plan, and one of the ego in the upper devachan plan. The most important thing now is that the human being works from the ego into the other bodies, and that only through this does he become aware of the different consciousnesses.

There is a peculiar connection between man and the different worlds, which is a most important mystery. If one learns to recognize this, then one gradually knows what an initiation is. When man works from his I into his astral body, then he rises up to the astral plane and becomes a companion of all astral beings. Everything that has an astral consciousness is around him. When he works with his I into his etheric body, then he rises at the same time into the lower parts of Devachan; then etheric beings emerge around him. This is a great and powerful moment: he sees light not only as light, but as the bearer of light-filled entities; with the physical rays of the sun, angelic beings approach that have light as their body. This is one result of initiation.

When a person ascends or descends even higher, let us remember the words of Goethe:

”It is all one..."

- then the moment has come when he first becomes one with the world's forefather. Then he can say: ‘I and the Father are one.’ Then entities emerge that are even higher than those described. Now imagine a personality who is so highly initiated that he consciously bears the nature of the higher beings in his own body, as John experienced with Christ Jesus. In the one Christ Jesus, the author of the Gospel of John sees the beings of the three worlds. And he has Philip say to Nathanael (John 1:45-51):

"We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.

And Nathanael said to him, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’

Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and said of him: Behold, a true Israelite (that is, an initiate of the fifth degree), in whom there is no guile.

Nathanael said to him: How do you know me? Jesus answered and said to him: Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.

Being under the tree is the occult expression for initiation, the secret of multiplying and expanding consciousness. Only now does Nathanael reply:

“Master, You are the Son of God” - thus an even higher initiate - “and a king in Israel.

Jesus answered and said to him, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that.

And He said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, from now on you shall see the sky open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’

That means: to see that which permeates his four consciousnesses. Man becomes a ladder on which one can see the angels of God ascending and descending. In this physical world, too, there are higher beings than man. Man used to have a group soul on the astral plane before he descended to the physical plane, at the time when the “blood Rubicon” had not yet been crossed. The entire tribe lived in this group soul. Likewise, the animal group souls will later descend and individualize. Here we touch on a great mystery, which belongs to the seven secrets that are called the unspeakable.

One of these secrets is the secret of numbers. It is true that whole groups of people had one soul. The secret is: From the One it flows and becomes a number: numerous like the grains of an ear of corn. When such a group soul descends, the same thing happens as with a seed: a grain is placed in the earth, and from it arises the ear of corn with many grains.

But everything in the world exists only once in a certain way. So this humanity, as it is now, is also only here once. Nothing in the world repeats itself in the same way. In the group souls of animals, we see some that will later become individual souls, but under very different circumstances than humans, in a very different nature. Are there also souls that have already been individual souls and then ascended to the astral plane again and became group souls? Yes, there are such souls. They arise when a number of people come together cosmically around an initiate and become like the members of a common body. Initiates thus become folk souls. Thus the Jewish people, the chosen people, had a common soul that united the individuals, which was once human and had ascended again and become the folk soul. In the bosom of Father Abraham it could rest.

Now imagine that a person undergoing initiation goes through his development more quickly. He then goes the same way as that folk soul as an individual soul: He becomes a group soul. The individual is absorbed in such an expanded consciousness. In truth, as an initiate, he has the cosmic value of an entire folk soul. You can still see this in the old terms. This stage of development was called by the name of the whole people, for example, Israelites.

In the Persian Mithras initiation, seven levels were distinguished. The initiate of the first degree bore the name of the raven. He is the messenger between the physical and the astral world. The symbol of the raven has been attributed significance since the most ancient times. In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah was provided for by the ravens. Ravens are the messengers of Wotan, who fly over the world every day and report to him what they have perceived. The Kyffhäuser mountain, where Barbarossa slumbers, is also circled by ravens, which are supposed to give him news when the hour of awakening has come.

The second degree is that of the Occult. This may already live in the inner sanctuary.

The initiate of the third degree, the warrior, may represent the occult wisdom he has absorbed in the world. Such a warrior is Lohengrin. This degree is alluded to in Mabel Collins' book “Light on the Path”.

The fourth degree is that of the Lion. This is the designation for an initiate who has ascended with his consciousness to the tribal soul. Hence the expression: Lion of the tribe of Judah.

In the initiate of the fifth degree, the consciousness of the people itself has awakened. He bears the name of his people; in the Mithras initiation, he is called the Persian.

The initiate of the sixth degree is the solar hero. He can deviate from his path no more than the sun itself.

The seventh degree is that of the Father. It is the union with the original spirit.

Thus the “Persian” bears the name of the entire nation; his individual soul becomes a national soul. The image that this level of initiation expresses is sitting under the tree. You will find this expression everywhere in the occult language. For example, Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree. The tree comes from the one seed and has become many. Such is the process with the initiate; he has gained the ability to empathize with every single soul. So how would such a person have been called by the Israelites? “Israelite,” of course. As we have seen, Jesus recognizes Nathanael as an initiate of the fifth degree, as one who has attained a national consciousness. Nathaniel recognizes in Christ the higher initiate: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.” Christ is an initiate of the seventh degree, who has expanded his consciousness to include the Father: “I (or the I-Am) and the Father (or the Divine) are one.” He is the life and light of men, for he has brought his high consciousness into the physical body.

Some will think that such an interpretation is being spun into the gospel. Many, and mostly today's theologians, believe that the Bible should be interpreted “simply,” which actually means conveniently. But the gospel is not written in the usual way and for people who are accustomed to reading a book only once and then putting it down again. The Gospel was written for a time when the content was a book of life that was read again and again. It must be read and received in this way, because only then will one learn to recognize that each of these great truths contains an even greater truth, and that even the wisest never stop learning in the knowledge of the religious scriptures and in their full understanding. In the past, these writings were approached by learning a sentence; afterwards, one allowed it to live in the soul over and over again, and if one then had the good fortune, the rare opportunity to meet an initiate, one allowed him to explain it. For religious documents, and especially the Gospel of John, are written from the depth of wisdom, and therefore cannot be grasped deeply enough. But wisdom is not there for the comfortable. Wisdom is there for those who seek and search.

The person to be initiated undergoes the first five stages of initiation while ascending or descending the astral plane. This is completely irrelevant, because the Hermetic saying applies here: “Everything above is as below.” Everything in the spiritual has its counterpart in the physical. If you ascend to the astral plane, you will find yourself in a national soul, for this lives on the astral plane.

The sixth stage means as much as the other five combined: here the human being ascends in his etheric body and brings about its development. One nation always arises out of another through the astral body becoming different; astral entities are always to be found behind the national soul. But the etheric body of humanity and that of the individual remains unchanged from nation to nation; a new etheric body only arises with the ascent from race to race. Even the physical body is subject to change. The ancient Atlanteans had a very different physical body, and the first Lemurians had no real physical body at all. The solar hero encompasses in his consciousness an entire human race like individual atoms. He grasps the whole race with his consciousness. The seventh stage, the Father Initiation, leads beyond the race to all mankind on earth, to all peoples and races of the whole planet. Christ Jesus is the representative of this; he carries all mankind within himself. That is why in the Gospel of John humanity is called the bride, and the initiated Son of Man is called the bridegroom. Christ Jesus is the one who, in the essence, encompasses the consciousness of all humanity. This brings us to where we left off from the previous lecture when we were considering the wedding at Cana.

Yesterday I told you how the great Initiate selected from the primal Semites, who were living in the neighbourhood of Ireland, a group of people whom he led towards the East and settled there. There Manu trained the chosen men to be the progenitors of the new civilisations. He taught them and gave them directions for a moral way of life, with everything laid down in the minutest detail. He taught them how to distribute their time and how to arrange their work from morning till evening. But even more than by his precepts he educated them by direct influence and by his thoughts. When he sent out his thoughts into the colony, his ideas and precepts acted by direct suggestion. This was the sort of influence needed by the men of that time for their training and re-moulding.

The following episode brings out the difference between the whole outlook of the Atlantean race and that of the new Root-race; it occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. European colonists had induced some Red Indians—in whom we have to see the descendants of Atlanteans who had failed to make headway and had then become retrograde—to relinquish their lands on condition that new hunting-grounds were allotted to them. But the promise had not been kept and the Indian Chief could not understand this. Hence he addressed the Europeans as follows: “You pale-faces promised us that your Chief would give our brothers other lands in place of those you have taken from us. Your feet are now on our land and you are walking over the graves of our brothers. The White Man has not kept the promise he made to the Brown Man. You Pale-faces have your black instruments with all kinds of little magic signs”—he meant their books—“from which you learn the will of your God. Your's must be a bad God if he does not teach his people to keep their word. The Brown-man's God is not like that; the Brown-man hears the thunder and sees the lightning and this language he can understand; his God speaks to him in this language. He hears the rustling of the leaves and trees in the woods, and in them also his God speaks to him. He hears the water rippling in the brook, and the Brown-man can understand that speech also. He knows when a storm is brewing. Everywhere he can hear his God speaking, and the lesson his God teaches is very different from what your magical black signs say to you.”

This is really a very significant speech, for it contains a sort of confession of faith. The Atlantean did not raise himself to his God through concepts and ideas. He discerned something holy in nature as a keynote of the Divine; it was as though he breathed in and breathed out his God. If he wished to express what he heard in this way, he would embody it in a sound similar to the Chinese T-A-O. For the Atlantean this was the sound which pervaded the whole of nature. When he touched a leaf, or saw a flash of lightning, he was aware that part of the Godhead was displayed before him; it was as if he were touching the garment of the Divine. Just as we make contact with some element in a man's soul when we shake hands with him, so the Atlantean, when he took hold of a form in nature, felt that he was touching the body of the Godhead. He lived in a religious feeling quite different from our own. The Atlantean, too, was still clairvoyant and was thus in direct communication with the world of spirits.

But then the type of thinking associated with logic and mathematical calculation began to develop, and the more it did so, the more did clairvoyance fade away. People began to concern themselves more with what the senses could perceive externally, and so nature was increasingly divested of divinity. People acquired a new gift at the cost of an old one. In proportion as they achieved the gift of exact sense-observation, they ceased to understand nature as the body of the Godhead. Gradually they came to see before them only the body of the world, and not its soul. But as the result of this a yearning for the Divine arose once more in man. In his heart it was written: Behind nature there must be God. And he came to realise that he must seek for God with his spirit. That is in fact the meaning of the word ‘religion’: to try to re-establish a connection with the Godhead; religere means to re-unite.

Now there are various ways of finding the Godhead. The Indians, who were the first sub-race of the Aryan race, took the following way. Certain God-inspired messengers of Manu, called the holy Rishis, became the teachers of the ancient Indian culture. No poetry or tradition tells us about this it is known only through what has been handed down orally in the occult schools. Poems such as the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, wonderful as they are, are of much later origin. The ancient Indian felt in his heart that external nature as he saw it was unreal, and that behind it the Godhead was concealed. The name he gave to this Godhead was Brahman, the hidden God. The whole external world was thus for him an illusion, deception, Maya. Whereas the Atlantean could still discern the Godhead in every leaf, the Indian said: “The Godhead is no longer apparent in the outer world. I must sink into my inner being and seek for Him in my heart; I must follow after Him towards a higher spiritual condition.” In every approach to the Godhead there was still a dreamlike element. The Indian could find no Divinity in nature; it was in great and powerful thought-pictures, in visions and imaginations that the world of Brahman revealed itself to him. Yoga was the name of the training he had to undergo in order to penetrate through illusion to the spirit and the primal source of being. The profound Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, that sublime song of human perfection, are only echoes of that ancient divine wisdom.

This was the first stage along the path by which humanity sought to return to the Godhead; it is a stage which could not achieve much in terms of external civilisation. The Indian turned away from everything external and looked for the higher life only in world-renouncing ascent to the Spirit.

The second sub-race, that of the ancient Persians, had a very different mission, although its culture originated from the clear purpose of Manu. Long before the time of Zarathustra, Persia had an ancient culture, of which only an oral tradition survives. People were now coming to the thought that external reality was an image of the Divine, which must not be turned away from but shaped anew. The Persian wished to transform nature by work; he became a husbandman. He moved out of the quiet realm of world-renouncing thoughts and learnt from the resistance he encountered that the outer world was not wholly Maya. Side by side with the world of Spirit he found a real world in which work had to be done. The conviction gradually grew within him that there are two worlds: the world of the good Spirit in which a man can immerse himself and the world which has to be worked upon. And then he said: In the world of the Spirit I shall find the ideas and concepts through which I may transform the world of external reality, so that it may itself become an image of the eternal Spirit.

Thus the Persian saw himself placed in a struggle between two worlds; and presently this took more and more the form of a conflict between two powers—Ormuzd, representing the world of the good Spirit, and Ahriman, representing the world which has to be transformed. But he found himself still at a loss in one respect: the outer world confronted him as something he could not understand; he could not discover any laws in it. He failed to see that the spiritual can be found in nature; he was aware only of nature's resistance to his work.

The third sub-race, comprising the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian people, and later the Semites who branched off from them, came to understand these laws. Men looked up to the stars and observed their movements and their influence on human life, and accordingly worked out a science which enabled them to understand these movements and influences. They brought the Heavens into connection with the Earth. We can see the character of this third sub-race from a particular example. The Egyptians observed that the flooding of the Nile, when it inundates the surrounding country, occurred at the time of the rising of a particular constellation, that of Sirius; and they connected the rising of the Nile with this constellation. Again, they observed the position of the Sun at the time of the arrival and departure of certain birds; they observed the rising and the setting of the stars, their relation to one another and to mankind, and so they gradually built up a science. It became clear to them that there was a great wisdom governing all natural processes; that everything happened in accordance with great laws, and these they tried to fathom. The ancient Chaldean priests, above all, were the custodians of profound wisdom, but for them these laws of nature were not merely abstract, nor were the stars merely physical globes. They looked on each planet as ensouled by a Being whose body it was. They had a quite concrete conception that behind every constellation was a divine Being which gave it life. Thus the Egyptians and Chaldeans discerned that they were spirits living among spirits in a world of spirits. They saw matter as filled with wisdom.

So humanity had gradually come by the path of knowledge to recognise the wisdom in external nature, and thus to rediscover something which the ancient Atlanteans had known through natural clairvoyance.

The fourth sub-race, the bearer of Graeco-Roman culture, was no longer directly influenced by Manu, but came under the influence of other cultures. It had a different mission—art. Little by little man had found the way to carry the spirit into nature. The Greek went further than the Egyptian: instead of taking the finished forms of nature, he took the still unformed substance of marble and impressed on it his own stamp. He formed his own gods, Zeus and the rest. The third sub-race had sought the spirit in the external world, the fourth impressed the spirit itself on the world. Art, the charming of spirit into matter, was the task reserved for the Graeco- Roman race.

The Egyptian studied the stars in their courses and in accordance with them he regulated his political institutions for centuries ahead. The Greek drew his ideas about the form of human society from his own inner life. The Roman went even further: he moulded the whole social life of human beings in accordance with his mind.

The Germans and Anglo-Saxons the fifth sub-race, to which we ourselves belong—go very much further in moulding the external world. They not only imprint on matter something from within themselves; they discover divinely-ordained laws of nature and use them to alter the world. They discover the laws of gravity, of heat, of steam and electricity, and with their aid they transform the whole visible world. The mission of this fifth sub-race is to study not only the laws which slumber within mankind, but those which permeate the whole world, and then to imprint them on the external world. The result is that humanity has become more material, indeed materialistic. In this age no Zeus could arise, but—the steam-engine!

We shall be succeeded by another race which will retrace the path to the spirit. The achievement of our race represents the highest point of man's power to transform the physical world. We have descended furthest into the physical plane and gone to the utmost limits in our conquest of it. This has been the mission of post-Atlantean humanity. The Indian turned away from the physical. The Persian saw it as a substance which resisted his efforts. The Chaldeans, Babylonians and Egyptians recognised the wisdom in nature. The Greeks and Romans went further in their conquest of the physical plane from within. Only our own culture has gone so far as to operate with the laws of nature on the physical plane. From now onwards mankind will become more spiritual again.

There is a great and powerful purpose in the course of human evolution. Each group of peoples has its own task. Present-day man knows nothing of what the third and fourth sub-races still had in their myths and legends as recollections of primal times and the world of the gods; he has only the physical plane. And through his descent to the physical plane he has lost his connection with the world of the gods. For him, only the physical world exists.

Theosophists are not reactionaries; they know that the age of materialism was necessary. Just as the organs of sight degenerate in animals when they go to live in dark caves, while other faculties develop more powerfully, so do we find the same thing happening in the world of the spirit and the world of the senses; if one faculty develops, another must fade away. The gift of clairvoyance and the power of memory had to withdraw in order that the power of physical sight could develop. When men learnt how to conquer the world by means of the laws of nature they had discovered, they had to sacrifice the power of seership.

How different earlier outlooks were! Copernicus,³⁵ for instance, freed men from the mistaken idea that the Earth stands still. It was an error, he taught, to believe that the Sun moved round the Earth. His doctrine was further developed by Kepler and Galileo. Yet Copernicus and Ptolemy³⁶ were both right. It all depends on the stand-point from which you are looking at Sun and Earth. If you study our solar system from the astral and not from the physical plane, Ptolemy's system is right—there is the Earth at the centre and the situation is as the ancients described it. We need only remind ourselves that on the astral plane everything appears reversed. The Ptolemaic system holds good for the astral plane, the Copernican for the physical. In future times yet another, quite different picture of the world will prevail. Generally we hear that Copernicus taught only two things: that the Earth revolves on its own axis and that the Earth moves round the Sun. It is seldom noticed that he taught also a third form of movement—that the whole solar system moves onward in a spiral. For the present this fact will be left aside, but in the future humanity will return to it. Copernicus stood on a frontier, and the old outlook was strongly present in him.

There is no absolute truth—each truth has its particular mission at a certain time. We talk of Theosophy today, but we know that when we come to reborn in the future we shall hear something very different and stand in quite a different relationship to one another.

Let us cast our gaze back to a time when we were perhaps even then assembled together in some region of Northern Europe, where people gathered round a Druid priest who imparted truth to them in the form of myths and legends. If we had not heeded what he then said and if he had not influenced our souls, we should not be able today to understand the truth which Theosophy now brings to us in a different form. When we are reborn, we shall hear the truth spoken in another and a higher form. Truth evolves, as does everything else in the world. It is the form of the divine Spirit, but the divine Spirit has many forms. If we thoroughly imbue ourselves with this characteristic of truth, we shall acquire a quite different relation to it. We shall say: Indeed we live in the truth, but it can take many forms. And we shall then look at modern humanity in a quite different light. We shall not say that we possess absolute truth; we shall say that these men, our brothers, are now at a point where we also stood in the past. It is our duty to enter into what another person says; we need only make it clear to him that we value him at that stage of truth where he now stands. Everyone has to learn for himself, and thus we shall become tolerant towards every form of truth. We come to a better understanding of things; we do not battle against people but seek to live with them. Modern humanity has cultivated individual freedom. From out of this fundamental view of truth, Theosophy will develop an inner tolerance.

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another, the most varied opinions can be reconciled. Hence it is deeply significant that in Theosophy no religion is attacked and no religion is specially singled out, but all are understood, and so there can be brotherhood because the adherents of the most varied religions understand one another.

This is one of the most important tasks for mankind today and in the future: that men should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of occult development is empty.

• 35. Nicholas Copernicus, 1473–1543, originator of the modern astronomical world-picture.
• 36. Ptolemy, 87–165, geographer and astronomer. For him the Earth was stationary at the centre of the Universe.

[Part I]

What the mind, which is directed towards the finite (kama manas), calls truth is only a subspecies of what the esotericist seeks as “the truth”. For the truth of the mind refers to that which has become, which is manifest. And the revealed is only a part of existence. Every thing in our environment is at the same time product, creature (i.e. what has become, what is revealed) and germ (what is unrevealed, what is becoming). And only when we look at a thing as the two aspects (what has become and what is becoming), then we see that it is a link in the One Life, the life that has time not outside itself but within itself. Thus finite truth is also only a becoming; it must be enlivened by an evolving truth. The former is grasped; the latter is “noted”. All mere scientific truth belongs to the first kind. For those who seek such truth alone, “Light on the Path” is not written. It is written for those who seek the truth that is a germ today in order to become a product tomorrow; and who do not grasp what has become, but pay attention to what is becoming. If anyone wants to understand the teachings of “Light on the Path,” then he must generate them as his own and yet love them as completely different, just as a mother generates her child as her own and loves it as different.

The first four teachings, when understood, open the gateway to esotericism. — What does a person bring to the objects of his knowledge? Whoever examines himself will find that joy and pain are his response to impressions from the sensual and supersensible world. It is so easy to believe that one has discarded pleasure and pain. But one must descend into the most hidden corners of one's soul and bring up one's pleasure and pain; for only when all such pleasure and all such pain is consumed by the bliss of the higher self, only then is knowledge possible. One thinks that one will become a cold and sober person as a result. This is not the case. A piece of gold remains the same piece of gold - in weight and color - even when it is transformed into a piece of jewelry. Similarly, Kama remains what it is - in content and intensity - even when it is spiritually transformed. The power of Kama should not be eradicated, but incorporated into the content of the divine fire. Thus the eye's subtlety shall not discharge itself in tears, but gild the received impressions. Dissolve every tear and give the radiance it has to the ray that penetrates the eye. Wasted power is your joy and your pain; wasted for knowledge. For the strength that flows into this joy and this pain shall flow into the object of knowledge. “Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.” He who still abhors the criminal in the ordinary sense, and he who still worships the saint in this ordinary sense, has not weaned his eye from tears. Burn all your tears in the will to help. Weep not over the poor; recognize his situation and help! Murren not over the evil; understand it and change it into good. Your tears only cloud the pure clarity of the light. You feel all the more tender the less sensitive you are. The sound becomes clear to the ear if this clarity is not disturbed by the rapture and sympathy that meet it at the entrance to the ear. “Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.” To put it another way, let the heartbeats of the other resonate within you and do not disturb them with the beating of your own heart. You should open your ear and not your nerve endings. For your nerve endings will tell you whether a sound is pleasant or not; but your open ear will tell you what the sound itself is like. When you go to the sick person, let every fiber of his body speak to you and absorb the impression he makes on you.

And to summarize the first two sentences: Reverse your will, let it become as powerful as possible, but do not let it flow into things as yours, but inquire into the nature of things and then give them your will; let yourself and your will flow out of things. Let the radiance of your eyes flow out of every flower, out of every star; but hold back yourself and your tears. Give your words to the things that are mute, so that they may speak through you. For they are not an invitation to your lust, these mute things, but they are an invitation to your activity. Not what they have become without you is there for you, but what they are to become must be there through you.

And as long as you impose your desire on a single thing, without that desire of yours being born of the thing itself, you wound the thing. But as long as you wound anything, no master can listen to you. For the master hears only those who need him. But no one needs a master who wants to impose himself on things. Man's lower self is like a sharp needle that wants to dig in everywhere. As long as it wants to do that, no master will want to hear its voice. “Before the voice can speak to the masters, it must unlearn the wounding.” As long as the sharp needles of the “/ch will” still stick out of the words of man, his words are the messengers of his lower self. Once these needles have been removed and the voice has become soft and pliable, wrapping itself around the secrets of all things like a veil, it weaves itself into a spiritual garment (Majavirupa), and the master's delicate sound clothes itself in it. With every thought that a person devotes to the inner truth of things in the true sense of the word, he weaves a thread to the garment in which the master may clothe himself when he appears. He who makes himself a messenger of the world, an organ through which the depths of the world's riddles speak, pours his soul's life into the world, his heart's blood moistens his feet so that they carry him swiftly to where work is to be done. And when the soul is where the lower self is not, when it is not where man stands enjoying himself, but where his active feet have carried him, then the Master also appears there. “And before them the soul can stand, the blood of the heart must moisten the feet.” He who remains within himself cannot find the Master; he who wants to find Him must let the strength of his soul - the blood of his heart - flow into his deeds - into his active feet.

Such is the first meaning of the four fundamental teachings. Those who live by this first teaching can have the second revealed to them, and then the following ones. For these teachings are occult truths, and every occult truth has at least sevenfold meaning.

[Part II: The following explanations refer to sentences 17 and 18 from Chapter 2 of “Light on the Path”]

§ 17.2. Chapter.

[Ask the innermost, the One, about its ultimate secrets, which it has held for millennia.

The great, difficult battle, the conquest of your own soul's desires, is a labor of millennia. Therefore, do not expect the prize of victory until you have gained experience over millennia. When the time comes that this last teaching becomes truth, man enters the threshold that lifts him above humanity.

These last few paragraphs of the second chapter of “Light on the Path” contain wisdom of the deepest kind. In No. 17, there is the invitation to ask the “innermost”, the “One” about his “secrets of the last”. Whoever shines a light into the depths of this “innermost being” will indeed find the results of “millennia”. For what man is today, he has become through long millennia. The “innermost being” has passed through worlds, and hidden in its bosom are the fruits it has taken from these worlds. That our innermost being is as it is now, we owe to the fact that countless formations have worked on its structure, that it has passed through many realms and that it has formed organs out of these realms over and over again. Through these organs, it has entered into an exchange with the worlds that have surrounded it in each case. And what it has gained from this interaction, it has taken over into new worlds, in order to have ever richer experiences on new levels, equipped with the achievements of the past. And today we use the differentiated essence of our innermost being to have a sum of experiences on the “planet” we call “Earth”. All the experiences of the “moon planet” and the earlier ones are in our innermost being. They were already in this innermost being when, through a pralaya, it developed into “earth”. And so these experiences were in the Pitri nature of this innermost being, just as the whole lily is - latently - in the lily seed. Of course, the lily seed is still something physically visible. But the Pitrisame, which slept its way from the moon to the earth, was incarnated in the highest kind of matter, perceptible only to the eye opened to the Dangma. But just as the lily seed, when it is placed in suitable soil, organizes the elements of earth, water and air in such a way that a new lily is formed, so the “Pitrisame”, in its cycles through earthly existence, the “Pitrisame” arranges the matters in such a way that in the course of these cycles the full “human being” gradually emerges, who, after the 6th and at the beginning of the 7th earthly round, may truly be called “God's image”. Until the middle of the fourth round - until the end of the Lemurian period - the human Pitrinatur divides itself in the work on its own organism with “formers” of the highest and higher kind; but from this point on, more and more of the human “innermost” must take over this work itself. K. H. says the following about this work: All you have to do is become a complete human being. For know that in your physical nature alone you are now already almost a human being. For you will only be a complete human being in your physical nature at the end of the fourth round. Your astral body, your mental body and your ego body (higher manas) are still unorganized and chaotic. Just as your physical body is complete after the fourth, so must your astral body be after the fifth, your mental body after the sixth, and your arupic (higher mental) body after the seventh, if you are to reach your destiny at the end of the earthly cycles. And only when you have reached this destiny can you, as a normal terrestrial Pitri, pass over to the next planet.

Those, however, who want to walk the occult path should work more and more consciously on this threefold externalization of their higher bodies from their “innermost being”. That is the meaning of meditation. One shapes (organizes) one's astral body by elevating it to the higher self and by self-examination. Just as extra-human forces have worked in past rounds to build the organs of today's physical body, so the inner human higher self works on the astral body so that it may become an “image of divinity” or also “fully human”. Then it becomes suitable to experience the secrets of higher worlds through its organs in the same way as the physical body experiences the secrets of the physical-mineral world through its sense organs. We examine ourselves in the evening with regard to our experiences during the day; we rise to our “higher self” through the well-known formula. In both activities we have an organizing, building effect on our astral body. Only through this do we make it into an astral organism, into a body with organs, whereas before it was only a kind of carrier. This “formula” is this: “Brighter than the sun, purer than the snow, more subtle than the ether is the Self, the Spirit, in the midst of my heart. I am this Self. This Self is me.” However, this opens up the view to a ‘work of millennia’, as it says further in $ 17. Just as millennia were necessary before the outer physical likeness was achieved, so a work of millennia will be necessary before this likeness is achieved for the higher bodies. Only then will man stand at the ‘threshold that lifts him beyond humanity’. And he must come to this threshold in the 7th round in the same way as he had to be at the threshold at the end of the lunarian (moon) epoch, which raised him above the lunarian pitritum.

Through the mental meditation of a sentence from the inspired scriptures, the meditator organizes his mental body. When a person takes such meditation sentences from the Bhagavad Gita or from other scriptures that the theosophical literature provides, then he is working on the organization of his mental body. It must be emphasized again and again that in this meditation it is much less important to intellectually go through the sentence - this should be done separately outside of the actual meditation - than to live with the sentence with a completely free field of vision of consciousness. It should tell us what it has to tell us. We should be the ones to receive from it. If it is an inspired sentence, then it begins to live in our consciousness, then something alive flows out from it, then it becomes abundance in us, previously unsuspected content. As long as we speculate about it, we can only put into it what is already in us. But that does not help us to progress.

The organization of the ego body depends on the devotional part of our meditation. The more we achieve through this devotion, the deeper and more earnest it is, the more we will resemble the being that we are to emerge from our planetary life to the tasks that will be set for us in a later being.

§ 18.

[The knowledge you now call your own is only yours because your soul has merged into one with all souls and become one with the innermost. A treasure from the Highest is entrusted to you. But if you betray its trust, abuse your knowledge, let it slumber when you should use it, then even from the heights you have reached, a fall is still possible. Even at the threshold, exalted ones still recoil, unable to bear the responsibility and unable to soar higher. Therefore, always remember this moment with holy fear, with anxious trembling, and prepare yourself in advance for the fight.

We must experience that we are one with all that lives. We must be clear about the fact that what we call our own has no life if it wants to be an idiosyncrasy. It has just as little life as our little finger would have life if it were cut off from our whole organism. And what for our little finger would be the physical-sensory cutting off, that would be for our peculiarity a knowledge that only wanted to refer to this peculiarity itself. We were one when we entered the planet, which was the third before our Earth, within an all-divine essence; we were within the all-divine essence and yet a peculiarity, just as each note in a symphony is a peculiarity and yet one with the whole symphony. And what we dare call our individuality shall have an effect on whatever it encounters in the 343 worlds through which it passes (seven planets, seven rounds on each planet, seven so-called globes for each round = 7 x 7 x 7 metamorphoses = 343). What we are able to experience there is laid in us at the beginning as an inclination. And that is the treasure, “familiar to you from on high.” And just as the treasure is familiar to us, so we should place it in the harmony of the planetary symphony. An experience will present itself again and again to him who fully understands these things. All deepening within us remains barren and empty if we want it only for ourselves. To strive for our own perfection is only to indulge a higher form of selfishness. Our knowledge must always flow out from us. This is not to say that we should always teach. Each person should teach as they can, and when they can. But the smallest action in everyday life makes it possible to be a living result of selflessly acquired knowledge. And when we have the feeling that all life is one, that all separateness is only based on Maya: then all our deepening into our inner being is also acquired with the living feeling that it should come to life in the All-One Life. But then our deepening is always rewarded with fertility. Then we are sure that we cannot fall. Those who strive for knowledge only to know, only for the sake of their own perfection, only to advance on the ladder of existence, can still fall even if they have already risen very high. And above all, we must be aware of the “responsibility” that we take upon ourselves by acquiring higher knowledge. Only a certain measure of development is allotted to humanity as a whole in the path of development. If we perfect ourselves, if we acquire a measure of perfection earlier than would be possible in normal progression, then we take something from the common measure of humanity for ourselves. We make the scale tip in our favor; the balance leaps up on the other side. Only by giving in some way can we make up for what we have taken. But we must not think that it is better not to take. That would mean being selfish again and avoiding taking so that we would also be relieved of the duty of giving. Not taking and not giving means death; but we are meant to serve life. We must acquire the ability to give; therefore we must take on the responsibility of taking. But we must be aware of this responsibility at every moment. We must constantly reflect on how we can best give when we have taken. This gives rise to a “struggle”, a serious, sacred struggle. But this struggle must be. We must not shy away from it. We must always prepare ourselves for this struggle. In particular, the great significance of this struggle was and is demonstrated to the adepts of all schools of initiation. They are admonished to fulfill themselves, to imbue themselves with the consciousness of this struggle. When our innermost being breathes the life of this struggle as the fundamental mood of the soul, then the inner sight and the inner hearing awaken in this innermost being. And when we are able to be calm, completely calm, on this battlefield, then higher secrets begin to flash across our astral and mental heaven. Then feelings and thoughts are symbolized in us as spiritually tangible realities; and out of the mist of these spiritually tangible realities, the voice of the Master sounds and the form of the Master takes shape. We begin to enter into higher communication. We no longer remain mere actors in the world, but become messengers (angelos) for it.

What is described here as an exegesis of No. 18 is, sentence by sentence, reality, higher reality to be experienced. And whoever imbues themselves with the meaning of this sentence (No. 18) in this way becomes a citizen of higher worlds. (To be continued in the very near future).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the dawn-lines of the Spirit!

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

[ 1 ] In selecting such a theme as the one I propose for to-day, “Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, and Theosophy,” I am aware that to a student of spiritual life it is fraught with difficulties, and that the statements I am about to make may possibly give offence to so-called materialists and theosophists alike. And yet there seems to me a necessity that this matter should, once in a while, be approached from the theosophical point of view, since from one standpoint the “gospel” derived from Haeckel's researches has been made accessible to thousands upon thousands of mankind by means of his book, The Riddle of the Universe. Ten thousand copies of this work were sold within a very short time of its appearance, and it has been translated into many languages. Seldom, indeed, has a book of serious purpose found so wide a circulation.

[ 2 ] Now, if theosophy is to make clear its aims, it is but right that it should take into account so important a publication—one that concerns itself with the most profound questions of existence. Theosophy should deal with it comprehensively, and seek to express its attitude with regard to it. For after all, the theosophical conception of life is not combative but rather conciliatory, desirous of harmonising opposing views.

Furthermore, I myself am in a very peculiar position with respect to Ernst Haeckel's conception of the universe, for I know well those feelings and perceptions which, partly by reason of a scientific consciousness, and partly from the general conditions of the world and the usual conceptions thereof, draw men as though by the power of some fascination towards such great and simple paths of thought as those from which Haeckel has constructed his conception of the universe. And here I may say that I should hardly have dared to speak my mind thus openly were I in any sense an opponent of Haeckel, or were it not that I am intimately acquainted with all that can be experienced in the process of adapting oneself to the wonderful edifice of his ideas.

[ 3 ] The very first thing that anyone bringing his attention frankly to bear upon the development of spiritual life is bound to recognise, is the moral power displayed in Haeckel's labours. For years past this man, imbued with an enormous amount of courage, has fought for the acceptance and the recognition of his conception of the universe—fought strenuously, having again and again to defend himself against the manifold obstacles that impeded his progress. On the other hand, we must not be unmindful of the fact that Haeckel's great powers of comprehensive expression are balanced by equally comprehensive powers of thought: the very qualities in which many scientists are deficient happen to be those with which he is very highly endowed.

In gathering together the results of his researches and investigations under the one comprehensive title of a conception of the universe, he has boldly departed from those tendencies of scientific thought which have for several decades opposed any such undertaking; and this very departure must be recognised as an act of special significance.

Another fact to be noted is, that I am placed in a singular position with regard to the theosophical conception of the universe when I speak about Haeckel; for anyone acquainted with the process of development through which the theosophical movement has passed will be aware of what sharp words and what opposition, not only on the part of theosophists in general, but on the part of the founder of the theosophical movement, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, were directed against the deductions which Ernst Haeckel draws from his work of investigation. Few publications touching cosmogony have been so violently opposed in the Secret Doctrine as that of Haeckel.

You will understand that I speak here without prejudice, for I think that in parts of my book, Haeckel and his Opponents, as well as in my other work on Cosmogonies of the Nineteenth Century, I have to the fullest extent done justice to what I take to be the real truths contained in Haeckel's conception of the universe. I believe that I have sifted from his labours that which is fruitful, and that which is enduring. [ 4 ] Consider the general attitude towards the conception of the world in so far as it is based upon scientific reasons. During the first half of the nineteenth century a totally different spiritual attitude prevailed from that known in the second half. Haeckel's appearance on the scene coincided with a time in which it was an easy thing for the new growth of so-called Darwinism to be subjected to materialistic interpretations. If, therefore, we realise how insistent was this tendency, at the very time when Haeckel was a young and enthusiastic student entering upon the pursuit of natural science, to reduce all discoveries in that domain of learning to a materialistic issue, the consequent bent towards materialism may well be understood, and may therefore lead us into a path of peace rather than of conflict.

If you will consider those men who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, set themselves to confront the great riddle of humanity with calm, unprejudiced eyes, you will find two things: on the one hand, a state of absolute resignation in relation to the highest questions concerning a divine ordering of the world, such as immortality, freedom of will, origin of life—a resignation, in short, with regard to all the actual riddles of the universe. On the other hand you will discover, co-existing with this attitude of resignation, remnants of an ancient religious tradition, and this even among students of natural science. Bold adventuring towards investigation of such questions from the scientific point of view was, during the first half of the nineteenth century, to be met with only among German philosophers, such as Schelling and Fichte, as well as Oken, who, by the way, was a pioneer of freedom without equal, not alone upon this subject, but in many paths of life.

All attempts made by men in the present day towards the fundamentalising of world-theories are to be found in still bolder outline among the works of Oken. And yet all this was animated by a certain subtleness—a breath, as it were, of that old spiritualism which is clearly conscious that, behind and beyond all that our senses can perceive, all that can be investigated by means of instruments, there still lurks something spiritual to be sought for. [ 5 ] Haeckel has again and again told us how distinctly the mind of his great teacher—that deep student of natural science, Johannes Müller, of imperishable memory—was tinged with this subtle breath. You can read in Haeckel's own writings how he had been struck (it was at the time when he was busy at the Berlin University and studying the anatomy of men and animals under Johannes Müller) by the great resemblance apparent not alone in outward form, but also by that similarity which compels attention in the evolution of form. He tells us how he had remarked to his master that such resemblance as this must hint at some mysterious kinship between man and beast, and that the answer made by Johannes Müller, who had searched so deeply into Nature, had been: “Ah! he who lays bare the secret of species will indeed have reached the highest summit.”

What we have to do is to attune ourselves to the spirit, the motive, of such a seeker; of one who assuredly would never have halted had he beheld a prospect of entering into possession of that secret. On one other occasion, when teacher and pupil were travelling together on some journey of investigation, Haeckel again referred to the close relationship existing between animals; and Johannes Müller once more replied very much to the same effect. In alluding to this I only wish to draw your attention to a certain attitude of mind.

If you will look back among the writings of any well-known naturalist belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century—for instance, to those of Burdach—you will find that, in spite of all the careful and elaborate minutiae appertaining to natural science, whenever the kingdom of life comes to be considered, the suggestion is ever present that here no mere physical and chemical powers are in operation, but that something higher has to be taken into account.

[ 6 ] When, however, improvements in microscopes made it possible for man to observe, to a far greater extent than heretofore, all those curious formations which serve to distinguish living creatures, showing that we have to do with a fine web of the minutest animalcules, and that this actually composes the physical body—when, as I have said, so much was made visible, the attitude of the scientific mind underwent a change. This physical body, which serves plants and animals as their garment, now resolved itself, so far as the scientist was concerned, into a tissue of cells. This discovery as to the life of these cells was made by naturalists about the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century, and, seeing that it was possible to ascertain so much about the lives of such animalcules by the exercise of the senses, assisted by the aid of the microscope, it required but a step further for that which acts as the organising principle in these living creatures to be lost sight of, because no physical sense, nothing external, proclaimed its presence.

[ 7 ] At that time there was no Darwinism, yet it was owing to the impression made by this great advance in the domain of practical research that we find a natural science grounded in materialism coming into vogue during the 'forties and 'fifties. It was then thought that what could be perceived by the senses, and thus explained, could be understood by the whole world. Things that now seem puerile created then the most intense sensation, and became, so to speak, a gospel for humanity. Such words as “energy” and “matter” became popular by-words, while men like Büchner and Moleschott were recognised authorities. It was considered an evidence of childish fancy, belonging to earlier epochs of the human race, to suppose that anything that could be minutely examined with the eye was possessed of aught beyond what was actually visible.

[ 8 ] Now, you must bear in mind that, side by side with all discovery, feelings and sensations play a great part in the development of mental life. Anyone who may be inclined to think that cosmogonies are the result of bold calculations of reason makes a mistake: in all such matters the heart is active, and the secret sources of education also contribute their share. Humanity has, during its latest phase of development, been passing through a materialistic stage of education. The actual beginning of this stage is traceable far back, it is true; nevertheless, it reached its apex in the time of which we are speaking. We call this epoch of materialistic education the age of enlightenment.

Man had now—and this was the final result of the Christian conception of the universe—to find his foothold upon the firm ground of reality: the God whom he had so long sought beyond the clouds he was now bidden to seek within his inner consciousness. This had a far-reaching effect upon the entire development of the nineteenth century, and anyone interested in psychological changes and caring to study the development of humanity at that time will be enabled to understand how all the events and occurrences which then followed upon each other, such as the struggle for freedom in the 'thirties and 'forties, can but be classed as separate storms and convulsions of the feelings which were the result of that newly developed sense of physical reality, and which were bound to run their appointed course. We have to deal with a tendency in human education that sought in the first place forcibly to eradicate from the human heart every aspiration towards a spiritual life.

It is not from natural science that those deductions, pronouncing the world to consist of naught but what can be perceived by the senses, have been drawn; they are a consequence of the educational teaching obtaining at that time. Materialism had become interwoven with explanations relating to the facts of natural science. Anyone who will take the trouble to study these things as they really are, bringing to bear upon the subject a mind free from prejudice, will be in a position to see for himself that the case is as I am about to set forth, but it is impossible for me in the space of one short hour to deal with the matter exhaustively.

[ 9 ] The whole of the stupendous advance made in the realms of natural science, of astronomy, of physics and chemistry, due to spectrum analysis, to a greater theoretical knowledge of heat, and to that teaching concerning the development of living organisms known to us as the Darwinian theory—all these come within this period of materialism. Had these discoveries been made at a time when people still thought as they did about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a time when a greater spiritual sensitiveness prevailed, then these discoveries would have been so construed as to furnish proofs positive of the working of the spirit in Nature—indeed, by very reason of the wonderful discoveries in natural science the supremacy of spirit would have been deemed incontestably established.

[ 10 ] It is clear, then, that scientific investigations with regard to Nature need not necessarily and under all circumstances lead to materialism. It was merely because so many leaders of civilisation at that time were materialistically inclined that these discoveries became interpreted in a materialistic way. Materialism was imported into natural science, and naturalists, such as Ernst Haeckel, accepted it unconsciously. Darwin's discovery per se need not have tended to materialism.

Materialism points to Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, as its chief support. Now, it is clear that if a thinker inclining to materialism approached these discoveries, he would be sure to invest Darwinism with a materialistic colouring, and it was due to Haeckel's boldly materialistic attitude of thought that Darwinism has received its present materialistic interpretation. It was an event of great moment when Haeckel, in the year 1864, announced the connection between man and the higher animals (apes). At that time this could but mean that man was descended from the higher animals. But since that day scientific thought has undergone a curious process of development. Haeckel has adhered to his opinion that man is the descendant of those higher animals, they being in their turn the developments of still lower types, reaching back finally to the very simplest forms of life. It is thus that Haeckel constructs man's entire genealogical tree—in fact, the lineal descent of all humanity. By this means everything of a spiritual nature became for him excluded from the world, except as a reflection of already-existing material things.

And yet Haeckel, having in the depths of his being a peculiar spiritual consciousness working side by side with his materialistic “thinking mind,” casts about for some means of help, since these two parts of his being have never been able to “come into line;” he has not succeeded in bringing about a working partnership between them. For this reason he comes to the conclusion that even the smallest living creature may be accredited with a sort of consciousness, but he does not explain to us how the complex human consciousness is developed out of that which is latent in the smallest living creature.

In the course of a conversation Haeckel once said: “People are always objecting to my materialism, but I don't deny the Spirit, nor do I deny Life: I only want people to observe that when you place matter in a retort everything in it soon begins to work and effervesce—to ferment.” That remark shows plainly enough that Haeckel possesses a spiritual as well as a scientific mind.

[ 11 ] Among those who, at the time of Darwin's supremacy, proclaimed their adherence to the theory of man's descent from the higher animals was the English scientist Huxley. He asserted the close similarity in external structure between man and the higher animals to be even greater than that existing between the higher and lower species of apes, and that we could but come to the conclusion that a line of descent existed leading from the higher animals to man. In more recent times scientists have discovered new facts, but even then those feelings which for centuries past have educated the human heart and soul were undergoing a change, a transformation. Hence it was that Huxley in the 'nineties, not long before his death, gave utterance to the following view—a strange one, coming from him:

“We see therefore,” he observed, “that in Nature life is conditioned by a series of steps, proceeding from the simplest and most incomplete up to the complicated and perfected. We cannot follow this continuity, yet why should not this continuous line proceed onwards in a region which we are unable to survey?”

In these words the way is indicated by which man may, by the pursuit of natural science, rise to the idea of a Divine being, standing high above man—a being farther removed from man than man himself is from the one-celled organism. Huxley had once said:

“I would rather have descended from such ancestors, ancestors similar to the brute, than from such as deny the human intelligence.”¹

[ 12 ] Thus do precepts and concepts, all the soul thinks and feels, alter in the course of time. Haeckel has continued his work of research along the lines he first adopted. In the year 1867 he had already published his popular work, The Natural History of Creation, and from this book much may be learnt. It teaches the laws by which the living kingdoms in Nature are linked one to the other. We can see through the veil shrouding the grey past and bring what is existent into relation with what is extinct, of which only the last remains may now be found upon the earth.

Haeckel has recognised this accurately. That world-history, here in a wider sense playing its part, I can only elucidate by making use of an illustration. You may find it no more accurate than are most comparative illustrations, yet it fairly bears out my meaning.

Let us suppose that a writer on art appeared upon the scene and produced a book in which he treated with consummate skill the whole period stretching from the days of Leonardo da Vinci to modern times. He presents to our minds all that has been achieved in the pursuit of art during that period, and we believe ourselves enabled to look within at the development of man's creative powers. Let us, then, go further, and imagine that another person came along and criticised the descriptive work, saying: “But, look here! Everything this art historian has put on record never happened at all! These are all descriptions of pictures that don't exist! What use have I for such imaginings? One has to investigate reality in order to arrive at the true method of adequately presenting art in its historical bearings. I will therefore investigate the remains of Leonardo da Vinci himself, and try to reconstruct the body, and then judge by the contours of his skull what brain he is likely to have had and how it may probably have functioned.” In the same way the events described by the art historian are depicted by the professor of anatomy. There may have been no mistake. All may have been correct. Well, then, in that case, says the anatomist, we must “fight to a finish” against this idealisation of our art historian; we must combat his phantasy, his imagination, for it amounts to credulity and superstition to allow anyone to attempt to make us believe that besides the form of Leonardo da Vinci there was some “gaseous vortex” to be apprehended as a soul.

[ 13 ] Now, this illustration, in spite of its manifest absurdity, really hits the mark. This is the position in which everyone finds himself who chooses to assert his belief in the Natural History of Creation as the only accurate one. Nor can this illustration be negatived by merely indicating its weak points. They are there, perhaps, but that is beside the point. What is of importance is that the obvious should for once be presented according to its inner relationship; and that is what Haeckel has done in a full and exhaustive way. It has been done in such a manner that anyone wishing to see, can see, how active is the Spirit in the moulding of the form, where, to all appearances, matter alone reigns supreme. Much may be learnt from that; we may learn how to acquire spiritually knowledge as to the world's material combination, how to acquire it with earnestness, dignity, and perseverance. Anyone going through Haeckel's Anthropogenesis sees how form builds itself up, as it were, from the simplest living creature to the most complicated, from the simplest organism to man. He who understands how to add the Spirit to what is already granted by the materialist may in this example of “Haeckelism” have the opportunity of studying the best elementary theosophy.

[ 14 ] The results of Haeckel's research constitute, so to speak, the first chapter of theosophy. Far better than by any other method, we can arrive at a comprehension of the growth and transformation of organic forms by a study of his works. We have every reason to call attention to the great things which have been achieved through the progress of this profound study of Nature.

[ 15 ] At the time when Haeckel had constructed this wonderful edifice, the world was facing the deeper riddles of humanity as problems without solution. In the year 1872 Du Bois-Reymond, in a speech memorable for its brilliant rhetoric, alluded to the limits placed to natural science and to our knowledge of Nature. During the past decade the utterances of few men have been so much discussed as has this lecture with the celebrated “Ignorabimus.” It was a momentous event, and offered a complete contrast to Haeckel's own development and to his theory of the descent of man. In another lecture Du Bois-Reymond has tabulated seven great questions as to existence, questions which the naturalist can only answer in part, if at all. These seven “riddles of the universe” are:

1. The origin of energy and matter
2. How did the first movement arise in this quiescent matter?
3. How did life originate within this “matter set in motion?”
4. How is it that so many things in Nature bear the stamp of utility to a degree only met with in such human achievements as are the result of intelligent reasoning?
5. Assuming we were able to examine our brain, we should find it to be nothing but a jumble of little whirling spheres; how is it, then, that these same little balls, or spheres, enable me, let us say, to “see red,” to hear the tones of the organ, to feel pain, etc.? Think of a mass of whirling atoms, and it will be plain to you that it is not from them that you derive the sensations expressing themselves in such words as “I see red,” “I smell the scent of the rose,” etc.
6. How do understanding, reason, and speech develop in the living being?
7. How can “free will” originate in a being so circumscribed that his every act is the product of the whirling of these atoms?

[ 16 ] It was in connection with these riddles of the universe put forward by Du Bois-Reymond that Haeckel gave his book the title of The Riddle of the Universe. His desire was to give the answer to the questions raised by Du Bois-Reymond. There is a specially important passage in the lecture Du Bois-Reymond delivered on the “Limits of Inquiry into Nature,” which will enable us to step across into the field of theosophy.

[ 17 ] At the time when Du Bois-Reymond was lecturing at Leipsic before an assembly of natural scientists and medical men, the spirit of natural science was seeking after a purer, higher, and freer atmosphere—such an atmosphere as might lead to the theosophical cosmogony. On that occasion Du Bois-Reymond spoke as follows:—

“If we study man from the point of view of natural science, he presents himself to us as a working compound of unconscious atoms. To explain man in accordance with natural science means to ‘understand’ this atomic motion to its uttermost degree.”

He considered that if one were in a position to indicate the precise way in which the atoms moved at any given place in the brain, while saying, for instance, “I think,” or “Give me an apple”—if this could be done, then the problem would, according to natural science, have been solved. Du Bois-Reymond calls this the “astronomic” understanding of man. Even as a miniature firmament of stars would be the appearance of these active groups of human atoms. But what has not here been taken into consideration is the question as to how sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise in the consciousness of the man of whom, let us say, I perfectly well know that his atoms move in such and such a manner. That natural science can as little determine as it can the manner in which consciousness arises. Du Bois-Reymond concluded with the following words:—

“In the sleeping man, who is not conscious of the sensation expressed in the words ‘I see red,’ we have before us the physical group of the active members of the body. With regard to this sleeping body, we need not say, ‘We cannot know’—‘Ignorabimus!’ We are able to comprehend the sleeping man. Man awake, on the contrary, is incomprehensible to the scientist. In the sleeping man something is absent which is nevertheless present in the man awake: I allude to the consciousness through which he appears before us as a spiritual being.” [ 18 ] At that time, owing to a lack of courage in matters concerning natural science, further progress was impossible; there was no question as yet of theosophy, because natural science had, in concise terms, defined the boundary, had set a barrier at the precise spot up to which it wished to proceed in its own fashion. It was owing to this self-limitation of science that theosophical cosmogony had, about this time, its beginning. No one is going to maintain that man, when he goes to sleep “ceases to be,” and on re-awaking in the morning “resumes existence.” And yet Du Bois-Reymond says that something which is present in him by day is absent during the night. It is here that the theosophical conception of the universe is enabled to assert itself. Sense-consciousness is in abeyance in the sleeping man. As, however, the man of science uses as a prop for his argument that which brings about this sense-consciousness, he is unable to say anything concerning the spirituality that transcends it, because he lacks precisely the knowledge of that which makes of man a spiritual being.

By the use of such means as serve for natural science we are unable to investigate matters spiritual. Natural science depends upon what may be demonstrated to the senses. What can no longer be sensed when man falls asleep, cannot be the object of scientific investigation. It is in this something, no longer perceptible in the sleeping man, that we must seek for that entity by which man becomes a spiritual being. No mental representation can be made of what transcends the purely material and passes beyond the knowledge of the senses, until organs, of which the scientist can know nothing if he only depends on his sense-perceptions—spiritual eyes—are developed; eyes which are able to see beyond the confines of the senses.

For this reason we have no right to say, “Here are the limits of cognition;” but merely, “Here are the limits of sense-perception.”

The scientist perceives by means of his senses, but he is no spiritual observer; he must become one. become a “seer.” in order that he may see what is spiritual in man. This is the bourne towards which tends all profound wisdom in the world; not seeking the mere widening of its radius where actual material knowledge is concerned, but striving towards the raising of human faculty.

This also is the great difference between what is taught by present-day natural science and what is taught by theosophy. Natural science says: “Man has senses with which he perceives, and a mind whereby he is enabled to connect the evidences of his senses. What does not come within the scope of these lies beyond the ken of natural science.”

[ 19 ] Theosophy takes a different view of the case. It says: “You scientists are perfectly right, so long as you judge from your point of view, just as right as the blind man would be from his in saying that the world is devoid of light and colour. We make no objection to the standpoint of natural science, we would only place it in juxtaposition to the view taken by theosophy, which asserts that it is possible—nay, that it is certain—that man is not obliged to remain stationary at the point of view he occupies to-day; that it is possible for organs—spiritual eyes—to develop after a similar fashion to that in which those physical sense-organs of the body, the eyes and ears, have been developed; and once these new organs are developed, higher faculties will make themselves apparent.”

This must be taken on faith at first—nay, it need not even be believed; it may just be accepted as an assertion in an unprejudiced manner. Nevertheless, as true as it is that all believers in the Natural History of Creation have not beheld all that is therein presented to them as fact (how many of them have actually investigated these facts?), so true is it that these facts concerning a knowledge of the super-sensual can be explained to everyone.

The ordinary man, held in bondage by his senses, cannot possibly gain admittance to this realm. It is only by the aid of certain methods of investigation that the spiritual world opens to the seeker. Thus, man must transform himself into an instrument for those higher powers, one able to penetrate into worlds hidden from those still enthralled by their physical senses. To such as can accomplish this, visions of a quite distinctive nature will appear. The ordinary human being is not capable of seeing for himself, or of consciously recognising things about him, when his senses are wrapped in slumber; but when he applies occult methods of investigation this incapacity ceases, and he begins to receive quite consciously impressions of the astral world.

[ 20 ] There is at first a state of transition, familiar to all, between that exterior life of sense cognisance and that life which even in the most profound state of slumber is not quite extinguished. This state of transition is the chaos of dreams. To most people these will appear as mere reflections of what they have been experiencing during the previous day. Indeed, you will ask, how should a man be able to receive any new experiences during sleep, since the inner self has as yet no organs of cognition? But still, something is there—life is there. That which left the body when sleep wrapped it round has memory, and this remembrance rises before the sleeper in pictures more or less fantastic and confused. (Should anyone desire more information on this subject, it will be found in my books entitled The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results, Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W.)

[ 21 ] Now, in place of this chaos, order and harmony will, in the course of time, be brought about; an order and a harmony governing this region of dreams, and this will be a sign that the person in question is beginning to develop spiritually. Then he will cease to see the mere aftermath of reality, grotesquely portrayed; he will see things which have in ordinary life no existence.

Those who desire to remain within the boundary of the senses will, of course, say, “But they are only dreams!” Yet, if they, by such means, obtain an insight into the loftiest secrets of creation, it may surely be a matter of indifference to them whether they gain this through the medium of a dream or by means of the senses. Let us, for instance, suppose that Graham Bell had invented the telephone in a state of dream-consciousness. That would have been of no moment whatever to-day, for the telephone itself in any case is an important and useful invention. Clear and regular dreaming is therefore the beginning, and if in the stillness of the night hours you have come to “live in your dreams,” if, after a time, you have habituated yourself to a cognisance of worlds quite other than this, then will soon come a time when you will learn, by these new experiences, to step forth into actuality.

Then the whole world will assume a new aspect, and you will be as sensible of this change as you would be of threading your way through a row of solid chairs, through anything your senses may at this moment be aware of in their vicinity. Such is the condition of anyone who has acquired a new state of consciousness. Something new, a new kind of personality, has awakened within him. In the course of his further development a stage will at length be reached where not only the curious apparitions of the higher worlds pass before the spiritual eye as visions of light, but the tones also of those higher worlds become audible, telling their spiritual names, and able to convey to the seer a new meaning. In the language of the mysteries, this is expressed in the words, “Man sees the sun at midnight;” which is to say, that for him there are no longer any obstacles in space to prevent him from seeing the sun when on the other side of the world. Then, too, is the work of the sun, acting within the universe, made plain to him, and he becomes aware of that harmony of the spheres, that truth to which the Pythagoreans bore witness.

Tones and sounds, this music of the spheres, now become, for him, actual. Poets who were also seers have known of the existence of something approaching this music, and only those who can grasp Goethe's meaning from this point of view will be able to understand those passages, for instance, occurring in the “Prologue in Heaven” (see Faust, pt. I), which may be taken either as poetic phraseology or as a lofty truth. Where Faust is a second time introduced into the world of spirits, he speaks of these sounds: “Sounding loud to spirit-hearing, See the new-born Day appearing!” Faust, Part II.

[ 22 ] Here we have the connection between natural science and theosophy. Du Bois-Reymond has pointed to the fact that the sleeper only can be an object for the experiments of natural science. But if man should begin to open his inner senses, if he should come to see and hear that there is such a thing as spiritual actuality, then indeed will the whole edifice of elementary theosophy, so wonderfully, constructed by Haeckel—a structure none can admire more profoundly than I—then will this great work glow with a new glory, revealing, as it must, an entirely new meaning. According to this marvellous structure we see a simple living creature as the archetype, yet we may trace back that creature spiritually to an earlier condition of consciousness.

[ 23 ] I will now explain what theosophy holds as the doctrine of the descent of man. It is obvious that in a single lecture like the present no “proofs” can be advanced, and it is also natural that to all who are only acquainted with the theories commonly advanced on this subject everything I say will appear fantastic and highly improbable. All theories thus advanced originated, however, in the leading circles of materialistic thought, and many who would probably resent the suggestion of materialism as utterly foreign to their nature, are nevertheless (and indeed quite comprehensibly so) caught in a net of self-delusion.

The true theosophical teaching concerning evolution is, in our day, hardly known; and when our opponents speak of it, he who does know is at once able to recognise by the objections raised that he is dealing with a caricature of this doctrine of evolution.

For all such as merely acknowledge a soul, or spirit, to which expression is given within the human, or animal organism, the theosophical mode of representation must be utterly incomprehensible, and every discussion touching that subject is, with such persons, quite fruitless. They must first free themselves from the state of materialistic suggestion in which they live, and must make themselves acquainted with the fundamental attitude of theosophical thought.

[ 24 ] Just as the methods of research employed by physical science trace back the organism of the physical body into the dim distance of primeval times, so it is the mode of theosophical thought to delve into the past with regard to the soul and the spirit. Now, the latter method does not lead to any conclusions antagonistic or contradictory to the facts advanced by natural science; only with the materialistic interpretations of these facts it can have nothing to do.

Natural science traces the descent of the physical living being backwards, arriving by this course at organisms of a less and less complicated kind. Natural science declares: “The perfect living being is a development of these simpler and less complicated ones;” and, as far as physical structure is concerned, this is true, although the hypothetical forms of primeval ages of which materialistic science speaks do not entirely conform with those known to theosophical research. This, however, need not concern us at the present moment.

[ 25 ] From the physical standpoint theosophy also acknowledges the relationship of man with the higher mammals, with the man-like apes. But there can be no question of the descent of our humanity from a creature of the mind and soul calibre of the ape, as we know it. The facts are quite otherwise, and everything that materialism puts forward of this nature rests upon an error of thought. This error may be cleared up by means of a simple comparison sufficient for our purpose, though trite.

We will imagine two persons, one morally deficient and intellectually insignificant; the other endowed with a high standard of morality and of considerable intellectuality. We will assume that some fact or other confirms the relationship of these two. Now, I ask you, will the inference be drawn that the one in every way more highly endowed is descended from one who was of the standard described? Never! We may think it a surprising fact that they are brothers. We may find, however, that they had a father who was not of exactly the same standard as either of the brothers, and in that case one will be found to have worked his way up, the other to have degenerated.

[ 26 ] Materialistic science makes a similar mistake to that here indicated. Facts known to it induce the acceptance of a connection between ape and man, yet from this it should not draw the conclusion that man is descended from the ape-like animals. What should be accepted is a primeval creature, a common physical ancestor, from the stock of which the ape has degenerated, while man has been the ascending “brother.”

[ 27 ] Now, what was there in that primeval creature to cause this ascendance to the human on the one hand, the sinking into the ape kingdom on the other? Theosophy answers, “The soul of man himself did this.” Even then the soul of man was present, at a time when, on the face of this physical earth, the creatures possessing the highest sense of development were these common ancestors of man and ape. From amid the multitude of these ancestors the best types were capable of subjecting themselves to the soul's progress, the rest were not. Thus it happens that the present-day human soul has a “soul-ancestor” just as the body has its physical forebear.

It is true that, so far as the senses are concerned, those “soul-ancestors” could not, according to our present-day observations, have been perceptible within our bodies. They still belonged in a sense to “higher worlds,” and they were also possessed of other capabilities and powers than those of the present human soul. They lacked the mental activity and the moral sense now evident. Such souls could conceive no way of fashioning instruments from the things in the outer world; they could create no political states. The soul's activity still consisted to a great extent in transforming the archetype of those ancestral bodies themselves. It laboured at improving the incomplete brain, enabling it at a later period to become the seat of thought activities. As the soul of to-day, directed towards external things, constructs machines, etc., so did that ancestral soul labour at constructing the body of the human ancestor. The following objection can, of course, be raised: “Why, then, does not the soul at the present day work at its body to the same extent?” The reason for its not doing so is that the energy used at a former time for the transforming of the organs has since been directing its whole effort upon external things in the mastery and regulation of the forces of Nature.

[ 28 ] We may therefore ascribe a twofold descent to man in primeval times. His spiritual birth is not coeval with the perfecting of his organs of sense. On the contrary, the “soul” of man was already present at a time when those physical “ancestors” inhabited the earth. Figuratively speaking, we may say that the soul “selected” a certain number of such “ancestors” as seemed best fitted for receiving the external corporeal expression distinguishing the present-day man. Another branch of these ancestors deteriorated, and in its degenerate condition is now represented by the anthropoid apes. These, then, form, in the true sense of the word, branch lines of the human ancestry. Those ancestors are the physical forebears of man, but this is due only to the capacity for reconstruction which they had primarily received from the human soul within. Thus is man physically descended from the “archetype,” while spiritually he is the descendant of the “ancestral soul.”

But we can go even further back with regard to the genealogical tree of living creatures, and we shall then arrive at a physically still more imperfect ancestor. Yet, at the time of this physical ancestor, too, the “soul-ancestor” of man was existent. It was this latter which raised the physical ancestor to the level of the ape, again outstripping its less adaptable brother in the race for development, and leaving him behind on a lower stage of creation. To such as these belong those present-day mammals of a lower grade than that of the apes. Thus we may go further and further back into primeval times, even to a time when upon this earth, then bearing so different an aspect, existed those most elementary of creatures from which Haeckel claims the development of all higher beings. The soul-ancestor of man was also a contemporary of these primitive creatures; it was already living when the “archetype” transformed the serviceable types, leaving behind at different stages those incapable of further development.

In actual truth, therefore, the entire sum of earth's living creatures are the descendants of man, within whom that which in this day “thinks and acts” as soul originally brought about the development of living beings. When our earth came into existence, man was a purely spiritual being; he began his career by building for himself the simplest of bodies. The whole ladder of living creatures represents nothing but the outgrown stages through which he has developed his bodily structure to its present degree of perfection.

The creatures of the present day differ widely in appearance from that of their ancestors at those particular stages where they branched off from the human tree. Not that they have remained stationary, for they have deteriorated in accordance with an inevitable law, which, owing to the lengthy explanation it would involve, cannot be entered into here. But the greatest interest attaches to the fact that through theosophy we arrive, so far as man's outward form is concerned, at a genealogical tree not altogether unlike Haeckel's. Haeckel, however, presupposes as the physical ancestor of man nothing but a hypothetical animal. Yet the truth is that at all those points where Haeckel uses the names of animals, the still undeveloped forebears of man should be installed; for those animals, down to the meanest living creatures, are but deteriorated and degenerate forms occupying those lower stages through which the human soul has passed on its upward journey.

Externally, therefore, the resemblance between Haeckel's genealogical tree and that of theosophy is sufficiently striking, though internal evidences show them to be as wide apart as the poles.

[ 29 ] Hence the reasons why Haeckel's deductions are so eminently suited for the learning of sound elementary theosophy. One need do no more than master, from the theosophical point of view, the facts he has elucidated in so masterly a manner, and then raise his philosophy to a higher and nobler plane. If Haeckel seeks to criticise and belittle any such “higher” philosophy, he shows himself to be simply puerile—after the fashion, for instance, of a person who, not having got beyond the multiplication table, yet presumed to assert: “What I know is true, and all higher mathematics are only imaginary nonsense.” No theosophist desires to deny or contradict the elementary facts of natural science; but the crux of the matter is that the scientist, deluded by materialistic suggestions, does not even know what theosophy is talking about.

[ 30 ] It depends upon a man himself what kind of philosophy he adopts. Fichte has put this in so many words: “The unperceiving eye cannot detect colours; The non-perceptive Soul cannot perceive Spirit.” The same thought has been voiced by Goethe in a well-known phrase: “Were the eye not sun-like—how could we see the sun? Were God's own power not within us, the God-like vision—could it enrapture us?” and an expression of Feuerbach, if rightly conceived, proclaims that each one sees God's image after his own likeness. The slave to his senses sees God in accordance with those senses; the spiritual observer sees the Spirit deified. “Were lions, bulls, and oxen able to set up gods, their gods would resemble lions, bulls, and oxen,” was the remark of a Greek philosopher long ages ago.

The fetish-worshipper, too, has as his highest principle something we may call spiritual, but he has as yet not come to seek for this within himself, and this is why he has not got beyond beholding his god as anything more than a block of wood. The fetish-worshipper cannot raise his prayer above what he can inwardly feel, for he still regards himself as on the same level as the block of wood. And those who can see no more than a whirl of atoms, those to whom the highest resolves itself into tiny dots of matter, such as these, too, have missed recognition of the highest principle within themselves.

[ 31 ] It is true that Haeckel places before us in all his works the information he has honestly acquired, so that to him must be accorded “les defauts de ses qualites.” The sterling worth of his teaching will live, its negative qualities will vanish. Taken from the higher point of view, one might say that the fetish-worshipper worships in his fetish a lifeless object, while the materialistic adherent of the theory of atoms worships not alone one “little god” but a whole host of them, which he calls atoms!² The superstition of the one is about as great as that of the other; for the materialistic atom is no more than a fetish, and the wooden block is made up of atoms too. Haeckel says in one passage: “We see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, in man—God is everywhere,” yet he only sees God as he can comprehend Him. How enlightening here are Goethe's words, when he says: “Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, Not me!”) —Bayard Taylor's translation.

Thus does the materialist mark the whirling atoms in stone, in plant, in animal, and in man, possibly, too, in every work of art, and claim for himself a knowledge of a monistic cosmogony that has overcome the ancient superstitions. Yet theosophists have a monistic cosmogony too; and we can say, in the same words as Haeckel uses, that we see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, and in the man; but what we see are no whirling atoms, but the living God, the spiritual God, whom we seek outside in Nature, because we can also seek Him within ourselves.

• 1. Readers who are unacquainted with Huxley's famous reply may be glad to have it in extenso, as given by Edward Clodd in Thomas Henry Huxley, published by William Blackwood and Sons:
  
  “At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, on 28th June, 1860, Owen emphasised the statement that ‘the brain of the gorilla presented more differences, as compared with the brain of man, than it did when compared with the brains of the very lowest and most problematical of the Quadrumana.’ To this Huxley, in polite English, gave the lie direct, and pledged himself to ‘justify that unusual procedure elsewhere.’ Two days after, by mere chance, he was present at the reading of a paper by Dr. Draper ‘On the Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.’ In the discussion which followed, Bishop Wilberforce, throwing a glance at Huxley, ended a suave and superficial speech by asking him ‘as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?’ Huxley did not rise till the meeting called for him. Then he let himself go. ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’ he said in an undertone to Sir Benjamin Brodie. After showing how ill-equipped was the Bishop for controversy upon the general question of organic evolution, although it was an open secret that Owen had primed him for the contest, Huxley said: ‘You say that development drives out the Creator, but you assert that God made you; and yet you know that you yourself were originally a piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case?’ Then followed the famous retort:
  
  “‘I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.’”
• 2. The word “worship” is, of course, not to be taken literally, for the materialistic thinker, though he has not yet been weaned from “fetishism,” has lost the habit of prayer.

[ 1 ] In selecting such a theme as the one I propose for to-day, “Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, and Theosophy,” I am aware that to a student of spiritual life it is fraught with difficulties, and that the statements I am about to make may possibly give offence to so-called materialists and theosophists alike. And yet there seems to me a necessity that this matter should, once in a while, be approached from the theosophical point of view, since from one standpoint the “gospel” derived from Haeckel's researches has been made accessible to thousands upon thousands of mankind by means of his book, The Riddle of the Universe. Ten thousand copies of this work were sold within a very short time of its appearance, and it has been translated into many languages. Seldom, indeed, has a book of serious purpose found so wide a circulation.

[ 2 ] Now, if theosophy is to make clear its aims, it is but right that it should take into account so important a publication—one that concerns itself with the most profound questions of existence. Theosophy should deal with it comprehensively, and seek to express its attitude with regard to it. For after all, the theosophical conception of life is not combative but rather conciliatory, desirous of harmonising opposing views.

Furthermore, I myself am in a very peculiar position with respect to Ernst Haeckel's conception of the universe, for I know well those feelings and perceptions which, partly by reason of a scientific consciousness, and partly from the general conditions of the world and the usual conceptions thereof, draw men as though by the power of some fascination towards such great and simple paths of thought as those from which Haeckel has constructed his conception of the universe. And here I may say that I should hardly have dared to speak my mind thus openly were I in any sense an opponent of Haeckel, or were it not that I am intimately acquainted with all that can be experienced in the process of adapting oneself to the wonderful edifice of his ideas.

[ 3 ] The very first thing that anyone bringing his attention frankly to bear upon the development of spiritual life is bound to recognise, is the moral power displayed in Haeckel's labours. For years past this man, imbued with an enormous amount of courage, has fought for the acceptance and the recognition of his conception of the universe—fought strenuously, having again and again to defend himself against the manifold obstacles that impeded his progress. On the other hand, we must not be unmindful of the fact that Haeckel's great powers of comprehensive expression are balanced by equally comprehensive powers of thought: the very qualities in which many scientists are deficient happen to be those with which he is very highly endowed.

In gathering together the results of his researches and investigations under the one comprehensive title of a conception of the universe, he has boldly departed from those tendencies of scientific thought which have for several decades opposed any such undertaking; and this very departure must be recognised as an act of special significance.

Another fact to be noted is, that I am placed in a singular position with regard to the theosophical conception of the universe when I speak about Haeckel; for anyone acquainted with the process of development through which the theosophical movement has passed will be aware of what sharp words and what opposition, not only on the part of theosophists in general, but on the part of the founder of the theosophical movement, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, were directed against the deductions which Ernst Haeckel draws from his work of investigation. Few publications touching cosmogony have been so violently opposed in the Secret Doctrine as that of Haeckel.

You will understand that I speak here without prejudice, for I think that in parts of my book, Haeckel and his Opponents, as well as in my other work on Cosmogonies of the Nineteenth Century, I have to the fullest extent done justice to what I take to be the real truths contained in Haeckel's conception of the universe. I believe that I have sifted from his labours that which is fruitful, and that which is enduring. [ 4 ] Consider the general attitude towards the conception of the world in so far as it is based upon scientific reasons. During the first half of the nineteenth century a totally different spiritual attitude prevailed from that known in the second half. Haeckel's appearance on the scene coincided with a time in which it was an easy thing for the new growth of so-called Darwinism to be subjected to materialistic interpretations. If, therefore, we realise how insistent was this tendency, at the very time when Haeckel was a young and enthusiastic student entering upon the pursuit of natural science, to reduce all discoveries in that domain of learning to a materialistic issue, the consequent bent towards materialism may well be understood, and may therefore lead us into a path of peace rather than of conflict.

If you will consider those men who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, set themselves to confront the great riddle of humanity with calm, unprejudiced eyes, you will find two things: on the one hand, a state of absolute resignation in relation to the highest questions concerning a divine ordering of the world, such as immortality, freedom of will, origin of life—a resignation, in short, with regard to all the actual riddles of the universe. On the other hand you will discover, co-existing with this attitude of resignation, remnants of an ancient religious tradition, and this even among students of natural science. Bold adventuring towards investigation of such questions from the scientific point of view was, during the first half of the nineteenth century, to be met with only among German philosophers, such as Schelling and Fichte, as well as Oken, who, by the way, was a pioneer of freedom without equal, not alone upon this subject, but in many paths of life.

All attempts made by men in the present day towards the fundamentalising of world-theories are to be found in still bolder outline among the works of Oken. And yet all this was animated by a certain subtleness—a breath, as it were, of that old spiritualism which is clearly conscious that, behind and beyond all that our senses can perceive, all that can be investigated by means of instruments, there still lurks something spiritual to be sought for. [ 5 ] Haeckel has again and again told us how distinctly the mind of his great teacher—that deep student of natural science, Johannes Müller, of imperishable memory—was tinged with this subtle breath. You can read in Haeckel's own writings how he had been struck (it was at the time when he was busy at the Berlin University and studying the anatomy of men and animals under Johannes Müller) by the great resemblance apparent not alone in outward form, but also by that similarity which compels attention in the evolution of form. He tells us how he had remarked to his master that such resemblance as this must hint at some mysterious kinship between man and beast, and that the answer made by Johannes Müller, who had searched so deeply into Nature, had been: “Ah! he who lays bare the secret of species will indeed have reached the highest summit.”

What we have to do is to attune ourselves to the spirit, the motive, of such a seeker; of one who assuredly would never have halted had he beheld a prospect of entering into possession of that secret. On one other occasion, when teacher and pupil were travelling together on some journey of investigation, Haeckel again referred to the close relationship existing between animals; and Johannes Müller once more replied very much to the same effect. In alluding to this I only wish to draw your attention to a certain attitude of mind.

If you will look back among the writings of any well-known naturalist belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century—for instance, to those of Burdach—you will find that, in spite of all the careful and elaborate minutiae appertaining to natural science, whenever the kingdom of life comes to be considered, the suggestion is ever present that here no mere physical and chemical powers are in operation, but that something higher has to be taken into account.

[ 6 ] When, however, improvements in microscopes made it possible for man to observe, to a far greater extent than heretofore, all those curious formations which serve to distinguish living creatures, showing that we have to do with a fine web of the minutest animalcules, and that this actually composes the physical body—when, as I have said, so much was made visible, the attitude of the scientific mind underwent a change. This physical body, which serves plants and animals as their garment, now resolved itself, so far as the scientist was concerned, into a tissue of cells. This discovery as to the life of these cells was made by naturalists about the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century, and, seeing that it was possible to ascertain so much about the lives of such animalcules by the exercise of the senses, assisted by the aid of the microscope, it required but a step further for that which acts as the organising principle in these living creatures to be lost sight of, because no physical sense, nothing external, proclaimed its presence.

[ 7 ] At that time there was no Darwinism, yet it was owing to the impression made by this great advance in the domain of practical research that we find a natural science grounded in materialism coming into vogue during the 'forties and 'fifties. It was then thought that what could be perceived by the senses, and thus explained, could be understood by the whole world. Things that now seem puerile created then the most intense sensation, and became, so to speak, a gospel for humanity. Such words as “energy” and “matter” became popular by-words, while men like Büchner and Moleschott were recognised authorities. It was considered an evidence of childish fancy, belonging to earlier epochs of the human race, to suppose that anything that could be minutely examined with the eye was possessed of aught beyond what was actually visible.

[ 8 ] Now, you must bear in mind that, side by side with all discovery, feelings and sensations play a great part in the development of mental life. Anyone who may be inclined to think that cosmogonies are the result of bold calculations of reason makes a mistake: in all such matters the heart is active, and the secret sources of education also contribute their share. Humanity has, during its latest phase of development, been passing through a materialistic stage of education. The actual beginning of this stage is traceable far back, it is true; nevertheless, it reached its apex in the time of which we are speaking. We call this epoch of materialistic education the age of enlightenment.

Man had now—and this was the final result of the Christian conception of the universe—to find his foothold upon the firm ground of reality: the God whom he had so long sought beyond the clouds he was now bidden to seek within his inner consciousness. This had a far-reaching effect upon the entire development of the nineteenth century, and anyone interested in psychological changes and caring to study the development of humanity at that time will be enabled to understand how all the events and occurrences which then followed upon each other, such as the struggle for freedom in the 'thirties and 'forties, can but be classed as separate storms and convulsions of the feelings which were the result of that newly developed sense of physical reality, and which were bound to run their appointed course. We have to deal with a tendency in human education that sought in the first place forcibly to eradicate from the human heart every aspiration towards a spiritual life.

It is not from natural science that those deductions, pronouncing the world to consist of naught but what can be perceived by the senses, have been drawn; they are a consequence of the educational teaching obtaining at that time. Materialism had become interwoven with explanations relating to the facts of natural science. Anyone who will take the trouble to study these things as they really are, bringing to bear upon the subject a mind free from prejudice, will be in a position to see for himself that the case is as I am about to set forth, but it is impossible for me in the space of one short hour to deal with the matter exhaustively.

[ 9 ] The whole of the stupendous advance made in the realms of natural science, of astronomy, of physics and chemistry, due to spectrum analysis, to a greater theoretical knowledge of heat, and to that teaching concerning the development of living organisms known to us as the Darwinian theory—all these come within this period of materialism. Had these discoveries been made at a time when people still thought as they did about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a time when a greater spiritual sensitiveness prevailed, then these discoveries would have been so construed as to furnish proofs positive of the working of the spirit in Nature—indeed, by very reason of the wonderful discoveries in natural science the supremacy of spirit would have been deemed incontestably established.

[ 10 ] It is clear, then, that scientific investigations with regard to Nature need not necessarily and under all circumstances lead to materialism. It was merely because so many leaders of civilisation at that time were materialistically inclined that these discoveries became interpreted in a materialistic way. Materialism was imported into natural science, and naturalists, such as Ernst Haeckel, accepted it unconsciously. Darwin's discovery per se need not have tended to materialism.

Materialism points to Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, as its chief support. Now, it is clear that if a thinker inclining to materialism approached these discoveries, he would be sure to invest Darwinism with a materialistic colouring, and it was due to Haeckel's boldly materialistic attitude of thought that Darwinism has received its present materialistic interpretation. It was an event of great moment when Haeckel, in the year 1864, announced the connection between man and the higher animals (apes). At that time this could but mean that man was descended from the higher animals. But since that day scientific thought has undergone a curious process of development. Haeckel has adhered to his opinion that man is the descendant of those higher animals, they being in their turn the developments of still lower types, reaching back finally to the very simplest forms of life. It is thus that Haeckel constructs man's entire genealogical tree—in fact, the lineal descent of all humanity. By this means everything of a spiritual nature became for him excluded from the world, except as a reflection of already-existing material things.

And yet Haeckel, having in the depths of his being a peculiar spiritual consciousness working side by side with his materialistic “thinking mind,” casts about for some means of help, since these two parts of his being have never been able to “come into line;” he has not succeeded in bringing about a working partnership between them. For this reason he comes to the conclusion that even the smallest living creature may be accredited with a sort of consciousness, but he does not explain to us how the complex human consciousness is developed out of that which is latent in the smallest living creature.

In the course of a conversation Haeckel once said: “People are always objecting to my materialism, but I don't deny the Spirit, nor do I deny Life: I only want people to observe that when you place matter in a retort everything in it soon begins to work and effervesce—to ferment.” That remark shows plainly enough that Haeckel possesses a spiritual as well as a scientific mind.

[ 11 ] Among those who, at the time of Darwin's supremacy, proclaimed their adherence to the theory of man's descent from the higher animals was the English scientist Huxley. He asserted the close similarity in external structure between man and the higher animals to be even greater than that existing between the higher and lower species of apes, and that we could but come to the conclusion that a line of descent existed leading from the higher animals to man. In more recent times scientists have discovered new facts, but even then those feelings which for centuries past have educated the human heart and soul were undergoing a change, a transformation. Hence it was that Huxley in the 'nineties, not long before his death, gave utterance to the following view—a strange one, coming from him:

“We see therefore,” he observed, “that in Nature life is conditioned by a series of steps, proceeding from the simplest and most incomplete up to the complicated and perfected. We cannot follow this continuity, yet why should not this continuous line proceed onwards in a region which we are unable to survey?”

In these words the way is indicated by which man may, by the pursuit of natural science, rise to the idea of a Divine being, standing high above man—a being farther removed from man than man himself is from the one-celled organism. Huxley had once said:

“I would rather have descended from such ancestors, ancestors similar to the brute, than from such as deny the human intelligence.”¹

[ 12 ] Thus do precepts and concepts, all the soul thinks and feels, alter in the course of time. Haeckel has continued his work of research along the lines he first adopted. In the year 1867 he had already published his popular work, The Natural History of Creation, and from this book much may be learnt. It teaches the laws by which the living kingdoms in Nature are linked one to the other. We can see through the veil shrouding the grey past and bring what is existent into relation with what is extinct, of which only the last remains may now be found upon the earth.

Haeckel has recognised this accurately. That world-history, here in a wider sense playing its part, I can only elucidate by making use of an illustration. You may find it no more accurate than are most comparative illustrations, yet it fairly bears out my meaning.

Let us suppose that a writer on art appeared upon the scene and produced a book in which he treated with consummate skill the whole period stretching from the days of Leonardo da Vinci to modern times. He presents to our minds all that has been achieved in the pursuit of art during that period, and we believe ourselves enabled to look within at the development of man's creative powers. Let us, then, go further, and imagine that another person came along and criticised the descriptive work, saying: “But, look here! Everything this art historian has put on record never happened at all! These are all descriptions of pictures that don't exist! What use have I for such imaginings? One has to investigate reality in order to arrive at the true method of adequately presenting art in its historical bearings. I will therefore investigate the remains of Leonardo da Vinci himself, and try to reconstruct the body, and then judge by the contours of his skull what brain he is likely to have had and how it may probably have functioned.” In the same way the events described by the art historian are depicted by the professor of anatomy. There may have been no mistake. All may have been correct. Well, then, in that case, says the anatomist, we must “fight to a finish” against this idealisation of our art historian; we must combat his phantasy, his imagination, for it amounts to credulity and superstition to allow anyone to attempt to make us believe that besides the form of Leonardo da Vinci there was some “gaseous vortex” to be apprehended as a soul.

[ 13 ] Now, this illustration, in spite of its manifest absurdity, really hits the mark. This is the position in which everyone finds himself who chooses to assert his belief in the Natural History of Creation as the only accurate one. Nor can this illustration be negatived by merely indicating its weak points. They are there, perhaps, but that is beside the point. What is of importance is that the obvious should for once be presented according to its inner relationship; and that is what Haeckel has done in a full and exhaustive way. It has been done in such a manner that anyone wishing to see, can see, how active is the Spirit in the moulding of the form, where, to all appearances, matter alone reigns supreme. Much may be learnt from that; we may learn how to acquire spiritually knowledge as to the world's material combination, how to acquire it with earnestness, dignity, and perseverance. Anyone going through Haeckel's Anthropogenesis sees how form builds itself up, as it were, from the simplest living creature to the most complicated, from the simplest organism to man. He who understands how to add the Spirit to what is already granted by the materialist may in this example of “Haeckelism” have the opportunity of studying the best elementary theosophy.

[ 14 ] The results of Haeckel's research constitute, so to speak, the first chapter of theosophy. Far better than by any other method, we can arrive at a comprehension of the growth and transformation of organic forms by a study of his works. We have every reason to call attention to the great things which have been achieved through the progress of this profound study of Nature.

[ 15 ] At the time when Haeckel had constructed this wonderful edifice, the world was facing the deeper riddles of humanity as problems without solution. In the year 1872 Du Bois-Reymond, in a speech memorable for its brilliant rhetoric, alluded to the limits placed to natural science and to our knowledge of Nature. During the past decade the utterances of few men have been so much discussed as has this lecture with the celebrated “Ignorabimus.” It was a momentous event, and offered a complete contrast to Haeckel's own development and to his theory of the descent of man. In another lecture Du Bois-Reymond has tabulated seven great questions as to existence, questions which the naturalist can only answer in part, if at all. These seven “riddles of the universe” are:

1. The origin of energy and matter
2. How did the first movement arise in this quiescent matter?
3. How did life originate within this “matter set in motion?”
4. How is it that so many things in Nature bear the stamp of utility to a degree only met with in such human achievements as are the result of intelligent reasoning?
5. Assuming we were able to examine our brain, we should find it to be nothing but a jumble of little whirling spheres; how is it, then, that these same little balls, or spheres, enable me, let us say, to “see red,” to hear the tones of the organ, to feel pain, etc.? Think of a mass of whirling atoms, and it will be plain to you that it is not from them that you derive the sensations expressing themselves in such words as “I see red,” “I smell the scent of the rose,” etc.
6. How do understanding, reason, and speech develop in the living being?
7. How can “free will” originate in a being so circumscribed that his every act is the product of the whirling of these atoms?

[ 16 ] It was in connection with these riddles of the universe put forward by Du Bois-Reymond that Haeckel gave his book the title of The Riddle of the Universe. His desire was to give the answer to the questions raised by Du Bois-Reymond. There is a specially important passage in the lecture Du Bois-Reymond delivered on the “Limits of Inquiry into Nature,” which will enable us to step across into the field of theosophy.

[ 17 ] At the time when Du Bois-Reymond was lecturing at Leipsic before an assembly of natural scientists and medical men, the spirit of natural science was seeking after a purer, higher, and freer atmosphere—such an atmosphere as might lead to the theosophical cosmogony. On that occasion Du Bois-Reymond spoke as follows:—

“If we study man from the point of view of natural science, he presents himself to us as a working compound of unconscious atoms. To explain man in accordance with natural science means to ‘understand’ this atomic motion to its uttermost degree.”

He considered that if one were in a position to indicate the precise way in which the atoms moved at any given place in the brain, while saying, for instance, “I think,” or “Give me an apple”—if this could be done, then the problem would, according to natural science, have been solved. Du Bois-Reymond calls this the “astronomic” understanding of man. Even as a miniature firmament of stars would be the appearance of these active groups of human atoms. But what has not here been taken into consideration is the question as to how sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise in the consciousness of the man of whom, let us say, I perfectly well know that his atoms move in such and such a manner. That natural science can as little determine as it can the manner in which consciousness arises. Du Bois-Reymond concluded with the following words:—

“In the sleeping man, who is not conscious of the sensation expressed in the words ‘I see red,’ we have before us the physical group of the active members of the body. With regard to this sleeping body, we need not say, ‘We cannot know’—‘Ignorabimus!’ We are able to comprehend the sleeping man. Man awake, on the contrary, is incomprehensible to the scientist. In the sleeping man something is absent which is nevertheless present in the man awake: I allude to the consciousness through which he appears before us as a spiritual being.” [ 18 ] At that time, owing to a lack of courage in matters concerning natural science, further progress was impossible; there was no question as yet of theosophy, because natural science had, in concise terms, defined the boundary, had set a barrier at the precise spot up to which it wished to proceed in its own fashion. It was owing to this self-limitation of science that theosophical cosmogony had, about this time, its beginning. No one is going to maintain that man, when he goes to sleep “ceases to be,” and on re-awaking in the morning “resumes existence.” And yet Du Bois-Reymond says that something which is present in him by day is absent during the night. It is here that the theosophical conception of the universe is enabled to assert itself. Sense-consciousness is in abeyance in the sleeping man. As, however, the man of science uses as a prop for his argument that which brings about this sense-consciousness, he is unable to say anything concerning the spirituality that transcends it, because he lacks precisely the knowledge of that which makes of man a spiritual being.

By the use of such means as serve for natural science we are unable to investigate matters spiritual. Natural science depends upon what may be demonstrated to the senses. What can no longer be sensed when man falls asleep, cannot be the object of scientific investigation. It is in this something, no longer perceptible in the sleeping man, that we must seek for that entity by which man becomes a spiritual being. No mental representation can be made of what transcends the purely material and passes beyond the knowledge of the senses, until organs, of which the scientist can know nothing if he only depends on his sense-perceptions—spiritual eyes—are developed; eyes which are able to see beyond the confines of the senses.

For this reason we have no right to say, “Here are the limits of cognition;” but merely, “Here are the limits of sense-perception.”

The scientist perceives by means of his senses, but he is no spiritual observer; he must become one. become a “seer.” in order that he may see what is spiritual in man. This is the bourne towards which tends all profound wisdom in the world; not seeking the mere widening of its radius where actual material knowledge is concerned, but striving towards the raising of human faculty.

This also is the great difference between what is taught by present-day natural science and what is taught by theosophy. Natural science says: “Man has senses with which he perceives, and a mind whereby he is enabled to connect the evidences of his senses. What does not come within the scope of these lies beyond the ken of natural science.”

[ 19 ] Theosophy takes a different view of the case. It says: “You scientists are perfectly right, so long as you judge from your point of view, just as right as the blind man would be from his in saying that the world is devoid of light and colour. We make no objection to the standpoint of natural science, we would only place it in juxtaposition to the view taken by theosophy, which asserts that it is possible—nay, that it is certain—that man is not obliged to remain stationary at the point of view he occupies to-day; that it is possible for organs—spiritual eyes—to develop after a similar fashion to that in which those physical sense-organs of the body, the eyes and ears, have been developed; and once these new organs are developed, higher faculties will make themselves apparent.”

This must be taken on faith at first—nay, it need not even be believed; it may just be accepted as an assertion in an unprejudiced manner. Nevertheless, as true as it is that all believers in the Natural History of Creation have not beheld all that is therein presented to them as fact (how many of them have actually investigated these facts?), so true is it that these facts concerning a knowledge of the super-sensual can be explained to everyone.

The ordinary man, held in bondage by his senses, cannot possibly gain admittance to this realm. It is only by the aid of certain methods of investigation that the spiritual world opens to the seeker. Thus, man must transform himself into an instrument for those higher powers, one able to penetrate into worlds hidden from those still enthralled by their physical senses. To such as can accomplish this, visions of a quite distinctive nature will appear. The ordinary human being is not capable of seeing for himself, or of consciously recognising things about him, when his senses are wrapped in slumber; but when he applies occult methods of investigation this incapacity ceases, and he begins to receive quite consciously impressions of the astral world.

[ 20 ] There is at first a state of transition, familiar to all, between that exterior life of sense cognisance and that life which even in the most profound state of slumber is not quite extinguished. This state of transition is the chaos of dreams. To most people these will appear as mere reflections of what they have been experiencing during the previous day. Indeed, you will ask, how should a man be able to receive any new experiences during sleep, since the inner self has as yet no organs of cognition? But still, something is there—life is there. That which left the body when sleep wrapped it round has memory, and this remembrance rises before the sleeper in pictures more or less fantastic and confused. (Should anyone desire more information on this subject, it will be found in my books entitled The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results, Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W.)

[ 21 ] Now, in place of this chaos, order and harmony will, in the course of time, be brought about; an order and a harmony governing this region of dreams, and this will be a sign that the person in question is beginning to develop spiritually. Then he will cease to see the mere aftermath of reality, grotesquely portrayed; he will see things which have in ordinary life no existence.

Those who desire to remain within the boundary of the senses will, of course, say, “But they are only dreams!” Yet, if they, by such means, obtain an insight into the loftiest secrets of creation, it may surely be a matter of indifference to them whether they gain this through the medium of a dream or by means of the senses. Let us, for instance, suppose that Graham Bell had invented the telephone in a state of dream-consciousness. That would have been of no moment whatever to-day, for the telephone itself in any case is an important and useful invention. Clear and regular dreaming is therefore the beginning, and if in the stillness of the night hours you have come to “live in your dreams,” if, after a time, you have habituated yourself to a cognisance of worlds quite other than this, then will soon come a time when you will learn, by these new experiences, to step forth into actuality.

Then the whole world will assume a new aspect, and you will be as sensible of this change as you would be of threading your way through a row of solid chairs, through anything your senses may at this moment be aware of in their vicinity. Such is the condition of anyone who has acquired a new state of consciousness. Something new, a new kind of personality, has awakened within him. In the course of his further development a stage will at length be reached where not only the curious apparitions of the higher worlds pass before the spiritual eye as visions of light, but the tones also of those higher worlds become audible, telling their spiritual names, and able to convey to the seer a new meaning. In the language of the mysteries, this is expressed in the words, “Man sees the sun at midnight;” which is to say, that for him there are no longer any obstacles in space to prevent him from seeing the sun when on the other side of the world. Then, too, is the work of the sun, acting within the universe, made plain to him, and he becomes aware of that harmony of the spheres, that truth to which the Pythagoreans bore witness.

Tones and sounds, this music of the spheres, now become, for him, actual. Poets who were also seers have known of the existence of something approaching this music, and only those who can grasp Goethe's meaning from this point of view will be able to understand those passages, for instance, occurring in the “Prologue in Heaven” (see Faust, pt. I), which may be taken either as poetic phraseology or as a lofty truth. Where Faust is a second time introduced into the world of spirits, he speaks of these sounds: “Sounding loud to spirit-hearing, See the new-born Day appearing!” Faust, Part II.

[ 22 ] Here we have the connection between natural science and theosophy. Du Bois-Reymond has pointed to the fact that the sleeper only can be an object for the experiments of natural science. But if man should begin to open his inner senses, if he should come to see and hear that there is such a thing as spiritual actuality, then indeed will the whole edifice of elementary theosophy, so wonderfully, constructed by Haeckel—a structure none can admire more profoundly than I—then will this great work glow with a new glory, revealing, as it must, an entirely new meaning. According to this marvellous structure we see a simple living creature as the archetype, yet we may trace back that creature spiritually to an earlier condition of consciousness.

[ 23 ] I will now explain what theosophy holds as the doctrine of the descent of man. It is obvious that in a single lecture like the present no “proofs” can be advanced, and it is also natural that to all who are only acquainted with the theories commonly advanced on this subject everything I say will appear fantastic and highly improbable. All theories thus advanced originated, however, in the leading circles of materialistic thought, and many who would probably resent the suggestion of materialism as utterly foreign to their nature, are nevertheless (and indeed quite comprehensibly so) caught in a net of self-delusion.

The true theosophical teaching concerning evolution is, in our day, hardly known; and when our opponents speak of it, he who does know is at once able to recognise by the objections raised that he is dealing with a caricature of this doctrine of evolution.

For all such as merely acknowledge a soul, or spirit, to which expression is given within the human, or animal organism, the theosophical mode of representation must be utterly incomprehensible, and every discussion touching that subject is, with such persons, quite fruitless. They must first free themselves from the state of materialistic suggestion in which they live, and must make themselves acquainted with the fundamental attitude of theosophical thought.

[ 24 ] Just as the methods of research employed by physical science trace back the organism of the physical body into the dim distance of primeval times, so it is the mode of theosophical thought to delve into the past with regard to the soul and the spirit. Now, the latter method does not lead to any conclusions antagonistic or contradictory to the facts advanced by natural science; only with the materialistic interpretations of these facts it can have nothing to do.

Natural science traces the descent of the physical living being backwards, arriving by this course at organisms of a less and less complicated kind. Natural science declares: “The perfect living being is a development of these simpler and less complicated ones;” and, as far as physical structure is concerned, this is true, although the hypothetical forms of primeval ages of which materialistic science speaks do not entirely conform with those known to theosophical research. This, however, need not concern us at the present moment.

[ 25 ] From the physical standpoint theosophy also acknowledges the relationship of man with the higher mammals, with the man-like apes. But there can be no question of the descent of our humanity from a creature of the mind and soul calibre of the ape, as we know it. The facts are quite otherwise, and everything that materialism puts forward of this nature rests upon an error of thought. This error may be cleared up by means of a simple comparison sufficient for our purpose, though trite.

We will imagine two persons, one morally deficient and intellectually insignificant; the other endowed with a high standard of morality and of considerable intellectuality. We will assume that some fact or other confirms the relationship of these two. Now, I ask you, will the inference be drawn that the one in every way more highly endowed is descended from one who was of the standard described? Never! We may think it a surprising fact that they are brothers. We may find, however, that they had a father who was not of exactly the same standard as either of the brothers, and in that case one will be found to have worked his way up, the other to have degenerated.

[ 26 ] Materialistic science makes a similar mistake to that here indicated. Facts known to it induce the acceptance of a connection between ape and man, yet from this it should not draw the conclusion that man is descended from the ape-like animals. What should be accepted is a primeval creature, a common physical ancestor, from the stock of which the ape has degenerated, while man has been the ascending “brother.”

[ 27 ] Now, what was there in that primeval creature to cause this ascendance to the human on the one hand, the sinking into the ape kingdom on the other? Theosophy answers, “The soul of man himself did this.” Even then the soul of man was present, at a time when, on the face of this physical earth, the creatures possessing the highest sense of development were these common ancestors of man and ape. From amid the multitude of these ancestors the best types were capable of subjecting themselves to the soul's progress, the rest were not. Thus it happens that the present-day human soul has a “soul-ancestor” just as the body has its physical forebear.

It is true that, so far as the senses are concerned, those “soul-ancestors” could not, according to our present-day observations, have been perceptible within our bodies. They still belonged in a sense to “higher worlds,” and they were also possessed of other capabilities and powers than those of the present human soul. They lacked the mental activity and the moral sense now evident. Such souls could conceive no way of fashioning instruments from the things in the outer world; they could create no political states. The soul's activity still consisted to a great extent in transforming the archetype of those ancestral bodies themselves. It laboured at improving the incomplete brain, enabling it at a later period to become the seat of thought activities. As the soul of to-day, directed towards external things, constructs machines, etc., so did that ancestral soul labour at constructing the body of the human ancestor. The following objection can, of course, be raised: “Why, then, does not the soul at the present day work at its body to the same extent?” The reason for its not doing so is that the energy used at a former time for the transforming of the organs has since been directing its whole effort upon external things in the mastery and regulation of the forces of Nature.

[ 28 ] We may therefore ascribe a twofold descent to man in primeval times. His spiritual birth is not coeval with the perfecting of his organs of sense. On the contrary, the “soul” of man was already present at a time when those physical “ancestors” inhabited the earth. Figuratively speaking, we may say that the soul “selected” a certain number of such “ancestors” as seemed best fitted for receiving the external corporeal expression distinguishing the present-day man. Another branch of these ancestors deteriorated, and in its degenerate condition is now represented by the anthropoid apes. These, then, form, in the true sense of the word, branch lines of the human ancestry. Those ancestors are the physical forebears of man, but this is due only to the capacity for reconstruction which they had primarily received from the human soul within. Thus is man physically descended from the “archetype,” while spiritually he is the descendant of the “ancestral soul.”

But we can go even further back with regard to the genealogical tree of living creatures, and we shall then arrive at a physically still more imperfect ancestor. Yet, at the time of this physical ancestor, too, the “soul-ancestor” of man was existent. It was this latter which raised the physical ancestor to the level of the ape, again outstripping its less adaptable brother in the race for development, and leaving him behind on a lower stage of creation. To such as these belong those present-day mammals of a lower grade than that of the apes. Thus we may go further and further back into primeval times, even to a time when upon this earth, then bearing so different an aspect, existed those most elementary of creatures from which Haeckel claims the development of all higher beings. The soul-ancestor of man was also a contemporary of these primitive creatures; it was already living when the “archetype” transformed the serviceable types, leaving behind at different stages those incapable of further development.

In actual truth, therefore, the entire sum of earth's living creatures are the descendants of man, within whom that which in this day “thinks and acts” as soul originally brought about the development of living beings. When our earth came into existence, man was a purely spiritual being; he began his career by building for himself the simplest of bodies. The whole ladder of living creatures represents nothing but the outgrown stages through which he has developed his bodily structure to its present degree of perfection.

The creatures of the present day differ widely in appearance from that of their ancestors at those particular stages where they branched off from the human tree. Not that they have remained stationary, for they have deteriorated in accordance with an inevitable law, which, owing to the lengthy explanation it would involve, cannot be entered into here. But the greatest interest attaches to the fact that through theosophy we arrive, so far as man's outward form is concerned, at a genealogical tree not altogether unlike Haeckel's. Haeckel, however, presupposes as the physical ancestor of man nothing but a hypothetical animal. Yet the truth is that at all those points where Haeckel uses the names of animals, the still undeveloped forebears of man should be installed; for those animals, down to the meanest living creatures, are but deteriorated and degenerate forms occupying those lower stages through which the human soul has passed on its upward journey.

Externally, therefore, the resemblance between Haeckel's genealogical tree and that of theosophy is sufficiently striking, though internal evidences show them to be as wide apart as the poles.

[ 29 ] Hence the reasons why Haeckel's deductions are so eminently suited for the learning of sound elementary theosophy. One need do no more than master, from the theosophical point of view, the facts he has elucidated in so masterly a manner, and then raise his philosophy to a higher and nobler plane. If Haeckel seeks to criticise and belittle any such “higher” philosophy, he shows himself to be simply puerile—after the fashion, for instance, of a person who, not having got beyond the multiplication table, yet presumed to assert: “What I know is true, and all higher mathematics are only imaginary nonsense.” No theosophist desires to deny or contradict the elementary facts of natural science; but the crux of the matter is that the scientist, deluded by materialistic suggestions, does not even know what theosophy is talking about.

[ 30 ] It depends upon a man himself what kind of philosophy he adopts. Fichte has put this in so many words: “The unperceiving eye cannot detect colours; The non-perceptive Soul cannot perceive Spirit.” The same thought has been voiced by Goethe in a well-known phrase: “Were the eye not sun-like—how could we see the sun? Were God's own power not within us, the God-like vision—could it enrapture us?” and an expression of Feuerbach, if rightly conceived, proclaims that each one sees God's image after his own likeness. The slave to his senses sees God in accordance with those senses; the spiritual observer sees the Spirit deified. “Were lions, bulls, and oxen able to set up gods, their gods would resemble lions, bulls, and oxen,” was the remark of a Greek philosopher long ages ago.

The fetish-worshipper, too, has as his highest principle something we may call spiritual, but he has as yet not come to seek for this within himself, and this is why he has not got beyond beholding his god as anything more than a block of wood. The fetish-worshipper cannot raise his prayer above what he can inwardly feel, for he still regards himself as on the same level as the block of wood. And those who can see no more than a whirl of atoms, those to whom the highest resolves itself into tiny dots of matter, such as these, too, have missed recognition of the highest principle within themselves.

[ 31 ] It is true that Haeckel places before us in all his works the information he has honestly acquired, so that to him must be accorded “les defauts de ses qualites.” The sterling worth of his teaching will live, its negative qualities will vanish. Taken from the higher point of view, one might say that the fetish-worshipper worships in his fetish a lifeless object, while the materialistic adherent of the theory of atoms worships not alone one “little god” but a whole host of them, which he calls atoms!² The superstition of the one is about as great as that of the other; for the materialistic atom is no more than a fetish, and the wooden block is made up of atoms too. Haeckel says in one passage: “We see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, in man—God is everywhere,” yet he only sees God as he can comprehend Him. How enlightening here are Goethe's words, when he says: “Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, Not me!”) —Bayard Taylor's translation.

Thus does the materialist mark the whirling atoms in stone, in plant, in animal, and in man, possibly, too, in every work of art, and claim for himself a knowledge of a monistic cosmogony that has overcome the ancient superstitions. Yet theosophists have a monistic cosmogony too; and we can say, in the same words as Haeckel uses, that we see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, and in the man; but what we see are no whirling atoms, but the living God, the spiritual God, whom we seek outside in Nature, because we can also seek Him within ourselves.

• 1. Readers who are unacquainted with Huxley's famous reply may be glad to have it in extenso, as given by Edward Clodd in Thomas Henry Huxley, published by William Blackwood and Sons:
  
  “At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, on 28th June, 1860, Owen emphasised the statement that ‘the brain of the gorilla presented more differences, as compared with the brain of man, than it did when compared with the brains of the very lowest and most problematical of the Quadrumana.’ To this Huxley, in polite English, gave the lie direct, and pledged himself to ‘justify that unusual procedure elsewhere.’ Two days after, by mere chance, he was present at the reading of a paper by Dr. Draper ‘On the Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.’ In the discussion which followed, Bishop Wilberforce, throwing a glance at Huxley, ended a suave and superficial speech by asking him ‘as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?’ Huxley did not rise till the meeting called for him. Then he let himself go. ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’ he said in an undertone to Sir Benjamin Brodie. After showing how ill-equipped was the Bishop for controversy upon the general question of organic evolution, although it was an open secret that Owen had primed him for the contest, Huxley said: ‘You say that development drives out the Creator, but you assert that God made you; and yet you know that you yourself were originally a piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case?’ Then followed the famous retort:
  
  “‘I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.’”
• 2. The word “worship” is, of course, not to be taken literally, for the materialistic thinker, though he has not yet been weaned from “fetishism,” has lost the habit of prayer.