The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] We have now defined the idea of knowledge. In the act of cognition this idea is directly given in human consciousness. Both outer and inner perceptions, as well as its own presence are given directly to the “I,” which is the center of consciousness. (It is hardly necessary to say that here “center” is not meant to denote a particular theory of consciousness, but is used merely for the sake of brevity in order to designate consciousness as a whole.) The I feels a need to discover more in the given than is directly contained in it. In contrast to the given world, a second world—the world of thinking—rises up to meet the I and the I unites the two through its own free decision, producing what we have defined as the idea of knowledge. Here we see the fundamental difference between the way the concept and the directly given are united within human consciousness to form full reality, and the way they are found united in the remainder of the world-content. In the entire remainder of the world picture we must conceive an original union which is an inherent necessity; an artificial separation occurs only in relation to knowledge at the point where cognition begins; cognition then cancels out this separation once more, in accordance with the original nature of the objective world. But in human consciousness the situation is different. Here the union of the two factors of reality depends upon the activity of consciousness In all other objects, the separation has no significance for the objects themselves, but only for knowledge. Their union is original and their separation is derived from the union. Cognition separates them only because its nature is such that it cannot grasp their union without having first separated them. But the concept and the given reality of consciousness are originally separated, and their union is derived from their original separation; this is why cognition has the character described here. Just because, in consciousness, idea and given are necessarily separated, for consciousness the whole of reality divides into these two factors; and again, just because consciousness can unite them only by its own activity, it can arrive at full reality only by performing the act of cognition. All other categories (ideas), whether or not they are grasped in cognition, are necessarily united with their corresponding forms of the given. But the idea of knowledge can be united with its corresponding given only by the activity of consciousness. Consciousness as a reality exists only if it produces itself. I believe that I have now cleared the ground sufficiently to enable us to understand Fichte's Science of Knowledge through recognition of the fundamental mistake contained in it. Of all Kant's successors, Fichte is the one who felt most keenly that only a theory of consciousness could provide the foundation for knowledge in any form, yet he never came to recognize why this is so. He felt that what I have called the second step in the theory of knowledge, and which I formulated as a postulate, must be actively performed by the I. This can be seen, for example, from these words:

“The science of knowledge, insofar as it is to be a systematic science, is built up in the same manner in which all possible sciences, insofar as they are systematic, are built up, that is, through a determination of freedom; which freedom, in the science of knowledge, is particularly determined: to become conscious of the general manner of acting of the intelligence. ... By means of this free act, something which is in itself already form, namely, the necessary act of the intelligence, is taken up as content and put into a new form, that is, the form of knowledge or of consciousness. ...”¹

What does Fichte here mean by the “acting of intelligence” if we express in clear concepts what he dimly felt? Nothing other than the production of the idea of knowledge, taking place in consciousness. Had Fichte become clear about this, then he would have formulated the above principle as follows: A science of knowledge has the task of bringing to consciousness the act of cognition, insofar as it is still an unconscious activity of the I; it must show that to objectify the idea of knowledge is a necessary deed of the I.

[ 2 ] In his attempt to define the activity of the I, Fichte comes to the conclusion: “The I as absolute subject is something, the being (essence) of which consists merely in postulating its own existence.”² For Fichte, this postulation of the I is the primal unconditioned deed, “it is the basis of all consciousness.”³ Therefore, in Fichte's sense too, the I can begin to be active only through an absolute original decision. But for Fichte it is impossible to find the actual content for this original activity postulated by the I. He had nothing toward which this activity could be directed or by which it could be determined. The I is to do something, but what is it to do? Fichte did not formulate the concept of knowledge which the I must produce, and in consequence he strove in vain to define any further activity of the I beyond its original deed. In fact, he finally stated that to investigate any such further activity does not lie within the scope of theory. In his deduction of representation, he does not begin from any absolute activity of the I or of the not-I, but he starts from a state of determination which, at the same time, itself determines, because in his view nothing else is, or can be contained directly in consciousness. What in turn determines the state of determination is left completely undecided in his theory; and because of this uncertainty, one is forced beyond theory into practical application of the science of knowledge.⁴ However, through this statement Fichte completely abolishes all cognition. For the practical activity of the I belongs to a different sphere altogether. The postulate which I put forward above can clearly be produced by the I only in an act which is free, which is not first determined; but when the I cognizes, the important point is that the decision to do so is directed toward producing the idea of cognition. No doubt the I can do much else through free decision. But if epistemology is to be the foundation of all knowledge, the decisive point is not to have a definition of an I that is “free,” but of an I that “cognizes.” Fichte has allowed himself to be too much influenced by his subjective inclinations to present the freedom of the human personality in the clearest possible light. Harms, in his address, On the Philosophy of Fichte, (p. 15) rightly says: “His world-view is predominantly and exclusively ethical, and his theory of knowledge has no other feature.” Cognition would have no task to fulfill whatever if all spheres of reality were given in their totality. But the I, so long as it has not been inserted by thinking into the systematic whole of the world-picture, also exists as something merely directly given, so that it does not suffice to point to its activity. Yet Fichte is of the opinion that where the I is concerned, all that is necessary is to seek and find it. “We have to search for the absolute, first, and unconditioned fundamental principle of human knowledge. It cannot be proven nor determined if it is to be absolute first principle.”⁵ We have seen that the only instance where proof and definitions are not required is in regard to the content of pure logic. The I, however, belongs to reality, where it is necessary to establish the presence of this or that category within the given. This Fichte does not do. And this is why he gave his science of knowledge a mistaken form. Zeller⁶ remarks that the logical formulas by which Fichte attempts to arrive at the concept of the I only lightly hide his predetermined purpose to reach his goal at any cost, so that the I could become his starting point. These words refer to the first form in which Fichte presented his science of knowledge in 1794. When it is realized that, owing to the whole trend of his philosophy, Fichte could not be content with any starting point for knowledge other than an absolute decree, it becomes clear that he has only two possibilities for making this beginning appear intelligible. One possibility is to focus the attention on one or another of the empirical activities of consciousness, and then crystallize out the pure concept of the I by gradually stripping away everything that did not originally belong to consciousness. The other possibility is to start directly with the original activity of the I, and then to bring its nature to light through self-contemplation and self-observation. Fichte chose the first possibility at the beginning of his philosophical path, but gradually went over to the second.

[ 3 ] On the basis of Kant's synthesis of “transcendental apperception”⁷ Fichte came to the conclusion that the activity of the I consists entirely in combining the material of experience into the form of judgment. To judge means to combine predicate with subject. This is stated purely formally in the expression: a == a. This proposition could not be made if the unknown factor x which unites the two a's did not rest on an absolute ability of the I, to postulate. For the proposition does not mean a exists, but rather: if a exists, then so does a. In other words there is no question of postulating a absolutely. In order, therefore, to arrive at something which is valid in a quite straightforward way, the only possibility is to declare the act of postulating as such to be absolute. Therefore, while a is conditional the postulation of a is itself unconditional. This postulation, however, is a deed of the I. To the I is ascribed the absolute and unconditional ability to postulate. In the proposition a == a, one a is postulated only because the other a is already postulated, and indeed is postulated by the I. “If a is postulated in the I, then it is postulated, or then it is.”⁸ This connection is possible only on condition that there exists in the I something which is always constant, something that leads over from one a to the other. The above mentioned x is based on this constant element. The I which postulates the one a is the same as the I which postulates the other a. This means that I == I. This proposition expressed in the form of a judgment: If the I exists, then the I exists, is meaningless. The I is not postulated by presupposing another I; it presupposes itself. This means: the I simply is, absolutely and unconditionally. The hypothetical form of a judgment, which is the form of all judgments, when an absolute I is not presupposed, here is transformed into a principle of absolute existence: I simply am. Fichte also expresses this as follows: “The I originally and absolutely postulates its own being.”⁹ This whole deduction of Fichte's is clearly nothing but a kind of pedagogical discussion, the aim of which is to guide his reader to the point where knowledge of the unconditional activity of the I dawns in him. His aim is to bring the activity of the I emphatically home to the reader, for without this activity there is no I.

[ 4 ] Let us now survey Fichte's line of thought once more. On closer inspection one sees that there is a break in its sequence; a break, indeed, of a kind that casts doubt upon the correctness of his view of the original deed of the I. What is essentially absolute when the I postulates? The judgment is made: If a exists, then so does a. The a is postulated by the I. There can, therefore, be no doubt about the postulation as such. But even if the I is unconditioned insofar as its own activity is concerned, nevertheless the I cannot but postulate something. It cannot postulate the “activity, as such, by itself,” but only a definite activity. In short: the postulation must have a content. However, the I cannot derive this content from itself, for by itself it can do no more than eternally postulate its own postulation. Therefore there must be something which is produced by this postulation, by this absolute activity of the I. Unless the I sets to work on something given which it postulates, it can do “nothing” and hence cannot postulate either. Fichte's own principle actually shows this: The I postulates its existence. This existence is a category. This means we have arrived at our principle: The activity of the I is to postulate, as a free decision, the concepts and ideas of the given. Fichte arrives at his conclusion only because he unconsciously sets out to prove that the I “exists.” Had he worked out the concept of cognition, he would then have arrived at the true starting point of a theory of knowledge, namely: The I postulates cognition. Because Fichte is not clear as to what it is that determines the activity of the I, he simply characterizes this activity as the postulation of being, of existence. In doing so, he also limits the absolute activity of the I. If the I is only unconditioned in its “postulation of existence.” everything else the I does must be conditioned. But then, all possible ways to pass from what is unconditioned to the conditioned are blocked. If the I is unconditioned only in the one direction described, it immediately ceases to be possible for the I to postulate, through an absolute act, anything but its own being. This makes it necessary to indicate the basis on which all the other activities of the I depend. Fichte sought for this in vain, as we have already seen.

[ 5 ] This is why he turned to the other of the two possibilities indicated for deducing the I. As early as 1797, in his First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge, he recommends self-observation as the right method for attaining knowledge of the essential being of the I:

“Be aware of yourself, withdraw your attention from all that surrounds you and turn it toward your inner being—this is the first demand that philosophy makes on the pupil. What is essential is not outside of you, but solely within yourself.¹⁰

To introduce the science of knowledge in this way is indeed a great advance on his earlier introduction. In self-observation, the activity of the I is actually seen, not one-sidedly turned in a particular direction, not as merely postulating existence, but revealing many aspects of itself as it strives to grasp the directly given world-content in thinking. Self-observation reveals the I engaged in the activity of building up the world-picture by combining the given with concepts. However, someone who has not elaborated the above considerations for himself—and who therefore does not know that the I only arrives at the full content of reality when it approaches the given with its thought-forms—for him, the process of knowledge appears to consist in spinning the world out of the I itself. This is why Fichte sees the world-picture more and more as a construction of the I. He emphasizes ever more strongly that for the science of knowledge it is essential to awaken the faculty for watching the I while it constructs the world. He who is able to do this appears to Fichte to be at a higher stage of knowledge than someone who is able to see only the construction, the finished product. He who considers only the world of objects does not recognize that they have first been created by the I. He who observes the I while it constructs, sees the foundation of the finished world-picture; he knows the means by which it has come into being, and it appears to him as the result of presuppositions which for him are given. Ordinary consciousness sees only what is postulated, what is in some way or other determined; it does not provide insight into the premises, into the reasons why something is postulated in just the way it is, and not otherwise. For Fichte it is the task of a completely new sense organ to mediate knowledge of these premises. This he expresses most clearly in his Introductory Lecture to the Science of Knowledge, delivered at Berlin University in the autumn of 1813:

“This science presupposes a completely new inner sense organ, through which a new world is revealed which does not exist for the ordinary man at all.” “The world revealed by this new sense, and therefore also the sense itself, is so far clearly defined: it consists in seeing the premises on which is based the judgment that ‘something is’; that is, seeing the foundation of existence which, just because it is the foundation, is in itself nothing else and cannot be defined.”¹¹

[ 6 ] Here too, Fichte lacks clear insight into the content of the activity carried out by the I. And he never attained this insight. That is why his science of knowledge could never become what he intended it to be: a philosophical foundation for science in general in the form of a theory of knowledge. Had he once recognized that the activity of the I can only be postulated by the I itself, this insight would also have led him to see that the activity must likewise be determined by the I itself. This, however, can occur only by a content being given to the otherwise purely formal activity of the I. As this content must be introduced by the I itself into its otherwise quite undetermined activity, the activity as such must also be determined by the I itself in accordance with the I's own nature. Otherwise its activity could not be postulated by the I, but at most by a “thing-in-itself” within the I, whose instrument the I would be. Had Fichte attempted to discover how the I determines its own activity, he would have arrived at the concept of knowledge which is to be produced by the I. Fichte's science of knowledge proves that even the acutest thinker cannot successfully contribute to any field of knowledge if he is unable to come to the right thought-form (category, idea) which, when supplemented by the given, constitutes reality. Such a thinker is like a person to whom wonderful melodies are played, but he does not hear them because he lacks an ear for music. Consciousness, as given, can be described only by someone who knows how to take possession of the “idea of consciousness.”

[ 7 ] Fichte once came very near the truth. In his Introduction to the Science of Knowledge (1797), he says that there are two theoretical systems: dogmatism—in which the I is determined by the objects; and idealism—in which the objects are determined by the I. In his opinion both are possible world-views. Both are capable of being built up into a consistent system. But the adherents of dogmatism must renounce the independence of the I and make it dependent on the “thing-in-itself.” For the adherents of idealism, the opposite is the case. Which of the two systems a philosopher is to choose, Fichte leaves completely to the preference of the individual. But if one wishes the I to retain its independence, then one will cease to believe in external things and devote oneself to idealism.

[ 8 ] This line of thought fails to consider one thing, namely that the I cannot reach any choice or decision which has some real foundation if it does not presuppose something which enables it to do so. Everything determined by the I remains empty and without content if the I does not find something that is full of content and determined through and through, which then makes it possible for the I to determine the given and, in doing so, also enables it to choose between idealism and dogmatism. This something which is permeated with content through and through is, however, the world of thinking. And to determine the given by means of thinking is to cognize. No matter from what aspect Fichte is considered, we shall find that his line of thought gains power and life when we think of the activity of the I, which he presents as grey and empty of content, as filled and organized by what we have called the process of cognition.

[ 19 ] The I is freely able to become active of itself, and therefore it can also produce the category of cognition through self-determination; in the rest of the world, by objective necessity the categories are connected with the given corresponding to them. It must be the task of ethics and metaphysics to investigate the nature of this free self-determination, on the basis of our theory of knowledge. These sciences will also have to discuss whether the I is able to objectify ideas other than those of cognition. The present discussion shows that the I is free when it cognizes, when it objectifies the ideas of cognition. For when the directly given and the thought-form belonging to it are united by the I in the process of cognition, then the union of these two elements of reality—which otherwise would forever remain separated in consciousness—can only take place through a free act.

[ 10 ] Our discussion sheds a completely new light on critical idealism. Anyone who has acquainted himself intimately with Fichte's system will know that it was a point of vital importance for this philosopher to uphold the principle that nothing from the external world can enter the I, that nothing takes place in the I which is not originally postulated by the I itself. Yet it is beyond all doubt that no idealism can derive from the I that form of the world-content which is here described as the directly given. This form of the world-content can only be given; it can never be constructed out of thinking. One need only consider that if all the colors were given us with the exception of one single shade, even then we could not begin to provide that shade out of the I alone. We can form a picture of distant regions that we have never seen, provided we have once personally experienced, as given, the various elements needed to form the picture. Then, out of the single facts given us, we combine the picture according to given information. We should strive in vain to invent for ourselves even a single perceptual element that has never appeared within our sphere of the given. It is, however, one thing merely to be aware of the given world: it is quite another to recognize its essential nature. This latter, though intimately connected with the world-content, does not become clear to us unless we ourselves build up reality out of the given and the activity of thinking. The essential What of the given is postulated for the I only through the I itself. Yet the I would have no occasion to postulate within itself the nature of something given if it did not first find itself confronted by a completely undetermined given. Therefore, what is postulated by the I as the nature and being of the world is not postulated without the I, but through it.

[ 11 ] The true shape is not the first in which reality comes before the I, but the shape the I gives it. That first shape, in fact, has no significance for the objective world; it is significant only as a basis for the process of cognition. Thus it is not that shape which the theory of knowledge gives to the world which is subjective; the subjective shape is that in which the I at first encounters it. If, like Volkelt and others, one wishes to call this given world “experience,” then one will have to say: The world-picture which, owing to the constitution of our consciousness, appears to us in a subjective form as experience, is completed through knowledge to become what it really is.

[ 12 ] Our theory of knowledge supplies the foundation for true idealism in the real sense of the word. It establishes the conviction that in thinking the essence of the world is mediated. Through thinking alone the relationship between the details of the world-content become manifest, be it the relation of the sun to the stone it warms, or the relation of the I to the external world. In thinking alone the element is given which determines all things in their relations to one another.

[ 13 ] An objection which Kantianism could still bring forward would be that the definition of the given described above holds good in the end only for the I. To this I must reply that according to the view of the world outlined here, the division between I and external world, like all other divisions, is valid only within the given and from this it follows that the term “for the I” has no significance when things have been understood by thinking, because thinking unites all opposites. The I ceases to be seen as something separated from the external world when the world is permeated by thinking; it therefore no longer makes sense to speak of definitions as being valid for the I only.

• 1. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, P. 71.
• 2. For fundamentals of the scientific teaching of Fichte, see his Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 97.
• 3. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 4. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.
• 5. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 6. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605. Eduard Zeller studied and taught at Tübingen, later (1847) becoming professor of Theology at Bern, later (1849) professor of Theology, afterward of Philosophy at Marburg. In 1862 he was made professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, afterward at Berlin to his retirement in 1895. His masterwork is the Philosophie der Greichen, Philosophy of the Greeks, 1844–52. He was recognized throughout the academic world for his learning and contributions to scholarship, and received many distinctions and honors. His Philosophie der Greichen has been transl. into English by S. F. Alleyne, 2 vols. 1881. In addition, an abridged version prepared by Zeller (1883) also appeared in English in 1896, as did a number of his other writings.
• 7. The perception of an object involving the consciousness of the pure self as subject. (Translator)
• 8. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.
• 9. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.
• 10. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 11. J. G. Fichtes nachgelassene Werke, J. G. Fichte's Posthumous Works, Edited by J. H. Fichte, Vol. I, Bonn, 1834, p. 4 and 16. (Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre, Introductory Studies in the Scientific Teachings.)

[ 1 ] With what has been presented so far, we have clarified the idea of knowing. This idea is now given in human awareness without any mediation, insofar as it is limited to knowing itself. The ego (without mediation the center of awareness) is given external perception, internal perception, and perception of its own self-existence (sein eigenes Dasein). (It hardly needs to be said that we do not want the term "center" to be associated with a theoretical view of the nature of consciousness, but rather that we are only using it as a stylistic shorthand for the overall characteristic features of awareness.) The ego feels the urge to find more in what is given than what is immediately given. It goes beyond the given world to the second world of thinking, and it combines the two through a free decision (about possible reality) which we have settled on as the idea of knowing.

Herein lies a fundamental difference between (firstly) the way, in objective human awareness, in which concept and immediately-given show themselves bound together in total reality, and (secondly) that which has value regarding the remaining world-content. With every other part of the world picture, we must imagine that the connection is original and necessary from the outset. Only at the beginning of knowing does an artificial separation occur for knowing, which ultimately will again be uplifted (aufgehoben), by means of the appropriate recognition of the original nature of what is objective.

Things are different with human awareness. Here the connection is only present if it is carried out consciously in actual activity. With any other object, the separation has no meaning for the object, only for knowing does it have meaning. The connection is the first thing here, the separation is the derivative. The act of knowing only carries out the separation, because in its own way, it cannot take possession of the connection unless it has separated first. But the concept and the given reality of awareness are originally separate. The connection is what is derived, and that is why knowing is described here in this way.

Because in consciousness the idea and the given necessarily appear separately, the whole of reality is split into these two parts, and because consciousness can only bring about the combination of the two elements mentioned through its own activity, in this way it arrives at full reality through bringing to reality the act of knowing. The remaining categories (ideas) would necessarily be linked to the corresponding forms of the given, if they were not included in knowing; the idea of knowing can be united with the given related to it only through the activity of awareness. A real consciousness exists only when it realizes itself, when it brings itself to reality (sich selbst verwirklicht). I believe that I am sufficiently prepared to expose the fundamental error of Fichte's Principles of Science (Wissenschaftlehre) and at the same time to provide the key to understanding it.

Fichte is the philosopher who felt most vividly (among Kant's successors) that the foundation of all scientific thinking (Wissenschaft),⁶⁵ could only stand within a theory of consciousness, but he never realized why that was so. He felt that what we call the second step of epistemology, and to which we give the form of a postulate, must really be carried out by the ego. We see this for example, in his following words. “The Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), insofar as it is intended to be a systematic science (just like all possible sciences insofar as they are intended to be systematic), arises through a stipulation of freedom, which here in particular stipulates the art of handling intelligence in raising it to consciousness at all.— Through this free handling (Handlung), the necessary action of intelligence, already itself a form, will now be taken up substantially as the new form of perception of experience (des Wissens) or aware existence (Bewußtseins)..." ⁶⁶ What is here understood by the art of handling of intelligence, expressing what is darkly felt in clear terms, is nothing other than fully bringing into awareness the idea of knowing. If Fichte had been fully aware of this, he would simply have had to formulate the above sentence like this: The Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) must raise knowing, insofar as it is still an unconscious activity of the ego, into awareness-existence (Bewußtsein). It must show that the objectification of the idea of knowing is carried out in the ego as a necessary action.

[ 2 ] In his attempt to define the activity of the ego, Fichte concludes, "Whoever’s existence (essential being) consists solely in the fact that it assumes itself as being, that is the ego, as an absolute subject.” ⁶⁷ For Fichte, this positioning of the ego is the first unencumbered active handling that “lies at the basis of all other awareness of existence.” ⁶⁸ In Fichte's sense, the ego can only begin all its activity through an absolute decision. But for Fichte it is impossible to help this activity (which is absolutely done by the ego) to find any content for its actions. For it has nothing upon which to direct this activity, and by which it should determine itself. His ego is supposed to carry out an act, but what should it do? Because Fichte did not establish the concept of knowing that the ego should realize, he struggled in vain to find any progression from his absolute act to a further determination of the ego. Yes, he finally declares regarding such a progression, that the investigation into this lies outside the limits of theory. In deducing what the mental picture is, he assumes neither an absolute activity of the ego nor of the “non-ego”, but takes his start rather from something determined and at the same time determining, because nothing else is or can be contained directly in consciousness.

What determines this determination remains completely undecided in theory, and through this indeterminacy we are driven beyond theory into the practical part of scientific theory.⁶⁹ With this clarification, Fichte destroys knowing altogether. For the practical activity of the ego belongs to a completely different arena. Clearly, the postulate I made above can only be realized through a free action of the ego, but if the ego is to behave in a way of knowing, then it is important that the determination of the ego is to realize the idea of knowing. It is certainly true that the ego can do many other things of its own free will. But the epistemological foundation of all sciences is not based on a characteristic of the free ego, but rather on a characteristic of the knowing ego. However, Fichte allowed himself to be influenced too much by his subjective tendency to place the freedom of the human personality in the brightest light. Harms rightly remarks in his speech on Fichte's philosophy S.15, "His world view is predominantly and exclusively ethical, and his epistemology has no other character." Cognition would have absolutely no task if all areas of reality were given in their totality. But since the ego, so long as it is not integrated by thinking into the systematic whole of the world picture, is nothing other than something directly given, simply showing what it does is not sufficient. Fichte, however, is of the opinion that everything is already done for the ego by simply looking for it. “We must seek out the first principle (absolutely without presuppositions) of all human knowing. It cannot be proven or determined if it is to be the absolute first principle.” ⁷⁰

We have seen that in proving and defining, only the content of pure logic is out of place, not required. The ego, however, belongs to reality, where it is necessary to determine the presence of this or that category in the given. Fichte didn't do that. And this is the reason why he gave his scientific theory such a wrong shape. Zeller notes ⁷¹ that the logical formulas through which Fichte wants to arrive at the concept of the ego only poorly disguise the fact that Fichte wants to achieve the already preconceived purpose of getting to this starting point at all costs. These words refer to the first form that Fichte gave to his scientific theory in 1794. If we hold on to the fact that Fichte, based on the whole nature of his philosophizing, could have wanted nothing other than to have science begin through an absolute power decree, then there are only two ways in which this beginning appears understandable. One was to touch consciousness in some of its empirical activities and to crystallize the pure concept of the ego by gradually peeling away everything that does not originally follow from it. The other way, however, was to start with the original activity of the ego and to reveal its nature through self-reflection and self-observation. Fichte took the first path at the beginning of his philosophizing, but as his philosophizing coursed along, he gradually moved on to the second.

[ 3 ] Building on Kant's synthesis of “transcendental apperception”, Fichte found that all activity of the ego consisted in the assembly of the material of experience according to the forms of judgment. Judging consists in linking the predicate with the subject, which is expressed in a purely formal way by the sentence “a” = “a”. This proposition would be impossible if the unknown factor “x” that connects the first and second “a” were not based on an absolute ability to posit. Because the sentence does not mean: “a” is, but rather: if “a” is, then “a” is. There can be no question of postulating “a” absolutely. There is nothing left to arrive at something totally valid, other than to declare the positing itself to be absolute. While the “a” is conditional, the positing of the “a” is unconditional. But this setting is an act of the ego. The ego therefore can posit absolutely and unconditionally. In the sentence “a” = “a”, one “a” is only posited by presupposing the other; namely it is set by the ego. Fichte states, “If ‘a’ is posited in the ego, then it is posited.” ⁷² This connection is only possible under the condition that there is something in the ego that is always the same, something that moves from one “a” to the other. And the “x” mentioned above is based on this constant. The ego that posits one “a” is the same as that which posits the other. And that means “I” “I” This sentence expressed in the form of the proposition: “If I am, then so it is”, but this proposition has no meaning. The ego is not placed under the presupposition of another, but rather it presupposes itself. But that means it is absolute and unconditional.

The hypothetical form of the judgment, which belongs to all judgments without the presupposition of the absolute ego, is transformed here into the form of the absolute existential sentence: “I simply am”. Fichte also expresses this as follows: “The ego originally posits its own being.” ⁷³ We see that Fichte's entire derivation is nothing but a kind of pedagogical discussion to lead his readers to the point where the knowledge of the unconditioned activity of the ego dawns on them. The purpose is to make clear to his readers, that without this activity of the ego, there is no ego at all.

[ 4 ] We now want to look back at Fichte's train of thought. If you look more closely, it turns out that there is a crack in it, and one that calls into question the correctness of the view of the original act. What really is absolute in the positing of the I? The judgment is made: If “a” is, then “a” is. The “a” is placed by the ego. There can be no doubt about this setting. But even if it is unconditional as an activity, the ego can only set something. It cannot posit “activity in and of itself”, but only a specific activity. In short: the setting must have a content. But it cannot take this from itself, otherwise it could do nothing but set forever. There must therefore be something for the positing, for the absolute activity of the ego, which is realized through it. Without the ego taking hold of something given and positing it, it can posit nothing, and therefore cannot posit. This is therefore shown by a Fichte-like sentence that the ego posits its existence, this existence is a category. We are back to our statement: The activity of the ego is based on the ego positing the concepts and ideas of the given out of its own free decision. Only because Fichte unconsciously sets out to establish the ego as something that has existence does he reach his conclusion. If he had developed the concept of knowing, he would have arrived at the true starting point of the theory of knowing (epistemology), that the ego posits knowing. Since Fichte did not make it clear to himself what determines the activity of the ego, he simply described the positing of existence as the character of this activity. But in doing so he also limited the absolute activity of the ego. For if only the “existence-positing” of the ego is unconditional, then everything else that emanates from the ego is conditional. But every path to get from the unconditional to the conditional is also cut off. If the ego is unconditioned only in the direction indicated, then the possibility for it to posit something other than its own being through an original act immediately ceases. The need therefore arises to give the reason for all other activity of the ego. Fichte searched for one in vain, as we have already seen above.

[ 5 ] Therefore, he turned to the other path described above to derive the ego. As early as 1797 in his First Introduction to the Doctrine of Scientific Awareness he recommended self-observation as the right thing to do to recognize the ego by its very own character. “Pay attention to yourself, turn your gaze away from everything that surrounds you and peer into your inner self. This is the first demand that philosophy makes to its apprentices. There is no talk of anything outside of you, but only of yourself.” ⁷⁴ This way of introducing the Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), however, has a great advantage over the other. For self-observation does not in fact deliver the activity of the ego one-sidedly in a certain direction, it does not merely show it as positing existence, but rather it shows it in its all-round development, how it tries to think and understand the immediately given content of the world. Introspection shows the ego how it builds its worldview from the combination of the given and the concept. But for anyone who has not gone through the consideration above, who does not know that the ego only comes to the full content of reality when it approaches the given with thinking, for him the process of knowing appears as the world spinning out of the ego. For Fichte, the worldview becomes more and more a construction of the ego. He increasingly emphasizes that what is important in scientific teaching is to awaken the sense that can overhear the ego constructing the world. Anyone who can do this appears to Fichte to be at a higher level of knowing than someone who only sees the constructed, the finished existence. Anyone who only looks at the world of objects, does not recognize that they are created by the ego. But whoever looks at the ego in its construing sees the basis of the finished world picture, and knows how it came about, for it appears to him due to certain given prerequisites. Someone with ordinary consciousness only sees what is posited, what is determined in this or that way. He lacks insight into the antecedents, into the reasons why it is set this way and not otherwise. According to Fichte, the conscious experience of perceiving with logic and clarity (das Wissen) is the task of a completely new sense. I find this most clearly expressed in his Introductory lectures on his Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) that he read aloud in the fall of 1813 at the University of Berlin: “This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sensory tool through which a new world is created that does not exist at all for the ordinary person." ⁷⁵ Also: “The world of the new sense (and thereby itself) is for the moment clearly determined. It is seeing the antecedents on which judgment is based. It is something that itself grounds the grounds of existence, which is exactly why, because it is this, is not itself again and is an existence.” ⁷⁶

[ 6 ] Here too, Fichte lacks a clear insight into the content of the activity carried out by the ego. He never got through to it. That is why his Wissenschaftslehre could not become what it otherwise would have had to become given its entire structure, which is a theory of knowing as basic philosophical science. Once it was recognized that the activity of the ego must be determined by the ego itself, it was obvious to think that it also receives its determination from the ego. But how can this happen other than by giving content to the purely formal actions of the ego. But if this is really to be introduced by the ego into its otherwise completely undetermined activity, then it must also be determined according to its nature. Otherwise, it could at most be realized by a “thing in itself” lying in the ego, whose tool is the ego, but not by the latter itself. If Fichte had attempted this definition, then he would have arrived at the concept of knowing, which is to be realized by the ego. Fichte's teaching of science is proof that even the most astute thinker will not succeed in having a fruitful impact in any field if one does not arrive at the correct thought form (category, idea), which when supplemented with what is given, gives reality. Such a thinker is the same as a person who listens to the most wonderful melodies, but doesn't hear them at all, due to having no feeling for melody. Consciousness, as a given, can only be characterized by someone who knows how to put himself in possession of the “idea of consciousness”.

[ 7 ] Fichte came quite close to the correct insight. In 1797 he found in his Introduction to the Principles of Science that there were two theoretical systems, dogmatism,⁷⁷ in which the ego is determined by things, and idealism, in which things are determined by the ego. In his view, both stand as possible worldviews. Both allow consistent implementation. But if we give in to dogmatism, then we must give up the independence of the ego and make it dependent on the thing-in-itself. We are in the opposite situation when we pay homage to idealism. Which of the systems one or the other philosopher wants to choose, Fichte simply leaves it up to the discretion of the ego. But if it wants to preserve its independence, it would suspend belief in things outside of us and surrender to idealism.

[ 8 ] All that Fichte had needed was to have considered that the ego cannot come to any real, well-founded decision and determination if it does not presuppose something that helps it to make one. All determination from the ego would remain empty and contentless if the ego does not find something full of content and thoroughly determined that makes it possible for it to determine what is given and thus also allows the choice to be made between idealism and dogmatism. But this thoroughly full-of-content world is the world of thinking. And determining what is given through thinking means knowing. We may linger on Fichte’s work wherever we want, but everywhere we will find that his train of thought immediately takes root when we think of the completely gray, empty activity of the ego as being filled and regulated by what we have called the process of knowing.

[ 9 ] The ego can put itself into activity through freedom, which makes it possible for it to make real the category of knowing through self-determination. In the rest of the world, the categories are linked to the given that corresponds to them through objective necessity. Investigating the nature of free self-determination will be the task of ethics and metaphysics based on our epistemology. This task will also have to discuss the question of whether the ego is also able to realize ideas other than knowing. it is already clear from the comments made above, however, that the realization of knowing occurs through freedom. For if what is immediately given and the associated form of thinking are united by the ego in the process of knowing, then the unification of the two elements of reality that otherwise always remain separate in consciousness can occur only through an act of freedom.

[ 10 ] Through the preceding discussion, light will be thrown on critical idealism in a completely different way. To anyone who has studied Fichte's system in detail, it appears to be a matter close to the heart of this philosopher to maintain the principle that nothing can enter the ego from outside, nothing that is not originally posited by the ego itself. But this entails that no idealism will ever be able to derive from the ego that form of world content that we have described as the immediately given. This form can only be given, never construed from thinking. Just consider that even if we were given the rest of the color gamut, we would not be able to add even one shade of color purely from the ego. We can form a picture of the most distant areas of the country, areas that we have never seen, if we have experienced similar elements individually as given. We then combine these individual elements we have experienced into a picture based on the descriptions given to us. But we will strive in vain to spin out of ourselves even a single element of perception that never lay in the realm of the “given”. It is quite different to simply to become acquainted (kennen) with something in the given world. it is also different to recognize (erkennen) the essential nature of something or someone. The latter, although it is intimately linked to the content of the world, is not clear to us unless we build reality ourselves from what is given and from thinking. The actual “what” of the given is posited for the ego only by the ego itself. But the ego has absolutely no reason to put the essential nature of a “given” inside itself, for it sees the matter first in a totally unencumbered way. Therefore, what is posited by the ego as the essential nature of the world is not posited without the ego, but through it.

[ 11 ] It is not the first form in which reality confronts the ego that is its true form, but the last form that the ego makes out of it. That first form has no meaning at all for the objective world, and only has such a meaning as a basis for the cognitive process. Therefore, the shape of the world that theory gives to it is not the subjective one, but rather that which is first given to the ego. If one wants to continue along with Volkelt’s followers, who call this given world experience, one must say that scientific knowing completes the organization of our awareness that appears in subjective form as experience, as emerging world-picture as what it essentially is.

[ 12 ] Our epistemology provides the basis for an idealism that understands itself in the true sense of the word. It establishes the belief that the essence of the world is conveyed in thinking. The relationship between the parts of the world's content can be shown by nothing other than thinking, whether it is the relationship of the heat of the sun to the heated stone, or of the ego to the outside world. Thinking alone is the element that determines all things in their relationships to one another.

[ 13 ] The objection that Kantianism could still make would be that the essential determination of the given as characterized above is only one for the ego. In the spirit of our basic conception, we must reply to this that the split between the ego and the external world only exists within the given, and therefore that “for the ego” has no meaning when compared to the thinking observation that unites all opposites. The ego as something separated from the outside world is completely lost in the thinking world view, so it no longer makes any sense to speak of determinations solely for the ego.

• 65. t/n In this sense science is consciously thinking about experiences with clarity and logic
• 66. Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 71.
• 67. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 97.
• 68. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 69. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.
• 70. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 71. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605.
• 72. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.
• 73. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.
• 74. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 75. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 76. J. G. Fichtes Nachgelassene Werke. Herausgegeben von J. H. Fichte, Bd. 1, Bonn 1834, S.4 und S.16.
• 77. t/n The meaning of dogmatism here is unclear. Here it sounds like materialism, but with the recent growing acceptance of materialism, dogmatism has come to be seen as something like Bishop Berkeley’s spiritism. In the modern view (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on idealism), idealism is often paired with its opposite realism, and materialism with its opposite spiritism. Anyone holding a specific world-view usually accuses those holding different views of being dogmatic, that is, holding beliefs that are unquestioned, undefended, and unsubstantiated.

Ladies and gentlemen present!

In the last two lectures I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as the representative of the deepest knowledge, the deepest wisdom, as it was at home in ancient Greece up to the fifth and sixth centuries. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, and that within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, people allowed themselves to be initiated, that they participated in this experience with their own personal involvement. The purpose of this contemplation of Heraclitus was to show how far a single personality, such as Heraclitus, can come, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views.

Now I would like to add, as it were to supplement and confirm what I have said, some sayings, some doctrines of Heraclitus which show us quite clearly how directly from these views - as I took the liberty of developing last time - the whole essence of Heraclitus' world view flowed from the relationships of the external world to human consciousness itself.

I have shown that the essence of the Mysteries consisted first of all in the fact that all the views which the great masses had of the origin and nature of the external world are submerged in that view of man which the man of everyday life takes of his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space,

but within himself, that therefore the highest knowledge is no longer external knowledge of the world, but his own self-knowledge, that this "know thyself", which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something secondary, but the foundation stone of all Greek wisdom. Knowledge of God can be found in self-knowledge: That, after all, is the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that - as in the image of Sais - we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [man] believes to be enclosed in his bodily life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self expands into the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self.

This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is able to develop to the highest rungs of consciousness. If the self really is the ultimate being of the world, then one must say that this self has actually been present in what is called world creation, world development. That which constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of the real, as is assumed in the theory of knowledge. It is assumed that the being of the world is complete and that the human being is nothing other than a mere mirror image. This [mirror image] ceases immediately when this self no longer appears as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present in the whole process. It [is] therefore what man himself is.

Any external fact appears to the senses in a very specific way. Man's belief clings to sense knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into the individual beings] in space and in time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. Only then does it become what it is in its

nature, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs alongside the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial being of the world, into that which actually underlies the world. So whoever is convinced that he is not merely absorbing, but rather pouring out his own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognizes himself in the world [...]. But man can only achieve this if he climbs up the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw in knowledge nothing other than the highest flowering that the world can bring forth, that he did not regard it as something that could also remain absent, emerges from what has come down to us from him. Knowledge appears to us [normally] as something that has been added to the whole world process by chance. That is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizing human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview will become completely clear to us.

Until Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because man himself is in a constant state of flux. Pfleiderer could not think otherwise than that Heraclitus was caught up in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand we have the great world process in the continuous coming and going, and on the other hand the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death, but can expand into the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the

observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter and not for him. The essence of the Mysteries consisted precisely in the fact that through life within the Mystery world this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were supposed to experience something that made the deep disharmony of the world disappear. The initiation, the participation in the Mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction that clings to the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus for the mystics, for those who allowed themselves to be initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view in this way that which brings the greatest fear to ordinary people, because it apparently makes the physical sense world, the up and down world, the eternally coming events and deeds disappear as if into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystic. The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. So what was the most terrible, the most horrible thing for the ordinary person, he should see as an experience. That is why the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view.

When Heraclitus says: corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse - this takes you much deeper into the Heraclitean view. In Greek there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with the burial mound, because such a comparison can be brought about by a simple play on words. Som" means "body" and "sema" means "burial mound". This play on words was not only used by Heraclitus, but by all those who had anything to do with Greek wisdom. This word leads us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view, which runs through the whole of Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls "soul" rests in the body like the body in the burial mound. With an almost sublime word he says that the gods live that which for the ordinary being is death. The immortals live the death of mortals.

Here, in a saying of Heraclitus, we have another form of ordinary understanding, of ordinary Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the external world lose the meaning they have for the everyday man, submerge into the spiritual world and become something completely different there. The things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the recognizing human being. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. That which the ordinary man calls life, that which for him is the most fruitful, the real, ceases to be the real. Thus that which the ordinary man calls life, that which the man calls sensuous reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and first causes the sensuous to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now for Heraclitus another view is connected with this, with which he, I would like to say, at the same time also shows in himself what is the basic conviction of all mysticism, namely that of the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to the ordinary wisdom of the day usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensual. We cannot penetrate into the fundamental being, into the "thing in itself", says [Kant]. Only a single real look into Heraclitus' basic view can show us that Heraclitus was much further along on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that he who is really able to walk the path will achieve a deep inner experience as a result, which we also find again in the German mystics and especially in Tauler, that if we penetrate into the very essence of the soul, if we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will come to no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. The external things are closed.

We can only penetrate them according to our senses. However, at a certain depth of our self-knowledge, we can step out to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge, because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an all-knowing and all-wise God. For the mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening more and more.

In this way, Heraclitus expands the world in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This saves Heraclitus from any accusation that he said: "I know everything." - For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also had the true, great, genuine humility that is the consequence of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be something perfect and complete. Thus we see that [there is] never despair of knowledge on the path that constitutes the fundamental nature of all mystical contemplation, but the true, genuine confidence that ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be achieved through continuous deepening. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And this conviction that comes over a person when he realizes this through continuous deepening into his inner being is what Heraclitus describes by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom passes through it like lightning.

This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are remelted in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before us in

steady coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, which is clamped between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of cognition and that this ceases for the higher [cognition]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal [shines] into the temporal life, so that it appears as one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears as equivalent, as synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus, on the one hand, has a great harmony and, on the other, dissolves the individual entities as if into an immortal entity, as if into an eternal entity. To recognize is to live, and to live is to overcome a contradiction that exists from the beginning. Whoever believes that he can resolve a contradiction by spintizing the intellect will not get beyond the contradiction, will not be able to grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that there must first be a contradiction and that life consists in overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have a background in the Mysteries, we can combine these sayings and then get a coherent world view that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal if we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of this wonderful personality, if we raise ourselves up by it.

Now a few words about the Greek mystery teaching after we have gone through Heraclitus, because I have to deal with the Orphic teaching together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time as the Orphic teaching had reached its height. This Orphic teaching also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us next to the

mysticism of the Pythagoreans like a light next to another light. [We have the Orphics on the one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We get to know the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic world views. In this, the two currents flow together.

There suddenly appears to us a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact [into a] symbol for knowledge that continues to deepen. This was only possible if the mystics were introduced step by step, on the higher levels of knowledge. They were led very slowly. The Pythagoreans also practiced slow guidance. It had to be this way because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge.

When we look at the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than what is contained in the Greek belief in the gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it initially appears to us as a description of external processes. It appears to us as nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language.

So in the profound Orphic world view we have given a world view which first of all regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything has its origin. From time sprang the ether and chaos. The ether is roughly what we know from Heraclitus as fire. Chaos is the entire abundance and diversity of the material world.

From the connection of chaos with the ether, i.e. the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming thus arises with chaos. Becoming presented under an image is the direct outflow of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as bringing forth. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the

limited and unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This brought forth from itself a mere female. And from these two emerged the first of what we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranos and Gaea. Uranos and Gaea are swallowed up by [Kronos], so that Zeus in turn absorbs all the earlier world entities that I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself.

We can only translate this world-creation process into inner processes of consciousness. Thus, with this description of external facts, we have what should initially be held against the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing emptiness, as that which is not yet, but which can produce everything from itself.

Unfulfilled time appears as the most congruent image of becoming. For consciousness, this can be translated into a state of consciousness with nothing other than memory, so that under Kronos we have to imagine nothing other than the eternal world memory. If we now translate the individual beings, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we imagine the humanly overcome being, then we attain a state of consciousness that exists only in memory, that things are behind and next to each other and can only be held in [coming] and going within time by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory.

From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation into the most solid and the most rigid.

Within the memory, no distinction can be made between the ether and chaos. This only happens when it becomes possible to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate for itself. This creates the material and the spiritual, and

Through this, man first gains the possibility of recognizing something of the very lowest level of the world. The world is in an eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from coming into being to passing away, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensuous existence is the interplay between spirit and matter.

The highest spirits have made this interplay an integral part of the basic teachings. Let us stop here for a moment with Goethe. He is known to have written something about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He was of the opinion that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms come into being through the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter.

Goethe looks at a seed, a small material grain, it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than matter, enclosed between certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we have before us today as a small material particle will be before us in a very short time as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different times. They are different in substance, but one and the same.

What is one and the same? The small seed is the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in spiritual form in the seed. The spirit has withdrawn into seclusion. This same spirit, which is sensualized in the plant, was already present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant.

In our world of the senses there is a continuous multiplicity of the spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that what it previously kept invisible, it presents visibly before us. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit

and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. Seed and plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant already lies within the seed as the multiplying spirit, which is once in sensual existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling apart the whole of reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay.

Then we have arrived at the state that presents itself to the physicians as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can imagine this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can bring forth another thing that is spiritually completely equal to it, but sensually different. Thus the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it appears to the sensual imagination, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul.

Now we have seen that what penetrates upwards is in the seed, then rises upwards, becomes a plant and has thus assumed sensual existence. If we have a plant before us, then the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows still more spirit; and even in man a great variety of spirit comes to a directly sensuous existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that that which rests in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than in a revelatory way that which is generally hidden. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously confronts the other being, the male-female being that emerges in the multiplicity of the world.

Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be grasped in such a way that the entire consciousness of the person stepping before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the person, but presents itself to us illuminated in the outside world. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world of his own accord. So it is like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself.

So the whole cosmogony was nothing more for the mystic than a point of support for understanding the progress and deepening of man. Yes, but the concept is nothing but its own realization. Yes, there was the conviction that knowledge is not something that is added to the world, but that it is precisely the essence itself. The mystical experiences were to be brought to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present but not yet sensually present, like the spiritual in the seed, which has not yet spread into the plant, but has already been present as such. This is why all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past.

The cosmogony is not constructed in such a way that the primordial being stands there as creator, but appears as something in Greek mysticism that is finally climbed as a stage of cognition, so that the process of cognition within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual bringing forth. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic.

The other side of the mystical world view, which did not seek to penetrate to the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world by delving into our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One school endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did

not plant the seed in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself, without sinking the seed into the soil before bringing it to development. In what way? By bringing the seed [spiritually] to development. In what way they [...] wanted to discover the spirit in the seed, we will look at that next time.

Answer to the question:

The question of "where from" is an inherited question for humans. We ask because we see becoming in the process of becoming. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, only not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word "beginning" is something future in the doctrines of the origin of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without a corresponding effect. If we ask: Is the one there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider the one earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this expenditure of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. You humanize the outside world. I really put myself into things, I am really in them. The act that you carry out in your head is the initial force of the world. The "before and after" loses its meaning. The seed can look back to the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause is already present as its own cause, but not in a sensual but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it force because it is sensual, dull striving. If we want

to imagine the power in the seed, that is already the plant.

If God were to divide his work into time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is elevated above time and space is everything there at the same time, then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they meet. "To whom time is like eternity and eternity like time, he is freed from all conflict" [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the concept of numbers like the Pythagoreans.

Why did Plato give his views in conversations? He could not have presented it any other way. If you take Plato's "Phaidon" and follow it properly, you will find that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the Mysteries led to expression through conversation.

Man stands in the world as thinking, contemplative being on the one hand, and as a doer, a being of action, on the other; with his feelings he lives within both these spheres. With his feeling he responds, on the one side, to what is presented to his observation; on the other side, feeling enters into his actions, his deeds. We need only consider how a man may be satisfied or dissatisfied with the success or lack of success of our deeds, how in truth all action is accompanied by impulses of feeling, and we shall see that feeling links the two poles of our being: the pole of thinking and the pole of deed, of action. Only through the fact that we are thinking beings are we Man in the truest sense. Consider too, how everything that gives us the consciousness of our essential manhood is connected with the fact that we can inwardly picture the world around us; we live in this world and can contemplate it. To imagine that we cannot contemplate the world would entail forfeiting our essential manhood. As doers, as men of action, we have our place in social life and fundamentally speaking, everything we accomplish between birth and death has a certain significance in this social life.

In so far as we are contemplative beings, thought operates in us; in so far as we are doers, that is to say, social beings, will operates in us. It is not the case in human nature, nor is it ever so, that things can simply be thought of intellectually side by side with one another; the truth is that whatever is an active factor in life can be characterized from one aspect or another; the forces of the world interpenetrate, flow into each other. Mentally, we can picture ourselves as beings of thought, also as beings of will. But even when we are entirely engrossed in contemplation, when the outer world is completely stilled, the will is continually active. And again, when we are performing deeds, thought is active in us. It is inconceivable that anything should proceed from us in the way of actions or deeds—which may also take effect in the realm of social life—without our identifying ourselves in thought with what thus takes place. In everything that is of the nature of will, the element of thought is contained; and in everything that is of the nature of thought, will is present. It is essential to be quite clear about what is involved here if we seriously want to build the bridge between the moral-spiritual world-order and natural-physical world-order.

Imagine that you are living for a time purely in reflection as usually understood, that you are engaging in no kind of outward activity at all, but are wholly engrossed in thought. You must realize, however, that in this life of thought, will is also active; will is then at work in your inner being, raying out its forces into the realm of thought. When we picture the thinking human being in this way, when we realize that the will is radiating all the time into his thoughts, something will certainly strike us concerning life and its realities. If we review all the thoughts we have formulated, we shall find in every case that they are linked with something in our environment, something that we ourselves have experienced. Between birth and death we have, in a certain respect, no thoughts other than those brought to us by life. If our life has been rich in experiences we have a rich thought-content; if our life experiences have been meagre, we have a meagre thought-content. The thought-content represents our inner destiny—to a certain extent. But within this life of thought there is something that is inherently our own; what is inherently our own is how we connect thoughts with one another and dissociate them again, how we elaborate them inwardly, how we arrive at judgments and draw conclusions, how we orientate ourselves in the life of thought—all this is inherently our own. The will in our life of thought is our own.

If we study this life of thought in careful self-examination we shall certainly realize that thoughts, as far as their actual content is concerned, come to us from outside, but that it is we ourselves who elaborate these thoughts.—Fundamentally speaking, therefore, in respect of our world of thought we are entirely dependent upon the experiences brought to us by our birth, by our destiny. But through the will, which rays out from the depths of the soul, we carry into what thus comes to us from the outer world, something that is inherently our own. For the fulfillment of what self-knowledge demands of us it is highly important to keep separate in our minds how, on the one side, the thought content comes to us from the surrounding world and how, on the other, the force of the will, coming from within our being, rays into the world of thought.

How, in reality, do we become inwardly more and more spiritual?—Not by taking in as many thoughts as possible from the surrounding world, for these thoughts merely reproduce in pictures this outer world, which is a physical, material world. Constantly to be running in pursuit of sensations does not make us more spiritual. We become more spiritual through the inner, will-permeated work we carry out in our thoughts. This is why meditation, too, consists in not indulging in haphazard thoughts but in holding certain easily envisaged thoughts in the very centre of our consciousness, drawing them there with a strong effort of will. And the greater the strength and intensity of this inner radiation of will into the sphere of thinking, the more spiritual we become. When we take in thoughts from the outer material world—and between birth and death we can take in only such thoughts—we become, as you can easily realize, unfree; for we are given over to the concatenations of things and events in the external world; as far as the actual content of the thoughts is concerned, we are obliged to think as the external world prescribes; only when we elaborate the thoughts do we become free in the real sense.

Now it is possible to attain complete freedom of our inner life if we increasingly efface and exclude the actual thought content, in so far as this comes from outside, and kindle into greater activity the element of will which streams through our thoughts when we form judgments, draw conclusions and the like. Thereby, however, our thinking becomes what I have called in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: purethinking. We think, but in our thinking there is nothing but will. I have laid particular emphasis on this in the new edition of the book (1918). What is thus within us lies in the sphere of thinking. But pure thinking may equally be called pure will. Thus from the realm of thinking we reach the realm of will, when we become inwardly free; our thinking attains such maturity that it is entirely irradiated by will; it no longer takes anything in from outside, but its very life is of the nature of will. By progressively strengthening the impulse of will in our thinking we prepare ourselves for what I have called in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, "Moral Imagination." Moral Imagination rises to the Moral Intuitions which then pervade and illuminate our will that has now become thought, or our thinking that has now become will. In this way we raise ourselves above the sway of the ‘necessity’ prevailing in the material world, permeate ourselves with the force that is inherently our own, and prepare for Moral Intuition. And everything that can stream into man from the spiritual world has its foundation, primarily, in these Moral Intuitions. Therefore freedom dawns when we enable the will to become an ever mightier and mightier force in our thinking.

Now let us consider the human being from the opposite pole, that of the will. When does the will present itself with particular clarity through what we do?—When we sneeze, let us say, we are also doing something, but we cannot, surely, ascribe to ourselves any definite impulse of will when we sneeze! When we speak, we are doing something in which will is undoubtedly contained. But think how, in speaking, deliberate intent and absence of intent, volition and absence of volition, intermingle. You have to learn to speak, and in such a way that you are no longer obliged to formulate each single word by dint of an effort of will; an element of instinct enters into speech. In ordinary life at least, it is so, and it is emphatically so in the case of those who do not strive for spirituality. Garrulous people, who are always opening their mouths in order to say something or other in which very little thought is contained, give others an opportunity of noticing—they themselves, of course, do not notice—how much there is in speech that is instinctive and involuntary. But the more we go out beyond our organic life and pass over to activity that is liberated, as it were, from organic processes, the more do we carry thoughts into our actions and deeds. Sneezing is still entirely a matter of organic life; speaking is largely connected with organic life; walking really very little; what we do with the hands, also very little. And so we come by degrees to actions which are more and more emancipated from our organic life. We accompany such actions with our thoughts, although we do not know how the will streams into these thoughts. If we are not somnambulists and do not go about in this condition, our actions will always be accompanied by our thoughts. We carry our thoughts into our actions, and the more our actions evolve towards perfection, the more are our thoughts being carried into them.

Our inner life is constantly deepened when we send will—our own inherent force—into our thinking, when we permeate our thinking with will. We bring will into thinking and thereby attain freedom. As we gradually perfect our actions we finally succeed in sending thoughts into these actions; we irradiate our actions—which proceed from our will—with thoughts. On the one side (inwards) we live a life of thought; we permeate this with the will and thus find freedom. On the other side (outwards) our actions stream forth from our will, and we permeate them with our thoughts. (Diagram IX)

But by what means do our actions evolve to greater perfection? To use an invariably controversial expression—How do we achieve greater perfection in our actions? We achieve this by developing in ourselves the force which can only be designated by the words: devotion to the outer world.—The more our devotion to the outer world grows and intensifies, the more does this outer world stir us to action. But it is just through unfolding devotion to the outer world that we succeed in permeating our actions with thoughts. What, in reality, is devotion to the outer world? Devotion to the outer world, which pervades our actions with thoughts, is nothing else than love.

Just as we attain freedom by irradiating the life of thought with will, so do we attain love by permeating the life of will with thoughts. We unfold love in our actions by letting thoughts radiate into the realm of the will; we develop freedom in our thinking by letting what is of the nature of will radiate into our thoughts. And because, as man, we are a unified whole, when we reach the point where we find freedom in the life of thought and love in the life of will, there will be freedom in our actions and love in our thinking. Each irradiates the other: action filled with thought is wrought in love; thinking that is permeated with will gives rise to actions and deeds that are truly free.

Thus you see how in the human being the two great ideals, freedom and love, grow together. Freedom and love are also that which man, standing in the world, can bring to realization in himself in such a way that, through him, the one unites with the other for the good of the world.

We must now ask: How is the ideal, the highest ideal, to be attained in the will-permeated life of thought?—Now if the life of thought were something that represented material processes, the will could never penetrate fully into the realm of the thoughts and increasingly take root there. The will would at most be able to ray into these material processes as an organizing force. Will can take real effect only if the life of thought is something that has no outer, physical reality. What, then, must it be?

You will be able to envisage what it must be if you take a picture as a starting-point. If you have here a mirror and here an object, the object is reflected in the mirror; if you then go behind the mirror, you find nothing. In other words, you have a picture—nothing more. Our thoughts are pictures in this same sense. (Diagram X) How is this to be explained?—In a previous lecture I said that the life of thought as such is in truth not a reality of the immediate moment. The life of thought rays in from our existence before birth, or rather, before conception. The life of thought has its reality between death and a new birth. And just as here the object stands before the mirror and what it presents is a picture—only that and nothing more—so what we unfold as the life of thought is lived through in the real sense between death and a new birth, and merely rays into our life since birth. As thinking beings, we have within us a mirror-reality only. Because this is so, the other reality which, as you know, rays up from the metabolic process, can permeate the mirror-pictures of the life of thought. If, as is very rarely the case today, we make sincere endeavors to develop unbiased thinking, it will be clear to us that the life of thought consists of mirror-pictures if we turn to thinking in its purest form—in mathematics. Mathematical thinking streams up entirely from our inner being, but it has a mirror-existence only. Through mathematics the make-up of external objects can, it is true, be analyzed and determined; but the mathematical thoughts in themselves are only thoughts, they exist merely as pictures. They have not been acquired from any outer reality.

Abstract thinkers such as Kant also employ an abstract expression. They say: mathematical concepts are a priori.—A priori, apriority, means "from what is before." But why are mathematical concepts a priori? Because they stream in from the existence preceding birth, or rather, preceding conception. It is this that constitutes their ‘apriority.’ And the reason why they appear real to our consciousness is because they are irradiated by the will. This is what makes them real. Just think how abstract modern thinking has become when it uses abstract words for something which, in its reality, is not understood! Men such as Kant had a dim inkling that we bring mathematics with us from our existence before birth, and therefore they called the findings of mathematics ‘a priori.’ But the term ‘a priori’ really tells us nothing, for it points to no reality, it points to something merely formal.

In regard to the life of thought, which with its mirror-existence must be irradiated by the will in order to become reality, ancient traditions speak of Semblance. (Diagram XI, Schein.)

Let us now consider the other pole of man's nature, where the thoughts stream down towards the sphere of will, where deeds are performed in love. Here our consciousness is, so to speak, held at bay, it rebounds from reality. We cannot look into that realm of darkness—a realm of darkness for our consciousness—where the will unfolds whenever we raise an arm or turn the head, unless we take super-sensible conceptions to our aid. We move an arm; but the complicated process in operation there remains just as hidden from ordinary consciousness as what takes place in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep. We perceive our arm; we perceive how our hand grasps some object. This is because we permeate the action with thoughts. But the thoughts themselves that are in our consciousness are still only semblance. We live in what is real, but it does not ray into our ordinary consciousness. Ancient traditions spoke here of Power (Gewalt), because the reality in which we are living is indeed permeated by thought, but thought has nevertheless rebounded from it in a certain sense, during the life between birth and death. (Diagram XI.)

Between these two poles lies the balancing factor that unites the two—unites the will that rays towards the head with the thoughts which, as they flow into deeds wrought with love, are, so to say, felt with the heart. This means of union is the life of feeling, which is able to direct itself towards the will as well as towards the thoughts. In our ordinary consciousness we live in an element by means of which we grasp, on the one side, what comes to expression in our will-permeated thought with its predisposition to freedom, while on the other side, we try to ensure that what passes over into our deeds is filled more and more with thoughts. And what forms the bridge connecting both has since ancient times been called Wisdom. (Diagram XI.)

In his fairy-tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe has given indications of these ancient traditions in the figures of the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Brazen King. We have already shown from other points of view how these three elements must come to life again, but in an entirely different form—these three elements to which ancient instinctive knowledge pointed and which can come to life again only if man acquires the knowledge yielded by Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

But what is it that is actually taking place as man unfolds his life of thought?—Reality is becoming semblance! It is very important to be clear about this. We carry about with us our head, which with its hard skull and tendency to ossification, presents, even outwardly, a picture of what is dead, in contrast to the rest of the living organism. Between birth and death we bear in our head that which, from an earlier time when it was reality, comes into us as semblance, and from the rest of our organism we pervade this semblance with the element issuing from our metabolic processes, we permeate it with the real element of the will. There we have within us a seed, a germinating entity which, first and foremost, is part of our manhood, but also means something in the cosmos. Think of it—a man is born in a particular year; before then he was in the spiritual world. When he passes out of the spiritual world, thought which there is reality, becomes semblance, and he leads over into this semblance the forces of his will which come from an entirely different direction, rising up from parts of his organism other than the head. That is how the past, dying away into semblance, is kindled again to become reality of the future.

Let us understand this rightly. What happens when man rises to pure thinking, to thinking that is irradiated by will?—On the foundation of the past that has dissolved into semblance, through fructification by the will which rises up from his egohood, there unfolds within him a new reality leading into the future. He is the bearer of the seed into the future. The thoughts of the past, as realities, are as it were the mother-soil; into this mother-soil is laid that which comes from the individual egohood, and the seed is sent on into the future for future life.

On the other side, man evolves by permeating his deeds and actions, his will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from him. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves. They become world-happenings; and if they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought-permeated deeds. Just as when a plant unfolds it contains in its blossom the seed to which the light of the sun, the air outside, and so on, must come, to which something must be brought from the cosmos in order that it may grow, so what is unfolded through freedom must find an element in which to grow through the love that lives in our deeds.

Thus does man stand within the great process of world-evolution, and what takes place inside the boundary of his skin and flows out beyond his skin in the form of deeds, has significance not only for him but for the world, the universe. He has his place in the arena of cosmic happenings, world-happenings. In that what was reality in earlier times becomes semblance in man, reality is ever and again dissolved, and in that his semblance is quickened again by the will, new reality arises. Here we have—as if spiritually we could put our very finger upon it—what has also been spoken of from other points of view.—There is no eternal conservation of matter! Matter is transformed into semblance and semblance is transformed to reality by the will. The law of the conservation of matter and energy affirmed by physics is a delusion, because account is taken of the natural world only. The truth is that matter is continually passing away in that it is transformed into semblance; and a new creation takes place in that through Man, who stands before us as the supreme achievement of the cosmos, semblance is again transformed into Being (Sein.)

We can also see this if we look at the other pole—only there it is not so easy to perceive. The processes which finally lead to freedom can certainly be grasped by unbiased thinking. But to see rightly in the case of this other pole needs a certain degree of spiritual-scientific development. For here, to begin with, ordinary consciousness rebounds when confronted by what ancient traditions called Power. What is living itself out as Power, as Force, is indeed permeated by thoughts; but the ordinary consciousness does not perceive that just as more and more will, a greater and greater faculty of judgment, comes into the world of thought, so, when we bring thoughts into the will-nature, when we overcome the element of Power more and more completely, we also pervade what is merely Power with the light of thought. At the one pole of man's being we see the overcoming of matter; at the other pole, the new birth of matter.

As I have indicated briefly in my book, Riddles of the Soul, man is a threefold being: as nerve-and-sense man he is the bearer of the life of thought, of perception; as rhythmic being (breathing, circulating blood), he is the bearer of the life of feeling; as metabolic being, he is the bearer of the life of will. But how, then, does the metabolic process operate in man when will is ever more and more unfolded in love? It operates in that, as man performs such deeds, matter is continually overcome.—And what is it that unfolds in man when, as a free being, he finds his way into pure thinking, which is, however, really of the nature of will?—Matter is born!—We behold the coming-into-being of matter! We bear in ourselves that which brings matter to birth: our head; and we bear in ourselves that which destroys matter, where we can see how matter is destroyed: our limb-and-metabolic organism.

This is the way in which to study the whole man. We see how what consciousness conceives of in abstractions is an actual factor in the process of World-Becoming; and we see how that which is contained in this process of World-Becoming and to which the ordinary consciousness clings so firmly that it can do no other than conceive it to be reality—we see how this is dissolved away to nullity. It is reality for the ordinary consciousness, and when it obviously does not tally with outer realities, then recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities. And because man cannot free himself in his thoughts from these firmly fixed realities, one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped. This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.

It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when he accepts the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nullity and continually rebuilt out of nullity. It is only because whenever matter dies away, new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter. They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in had been carried out—that it is the same thing. The reality is that the old documents have been burned and new ones written. It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of man's being, where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises, there lies the possibility of freedom, and there lies the possibility of love. And freedom and love belong together, as I have already indicated in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Those who on the basis of some particular conception of the world speak of the imperishability of matter, annul freedom on the one side and the full development of love on the other. For only through the fact that in man the past dies away, becomes semblance, and the future is a new creation in the condition of a seed, does there arise in us the feeling of love—devotion to something to which we are not coerced by the past—and freedom—action that is not predetermined. Freedom and love are, in reality, comprehensible only to a spiritual-scientific conception of the world, not to any other. Those who are conversant with the picture of the world that has appeared in the course of the last few centuries will be able to assess the difficulties that will have to be overcome before the habits of thought prevailing in modern humanity can be induced to give way to this unbiased, spiritual-scientific thinking. For in the picture of the world existing in natural science there are really no points from which we can go forward to a true understanding of freedom and love.

How the natural-scientific picture of the world on the one side, and on the other, the ancient, traditional picture of the world, are related to a truly progressive, spiritual-scientific development of humanity—of this we will speak on some other occasion.

I want to speak in a rather aphoristic way this evening about a subject which I consider of importance, especially at the present time.

Many of our studies have been concerned with the Christ Impulse, with the Impulse which since the Mystery of Golgotha has been working in the evolution of humanity. And this evening I want to speak of the Impulse itself and of its significance for evolution. It must be emphasised at the outset that the Christ Impulse is a difficult subject because if even an approximately adequate conception of it is to be acquired, the teachings still being given in the various Christian denominations must be left out of account. Perhaps you will ask: How can the Christ Impulse be studied at all if such teachings are to be entirely disregarded? How can we learn about the working of this Impulse from any sources other than the beliefs that have been held for centuries? The answer must be this.—Everyone will admit that it would be unfortunate if the effects of the Sun upon human beings living on the Earth were dependent upon some generally accepted teaching about the nature of the Sun. No matter what hypotheses are put forward, the effects of the Sun are quite evident. Science admits that it does not yet know precisely what electricity is, yet electricity is put to innumerable practical uses. Therefore it is certainly justifiable to speak of the effects of the Christ Impulse without believing that the study is in any way dependent upon what has been thought about Christ in the different centuries.

The Mystery of Golgotha, the penetration of the Christ impulse into the Earth sphere, into the evolution of humanity, took place in a particular epoch. The point of time at which it occurred has been determined with at least approximate accuracy, for our time-reckoning in the West is based upon it. What kind of epoch was it? We know that different civilisations have taken their course in the process of evolution—in the post-Atlantean era, the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Roman and our own. One of the characteristics distinguishing these culture-epochs is that a different form of human understanding, human wisdom, existed in each of them. In the ancient Indian epoch, for example, men were possessed of penetrating insight into certain cosmic mysteries. In those times the etheric body was the most active member of man’s constitution. Then, as evolution proceeded, the etheric body receded more into the background and in the ancient Persian epoch the sentient body, the astral body, became predominantly active. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch the sentient soul was predominant, in the Graeco-Latin epoch the intellectual or mind-soul, in our own epoch the spiritual or consciousness soul, and the epoch of the Spirit-Self lies in the future. Because different members of man’s constitution are predominantly active during the several epochs, individuals confront the world in each epoch with a different kind of understanding.

Now there is a certain striking and very illuminating fact in connection with the Graeco-Latin epoch. This was the epoch of the intellectual or mind-soul, and it lasted from the eighth century B.C., approximately from the time of the founding of Rome, until the fifteenth century A.D. Because the intellectual or mind-soul was developing during that epoch, the forces in individuals who were essentially typical of this function of soul-life became particularly important. This province of the soul was undergoing a special process of development for a little more than two millennia. Since the fifteenth century mankind has been living in the epoch of the development of the consciousness-soul. Not very much of this epoch has passed as yet, for not until the present century and two more centuries have taken their course will a third of the time appointed for the development of the consciousness-soul have elapsed. Quite different faculties will develop in man’s soul during the following epochs. Seven such epochs constitute the post-Atlantean age.

Let us now ask: Which of those epochs was least qualified to understand the Christ Being? Conceptions of the nature of man differed in all of them. The epoch least qualified to form adequate conceptions of the nature of Christ was the epoch of the intellectual or mind-soul, from the eighth century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. And the remarkable fact is that this is the very epoch when the Mystery of Golgotha took place!

If, to speak hypothetically, the Christ had appeared on the Earth in the days, let us say, of the holy Rishis of ancient India, there would have been widespread understanding of who He was. So too in ancient Persia, where men had been taught of the Sun Spirit. Had the Christ descended into a human body during that epoch men would have known that the Sun Spirit had come down into the body of a man on the Earth. And in the epoch of the Egyptian Temple Wisdom, something equivalent might still have been possible. But in the epoch when understanding of the nature of Christ was farthest from men’s reach—in that very epoch the Christ appeared on Earth.

It is not easy to add anything to this strange fact by way of illustration, for the conclusion to be drawn is that obviously hardly anything about the real nature of the Christ Being is to be found in the teachings formulated in that epoch and that understanding can therefore be expected only in later centuries.

Since the fifteenth century men may have begun to pride themselves on their intellectual acumen and to believe that in respect of an understanding of Christ better times have come with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In a certain sense it is so, but in another sense it is not.

What is there to be said about the intellectual faculties of men of the present age, since the fif-teenth century? Generally speaking these faculties have in no sense become more spiritual than they were in earlier times. In a certain respect man’s life of soul has sunk still more deeply into matter—as indeed was necessary in order that the stage of the consciousness-soul might be attained. So we find that Spiritual Science—which before the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries was still a matter of remembrance, of recollection—fell into the background and materialism steadily increased. Spiritual Science blossomed in certain personages of the Middle Ages, reached a certain height as it were through the elemental forces working in individual mystics, and then receded. But from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards it is obvious that something else is beginning to appear. A symptom is that men attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of God. Only people with very strange ideas about the world could fail to recognise what that means. As a rule we try to ‘prove’ what we do not know or understand. We try to prove that someone has stolen when we did not actually see him commit the theft. And when men lost all inner experience of God, when they no longer knew by what paths to seek for the Divine, they set about trying to ‘prove’ the existence of the Divine. This is irrefutable proof that men were beginning to lose all knowledge of God. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch must necessarily be the epoch of materialism because since it began man has been obliged to view nature as presented to the senses and intellect; for only so can the Ego in its full power become conscious.

To understand what I mean, let us think back to the epoch of ancient Persia. In the epoch of ancient India it would have been still more clearly in evidence, and even in the Egyptian epoch it was still apparent to a certain extent. A man belonging to the ancient Persian civilisation would have been astonished that a cosmological system such as that of Copernicus should be derived from observation of the planetary movements.—I must here say something highly paradoxical.—A man in ancient Persia would have been very surprised if attempts had been made to teach him astronomy in anything faintly resembling its modern form. He would have said: Am I supposed to be so stupid that if I want to walk about, someone must show me how to do it? When the Sun is moving along its path through cosmic space, my soul accompanies it.—He knew this just as a man today knows which way he is going when his body moves. Out of his innate knowledge the ancient Persian drew a spiral corresponding exactly with the course of the Sun through cosmic space. In that epoch the human soul felt united with the Earth-soul and the path taken by the Earth was indicated by the Caduceus, the Staff of Mercury. Not until later was man thrust out of his spiritual environment so drastically that he was obliged to plan and calculate the path of the Earth, his own planet.

On the other hand, if man’s relation to the external world had remained at the earlier stage, he would never have been able to develop full self-consciousness. He would have lived through the Graeco-Latin civilisation-epoch, when intellect and soul-life in general would have been left to their own resources, as it were smouldering inwardly; a condition would have come about in which the soul has no longer any direct knowledge of its relation to the world but makes progress only in itself. It was necessary for the human soul to emerge from that condition too, and pass into the epoch of the consciousness-soul. Man was to learn to live altogether in his ‘I’, in his Ego. He was to disassociate everything external from his ‘I’ and cognise the world through logic alone. He was thrust out of the spiritual content of the world.

In the Graeco-Latin epoch the soul still contained the active intellectual principle which although it no longer experienced the happenings in the external spiritual world directly, nevertheless did still experience the Divine. In the modern age men lost the Divine! It would never have occurred to Aristotle to attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of the Divine. The intellectual or mind-soul still experienced the indwelling Divine, although it could offer no proof of Christ. Then from the fifteenth /sixteenth century onwards even that experience was lost. Nevertheless when this stage too is over man will be capable with his own powers of evolving a conception of the Divine.

From the fifteenth century, for four hundred years, the self-dependent human intellect has been unable to penetrate to the idea of the Divine. Something very strange has happened—and the fact that we commented upon it caused great offence. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, lived in the eighteenth century. What happened to him was that he confused the particular nature of the human soul since the fifteenth century with the nature of the human soul in general. Hence he came to the conclusion that it is impossible for man, by means of his own powers, to acquire knowledge of the Divine. What he ought to have said was that this had been impossible only since the beginning of the fifteenth century. But as Lucifer had Kant firmly by the collar and had made him an arrogant individual, he believed that what he said applied to the whole human race!

It might be thought from this that the prospects of understanding the Christ Being are even less hopeful than in the previous centuries. But it is not so. Men have faculties of knowledge other than those they possessed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and different, too, from the only faculties that are used today for grasping the nature of the Ego. The other powers of cognition lie more in the underground province of the soul and have to be drawn up from there. But a modern man does this only under coercion. As long as it was possible for the human soul at surface level to cognise the Divine, men did not make efforts to bring their deeper forces into action. But now, in our present time, as man can make no real approach to the Divine, reaction compels him to delve to greater depths within himself and to summon into activity forces other than those operating on the surface of the soul. Connected with this is the fact that we are approaching an age when an understanding of the Christ Being through the deeper forces in man’s nature is beginning-to take root.

A few days ago in Oslo I ventured to speak of a Fifth Gospel.¹ Through the Fifth Gospel information is given in addition to what is contained in the other four Gospels. The Fifth Gospel tells us still more of the nature of Christ. There can be no question of presumptuousness when this apparently new information about the nature of the Christ Being is given, for communications of this kind are made only when the times demand it. What has been said about the Christ Being here in Copenhagen, for instance, and printed in the booklet The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, and in various lecture-courses—this too belongs in a certain way to the Fifth Gospel. Such communications are made when the times demand that they shall come to the knowledge of men. If you think only of what was said in that booklet about the two Jesus children, you will agree that all the intelligence of our present age—consisting as it does of the forces operating on the surface of man’s soul—not only does not understand these things but rages against them when they are communicated.

We are on the threshold of a new conception of Christ. It will not be an intellectual understanding. People will certainly be able to grasp its meaning but it will be discovered through the more deeply lying forces of soul. When the eye of clairvoyance desires to have any prevision of the future of humanity in the next centuries, also of the next incarnations of individuals now living, it must be remembered that the forces operating on the surface of soul-life will become increasingly less effective. Mankind will feel more and more drawn to the revelations of the deeper forces of the soul.

Of the Graeco-Latin epoch it is rightly said that the nature of the human beings then living was inwardly whole, inwardly complete. Fundamentally speaking, this can no longer be said of even healthy souls today and will in future be less and less the case. If humanity in the future were to be taught only of matters accessible to the superficial forces of cognition, the life of soul would become increasingly barren, barren in a remarkable respect.

We have not yet reached the point when religious teaching is no longer given in schools, but already there are demands that only what is authenticated by science shall be taught. The demands made by people of this mentality will become so powerful an influence in outer life that very soon mankind will become dangerously superficial. Human beings today still learn to write, but in a future not far distant people will have to remind themselves of the fact that once upon a time hand-writing was a custom! A kind of mechanical stenography will become general—executed, furthermore, on machines. Mechanisation of life! I will indicate it by just one symptom. Think of a civilisation at its prime, when the historic truth will be unearthed that once upon a time there were human beings who wrote by hand. This historic truth will be unearthed just as we today unearth the contents of the Egyptian temples. Handwritten texts will be excavated as we excavate the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. But a reaction of the life of soul against mechanisation will also take place. True as it is that in future times our handwriting will be no less a wonder than the Egyptian hieroglyphs are a wonder to us, it is also true that the souls of men will long once again for the direct revelations of the spirit. Outer life will become more and more superficial but the inner life will claim its rights.

People may scoff today at Spiritual Science but the materialists will eventually be forced to retreat before man’s cry of longing for the spiritual world. And so a real understanding of Christ will begin in times when the doors are open for spirituality, although admittedly through reaction against the conditions prevailing in external life.

Let us now consider still another aspect of the subject. Maybe the following picture will evoke an echo in your souls. We can think of the women who, according to the Gospels, seek for the body of Christ and find the grave empty. The Angel says to them: He whom ye seek is not here; He is risen! That is, He lives in the Spirit. The One for whom they were seeking in the physical world appeared subsequently to the Apostles, teaching them for a time as exceptional individuals who had responded to Him with a certain measure of understanding. Christ appeared to them as a spiritual figure. And in the spirit He moved through Greece, Rome, to the Germanic peoples, moved from East to West and then to the North. We shall not look for an intellectual, abstract or scientific interpretation of the Christ Being among the great Roman philosophers who speak of Him without understanding. Nor among the somewhat inarticulate Germanic peoples shall we find evidence of understanding. The souls of men are drawn to Christ but without intellectual understanding. He lives in their hearts, only in their hearts.

In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the picture is not of the women who go to the grave to seek for the body of Christ and do not find it. Whole hosts of European peoples feel urged to seek for the grave of Christ. This is the age of the Crusades. Men journey from the West to the East to find the grave where the women had once sought. And what do these hosts experience?—He for whom ye seek is not here!—Truth to tell they were seeking for something that was living in their souls, but they understood it so little that they journeyed to the East to look for the physical grave, and finally, after many disillusionments and sufferings, were destined to know: He whom ye seek is not here!—Where, then, was the object of their quest?

On the one side there are the journeys to the East and on the other side European Mysticism at its preparatory stages in Tauler and Meister Eckhart, reaching its prime later on in Jacob Boehme. There was the one for whom men had sought in the East and had not found. Thither He had gone, but His Presence took effect in a particular way. What is the most significant characteristic of this medieval Mysticism?

Eckhart, Tauler and the others do not claim to understand the Divine Being, the Christ, but they resolved to lead a life of piety in order to experience Christ in their souls. And the greater the intensity of this experience, the more deeply they longed to be permeated by the Divine, by the Christ, in the way suitable for their time. The Crusaders had experienced no more than this: He whom ye seek is not here!—What they were seeking came to life in the form of European mysticism.

We too are living in an epoch with very definite characteristics. Not only the peoples of Europe but also those of America participate in the remarkable conditions now prevailing. Let me give one striking example—from Berlin. On February 1st, 1910, a famous modern theologian came out with the following ‘ingenious’ utterance: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I challenge you to bring me a single sentence attributed to Christ Jesus which I cannot prove to have been current in pre-Christian spiritual life.”—That is an entirely typical attitude today. Evidence is brought forward in attempts to prove that the content of Christianity, including even the Lord’s Prayer, was previously in existence. The words of the theologian quoted are in complete conformity with the current attitude, and similar utterances will become more and more common. What kind of impression is made by the statement that all Christ’s sayings were already current before His coming?—I was once listening to an address by a very erudite scholar and a child happened to be present. Someone asked the child: “What have you been told?” His answer was: “He has told me nothing new. I already knew all the words!”—Theologians too are familiar with the words and detect nothing new resounding through them.

These things should really be self-evident but nowadays are invariably met with resistance. The attitude that a cultured individual may still have something to learn is seldom present but it is widely held that everyone is capable of judging according to his own standard. We have witnessed a striking exhibition of this attitude. When materialism came to the fore, theology began to eliminate all divinity from Christ Jesus and to speak only of the man Jesus, although acknowledging his superiority. This view became widespread in the nineteenth century and was given grotesque expression in Ernst Renan’s famous book, The Life of Jesus, published in 1863. He spoke of Jesus in wonderfully beautiful language but his description of the Lazarus miracle suggests that in reality no awakening of a dead man had taken place, that Jesus had simply allowed His followers to spread reports to this effect; hence the so-called miracle was in the nature of a swindle! Thus something resembling a chapter from a cheap novel has been inserted into an otherwise genuinely fine work. There seems to be no reason for Renan having written any words of reverence, for the figure he describes merits no particular veneration. But for half a century this was all accepted without thought and it is only one example from literature in which tribute is paid to Christ Jesus as a man—but simply as a man.

Now, however, it has been realised that a great deal of what is reported of Jesus Christ would be impossible if He had been a mere man—especially the assertion made by Jesus that He himself was the Christ—therefore more than a man. Many contradictions were found. Then, more recently, God—an imaginary God—was again substituted for man. Christ Jesus became a phantom, a fetish—but a limited fetish. This was a truly remarkable state of things! For centuries men had eliminated Divinity from Christ Jesus and had made Him a man, and now the Divinity made the manhood an impossibility. Such arguments will go on ad infinitum and there is ample evidence that we are taking a path along which understanding is beyond the reach of the forces at the surface of human nature. To put it differently.—In the twentieth century men have attempted a kind of crusade in search of the historical Christ Jesus. And once again the answer will be: He whom you seek is not to be found here!—Those who seek in this way for the historical man Jesus will no more be able to find Him than could the women at the tomb or the Crusaders who thronged thither. The Crusaders could not find Christ because they were not seeking for Him inwardly; nor can the modern crusaders find Him because they do not seek with the inner forces of the soul by which alone Christ can be found.

Within the stream of spiritual life a deepening of the forces of soul-and-spirit is in process. And whereas the spiritual forces lying at the surface will deny the Christ more and more insistently, deeper forces of soul will rise up and seek for Christ. Increasing numbers of people will see the Christ, who will appear in the etheric realm and will be found by those who are sensitive to this experience. We therefore speak of an etheric appearance of Christ in the twentieth century. Those who have this experience will have direct knowledge that at the moment when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled the Christ Being entered in very truth into the Earth sphere and in ever greater numbers individuals will know with certainty who the Christ is.

Knowledge of Spiritual Science will deepen souls to such an extent that men’s vision will be awakened and the Christ revealed. A wonderful prospect opens for the eye of prophetic clairvoyance. The forces belonging to the superficial activities of the soul will become more and more ineffective and human beings born as time goes on will comparatively soon have finished with these surface-forces of their souls. An epoch reminiscent in a remarkable way of the Christ Event is approaching.

In the thirtieth year of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, Christ entered into him. A new life of soul began in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, for the Christ had taken the place of the Zarathustra-Ego which had departed from that body. That was at the beginning of our era. An epoch is now approaching when into increasing numbers of men from their thirtieth year onwards, knowledge of Christ—not Christ in His full reality—will penetrate as though through enlightenment. In the thirtieth year of the life of these men a new, all-embracing soul-life will begin because they will have vision of the Christ in His etheric form.

We understand our epoch in the sense of Spiritual Science when we realise what this prospect signifies. When the souls now living are again incarnated—and this will happen to many sooner than the normal period—numbers of individuals, from a particular age onwards, will feel through actual experience that something has penetrated into them of which they could previously have known only by having been informed of it. They will be able to say: I myself know through actual vision who Christ is; vision has enabled me to understand. When that time comes, efforts to prove the existence of Christ will cease, for the number of those who can testify to direct experience of Christ moving over the Earth as it Spirit Being, will constantly increase. Men will no longer search for the historic Christ.

There are two aspects to the picture of the future: On the one side barrenness will become more and more widespread owing to the activity of the superficial soul-forces; on the other side, as reaction against the barrenness, the soul-forces lying in the depths of man’s being will be evoked. We spread Anthroposophy in order that this shall be made known.

Men should not heedlessly allow impressions however faint to pass them by, for strong impres-sions are rare. As a result of the spread of true Anthroposophy the souls of men will not allow enlightenment, when it comes, to elude them, for if they do it would be beyond their reach for several incarnations. Other people, however, who make use of the superficial soul-forces will speak of those who have known enlightenment as fools or lunatics. A terrible beginning in this direction has already been made. Psychiatrists have already begun to investigate the problem of Christ Jesus. The Gospels are studied with the aim of discovering in Him symptoms of insanity! Such phenomenal occurrences should not be ignored; they should rather lead to the insight that Christ, who came into humanity in an age when He could least be understood, is working perpetually to prepare the understanding that will come in future ages.

A person who looks into the future should not generalise about it in abstract phrases. The future reveals two aspects: the aspect of barrenness of soul, of complete absorption in materialism, but also the aspect of the birth of a new spiritual world, not only in thoughts or in vision but in existence itself. For Christ will come to the side of men and be their counsellor. This is not a mere image. In actual reality men will receive the counsels they need from the Living Christ who will be their adviser and friend, who will speak to their souls just like someone who is physically near. If men needed a prophetic proclamation at the time when He was to appear in a human body, they need such a proclamation even more at this time, when He will come in an etheric form. What has now been said should be regarded as a preparatory announcement of what will and indeed must come to pass.

Have no illusion about the future. We are not giving way to illusion when we picture what outer, material life will be like in a future when handwriting will be spoken of in the same sense as we today speak of the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. The last vestiges of a spiritual culture still survive, even today, for writing still expresses characteristics of the soul; but the traces of soul will soon have disappeared from external culture as completely as Egyptian culture has vanished from our ken. People will speak of many things which in our time are still imbued with soul, as of something belonging to a far distant past. But the same voice that will proclaim the existence in the past age of a kind of hand-writing, will proclaim out of spiritual knowledge that in the spirit the living Christ is again moving among humanity. Men will have to exchange the spirit of mere intellectual conjecture for the spirit of direct vision, of direct feeling and experience of the Living Christ moving as a reality in the spirit by the side of the souls of men.²

• 1. See, The Fifth Gospel. Seven lectures given in Oslo and Cologne in 1913. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)
• 2. See also The True Nature of the Second Coming. Rudolf Steiner. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

Our last lectures showed the fundamental difference between man's whole conception here, from birth to death, and in the spiritual world, from death to a new birth. We have already explained that in the present epoch; i.e., ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, man may gain freedom during his existence between birth and death; everything on earth which he fulfils out of the impulse of freedom, gives his being, as it were, weight, reality and life. When we emancipate ourselves from the necessities of earthly existence, when we rise up to free motives guiding our will; that is to say, if we do not take anything out of earthly life for our will, then we create the possibility of independence also between death and a new birth. But in the present epoch this capacity of preserving our own independent existence after death calls for something which we may designate as the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, for the Mystery of Golgotha may be viewed from many different aspects. In the course of the past years, we have already studied quite a number of these aspects; today we shall view the Mystery of Golgotha from a standpoint arising from the study of freedom and its significance for the human being.

Here on earth, between birth and death, the human being really does not have in his ordinary consciousness any conception of his own self. He cannot look into his own self. It is, of course, an illusion to believe, as external science does, that it is possible to obtain a knowledge of the inner constitution of the human organism by observing man's lifeless parts, indeed sometimes by studying only the corpse. This is an illusion, a deception. Here, between birth and death, man only has a conception of the external world. But of what kind is this conception? It is one which we have frequently characterized as the conception of illusion (Schein), of semblance, and I have again emphasized this yesterday.

When our senses are turned to the things which surround us in the world in which we live from birth to death, then the world appears to us as a semblance, as an illusion. This semblance may be taken into our Ego being. We may, for example, preserve it in our memory, and in a certain sense make it our own. But insofar as it stands before us when looking out into the world, it is an illusion which manifests itself particularly—as I have already explained to you yesterday—by disappearing with death and by re-appearing in another form; that is to say, we then no longer experience it within us, but before or around us.

If, however, in the present epoch we were not able to experience the world as an illusion during our existence from birth to death, if we were unable to experience this illusion, we could not be free. The development of freedom is only possible in the world of illusion. I have mentioned this in my book, The Riddle of Man, and have pointed out that in reality the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we perceive is a semblance, an illusion. But the human being is not completely woven into this illusion of the world. He is woven into it only in regard to his perception, which fills his waking consciousness. But when he considers his impulses, instincts, passions and temperament, and everything that surges up from the human depths without his being able to grasp it in the form of clear concepts, at least in the form of waking concepts, then all this is not only a semblance or illusion; it is a reality, but one which does not rise up in man's present consciousness.

From birth to death, man lives in a real world unknown to him, one which cannot ever give him freedom. It may implant in him instincts which deprive him of freedom; it may call forth inner necessities, but never can it enable him to experience freedom. Freedom can only be experienced within a world of pictures, of semblance. When we wake up in the morning, we must enter a perceptive life of semblance, so that freedom may unfold. But this life of semblance, which constitutes our waking perceptive life, did not always exist in this form in mankind's historical evolution.

If we go back into ancient times, which have so often been envisaged in our lectures, to times when people still had a certain instinctive clairvoyance, or remnants of this clairvoyance (which lasted until the middle of the Fifteenth Century), we cannot in the same way say that man was surrounded only by a world of semblance. Of course, everything which man saw in his own way as the world's spiritual background, spoke through this semblance. He perceived the illusion, but differently; to him it was an expression, a manifestation of a spiritual world. This spiritual world then vanished behind the semblance, and only the semblance remained. The essential thing in the development of mankind is that in older times the semblance was viewed as the manifestation of a divine spiritual world, but the divine spiritual vanished from the semblance, so that man was confronted only by illusion, in order that he might discover freedom in this world of semblance. Man must therefore find freedom in a world of illusion; he does not find it in the world of reality which completely withdrew to the darkened experiences of his inner being; there, he can only find necessity. We may therefore say that the world which man perceives from birth to death—but everything I say applies to our age—is a world of semblance, of illusion. Man perceives the world, but in the form of semblance.

How do matters stand in regard to the life between death and a new birth? In our last lectures we explained that after death the human being does not perceive the external world which he sees here, between birth and death, but between death and a new birth he essentially perceives the human being himself, man's inner being. Man's world is then the human being. What is concealed here on earth, becomes manifest in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth, man obtains insight into the whole connection between man's soul life and his organic life, or the activity of the single organs; in short, into everything which, symbolically speaking, lies enclosed within the human skin.

But we find that in the present age man cannot live in a world of illusion after death. He can only live in a world of illusion from birth to death. But between death and a new birth he cannot live in an illusion. When he passes through death, necessity imprisons him, as it were. Here on earth, he feels that he is free in regard to his perceptions, for he may turn his eyes to the things he wants to see; he may collect his perceptions in the form of thoughts, so as to feel the freedom of action in the sphere of thought; but between death and a new birth he feels a complete lack of freedom in regard to the world of his perceptions. This world takes hold of him violently, as it were. It is just as if he perceived as he would perceive here on earth if every sense perception were to hypnotize him, as if every sense perception were to take hold of him so as to render him unable to free himself from them of his own accord.

This is the course of man's development since the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The divine spiritual worlds vanished from the semblance which confronted him, but between death and a new birth, the divine spiritual worlds imprison him so that he cannot maintain his independence. I said that if we really develop freedom on earth; i.e., if we submit completely to the semblance in life, we may carry our own being through the portal of death. By envisaging still another difference between the present time and older human conceptions, we shall realize, however, what is needed in addition to this.

Whether we consider mankind in general, or the initiates and the Mysteries of ancient times, we find that the whole conception of the world had another direction from that of today. If we remain standing by what the human being has acquired ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, through the form of knowledge which has arisen since that time, we come across certain definite ideas on the development of the earth and of the human race. But man lost track of the conceptions which might have given him satisfactory indications about the beginning and end of the earth. We might say that he was able to survey a certain line of development; he looked back into history; he looked back into the geological development of the earth. But when he went back still further, he began to construct hypotheses. He imagined that the beginning of the world was a nebula, a kind of physical structure. Out of it developed; i.e., not really, but people imagined that this was so—the higher beings of the kingdoms of Nature: plants, animals, etc. Again, in accordance with conceptions of physics, people thought that life on earth and the earth itself would end by heat—again, a hypothesis. A fragment was thus surveyed, which lies between the beginning and end of the earth. Beginning and end became a hazy, unsatisfactory picture.

But this was different in a more remote past. In past times people had very clear notions of the beginning and end of the world, because they still saw the divine spiritual in the semblance. Bear in mind, for example, the Old Testament, or other religious teachings of the past. In the Old Testament we find ideas which are above all connected with the beginning of the world, and they are described in a form accessible to man, which enabled him to grasp his own existence upon the earth. The Kant-Laplace nebula instead, does not enable him to understand human life on earth. If you take the wonderful cosmogonies of the various pagan nations, you will again find that they enabled man to grasp his earthly existence. The human being thus directed his gaze towards the beginning of the earth and obtained thoughts which encompassed man. Conceptions of the end of the earth remained for a longer time in human consciousness. In Michelangelo's “Last Judgment,” for example, we come across ideas connected with the end of the world, which were handed down as far as our own epoch and which encompass man; for although the conceptions of sin and atonement are difficult, they do not do away with man.

But take the modern hypothetical conception of the end of the world: viz. that everything will end in uniform heat. Man's whole being dissolves, there is no room for him in the world. In addition to the disappearance of divine spiritual life from the illusion of perception, man therefore lost, in the course of time, his conceptions of the world's beginning and end. Within these ideas he could still assert himself and view himself within the cosmos as a being connected with the beginning and end of the earth.

How did the people of past epochs view history? No matter in what form they saw it, history was something which moved from the beginning to the end of the earth, and it obtained its meaning through the conceptions of the beginning and end of the earth. Take any of the pagan cosmologies: they will enable you to picture mankind's historical development. They reach back to ages when earthly life was still united with a divine spiritual weaving. History has a meaning. If we turn to the beginning and also to the end of the earth, history acquires a meaning. Whereas the conception of the end of the earth, as an imaginative conception contained in religious feeling, continued to exist even in more recent epochs; the conception of the end of the earth lived on in historical ideas, as a kind of straggler, even in more recent times. In historical works, such as Rotteck's “World History,” you may still find the influence of this idea of the world's beginning, which gives a meaning to history. The significant, peculiar fact is that at the same time in which man entered the stage of perceiving the world as an illusion, so that he perceived external Nature as an illusion, history began to lose its meaning and became inaccessible to man's direct knowledge, because he no longer had any notion of the earth's beginning and end.

Consider this fact quite seriously. Take the nebula at the beginning of the earth's development, from which undefined forms first condensed themselves, and then all the beings, rising as far as man. And consider the death by heat at the end of the earth's development, in which everything will perish. In between lies what we know, for example, concerning Moses, the great men of ancient China, the great men of ancient India, Persia, Egypt—and further on, of Greece and Rome, as far as our present time. In thought we may add all that has still to come. But all this takes place on earth like an episode, with no beginning and end. History thus appears to have no meaning. Let us realize this.

Nature may be surveyed, even if we cannot survey its inner essence. It rises up before us as a semblance together with the experience of our own self, between birth and death. Modern people simply lack the courage to admit that history has no meaning; it is meaningless, because man has lost track of the beginning and end of the world. He should really feel that mankind's historical development is the greatest of riddles. He should say to himself that the historical course of development has no sense.

Some people had an idea of this truth. Read what Schopenhauer wrote on the absence of meaning in history, when one sets out from occidental beliefs. This will show you that Schopenhauer really felt this absence of meaning in history. We should be filled with the longing to rediscover the meaning of history in some other way. The world of semblance enables us to develop a satisfactory knowledge of Nature, particularly in Goethe's meaning, if we give up hypotheses and remain by the phenomena; i.e., by the truths based on semblance, on illusion. Natural science may satisfy us, if we eliminate all the disturbing hypotheses connected with the beginning and end of the world. But we are then imprisoned, as it were, in our earthly cave and we do not look out of it. The Kant-Laplace theory and the end of the world by heat block our outlook into Time's cosmic distances.

This is after all the situation of present-day mankind from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness: consequently mankind is threatened by a certain danger. It cannot quite penetrate into the mere world of phenomena; above all it is unable to penetrate into this world of semblance with the forces of inner life. Man would like to submit to the inner necessity, to his instincts, impulses, and passions. Today we do not see much of all that may be realized on the basis of free impulses born out of pure thinking. But in the same degree in which man lacks freedom during his life from birth to death, he is overcome by lack of freedom, by the necessity of perception arising out of the hypnotizing coercion which exists between death and a new birth. Man is therefore threatened by the danger of passing through the portal of death without taking with him his own being and without penetrating into a free realm in regard to his perceptive world, but into something which submerges him into a state of coercion, which makes him, as it were, grow rigid in the external world.

The impulse which must in future enter the life of mankind is that the divine spiritual should appear to man in a new way, not in the same way in which it appeared in ancient times. In past epochs man could imagine a spiritual essence in the physical at the beginning and end of the earth, to which he was united and which did not exclude him. But this must take place in an ever-growing measure from the centre, instead of from the beginning and end. Even as in the Old Testament the beginning of the world was looked upon as a genesis of the human being, in which his existence was ensured, even as the pagan cosmogonies spoke of mankind's development out of a divine-spiritual existence, even as the contemplation of the end of the earth, which—as stated—was still contained in the conceptions of the end of the world and the final judgment, which do not deprive man of his own self, so modern times must find in a right conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the centre of the earth's development, that which again enables man to see divine life united with earthly life.

We should grasp in the right way that God passed through Man in the Mystery of Golgotha. This will replace what we lost in regard to the beginning and end of the earth. But there is an essential difference between the way in which we should now look upon the Mystery of Golgotha and the old way of looking at the beginning and end of the earth.

Try to penetrate into the way in which the pagan cosmogonies arose. In the present time we often come across conceptions stating that these pagan cosmogonies were thought out in the same way in which modern men freely join thought to thought and disconnect them again. But this is an erroneous University conception which has no reasonable foundation. We find instead that in the past, man gave himself up entirely to the contemplation of the world; he could see the beginning of the world only in the way in which it appeared to him in the cosmogony and in the myths. There was no freedom in this; it was altogether the result of necessity. Man had to envisage the beginning of the earth, he could not refrain from doing so. In the present time, we no longer conceive in the right way how in the past man's soul confronted the beginning of the world and, in a certain respect, also the end of the world with the aid of an instinctive knowledge. Today it is impossible for the human soul to envisage the Mystery of Golgotha in this way. This constitutes the great difference between Christianity and the ancient teachings of the Gods. If we wish to find Christ, we must find him in freedom and turn to the Mystery of Golgotha freely. But the content of the ancient cosmogonies was forced upon man, whereas the Mystery of Golgotha does not force itself upon him. He must approach the Mystery of Golgotha in freedom and his being must pass through a kind of resurrection.

Man is led to such freedom by an activity which I have recently designated in anthroposophical spiritual science as the cognitive activity. A clergyman who believes that he may gain knowledge of the “Akasha Chronicle” through an “illustrated luxury edition”, that is to say without any inner activity on his part, for the grasping of truths which should appear before his soul in the form of concepts and become images—such a clergyman would simply show that he is predisposed to grasp the world only in a pagan way, not in a Christian way; for Christ must be reached in inner freedom. Particularly the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha should be faced, constitutes the most intimate means of an education towards freedom.

If the Mystery of Golgotha is experienced rightly, it already tears us away from the world. What arises in that case? In the first place, we live in a world of apparent perception and in it surges up something which leads us to a spiritual life guaranteed by the Mystery of Golgotha. This is one thing. But the other thing is that history ceased to have a meaning, because beginning and end were lost; it obtains a new meaning when it receives it anew from the centre. We learn to recognize that everything before the Mystery of Golgotha tends towards the Mystery of Golgotha as its goal, and everything after the Mystery of Golgotha sets out from it.

History thus once more acquires a meaning, whereas otherwise it is an illusory episode without beginning and end; the world which we perceive outside faces us as an illusion for the sake of our own freedom and also changes history into something which it should not be—an illusory episode without any centre of gravity. It dissolves into fog and mist and theoretically we already find this in Schopenhauer's writings.

By tending towards the Mystery of Golgotha, all that was once mere illusion in history obtains inner life, an historical soul, connected with everything which modern man requires through the fact that he must develop freedom in life. He will then pass through the portal of death with the great teaching of freedom. Avowal of the Mystery of Golgotha throws into life a light which must fall on everything in man that is capable of freedom. And having the disposition to freedom in the illusory aspect of the world which is given to him, he has the possibility to escape the danger of failing to develop freedom, because after death he submits to instincts and passions, thus falling a prey to necessity. By accepting a religious faith which is quite different from those of the past, by allowing his whole soul to be filled by a religious faith which only lives in freedom, he becomes able to experience freedom.

In the present civilization, only a small number of people have really grasped that only a knowledge gained in freedom, a knowledge gained by inner activity, is able to lead us to Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha. The Bible gave man the historical record so that he might have a message of the Mystery of Golgotha for the time when he could not yet take in spiritual science.

To be sure, the Gospel will never lose its value. It will have an every greater value, but the Gospel must be added to the direct knowledge of the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ should be felt and recognized also with the aid of human forces, not only with the aid of the forces working through the Gospel. This is what spiritual science strives for in regard to Christianity. Spiritual science seeks to explain the Gospels, but it is not based upon the Gospels. It is able to appreciate the Gospels so fully, just because it discovered, as it were, subsequently, all that lies concealed in them, all that has already been lost in the course of mankind's outer development.

You see, the whole modern development of mankind is thus connected on the one hand with freedom and the illusion of perception, and on the other, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the meaning of the historical development. The sequence of many episodes which constitutes history as it is generally described and accepted today, obtains its true weight if the Mystery of Golgotha can be set into the historical course of development.

Many people felt this in the right way and also used appropriate images for this. They said to themselves: Once upon a time, man looked out into the heavenly spaces; he saw the Sun, but not as we see it now. Today there are physicists who think that out there in the universe there swims a large sphere of gaseous matter. I have frequently said that they would be astonished if they could build a world airship and reach the Sun, for where they suppose the existence of a gaseous sphere, they would find negative space, which would transport them in a moment not only into Nothing, but beyond Nothing, far beyond the sphere of Nothing. The cosmologies developed today, the modern materialistic cosmologies, are pure fantasy. In past epochs, people did not imagine the Sun as a gaseous sphere swimming in the heavenly spaces, but they saw a Spiritual Being in the Sun. Even today the Sun is a Spiritual Being to those who contemplate the world in a real way; it is a Spiritual Being manifesting itself only outwardly in the way in which the eye is able to perceive the Sun. In Christ an older human race felt the presence of this central Spiritual Being. When speaking of Christ, it pointed to the Sun.

By recognizing the Sun as a Spiritual Being, it was possible to connect a conception worthy of man with the beginning and end of the earth. The conception of Jesus, who was Christ's abode, renders possible a conception worthy of man in regard to the middle of the earth's development, and from there will ray out towards beginning and end that which will once more make the whole cosmos appear in a light that gives man his place in the universe. We should therefore envisage a future in which hypotheses concerning the world's beginning and end will not be constructed on the basis of materialistic, natural-scientific conceptions, but in which the point of issue will be the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will also enable us to survey the whole cosmic development. In ancient times, the Christ was felt to be outside in the cosmos, where the Sun was shining. A true knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha enables us to see in the historical development of the earth the Sun of the earth's development shining through Christ. The Sun shines outside in the world and also in history—it shines physically outside, and spiritually in history; Sun here, and Sun there.

This indicates the path to the Mystery of Golgotha from the aspect of freedom. Modern mankind must find it, if it wants to come out of the forces of descent and enter the ascending forces. This should be realized fully and profoundly. This knowledge will not be abstract, not merely theoretical, but one that fills the whole human being. It will be a knowledge which must be felt and experienced in feeling. The Christianity which Anthroposophy will have to teach, will not only imply looking at Christ, but being filled by Christ.

People always want to know the difference between the teachings of the older Theosophy and the truths that live in Anthroposophy. Is this difference not evident? The older Theosophy warmed up the pagan cosmology. In the theosophical literature you will discover everywhere warmed-up pagan cosmologies, which are no longer suited to modern men, and although Theosophy speaks of the world's beginning and end, this no longer means what it meant in the past. What is missing in the writings of an older Theosophy? The centre is missing, the Mystery of Golgotha is missing throughout. It is missing to an even greater extent than in external natural science.

Anthroposophy has a continued cosmology which does not blot out the Mystery of Golgotha, but admits it, so that it is contained in it. The whole evolution, reaching back as far as Saturn and forward as far as Vulcan, will take its course in such a way that the light enabling us to see it, will ray out from our knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we but recognize this fundamental contrast, we shall no longer have any doubt as to the difference between the older Theosophy and Anthroposophy.

Particularly when so-called Christian theologians again and again put together Anthroposophy and Theosophy, this is due to the fact that they do not really understand much about Christianity. For it is deeply significant that Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck, the truly conspicuous theologian of Basle, wrote a book on the Christianity of modern theology, in which he tried to prove that modern theology; i.e., the Christian theology, is no longer Christian. One may therefore say: Even in regard to this point, external science has already drawn attention to the fact that modern Christian theology does not understand anything about Christianity and knows nothing about it.

One should thoroughly understand all that is unchristian. Modern theology, in any case, is not Christian; it is unchristian through love of ease, through indolence. Yet people prefer to ignore these things, which should not be ignored, for to the extent in which they are ignored, people will lose the possibility to experience Christianity in a real way, from within. This must be experienced, for it is the other pole of the experience of freedom, which must appear. Freedom must be experienced, but the experience of freedom alone would lead us into the abyss. Only the Mystery of Golgotha can lead us across this abyss.

It is necessary to let certain fundamental truths of spiritual development come to mind whenever you have gained some material, as we may call it, by way of knowledge and the like, for this will allow you to penetrate those fundamental truths more deeply. In the last days we have considered all kinds of ideas which may explain the events of our time, at least to some extent. We have therefore acquired a number of ideas concerning present developments. We can put these together with fundamental truths which we already know from certain points of view, but which can be penetrated more deeply if we approach them again following further preparation.

I have frequently spoken of the significant break which occurred in the spiritual development of the peoples of Europe and America in the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially in the 1840s. I have pointed out that this was the time when the materialistic point of view came to its peak, with a peak was reached in what we may call a way of grasping dead, outer facts with the intellect, refusing to enter into living reality.

The deeper sources of such events—and today we are very much involved in their after-effects, which will continue to have an influence for a long time to come—must be sought in the world of the spirit. And if we investigate the processes in that world which have come to outer expression in the event of which I have just spoken, we have to point to a struggle, a real war in that world, which began then and came to a certain conclusion for the world of the spirit by the autumn of 1879. To have the right idea about these things, you must visualize a battle which continued for decades in the spiritual worlds, from the 1840s until the autumn of 1879.

This may be called a battle which the spirits who are followers of the spirit belonging to the hierarchy of Archangels whom we may call Michael fought with certain ahrimanic powers. Please consider this battle to have been in the first place a battle in the spiritual world. Everything I am referring to at the moment relates to this battle fought by Michael and his followers against certain ahrimanic powers. A good way of strengthening this idea, especially if you want to make it fruitful for your life in the present time, is to have it in your mind's eye that the human souls who were born exactly in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century actually took part in this battle between Michael's followers and the ahrimanic powers when they were in the spiritual world. If you think on this, it will give you a great deal of understanding of the outer and inner destiny experienced by these individuals, and above all of their inner constitution. The battle thus took place in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s and came to a conclusion in the autumn of 1879, when Michael and his followers won a victory over certain ahrimanic powers.

What does this signify? To see something like this in the right way, we can always call on an image which humanity has known throughout its evolution—the fight between Michael and the dragon. This image has come up again and again in the course of evolution. We may characterize it by saying that every battle between Michael and the dragon is similar to the one in the 1840s, but it is about different things—harmful and damaging things. We may say that a particular crowd of ahrimanic spirits seek over and over again to bring something into world evolution, but they are always overcome. And so they also lost the battle in the autumn of 1879, and, as I said, this was in the spiritual world.

But what does it signify that the powers of the dragon, this crowd of ahrimanic spirits, are driven down into the human realms, banished from heaven to earth, as it were? Losing the battle means they are no longer to be found in the heavens, to use the biblical term. Instead they are to be found in the human realms, which means that the late 1870s were a particular time when human souls became subject to ahrimanic powers with regard to certain powers of perception. Before this, these powers were active in the spiritual realms and therefore left human beings more in peace; when they were driven out of the spiritual realms they came upon human beings. And if we enquire into the nature of the ahrimanic powers which entered into human beings when they had to leave the realms of the spirit, the answer is, the ahrimanic materialistic view with its personal—mark this well—its personal bias.

Materialism had, of course, reached its peak in the 1840s, but in those days its impulses were more instinctive in humans, for the crowd of ahrimanic spirits still sent their impulses from the spiritual world into human instincts. From the autumn of 1879 onwards, these ahrimanic impulses—powers of perception and of will—became the personal property of human beings. Before this they were more of a general property, now they were transplanted to become personal property. We are thus able to say that due to the presence of these ahrimanic powers from 1879 onwards, personal ambitions and inclinations to interpret the world in materialistic terms came to exist in the human realm. You only have to trace some of the events which have arisen because of personal inclinations since then, to understand that they resulted when the Archangel Michael drove the dragon, that is the crowd of ahrimanic spirits, from the realms of the spirit, from the heavens, down to earth.

This occurrence has profound significance. The people of the nineteenth century and of our own time are not inclined to pay attention to such occurrences in the spiritual world and to the way in which they relate to the physical world. Yet the ultimate reasons and final impulses for events on earth can only be found if one knows the spiritual background. It has to be said that it takes a fair amount of materialism, even if dressed up as idealism, to say: ‘In terms of eternity, what does it matter if so and so many more tons of organic matter will perish as the war is allowed to continue?’ One has to feel the extent to which such a view has its roots in ahrimanism, for its roots truly are in the realms of inner response. The philosopher Henri Lichtenberger's¹ philosophy of ‘tons of organic matter’ is one of many examples which may be quoted to Show the specific forms taken by the ahrimanic way of thinking.

The deepest impulse which has been living in many human souls since 1879 is therefore one which was cast down into the human realms; before that, it lived as ahrimanic power in the world of the spirit. It is helpful to look for other ways of strengthening the idea in our minds by using concepts from the material world, using them essentially as symbolic images. What happens today more at the level of soul and spirit had more of a material bias in very early times. The world of matter is also spiritual; it is merely a different form of spirituality.

If you were to go back to very early times in evolution, you would find a battle similar to the one I have just described. As already mentioned, these battles have recurred over and over again, but always on different issues. In the distant past, the crowd of ahrimanic spirits were also cast down from the spiritual worlds into the earthly realm when they had lost such a battle. You see, they would return to the attack again and again. After one of these battles, for example, the crowd of ahrimanic spirits populated the earth with the earthly life-forms which the medical profession now calls bacilli. Everything which has the power to act as a bacillus, everything in which bacilli are involved, is the result of crowds of ahrimanic spirits being cast down from heaven to earth at a time when the dragon had been overcome. In the same way the ahrimanic, mephistophelean way of thinking has spread since the late 1870s as the result of such a victory. Thus we are able to say that tubercular and bacillary diseases come from a similar source as the materialism which has taken hold of human minds.

We can also compare the occurrences of the last century with something else. We can point to something which you know already from Occult Science² the withdrawal of the Moon from the sphere of Earth evolution. The Moon was once part of the Earth; it was cast out from the Earth. As a result, certain Moon influences took effect on Earth, and this, too, followed a victory won by Michael over the dragon. We are therefore also able to say that everything connected with certain effects relating to the phases of the Moon, and all impulses which reach the Earth from the Moon, have their origin in a similar battle between Michael and the dragon.

These things really do belong together, in a way, and it is extremely useful to consider this, for it has profound significance. Some individuals develop an irresistible hankering for intellectual materialism which arises from being in league with the fallen Ahriman. They gradually come to love the impulses which Ahriman raises in their souls and, indeed, consider them to be a particularly noble and sublime way of thinking. Once again, it is necessary to be fully and clearly aware of these things. Unless they are in our conscious awareness and we have clear insight, we cannot make head or tail of events. The danger inherent in all this must be looked at with a cool eye, as it were, and a calm heart. We have to face them calmly. We shall only do so, however, if we are quite clear about the fact that a certain danger threatens human beings from this direction. This is the danger of preserving what should not be preserved. Everything which happens within the great scheme of things does also have its good side. It is because the ahrimanic powers entered into us when Michael won his victory that we are gaining in human freedom. Everything is connected with this, for the crowd of ahrimanic spirits has entered into all of us. We gain in human freedom, but we must be aware of this. We should not allow the ahrimanic powers to gain the upper hand, as it were, and we should not fall in love with them.

This is tremendously important. There always is the danger of people continuing in materialism, in the materialistic, ahrimanic way of thinking, and carrying this on into ages when, according to the plan of things, it should have been overcome. The people who do not turn away from the ahrimanic, materialistic way of thinking and want to keep it, would then be in league with everything which has come about through similar victories won over the dragon by Michael. They therefore would not unite with spiritual progress in human evolution but with material progress. And a time would come in the sixth post-Atlantean age when the only thing to please them would be to live in something which will have been brought about by bacilli, those microscopically small enemies of humanity.

Something else also needs to be understood. Exactly because of its logical consistency, and indeed its greatness, the scientific way of thinking, too, is in great danger of sliding into the ahrimanic way of thinking. Consider how some scientists are thinking today in the field of geology, for instance. They study the surface formation of the earth and the residues and so on, to determine how certain animals live, or have lived, in the different strata. Empirical data are established for certain periods. Scientists use these as a basis for their views as to what the earth looked like thousands and millions of years ago, arriving, for instance, at the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace.³ They also develop ideas as to the future evolution of the earth, and from the physical point of view these are quite correct. They are often utterly brilliant, but they are based on a method where the evolution of the earth is observed for a time and then conclusions are drawn: millions of years before, and millions of years afterwards.

What is really being done in this case? It is the same as if we were to observe a child when it is seven, eight or nine years old, taking note of how its organs gradually change, or partly change, and calculate how much these human organs change over a period of two or three years. We then multiply this to work out how much these organs change over a period of centuries. So we can work out what this child looked like a hundred years ago, and going in the other direction we can also work out what it will look like in a hundred and fifty years. It is a method which can be quite brilliant and is, in fact, the method used by geologists today to work out the primeval conditions of the earth; it was also used to produce the hypothesis of Laplace. Exactly the same method is used to visualize what the world is going to be like according to the physical laws which can now be observed. But I think you will admit that such laws do not signify much when applied to a human being, for example. A hundred years ago the child did not exist as a physical human being; neither will it exist as a physical human being in a hundred and fifty years' time.

The same applies to the earth with reference to the time-scale used by geologists. The earth came into existence later than Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel⁴ and others reckon. Before the time comes when you can simply paint the walls of a room with protein and have enough light to read by, the earth will be nothing but a corpse. It is quite easy to work out that one day it will be possible to use physical means to put protein on a wall where it will shine like electric light, so that one can read the paper. This is bound to happen as part of the physical changes, no doubt. But in fact the time will never come, just as it will never happen that in a hundred and fifty years time a child will show the changes calculated from successive changes seen in its stomach and liver in the course of two or three years between the ages of seven and nine.

Here you gain insight into some very strange things we have today. You can see how they clash. Think of a conventional scientist listening to what I have just been saying. He will say this is sheer foolishness. And then think of a spiritual scientist; he will consider the things the conventional scientist says to be foolish. All the many hypotheses concerning the beginning and the end of the earth are indeed nothing but foolishness, even though people have been utterly brilliant in establishing them.

You see from this how unconsciously human beings are, in fact, being guided. But we are now in an age when such things must be perceived and understood. It is necessary to link such an idea with the other ideas we have characterized today. A time will come when we must have transformed our materialistic ideas to such an extent that we can progress to a more spiritual form of existence, but by then the earth will have been a corpse for a long time. It will no longer support us, and incarnations in the flesh such as we seek today will no longer be sought. But the individuals who have become so tied up with the materialistic way of thinking that they cannot let go of it will still sneak down to that earth and find ways of involving themselves in the activities of bacilli—the tubercle bacillus and others—bacillary entities which will be rummaging through every part of the earth's corpse. Today's bacilli are merely the prophets, let us say, of what will happen to the whole earth in future. Then a time will come when those who cling to the materialistic way of thinking will unite with the moon powers and surround the earth, which will be a burnt-out corpse, together with the moon. For all they want is to hold on to the life of the earth and remain united with it; they do not want to take the right course, which is to progress from the earth's corpse to what will be the future soul and spirit of the earth.

In our time particularly, all these things are having an effect on many much admired brilliant ideas and moral impulses—people christen everything ‘moral impulse’‘ nowadays—in which the ahrimanic and materialistic powers are alive. These have the capacity to develop into the impulses which act as numerous ties to hold human beings to the earth, of their own will. It is important, therefore, to turn our attention to these things. And it is really most necessary to pay real heed to some highly respected elements which are taken as a matter of course today, such as certain laws of nature. Anyone who does not accept them is called an amateur and a fool. Certain moral and political aspirations are taken as a matter of course. Great Wilsoniades are proclaimed with regard to them. All these things have the potential to develop into something that can be characterized in the way I have just done.

I had my reasons for saying that the people who had a part in the beginning of the battle in the 1840s were in a special position. They were placed on earth at that time. And we can understand a great deal of the inner life of these people, especially those who were active in mind and spirit, and of their doubts and their inner battles, if we consider the impulse they brought from the life of the spirit in the 1840s into the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Something else also relates to this, something which should not be overlooked today, but very often is. It is the belief that spiritual entities and their activities have no part in human affairs. People do not like to speak of events in human affairs having spiritual causes. Anyone who knows the real situation, however, is well aware that psychic or spiritual influences from the spiritual world on human beings here in the physical world are, in fact, particularly powerful at the present time. It is not at all uncommon to find people today who will tell you that a dream, or something like a dream—they do not normally understand what is going on, but these are always non-physical elements—drove them to a particular course of events. Psychic influences of this kind play a much greater role today than materialists are prepared to believe. Anyone who has the opportunity to go into such things will find them at every turn. If you were to take the published works of today's better poets and do a statistical analysis of how many poems have come into existence in a way for which there is a rational explanation, and how many by an inspiration—a definite spiritual influence from the other world, with the poet experiencing it in a dream or something similar—you would be surprised how great is the percentage of direct influences from the spiritual world. People are influenced by the spiritual world to a much greater extent than they are prepared to admit. And the human actions performed under the influence of the spiritual world are indeed significant ones.

Now and then the question comes up: ‘Why was a particular newspaper started?’‘ The individual who started it had a particular impulse from the spiritual world. If he trusts you enough to speak openly about his impulses, he will speak of a dream when you ask about the real origin. This is why some time ago I had to say here that when historians come to discuss the outbreak of this war in time to come and use the documents of our civilization in the same way as did Ranke⁵ and other historians who went by the documents, they will never write about the most important event, which is something that happened under the influence of the spiritual world in 1914.

Things go in cycles or periods. Anything which happens in the physical world is really a kind of projection, or shadow, of what happens in the spiritual world, except that it would have happened earlier in the spiritual world. Let us assume this line here (Fig. 9a) was the line or plane separating the spiritual and the physical worlds. What I have just said could then be characterized as follows: Let us assume an event—for example the battle between Michael and the dragon—happens first of all in the spiritual world. It finally comes to an end when the dragon is cast down from heaven to earth. On earth, then, the cycle is brought to completion after a time interval which approximately equals the time between the beginning of the battle in the spiritual world and the time when the dragon was cast down. We might say: The dawn, the very beginning of this battle between Michael and the dragon, was in 1841. Things were particularly lively in 1845. It is thirty-four years from 1845 to 1879, and if we move on thirty-four years after 1879 we come to the mirroring event: You get 1913, the year preceding 1914. You see, the developments which started in the physical world in 1913 are the mirror-image of the prime reasons for the spiritual battle. And now consider 1841—1879—1917! 1841 was the crucial year in the nineteenth century. 1917 is its mirror-image. If one realizes that the exertions of the crowd of ahrimanic spirits in 1841, when the dragon started to fight Michael in the spiritual world, are mirrored right now in 1917, much of what is happening now will not really come as a surprise. Events in the physical world can really only be understood if one knows that they have been in preparation in the spiritual worlds.

These things are not being said to worry people or put strange notions in their heads; they are meant as a challenge to see things clearly, to resolve to make the effort to look into the spiritual world and not to sleep through events. This is why it has become necessary in the field of anthroposophical development to say over and over again that there is need to be watchful, to take note of what is happening and not let events go by unnoticed.

It is sometimes only possible to say what I mean by using an analogy. Yesterday I spoke of the way in which the people in Eastern Europe draw conclusions from such events. If we here in the West want to find out what actually lives in the East European soul, the best way is to study the works of the philosopher Soloviev, <⁶ though there are serious limits to what we can learn in this way. Real insight can only be gained from what has been said for many years in lectures and lecture courses given within the anthroposophical movement on the destiny and true nature of the Russian spirit. But by turning our attention to the philosopher Soloviev it is possible to express by means of an analogy what one really wants to say in this case. As you know, Soloviev died at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and has therefore been dead for a long time. Western people did not bother much with his philosophy. They had little opportunity to get to know it and little effort was made to study Soloviev as a representative of Eastern Europe. At best we have the situation of the professor who some years ago had an idea that it was not exactly right for a Professor of Philosophy to know nothing about Soloviev—you know the story. So he let someone write a doctoral dissertation, saying to himself: He can study the work of Soloviev and I can read his dissertation.

I merely want to use the point at issue as an analogy, therefore. I should like to put it like this. If we were to say that, hypothetically, Soloviev were alive today and had known this war and the events taking place in Russia—what would he, a Russian, have done? The answer can, of course, only be hypothetical, but it is a reasonable assumption that Soloviev would have found a way of removing everything he had written before the war and would have written new works. He would have realized that it was necessary to revise his views completely, for his views were based on the time when they were written. He would thus have drawn the same conclusion as the whole of Eastern Europe.

It seems paradoxical to say something like this. But if one reads Soloviev today it is best to be clear in one's mind that little would have Soloviev's absolute approval today. It would be a sign of being wide awake to make a fundamental revision of ideas which carried the greatest weight at the time but have since been reduced to absurdity. 2+2=4 would still be 2+2=4, but other things must certainly be revised. And we are only awake in our time if we are aware of this need for revision.

In this year of 1917—thirty-eight years after 1879, with 1879 thirty-eight years after 1841—something important is being asked of humanity. What matters today is not what people did in 1914, but that they get themselves out of this situation. The problem we have to face now is how to get out of it again. And unless people realize that the old ideas will not get us out of it and that new ideas are needed, the result will be failure. Anyone who thinks we shall get out of this with the old ideas is barking up the wrong tree. The effort must be made to gain new ideas, and this is only possible with insight into the spiritual world.

It has been my intention today to give you something of a background to much of I have been saying in there last days. You see, if one deals with spiritual life in concrete terms, it is not enough to have the general twaddle which is so popular with the people who believe in pantheism and similar philosophies—that there is a spiritual world, that the spirit is behind all physical things. Talking about the spirit in vague general terms will get you nowhere. We must consider specific spiritual events and spiritual entities which are beyond the threshold. Events in this world are not merely general but quite specific, and they are concrete and specific in the other world. I do not think that there are many who, as they get up in the morning, would think: ‘If I step outside the front door, I shall be out in the world.’‘ They would not say this, but they will have ideas about something specific they are going to encounter. In the same way we shall only manage to deal with the deeper sources of human and world evolution if we are able to visualize the things which are beyond the threshold in a specific and concrete way and not just refer to them in general terms such as ‘universal’, ‘providence’, and the like.

Much, much can be felt when we look at the figures 1841 and 1917 in the diagram (see Fig. 9a). But our inner response to this has to be alive in us if we are to understand what is really happening.

• 1. See Note 1 of lecture 8.
• 2. See Note 2 of lecture 4.
• 3. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher, wrote an essay on Newtonian cosmology in 1755 in which he anticipated the nebular hypothesis of Simon Pierre Laplace (1749–1827). The hypothesis is that the planets condensed from a nebula which finally contracted into the primitive Sun.
• 4. John Tyndall (1820–1893), Irish physicist. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), English biologist, friend of Darwin and one of the major protagonists of Darwinism. Ernst Haeckel, see Note 1 of lecture 2.
• 5. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), German historian. His best known work in English is his History of the Popes in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1834–37; translated into English by Sarah Austin, 1846). He wrote many historical works right until the end of his life.
• 6. See Note 6 of lecture 8.

As human beings we stand in the world as thinking, contemplative beings on the one hand, and as doers, as beings of action, on the other; with our feelings we live within both these spheres. With our feelings we respond, on the one side, to what is presented to our observation; on the other side, feelings enter into our actions, our deeds. We need only consider how we may be satisfied or dissatisfied with the success or lack of success of our deeds, how in truth all action is accompanied by impulses of feeling, and we shall see that feeling links the two poles of our being: the pole of thinking and the pole of deed, of action. Only through the fact that we are thinking beings are we human in the truest sense. Consider too, how everything that gives us the consciousness of our essential humanity is connected with the fact that we can inwardly picture the world around us; we live in this world and can contemplate it. To imagine that we cannot contemplate the world would entail forfeiting our essential humanity.

As doers we have our place in social life and everything we accomplish between birth and death has a certain significance in this social life. Insofar as we are contemplative beings, thought operates in us; insofar as we are doers, that is to say, social beings, will operates in us. It is not the case in human nature, nor is it ever so, that things can simply be thought of intellectually side by side; the truth is that whatever is an active factor in life can be characterized from one aspect or another; the forces of the world interpenetrate, flow into each other. Mentally we can picture ourselves as beings of thought and also as beings of will. But even when we are entirely engrossed in contemplation, when the outer world is completely stilled, the will is continually active. And again, when we are performing deeds, thought is active in us. It is inconceivable that anything should proceed from us in the way of actions or deeds—which may also take effect in the realm of social life—without our identifying ourselves in thought with what thus takes place. In everything that is of the nature of will, the element of thought is contained; and in everything that is of the nature of thought, will is present. It is essential to be quite clear about what is involved here if we seriously want to build the bridge between the moral-spiritual world order and natural-physical world order.

Imagine that you are living for a time purely in reflection as usually understood, that you are engaging in no kind of outward activity at all, but are wholly engrossed in thought. You must realize, however, that in this life of thought, will is also active; will is then at work in your inner being, raying out its forces into the realm of thought. When we picture the thinking human being in this way, when we realize that the will is radiating all the time into the thoughts, something will certainly strike us concerning life and its realities. If we review all the thoughts we have formulated, we shall find in every case that they are linked with something in our environment, something that we ourselves have experienced. Between birth and death we have, in a certain respect, no thoughts other than those brought to us by life. If our life has been rich in experiences we have a rich thought content; if our life experiences have been meager, we have a meager thought content. The thought content represents our inner destiny—to a certain extent. But within this life of thought there is something that is inherently our own; what is inherently our own is how we connect thoughts with one another and dissociate them again, how we elaborate them inwardly, how we arrive at judgments and draw conclusions, how we orientate ourselves in the life of thought—all this is inherently our own. The will in our life of thought is our own.

If we study this life of thought in careful self-examination, we shall certainly realize that thoughts, as far as their actual content is concerned, come to us from outside, but that it is we ourselves who elaborate these thoughts. Therefore, in respect to our world of thought we are entirely dependent upon the experiences brought to us by our birth, by our destiny. But through the will, which rays out from the depths of the soul, we carry into what thus comes to us from the outer world, something that is inherently our own. For the fulfillment of what self-knowledge demands of us it is highly important to keep separate in our minds how, on the one side, the thought content comes to us from the surrounding world and how, on the other, the force of the will, coming from within our being, rays into the world of thought.

How, in reality, do we become inwardly more and more spiritual?—Not by taking in as many thoughts as possible from the surrounding world, for these thoughts merely reproduce in pictures this outer world, which is a physical, material world. Constantly to be running in pursuit of sensations does not make us more spiritual. We become more spiritual through the inner, will-permeated work we carry out in our thoughts. This is why meditation, too, consists in not indulging in haphazard thoughts but in holding certain easily envisaged thoughts in the very center of our consciousness, drawing them there with a strong effort of will. And the greater the strength and intensity of this inner radiation of will into the sphere of thinking, the more spiritual we become. When we take in thoughts from the outer material world—and between birth and death we can take in only such thoughts—we become, as you can easily realize, unfree; for we are given over to the concatenations of things and events in the external world; as far as the actual content of the thoughts is concerned, we are obliged to think as the external world prescribes; only when we elaborate the thoughts do we become free in the real sense.

It is possible to attain complete freedom in our inner life if we increasingly efface and exclude the actual thought content, insofar as this comes from outside, and kindle into greater activity the element of will which streams through our thoughts when we form judgments, draw conclusions and the like. Thereby, however, our thinking becomes what I have called in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity ‘pure thinking’. We think, but in our thinking there is nothing but will. I have laid particular emphasis on this in the new edition of the book (1918). What is thus within us lies in the sphere of thinking. But pure thinking may equally be called pure will. Thus from the realm of thinking we reach the realm of will, when we become inwardly free; our thinking attains such maturity that it is entirely irradiated by will; it no longer takes anything in from outside, but its very life is of the nature of will. By progressively strengthening the impulse of will in our thinking we prepare ourselves for what I have called in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, ‘Moral Imagination’. Moral Imagination rises to the 'Moral Intuitions' which then pervade and illuminate our will that has now become thought, or our thinking that has now become will. In this way we raise ourselves above the sway of the 'necessity' prevailing in the material world, permeate ourselves with the force that is inherently our own, and prepare for Moral Intuition. And everything that can stream into us from the spiritual world has its foundation, primarily, in these Moral Intuitions. Therefore freedom dawns when we enable the will to become an ever mightier and mightier force in our thinking.

Now let us consider the human being from the opposite pole, that of the will. When does the will present itself with particular clarity through what we do? When we sneeze, let us say, we are also doing something, but we cannot, surely, ascribe to ourselves any definite impulse of will when we sneeze! When we speak, we are doing something in which will is undoubtedly contained. But think how, in speaking, deliberate intent and absence of intent, volition and absence of volition, intermingle. You have to learn to speak, and in such a way that you are no longer obliged to formulate each single word by dint of an effort of will; an element of instinct enters into speech. In ordinary life at least, it is so, and it is emphatically so in the case of those who do not strive for spirituality. Garrulous people, who are always opening their mouths in order to say something or other in which very little thought is contained, give others an opportunity of noticing—they themselves, of course, do not notice—how much there is in speech that is instinctive and involuntary. But the more we go out beyond our organic life and pass over to activity that is liberated, as it were, from organic processes, the more do we carry thoughts into our actions and deeds. Sneezing is still entirely a matter of organic life; speaking is largely connected with organic life; walking really very little; what we do with the hands, also very little. And so we come by degrees to actions which are more and more emancipated from our organic life. We accompany such actions with our thoughts, although we do not know how the will streams into these thoughts. If we are not somnambulists and do not go about in this condition, our actions will always be accompanied by our thoughts. We carry our thoughts into our actions, and the more our actions evolve towards perfection, the more are our thoughts being carried into them.

Our inner life is constantly deepened when we send will, our own inherent force, into our thinking, when we permeate our thinking with will. We bring will into thinking and thereby attain freedom. As we gradually perfect our actions we finally succeed in sending thoughts into these actions; we irradiate our actions—which proceed from our will—with thoughts. On the one side (inwards) we live a life of thought; we permeate this with the will and thus find freedom. On the other side (outwards) our actions stream forth from our will, and we permeate them with our thoughts.

But by what means do our actions evolve to greater perfection? How do we achieve greater perfection in our actions? We achieve this by developing in ourselves the force which can only be designated by the words: devotion to the outer world.—The more our devotion to the outer world grows and intensifies, the more does this outer world stir us to action. But it is just through unfolding devotion to the outer world that we succeed in permeating our actions with thoughts. What, in reality, is devotion to the outer world? Devotion to the outer world, which permeates our actions with thoughts, is nothing else than love.

Just as we attain freedom by irradiating the life of thought with will, so do we attain love by permeating the life of will with thoughts. We unfold love in our actions by letting thoughts radiate into the realm of the will; we develop freedom in our thinking by letting what is of the nature of will radiate into our thoughts. And because, as human beings, we are a unified whole, when we reach the point where we find freedom in the life of thought and love in the life of will, there will be freedom in our actions and love in our thinking. Each irradiates the other: action filled with thought is wrought in love; thinking that is permeated with will gives rise to actions and deeds that are truly free.

Thus you see how in the human being the two great ideals, freedom and love, grow together. Freedom and love are also that which we, standing in the world, can bring to realization in ourselves in such a way that, through us, the one unites with the other for the good of the world.

We must now ask: How is the ideal, the highest ideal, to be attained in the will-permeated life of thought?—If the life of thought were something that represented material processes, the will could never penetrate fully into the realm of the thoughts and increasingly take root there. The will would at most be able to ray into these material processes as an organizing force. Will can take real effect only if the life of thought is devoid of outer, physical reality. What, then, must it be?

You will be able to envisage what it must be if you take a picture as a starting point. If you have here a mirror and here an object, the object is reflected in the mirror; if you then go behind the mirror, you find nothing. In other words, you have a picture—nothing more. Our thoughts are pictures in this same sense. How is this to be explained?—In a previous lecture I said that the life of thought as such is not a reality of the immediate moment. The life of thought rays in from our existence before birth, or rather, before conception. The life of thought has its reality between death and a new birth. And just as here the object stands before the mirror and what it presents is a picture—only that and nothing more—so what we unfold as the life of thought is lived through in the real sense between death and a new birth, and merely rays into our life since birth. As thinking beings, we have within us a mirror reality only. Because this is so, the other reality which, as you know, rays up from the metabolic process, can permeate the mirror pictures of the life of thought. If, as is very rarely the case today, we make sincere endeavors to develop unbiased thinking, it will be clear to us that the life of thought consists of mirror-pictures if we turn to thinking in its purest form—in mathematics. Mathematical thinking streams up entirely from our inner being, but it has a mirror-existence only. Through mathematics the make-up of external objects can, it is true, be analyzed and determined, but the mathematical thoughts in themselves are only thoughts, they exist merely as pictures. They have not been acquired from any outer reality.

Abstract thinkers such as Kant also employ an abstract expression. They say: mathematical concepts are a priori.—A priori, apriority, means ‘existing in the mind independent of experience’. But why are mathematical concepts a priori? Because they stream in from the existence preceding birth, or rather, preceding conception. It is this that constitutes their ‘apriority’. And the reason why they appear real to our consciousness is because they are irradiated by the will. This is what makes them real. Just think how abstract modern thinking has become when it uses abstract words for something which, in its reality, is not understood! Men such as Kant had a dim inkling that we bring mathematics with us from our existence before birth, and therefore they called the findings of mathematics ‘a priori’. But the term ‘a priori’ really tells us nothing, for it points to no reality, it points to something merely formal.

In regard to the life of thought, which with its mirror existence must be irradiated by the will in order to become reality, ancient traditions speak of semblance. (Diagram XI, Schein.)

Let us now consider the other pole of man's nature, where the thoughts stream down towards the sphere of will, where deeds are performed in love. Here our consciousness is, so to speak, held at bay; it rebounds from reality. We cannot look into that realm of darkness—a realm of darkness for our consciousness—where the will unfolds whenever we raise an arm or turn the head, unless we take super-sensible conceptions to our aid. We move an arm; but the complicated process in operation there remains just as hidden from ordinary consciousness as what takes place in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep. We perceive our arm; we perceive how our hand grasps some object. This is because we permeate the action with thoughts. But the thoughts that are in our consciousness are still only semblance. We live in what is real, but it does not ray into our ordinary consciousness. Ancient traditions spoke here of Power (Gewalt), because the reality in which we are living is indeed permeated by thought, but thought has nevertheless rebounded from it in a certain sense, during the life between birth and death. (Diagram XI.)

Between these two poles lies the balancing factor that unites the two—unites the will that rays towards the head with the thoughts which, as they flow into deeds wrought with love, are, so to say, felt with the heart. This means of union is the life of feeling, which is able to direct itself towards the will as well as towards the thoughts. In our ordinary consciousness we live in an element by means of which we grasp, on the one side, what comes to expression in our will-permeated thought with its predisposition to freedom, while on the other side, we try to ensure that what passes over into our deeds is filled more and more with thoughts. And what forms the bridge connecting both has since ancient times been called Wisdom. (Diagram XI.)

In his fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe has given indications of these ancient traditions in the figures of the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Brazen King. We have already shown from other points of view how these three elements must come to life again, but in an entirely different form—these three elements to which ancient instinctive knowledge pointed and which can come to life again only if we acquire the knowledge yielded by Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But what is it that is actually taking place as we unfold our life of thought?—Reality is becoming semblance! It is very important to be clear about this. We carry about with us our head, which with its hard skull and tendency to ossification, presents, even outwardly, a picture of what is dead, in contrast to the rest of the living organism. Between birth and death we bear in our head that which, from an earlier time when it was reality, comes into us as semblance. From the rest of our organism we permeate this semblance with the element issuing from our metabolic processes; we permeate it with the real element of the will. There we have within us a seed, a germinating entity which, first and foremost, is part of our humanity, but also means something in the cosmos. Think of it—an individual is born in a particular year; before then she was in the spiritual world. When she passes out of the spiritual world, thought which there is reality, becomes semblance, and she leads over into this semblance the forces of her will which come from an entirely different direction, rising up from parts of her organism other than the head. That is how the past, dying away into semblance, is kindled again to become reality of the future.

Let us understand this rightly. What happens when we rise to pure thinking, to thinking that is irradiated by will?—On the foundation of the past that has dissolved into semblance, through fructification by the will which rises up from our egohood, there unfolds within us a new reality leading into the future. We are the bearers of the seed into the future. The thoughts of the past, as realities, are as it were the mother-soil; into this mother-soil is laid that which comes from the individ ual egohood, and the seed is sent on into the future for future life.

On the other side, we evolve by permeating our deeds and actions, our will-nature, with thoughts; deeds are performed in love. Such deeds detach themselves from us. Our deeds do not remain confined to ourselves; they become world happenings. If they are permeated by love, then love goes with them. As far as the cosmos is concerned, an egotistical action is different from an action permeated by love. When, out of semblance, through fructification by the will, we unfold that which proceeds from our inmost being, then what streams forth into the world from our head encounters our thought-permeated deeds. Just as when a plant unfolds it contains in its blossom the seed to which the light of the sun, the air outside, and so on, must come, to which something must be brought from the cosmos in order that it may grow, so what is unfolded through freedom must find an element in which to grow through the love that lives in our deeds.

Thus do we stand within the great process of world evolution, and what takes place inside the boundary of our skin and flows out beyond our skin in the form of deeds, has significance not only for us but for the world, the universe. We have our place in the arena of cosmic happenings. By reality in earlier times becoming semblance in us, reality is ever and again dissolved, and in that the semblance is quickened again by the will, new reality arises. Here we have—as if spiritually we could put our very finger upon it—what has also been spoken of from other points of view.—There is no eternal conservation of matter! Matter is transformed into semblance and semblance is transformed into reality by the will. The law of the conservation of matter and energy affirmed by physics is a delusion, because account is taken of the natural world only. The truth is that matter is continually passing away in that it is transformed into semblance; and a new creation takes place in that through the human being, who stands before us as the supreme achievement of the cosmos, semblance is again transformed into Being (Sein).

We can also see this if we look at the other pole—only there it is not so easy to perceive. The processes which finally lead to freedom can certainly be grasped by unbiased thinking. But to see rightly in the case of this other pole needs a certain degree of spiritual-scientific development. For here, to begin with, ordinary consciousness rebounds when confronted by what ancient traditions called Power. What is living itself out as Power, as Force, is indeed permeated by thoughts; but the ordinary consciousness does not perceive that just as more and more will, a greater and greater faculty of judgment, comes into the world of thought, so, when we bring thoughts into the will-nature, when we overcome the element of Power more and more completely, we also pervade what is merely Power with the light of thought. At the one pole of man's being we see the overcoming of matter; at the other pole, the new birth of matter.

As I have indicated briefly in my book, Riddles of the Soul (Mercury Press, 1996), the human being is a threefold being: as nerve-and-sense being, the bearer of the life of thought, of perception; as rhythmic being (breathing, circulating blood), the bearer of the life of feeling; as metabolic being, the bearer of the life of will. But how then does the metabolic process operate in us when will is ever more and more unfolded in love? It operates in that, as we perform such deeds, matter is continually overcome. And what is it that unfolds in us when, as a free being, we find our way into pure thinking, which is, however, really of the nature of will?—Matter is born!—We behold the coming-into-being of matter! We bear in ourselves that which brings matter to birth: our head; and we bear in ourselves that which destroys matter, where we can see how matter is destroyed: our metabolic-limb organism.

This is the way in which to study the whole human being. We see how what consciousness conceives of in abstractions is an actual factor in the process of World-Becoming; and we see how that which is contained in this process of World-Becoming and to which the ordinary consciousness clings so firmly that it can do no other than conceive it to be reality—we see how this is dissolved into nothingness. It is reality for the ordinary consciousness, and when it obviously does not tally with outer realities, then recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities. And because one cannot free oneself in one's thoughts from these firmly fixed realities, one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped. This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.

It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when accepting the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nothingness and continually rebuilt out of nothingness. It is only because whenever matter dies away, new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter. They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in had been carried out—that it is the same thing. The reality is that the old documents had been burned and new ones written. It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of the human being, where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises, there lies the possibility of freedom, and there lies the possibility of love. And freedom and love belong together, as I have already indicated in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Those who, on the basis of some particular conception of the world, speak of the imperishability of matter, annul freedom on the one side and the full development of love on the other. For only through the fact that in us the past dies away, becomes semblance, and the future is a new creation in the condition of a seed, does there arise in us the feeling of love, the devotion to something to which we are not coerced by the past, and freedom, action that is not predetermined. Freedom and love are, in reality, comprehensible only to a spiritual-scientific conception of the world, not to any other. Those who are conversant with the picture of the world that has appeared in the course of the last few centuries will be able to assess the difficulties that will have to be overcome before the habits of thought prevailing in modern humanity can be induced to give way to this unbiased, spiritual-scientific thinking. For in the picture of the world existing in natural science there are really no points from which we can go forward to a true understanding of freedom and love.

How the natural-scientific picture of the world on the one side, and on the other, the ancient, traditional picture of the world, are related to a truly progressive, spiritual-scientific development of humanity—of this we will speak on some other occasion.

[ 1 ] This study of the theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world-conception was written in the middle of the decade 1880–90. My mind was then vitally engaged in two activities of thought. One was directed toward the creative work of Goethe, and strove to formulate the view of life and of the world which revealed itself as the impelling force in this creative work. The completely and purely human seemed to me to be dominant in everything that Goethe gave to the world in creative work, in reflection, and in his life. Nowhere in the modern age did that inner assurance, harmonious completeness, and sense of reality in relation to the world seem to me to be as fully represented as in Goethe. From this thought there necessarily arose the recognition of the fact that the manner, likewise, in which Goethe comported himself in the act of cognition is that which issues out of the very nature of man and of the world.

In another direction my thought was vitally absorbed in the philosophical conceptions prevalent at that time regarding the essential nature of knowledge. In these conceptions, knowledge threatened to become sealed up within the being of man himself. The brilliant philosopher Otto Liebmann had asserted that human consciousness cannot pass beyond itself; that it must remain within itself. Whatever exists, as the true reality, beyond that world which consciousness forms within itself—of this it can know nothing. In brilliant writings Otto Liebmann elaborated this thought with respect to the most varied aspects of the realm of human experience. Johannes Volkelt had written his thoughtful books dealing with Kant's theory of knowledge and with Experience and Thought. He saw in the world as given to man only a combination of representations¹ based upon the relationship of man to a world in itself unknown. He admitted, to be sure, that an inevitability manifests itself in our inner experience of thinking when this lays hold in the realm of representations. When engaged in the activity of thinking, we have the sense, in a manner, of forcing our way through the world of representations into the world of reality. But what is gained thereby? We might for this reason feel justified, during the process of thinking, in forming judgments concerning the world of reality; but in such judgments we remain wholly within man himself; nothing of the nature of the world penetrates therein.

[ 2 ] Eduard von Hartmann, whose philosophy had been of great service to me, in spite of the fact that I could not admit its fundamental presuppositions or conclusions, occupied exactly the same point of view in regard to the theory of knowledge set forth exhaustively by Volkelt.

[ 3 ] There was everywhere manifest the confession that human knowledge arrives at certain barriers beyond which it cannot pass into the realm of genuine reality.

[ 4 ] In opposition to all this stood in my case the fact, inwardly experienced and known in experience, that human thinking, when it reaches a sufficient depth, lives within the reality of the world as a spiritual reality. I believed that I possessed this knowledge in a form which can exist in consciousness with the same clarity that characterizes mathematical knowledge.

[ 5 ] In the presence of this knowledge, it is impossible to sustain the opinion that there are such boundaries of cognition as were supposed to be established by the course of reasoning to which I have referred.

[ 6 ] In reference to all this, I was somewhat inclined toward the theory of evolution then in its flower. In Haeckel this theory had assumed forms in which no consideration whatever could be given to the self-existent being and action of the spiritual. The later and more perfect was supposed to arise in the course of time out of the earlier, the undeveloped. This was evident to me as regards the external reality of the senses, but I was too well aware of the self-existent spiritual, resting upon its own foundation, independent of the sensible, to yield the argument to the external world of the senses. But the problem was how to lay a bridge from this world to the world of the spirit.

[ 7 ] In the time sequence, as thought out on the basis of the senses, the spiritual in man appears to have evolved out of the antecedent non-spiritual. But the sensible, when rightly conceived, manifests itself everywhere as a revelation of the spiritual. In the light of this true knowledge of the sensible, I saw clearly that “boundaries of knowledge,” as then defined, could be admitted only by one who, when brought into contact with this sensible, deals with it like a man who should look at a printed page and, fixing his attention upon the forms of the letters alone without any idea of reading, should declare that it is impossible to know what lies behind these forms.

[ 8 ] Thus my look was guided along the path from sense-observation to the spiritual, which was firmly established in my inner experiential knowledge. Behind the sensible phenomena, I sought, not for a non-spiritual world of atoms, but for the spiritual, which appears to reveal itself within man himself, but which in reality inheres in the objects and processes of the sense-world itself. Because of man's attitude in the act of knowing, it appears as if the thoughts of things were within man, whereas in reality they hold sway within the things themselves. It is necessary for man, in experiencing the apparent,² to separate thoughts from things; but, in a true experience of knowledge, he restores them again to things.

[ 9 ] The evolution of the world is thus to be understood in such fashion that the antecedent non-spiritual, out of which the succeeding spirituality of man unfolds, possesses also a spiritual beside itself and outside itself. The later spirit-permeated sensible, amid which man appears, comes to pass by reason of the fact that the spiritual progenitor of man unites with imperfect, non-spiritual forms, and, having transformed these, then appears in sensible forms.

[ 10 ] This course of thought led me beyond the contemporary theorists of knowledge, even though I fully recognized their acumen and their sense of scientific responsibility. It led me to Goethe.

[ 11 ] I am impelled to look back from the present to my inner struggle at that time. It was no easy matter for me to advance beyond the course of reasoning characterizing contemporary philosophies. But my guiding star was always the self-substantiating recognition of the fact that it is possible for man to behold himself inwardly as spirit, independent of the body and dwelling in a world of spirit.

[ 12 ] Prior to my work dealing with Goethe's scientific writings and before the preparation of this theory of knowledge, I had written a brief paper on atomism, which was never printed. This was conceived in the direction here indicated. I cannot but recall what pleasure I experienced when Friedrich Theodor Vischer, to whom I sent that paper, wrote me some words of approval.

[ 13 ] But in my Goethe studies it became clear to me that my way of thinking led to a perception of the character of the knowledge which is manifest everywhere in Goethe's creative work and in his attitude toward the world. I perceived that my point of view afforded me a theory of knowledge which was that belonging to Goethe's world-conception.

[ 14 ] During the 'eighties of the last century I was invited through the influence of Karl Julius Schröer, my teacher and fatherly friend, to whom I am deeply indebted, to prepare the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings for the Kürschner National-Literatur, and to edit these writings. During the progress of this work, I traced the course of Goethe's intellectual life in all the fields with which he was occupied. It became constantly clearer to me in detail that my own perception placed me within that theory of knowledge belonging to Goethe's world-conception. Thus it was that I wrote this theory of knowledge in the course of the work I have mentioned.

[ 15 ] Now that I again turn my attention to it, it seems to me to be also the foundation and justification, as a theory of knowledge, for all that I have since asserted orally or in print. It speaks of an essential nature of knowledge which opens the way from the sense world to a world of spirit.

[ 16 ] It may seem strange that this youthful production, written nearly forty years ago, should now be published again, unaltered and expanded only by means of notes. In the manner of its presentation, it bears the marks of a kind of thinking which had entered vitally into the philosophy of that time, forty years ago. Were I writing the book now, I should express many things differently. But the essential nature of knowledge I could not set forth in any different light. Moreover, what I might write now could not convey so truly within itself the germ of the spiritual world-conception for which I stand. In such germinal fashion one can write only at the beginning of one's intellectual life. For this reason, it may be well that this youthful production should again appear in unaltered form. The theories of knowledge existing at the time of its composition have found their sequel in later theories of knowledge. What I have to say in regard to these I have said in my book Die Rätsel der Philosophie.³ This also will be issued in a new edition at the same time by the same publishers. That which I outlined many years ago as the theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world-conception seems to me just as necessary to be said now as it was forty years ago.

Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, November 1923

• 1. Vorstellungen, single concepts corresponding to single percepts.
• 2. in einem Schein-Erleben
• 3. The Riddles of Philosophy—not yet translated into English

[ 1 ] Let us now take a look at pure experience. What does it contain, as it sweeps across our consciousness, without our working upon it in thinking? It is mere juxtaposition in space and succession in time; an aggregate of utterly disconnected particulars. None of the objects that come and go there has anything to do with any other. At this stage, the facts that we perceive, that we experience inwardly, are of no consequence to each other.

[ 2 ] This world is a manifoldness of things of equal value. No thing or event can claim to play a greater role in the functioning of the world than any other part of the world of experience. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact has greater significance than another one, we must then not merely observe the things, but must already bring them into thought-relationships. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which perhaps does not have the least importance for its organic functioning, is for experience of exactly the same value as the most essential organ of the animal's body. This greater or lesser importance will in fact become clear to us only when we begin to reflect upon the relationships of the individual parts of observation, that is, when we work upon experience.

[ 3 ] For experience, the snail, which stands at a low level of organization, is the equal of the most highly developed animal. The difference in the perfection of organization appears to us only when we grasp the given manifoldness conceptually and work it through. The culture of the Eskimo, in this respect, is also equal to that of the educated European; Caesar's significance for the historical development of humanity appears to mere experience as being no greater than that of one of his soldiers. In the history of literature, Goethe does not stand out above Gottsched, if it is a matter of merely experienceable factuality.

[ 4 ] At this level of contemplation, the world is a completely smooth surface for us with respect to thought. No part of this surface rises above another; none manifests any kind of conceptual difference from another. It is only when the spark of thought strikes into this surface that heights and depths appear, that one thing appears to stand out more or less than another, that everything takes form in a definite way, that threads weave from one configuration to another, that everything becomes a harmony complete within itself.

[ 5 ] We believe that these examples suffice to show what we mean by the greater or lesser significance of the objects of perception (here considered to be synonymous with the things of experience), and what we mean by that knowing activity which first arises when we contemplate these objects in their interconnection. At the same time, we believe that in this we are safe from the objection that our world of experience in fact shows endless differences in its objects even before thinking approaches it. After all, a red surface differs from a green one even if we do not exercise any thinking. This is correct. If someone wanted to refute us by this, however, he would have misunderstood our argument totally. This is precisely our argument, that an endless number of particulars is what experience offers us. These particulars must of course differ from one another; otherwise they would not in fact confront us as an endless, disconnected manifoldness. It is not at all a question of perceived things being undifferentiated, but rather of their complete unrelatedness, and of the absolute insignificance of the individual sense-perceptible facts for the totality of our picture of reality. It is precisely because we recognize this endless qualitative differentiation that we are driven to our conclusions.

[ 6 ] If we were confronted by a self-contained, harmoniously organized unity, we could not then say, in fact, that the individual parts of this unity are of no significance to one another.

[ 7 ] If, for this reason, someone does not find the comparison we used above to be apt, he has not grasped it at the actual point of comparison. It would be incorrect, of course, for us to want to compare the world of perception, in all its in finitely diverse configuration, to the uniform regularity of a plane. But our plane is definitely not meant to represent the diverse world of phenomena, but rather the homogeneous total picture we have of this world as long as thinking has not approached it. After the activation of our thinking, each particular of this total picture no longer appears in the way our senses alone communicate it, but al ready with the significance it has for the whole of reality. It appears then with characteristics totally lacking to it in the form of experience.

[ 8 ] In our estimation, Johannes Volkelt has succeeded admirably in sketching the clear outlines of what we are justified in calling pure experience. He already gave a fine characterization of it five years ago in his book on Kant's Epistemology, and has then carried the subject further in his most recent work, Experience and Thinking. Now he did this, to be sure, in support of a view that is utterly different from our own, and for an essentially different purpose than ours is at the moment. But this need not prevent us from introducing here his excellent characterization of pure experience. He presents us, simply, with the pictures which, in a limited period of time, pass before our consciousness in a completely unconnected way. Volkelt says: “Now, for example, my consciousness has as its content the mental picture of having worked hard today; immediately joining itself to this is the content of a mental picture of being able, with good conscience, to take a walk; but suddenly there appears the perceptual picture of the door opening and of the mailman entering; the mailman appears, now sticking out his hand, now opening his mouth, now doing the reverse; at the same time, there join in with this content of perception of the mouth opening, all kinds of auditory impressions, among which comes the impression that it is starting to rain outside. The mailman disappears from my consciousness, and the mental pictures that now arise have as their content the sequence: picking up scissors, opening the letter, criticism of illegible writing, visible images of the most diverse written figures, diverse imaginings and thoughts connected with them; scarcely is this sequence at an end than again there appears the mental picture of having worked hard and the perception, accompanied by ill humor, of the rain continuing; but both disappear from my consciousness, and there arises a mental picture with the content that a difficulty believed to have been resolved in the course of today's work was not resolved; entering at the same time are the mental pictures: freedom of will, empirical necessity, responsibility, value of virtue, absolute chance, incomprehensibility, etc.; these all join together with each other in the most varied and complicated way; and so it continues.”

[ 9 ] Here we have depicted, within a certain limited period of time, what we really experience, the form of reality in which thinking plays no part at all.

[ 10 ] Now one definitely should not believe that one would have arrived at a different result if, instead of this everyday experience, one had depicted, say, the experience we have of a scientific experiment or of a particular phenomenon of nature. Here, as there, it is individual unconnected pictures that pass before our consciousness. Thinking first establishes the connections.

[ 11 ] We must also recognize the service rendered by Dr. Richard Wahle's little book, Brain and Consciousness (Vienna, 1884), in showing us in clear contours what is actually given by experience divested of everything of a thought-nature, with only one reservation: that what Wahle presents as the characteristics applying absolutely to the phenomena of the outer and inner world actually applies only to the first stage of the world contemplation we have characterized. According to Wahle we know only a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. For him there can be absolutely no question of a relationship between the things that exist in this juxtaposition and succession. For example, there may after all be an inner connection somewhere between the warm rays of the sun and the warming up of a stone; but we know nothing of any causal connection; all that becomes clear to us is that a second fact follows upon the first. There may also be somewhere, in a world unaccessible to us, an inner connection between our brain mechanism and our spiritual activity; we only know that both are events running their courses parallel to each other; we are absolutely not justified, for example, in assuming a causal connection between these two phenomena.

[ 12 ] Of course, when Wahle also presents this assertion as an ultimate truth of science, we must dispute this broader application; his assertion is completely valid, however, with respect to the first form in which we become aware of reality.

[ 13 ] It is not only the things of the outer world and the processes of the inner world that stand there, at this stage of our knowing, without interconnection; our own personality is also an isolated entity with respect to the rest of the world. We find ourselves as one of innumerable perceptions without connection to the objects that surround us.