The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If I had the task of presenting my subject purely according to the methods of Spiritual Science, I should naturally have to start from different premises and we should be able to reach our goal more quickly. Such a presentation, however, would not fulfill the special purpose of these lectures. For the whole point of these lectures is to throw a bridge across to the customary methods of scientific thought. Admittedly, I have chosen just the material which makes the bridge most difficult to construct, because the customary mode of thought in this realm is very far from realistic. But in contending against an unreal point of view, it will become apparent how we can emerge from the unsatisfying nature of modern theories and came to a true grasp of the facts in question. Today, then, I should like to consider the whole way in which ideas have been formed in modern times about the celestial phenomena.

We must, however, distinguish two things in the formation of these ideas. First, the ideas¹ are derived from observation of the celestial phenomena, and theoretical explanations are then linked on to the observations. Sometimes very far-reaching, spun-out theories have been linked on to relatively few observations. That is the one thing, namely, that a start is made from observations out of which certain ideas have been developed. The other is that, the ideas having been reached, they are further elaborated into hypotheses. In this creating of hypotheses,—a process which ends in the setting up of some definite cosmology,—much arbitrariness prevails, since in the setting-up of theories, any preconceived ideas existing in the minds of those who put forward the theory, make themselves strongly felt.

I will therefore first call your attention to something which will perhaps strike you as paradoxical, but which, when carefully examined, will none the less prove fruitful in the further course of our studies.

In the whole mode of thought of modern Science there prevails what might be called, and indeed has been called, the ‘Regula philosophandi’. It consists in saying: What has been traced to definite causes in one realm of reality, is to be traced to the same causes in other realms. In setting up such a ‘regula philosophandi’ the starting-point is as a rule apparently self-evident. It will be said—scientists of the Newtonian school will certainly say—that breathing must have the same causes in man as in the animal, or again, that the ignition of a piece of wood must have the same cause whether in Europe or in America. Up to this point the thing is obvious enough. But then a jump is made which passes unnoticed,—is taken tacitly for granted. Those who are wont to think in this way will say, for example, that if a candle and the Sun are both of them shedding light the same causes must surely underlie the light of the candle and the light of the Sun. Or again, if a stone falls to Earth and the Moon circles round the Earth, the same causes must underlie the movement of the stone and the movement of the Moon. to such an explanation they attach the further thought that if this were not so, we should have no explanations at all in Astronomy. The explanations are based on earthly things. If the same causality did not obtain in the Heavens as on Earth, we should not be able to arrive at any theory at all.

Yet when you come to think of it, this regula philosophandi is none other than a preconceived idea. Who in the world will guarantee that the causes of the shining of a candle and of the shining of the Sun are one and the same? Or that in the falling of a stone, or the falling of the famous apple from the tree by which Newton arrived at his theory, there is the same underlying cause as in the movements of the heavenly bodies? This would first have to be established. As it is, it is a mere preconceived idea. Prejudices of this kind enter in, when, having first derived theoretical explanations and thought—pictures inductively from the observed phenomena, people rush headlong into deductive reasoning and construct world-systems by deductive methods.

What I am now describing thus abstractly has, however, become a historical fact. There is a continuous line of development from what the great thinkers at the opening of the modern age—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo—concluded from comparatively few observations. Of Kepler—notably of his third Law, quoted yesterday—it must be said that his analysis of the facts which were available to him is a work of genius.

It was a very great intensity of spiritual force which Kepler brought to bear when, from the little that lay before him, he discovered this ‘law’ as we call it, or better, this ‘conceptual synthesis’ of the phenomena of the universe. Then however, by way of Newton a development set in which was not derived from observation but from theoretical constructions, including concepts of force and mass and the like, which we must simply omit if we only want to hold to what is given. The development in this direction reaches a culminating point—conceived, admittedly, with genius and originality—in Laplace, where it leads to a genetic explanation of the entire cosmic system (as you will convince yourselves if you read his famous book Exposition du Systeme du Monde ), or again in Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In all that has followed in this trend we see the effort constantly made to come to conclusions based on the thought pictures that have thus been conceived of the connections of the celestial movements, and resulting in such explanations of the origin of the universe as the nebular theory and so on.

It must be noted that in the historical development of these theories we have something which is put together from inductions made, once again, with no little genius in this domain—and from subsequent deductions in which the special predilections of their authors were included. Inasmuch as a thinker was imbued with materialism it was quite natural for him to mingle materialistic ideas with his deductive concepts. Then it was no longer the facts which spoke, for one proceeded on the basis of the theories which had emerged from the deductions. Thus, for example, inductively men first arrived at the mental pictures which they summed up in the notion of a central body, the Sun, with the planets revolving around it in ellipses according to a certain law, namely: the radius-vectors describe equal areas in equal periods of time. By observing the different planets of a solar system, it was moreover possible to summarize their mutual relations in Kepler's third law: ‘For different planets the squares of the periods of revolution are proportional to the cubes of the radius-vectors’. Here was a certain picture. The question, however, was not decided, whether this picture completely fitted the reality. It was in truth an abstraction from reality; to what extent it related to the full reality, was not established. From this picture—not from reality, but from this picture—people deduced what then became a whole genetic system of Astronomy. All this must be borne in mind. Modern man is taught from childhood as if the theories which have been reached in the past few centuries by deductive reasoning were the real facts. We will therefore, while taking our start from what is truly scientific, disregard as far as is possible all that is merely theoretical and link on to those ideas which only depart from reality to the extent that we shall still be able to discover in them a connection with what is real. It will be my task, in all that I give to-day, to follow the direction of modern scientific thought only up to those ideas and concepts which still permit one to find the way back again into reality. I shall not depart so far from reality that the concepts become crude enough to allow of the deduction of nebular hypotheses.

Proceeding in this way,—pursuing the modern method of forming concepts in this particular field,—we must first form a concept which presented itself inductively to Kepler and was then developed further I repeat expressly, I will only go so far in these concepts that even if the picture in the form in which it was conceived should be mistaken, it has departed only so far from reality that it will be possible to eliminate the mistake and return to what is true. We need to develop a certain flair for reality in the concepts we entertain. We cannot proceed in any other way if we wish to throw a bridge across from the reality to the spun-out theories of modern scholarship and science.

Here then, to begin with, is a concept which we must examine. The planets have eccentric orbits,—they describe ellipses. This is something with which we can begin. The planets have eccentric orbits and describe ellipses, in one focus of which is the Sun. They describe the ellipses in accordance with the law that the radius—vectors describe equal areas in equal periods of time.

A second essential for us to hold to is the idea that each planet has its own orbital plane. Although the planets carry out their evolutions in the neighborhood of each other, so to speak, yet for each planet there is the distinct plane of its orbit, more or less inclined to the plane of the Sun's equator: If this depicts the plane of the Sun's equator (Fig.1), an orbital plane of a planet would be thus; it would not coincide at all with the plane of the Sun's equator.²

These are two very significant mental pictures, to be formed from the facts of observation. And yet, in the very forming of them we must take note of something in the real world-picture, which as it were, rebels against them. For instance, if we are trying to understand our solar system in its totality, and only base it upon the picture of the planets moving in eccentric orbits, the orbital planes being inclined at varying degrees to the plane of the solar equator, we shall be in difficulties if we also take into account the movements of the comets. The moment we turn our attention to the cometary movements, the picture no longer suffices. The outcome will be better understood from the historical facts than from any theoretical explanations.

Upon these two thought-pictures,—that the orbital planes of the planets lie in the proximity of the plane of the Sun's equator, and that the orbits are eccentric ellipses,—Kant, Laplace and their successors built up the nebular hypothesis. Follow what emerges from this. At a pinch, and indeed only at a pinch, it is a way of imagining the origin of the solar system. But the astronomical system thus constructed contains no satisfactory explanation of the part played by the cometary bodies. They always fall out of the theory. This discordance of the comets with the theories which were formed, as described, in the course of scientific history, proves that the cometary life somehow rebels against a concept formed, not from the whole but only from a part of the whole. We must be clear, too, that the paths of the comets frequently coincide with those of other bodies which also play into our system and present a riddle precisely through their association with the comets. These are the meteoric swarms, whose paths very frequently—perhaps even always—coincide with the cometary paths. Here, my dear friends, taking into account the totality of our system, we are led to say: A sea of ideas has gradually been formed from the study of our planetary system as a whole,—ideas with which we cannot do justice to the seemingly irregular and almost arbitrary paths of the comets and meteoric swarms. They simply refuse to be included in the more abstract pictures that have been reached. I should have to give you long historical descriptions to show in detail how many difficulties have arisen in connection with the concrete facts, when the investigators—or rather, thinkers—approached the comets and meteoric swarms with their astronomical theories.

I wish only to point out the directions in which a sound understanding can be sought. We shall come to such an understanding if we pay attention to yet another aspect.

Starting in this way from concepts which still have a remnant of reality in them, we will now try to go back a little towards what is real. It is indeed always necessary to do this in relation to the outer world, in order that our concepts may not stray too far from reality,—for this is a strong propensity of man. We must go back again and again to the reality.

There is already no little danger in forming such a concept as that the planets move in ellipses, and then beginning at once to build a theory upon this concept. It is far better, after forming such a concept, to turn back to reality in order to see if the concept does not need correcting, or at least modifying. This is important. It is very clearly seen in astronomical thinking. Also in biological and especially in medical thought, the same failing has led people very far astray. They do not take into account, how necessary it is directly they have formed a concept, to go back to reality in order to make sure that there is no reason to modify it.

The planets, then, move in ellipses. But these ellipses vary; they are sometimes more circular, sometimes more elliptical. We find this if we return to reality with the ellipse idea. In the course of time the ellipse becomes more bulging, more like a circle, and then again more like an ellipse. So I by no means include the whole reality if I merely say, ‘the planets move in ellipses’. I must modify the concept and say: The planets move in paths which continually struggle against becoming a circle or remaining one and the same ellipse. If I were now to draw the elliptic line, to be true to the reality I should have to make it of india-rubber, or form it flexibly in some way, continually altering it within itself. For if I had formed the ellipse which is there in one revolution of the planet, it would not do for the next revolution, and still less for the following one. It is not true that when I pass from reality to the rigid concept I still remain within the real. That is the one thing.

The other is: We have said that the planes of the planetary orbits are inclined to the plane of the Sun's equator. Where the planets cross the point of intersection of their orbits (with the Ecliptic) in an upward or downward direction, they are said to form Nodes. The lines, joining the two Nodes (K-K 1 in Fig. 1), are variable. So too are the inclinations of the planes to one-another, so that even these inclinations, if we try to express them in a single concept, bring us to a rigid concept which we must immediately modify in face of the reality. For if an orbit is inclined at one time in one way, and at another time in another way, the concept we deduce in the first instance must afterwards be modified. To be sure, once such a point has been reached, we can take an easy line and say that there are ‘disturbances’ and that the reality is only grasped ‘approximately’ with our concepts. We then go on swimming comfortably in further theories. But in the end we swim so far that the fanciful and theoretic pictures we are constructing no longer correspond to the reality, though they are meant to do so.

It is easy to agree that this mutability of the eccentric orbits, and of the mutual inclination of the planes of the orbits, must somehow or other be connected with the life of the whole planetary system, or shall we say, with its continuing activity. It must be connected in some way with the living activity of the whole planetary system. That is quite evident. Starting from this, one might again try to form the concept, saying: Well now, I will bring such mobility into my thoughts that I picture the ellipses continually bulging out and contracting, the planes of the orbits ascending, descending and rotating, and then from this starting-point I will build up a world-system according to reality. Good. But if you think the idea through to the end, then precisely as the outcome of such logical thought, the result is a planetary system which cannot possibly go on existing. Through the summation of the disturbances which arise especially through the variability of the Nodes, the planetary system would move towards its own ultimate death and rigidity. Here there comes in what philosophers have pointed out again and again. While such a system can be thought out, in reality it would have had ample time to reach the ultimate finale. There is no reason why it should not. The infinite possibility would have been fulfilled; rigidity would long ago have set in.

We enter here into a realm where thought apparently comes to a standstill. Precisely by following my thinking through to the very last, I arrive at a world-system which is still and rigid. But that is not reality.

Now, however, we come to something else, to which we must pay special attention. In pursuing these things further—you can find the theory of it in the work of Laplace; I will only relate the phenomena—one finds that the reason why the system has not actually reached rigidity under the influence of the disturbances—the variability of the Nodes, etc.,—is that the ratios of the periods of revolution of the planets are not commensurable. They are incommensurable quantities, numbers with decimals to an infinite number of places. Thus we must say: If we compare the periods of revolution of the planets in the sense of Kepler's Third Law, the ratios of these periods cannot be given in integers, nor in finite fractions, but only in incommensurable numbers. Modern Astronomy is clear on this. It is to the incommensurability of the ratios between the periods of revolution of the several planets (in Kepler's third Law) that the planetary system owes its continued mobility. Otherwise, it must long ago have come to a standstill.

Observe now, what has happened. In the last resort, we are obliged to base our thoughts about the planetary system upon numbers which in the end elude our grasp. This is of no little importance.

We are therefore led, by the very requirements of scientific development, to think of the planetary system mathematically in such a way that the mathematical results are no longer commensurable. We are at the place, where in the mathematical process itself we arrive at incommensurable numbers. We have to let the number stand,—we come to a stop. We can write it in decimals no doubt, but only up to a certain place. Somewhere or other we must leave off when we come to the incommensurable. The mathematicians among you will be clear about this. You will see that in dealing with incommensurable number I reach the point where I must say: I calculate up to here and then I can go no further. I can only say (forgive my using a somewhat amusing comparison for a serious subject) that this coming to an inevitable halt in mathematics reminds me of a scene in which I was once a participator in Berlin. A fashion in Variety-entertainment came about through certain persons, one of whom was Peter Hill. He had founded a kind of Cabaret and wanted to read his own poems there. He was a very lovable person, in heart and soul a Theosophist, he had rather gone to seed in Bohemian circles. I went to a performance in which he read his own poems. The poem had got so far that single lines were finished, and so he read it aloud:

The Sun came up. ... etc. (The first line.)
The Moon rose. ... etc. (That was the second line.)

At each line he said ‘etc.’ That was a reading I once attended. As a matter of fact it was most stimulating. Everyone could finish the line as he chose! Admittedly with incommensurable numbers [you] cannot do this, yet here too you can only indicate the further process. You can say that the process continues in a certain direction, but nothing is given by which you might form an idea as to what numbers may yet be coming. It is important that precisely in the astronomical field we are led into incommensurabilities. We are forced by Astronomy to the very limits of mathematising; here the reality escapes us. Reality escapes us, we can say nothing else; reality eludes our grasp.

What does this mean? It means that we apply the most secure of our sciences, Mathematics, to the celestial phenomena, and in the last resort the celestial phenomena do not submit; the moment comes where they elude us. Precisely where we are about to reach their very life, they slip away into the incommensurable realm. Here then, our grasp of reality comes to an end at a certain point and passes over into chaos.

We cannot say without more ado, what this reality, which we are trying to follow mathematically, actually does when it slides away into the incommensurable. Undoubtedly this is related to its power of continued life. To enter the full astronomical reality we must take leave of what we are able to master mathematically. The calculation plainly shows this; the very history of science shows it.

Such are the points which we must work towards, if we would proceed in a realistic spirit. Now I would like to set before you the other pole of the matter. If you follow it physiologically you can begin from any point you like in embryonic development, whether it be from the development of the human embryo in the third or second month,—or the embryo of some other creature. You can follow the development back as far as ever you can with the means of modern science. (it is in fact only possible to a limited extent, as those of you who have studied it will know.) You can trace it back to a certain point, from which you cannot get much further, namely to the detachment of the ovum—the fertilized ovum. Picture to yourselves how far you can go back. If you wished to go still further back you would be entering the indeterminate realm of the whole maternal organism. This means that in going back you come into a kind of chaos. You cannot avoid this, and the fact that it cannot be avoided is shown by the course of scientific development. Think of such scientific hypotheses as the theory of “Panspermia” for instance, where they speculated as to whether the single germ-cell was prepared out of the forces of the whole organism, which was more the point of view of Darwin, or whether it developed in a more segregated way in the purely sexual organs. You will see when you study the course of scientific development in this field that no little fantasy was brought to bear on the attempt to explain the underlying genesis, when tracing backward the arising of the germ cell from the maternal organism. You come into a completely indeterminate realm. There is little but speculation in the external science of today as to the connection between the germ-cell and the maternal organism.

Then at a certain point in its development this germ appears in a very definite way, in a form which can be grasped at least approximately by mathematical or at any rate geometrical means. Diagrams can be made from a certain point onward. Many such diagrams exist in Embryology. The development of the germ-cell and other cells can be delineated more or less exactly. So one begins to picture the development in a geometrical way, representing it in forms similar to purely geometrical figures. Here we are following up a reality which in a way is the reverse of what we had in Astronomy. There we pursued a reality with our cognitional process and came to incommensurable numbers; the whole thing slips into chaos through the process of knowledge itself. In Embryology we slip out of chaos. From a certain moment onward we can grasp what emerges from chaos through forms that are like purely geometrical forms. Thus in effect, in employing Mathematics in Astronomy we come at one point into chaos. And by pure observation in Embryology we have at a certain point nothing before us but chaos; it all seems chaotic at first, observation is impossible. Then we come out of chaos into the realm of Geometry. It is therefore an ideal of certain biologists—a very justifiable ideal—to grasp in a geometrical form what presents itself in Embryology; not merely to make illustrations of the growing embryo naturalistically, but to construct the forms according to some inherent law, similar to the laws underlying geometrical figures. It is a justifiable ideal.

Now therefore we can say: When in Embryology we try to follow up the real process by observation, we emerge out of a sphere which lies about as near to our understanding as that which is beyond the incommensurable numbers. In Astronomy on the one hand, we proceed with our understanding up to the point where we can no longer follow mathematically. In Embryology on the other hand our understanding begins at a certain point, where we are first able to set to work with something resembling Geometry.

Think the thought through to its conclusion. You can do so, since it is a purely ‘methodological’ thought, that is to say the reality of it is in our own inner life.

If in arithmetic we reach the incommensurable numbers,—that is, we reach a point where the reality is no longer represented by a number that can be shown in its complete form—then we should also begin to ask whether the same thing may not happen with geometrical form as with arithmetical analysis. (We shall speak more of this in the next lecture.) The analytical process leads to incommensurable number. Now let us ask: How do geometrical forms image the celestial movements? Do not these images perhaps lead us to a certain point. Similar to that to which arithmetical analysis is leading when we reach incommensurable number? Do we not in our study of the heavenly bodies—namely the planets—come to a boundary, at which we must admit we can no longer use geometrical forms as a means of illustration; the facts can no longer be grasped with geometrical forms? Just as we must leave the region of commensurable numbers, it may well be that we must leave the region where reality can still be clothed in geometrical (or again arithmetical, algebraic, analytical) forms, such as in drawings of spirals and other figures derived from Geometry. So, in Geometry too, we should be coming into the incommensurable realm. In this sense it is indeed remarkable that in Embryology, though arithmetical analysis is not yet of much use, Geometry makes its presence felt pretty strongly the moment we begin to take hold of the embryological phenomena as they emerge from chaos. Here we are dealing, not indeed with incommensurable number but with something that tends to pass from incommensurable into commensurable form.

We have thus sought to grasp reality at two poles: On the one hand where the process of cognition leads through analysis into the incommensurable, and on the other where observation leads out of chaos to a grasping of reality in ever more commensurable forms. It is essential that we bring these things before our minds with full clarity, if we would add reality to what is presented by the external science of today. In no other way can we reach this end.

I should now like to add a methodical reflection, from which we can tomorrow make our way into more realistic problems.

In all that we have spoken of hitherto, we have been taking it for granted that the cosmic phenomena have been approached from the standpoint of Mathematics. It appeared that at one point the mathematician comes up to a limit—a limit he encounters too in purely formal Mathematics. Now there is something underlying our whole way of thinking in this realm, which perhaps passes unnoticed because it always wears the mask of the ‘obvious’ and we therefore never really face the problem. I mean the whole question of the application of mathematics to reality. How do we proceed? We develop Mathematics as a formal science and it appears to us absolutely cogent in its conclusions; then we apply it to reality, without giving a thought to the fact that we are really doing so on the basis of certain hypotheses. Today however, sufficient ground has already been created for us to see that Mathematics is only applicable to outer reality on the basis of certain premises. This becomes clear when we try to continue Mathematics beyond certain limits. First, certain laws are developed,—laws which are not obtained from external facts, as for example are Kepler's Laws, but from the mathematical process itself. They are in fact inductive laws, developed within Mathematics. They are then employed deductively; highly elaborate mathematical theories are built upon them.

Such laws are those encountered by anyone who studies Mathematics. In lectures given recently in Dornach by our friend Dr. Blumel, significant indications were given of this line of mathematical research. One of the laws in question is termed the Commutative Law. It can be expressed in saying: It is obvious that \(a+b\) equals \(b+a\), or \(a•b\) equals \(b•a\). This is a self-evident fact so long as one remains within the realm of real numbers: But it is merely an inductive law derived from the use of the implicit postulates in the arithmetic of real numbers.

The second law is the Associative Law. It is expressed as \((a + b) + c = a + (b + c)\). Again this is a law, simply derived by working with the implicit postulates in the arithmetic of real numbers.

The third is the so-called Distributive Law, expressible in the form: \(a (b + c) = ab + ac\). Once more, it is a law obtained inductively by working with the implicit postulates in the arithmetic of real numbers.

The fourth law may be expressed as follows: ‘A product can only equal zero if at least one of the factors equals zero.’ This law again is only an inductive one, derived by working with the implicit postulates in the arithmetic of real numbers.

We have, then, these four laws; the commutative law, the associative law, the distributive law, and this law about the product being equal to zero. These laws underlie the formal Mathematics of today, and are used as a basis for further work. The results are most interesting, there is no question of that. But the point is this: These laws hold good so long as we remain in the sphere of real numbers and their postulates. But no thought is ever given to the question, to what extent the real facts are in accord with them. Within our ordinary formal modes of experience it is true, no doubt that \(a + b = b + a\), but does it also hold good in outer reality? There is no ascertainable reason why it should. We might be very astonished one day to find that it did not work if we applied to some real process the idea that \(a + b\) equals \(b + a\). But there is another side to it. We have within us a very strong inclination to cling to these laws; with them therefore. We approach reality and everything that does not fit in escapes our observation. That is the other side.

In other words: We first set up postulates which we then apply to reality and take them as axioms of the reality itself. We ought only to say: I will consider a certain sphere of reality and see how far I get with the statement \(a + b = b + a\). More than that, I have no right to say. For by approaching reality with this statement we meet what answers to it, and elbow aside anything that does not. We have this habit too in other fields. We say for example, in elementary physics: Bodies are subject to the law of inertia. We define ‘inertia’ as consisting in the fact that bodies do not leave their position or alter their state of motion without a definite impelling force. But that is not an axiom; it is a postulate. I ought only so say: I will call a body which does not alter its own state of motion ‘inert’, and now I will seek in the real world for whatever answers to this postulate.

In that I form certain concepts, I am therefore only forming guiding lines with which to penetrate reality, and I must keep the way open in my mind for penetrating other facts with other concepts. Therefore I only regard the four basic laws of number in the right way if I see them as something which gives me a certain direction, something which helps me regulate my approach to reality. I shall [be] wrong if I take Mathematics as constituting reality, for then in certain fields, reality will simply contradict me. Such a contradiction is the one I spoke of, where incommensurability enters in, in the study of celestial phenomena.

• 1. Note by translators: In the first few pages of this lecture, the word Vorstellungen has been translated, either as “mental pictures” or “thought-pictures”, or by the word “ideas” as in Prof. Hoernle's original English edition of Dr. Steiner's Philosophie der Freiheit. In other translations, including the later editions of this book, the word is rendered “representations”, or again, “Mental presentations”. Dr. Steiner's use of Vorstellung corresponds, we believe, to the colloquial, work-a-day meaning of the word “idea” in current English. (Where Idea is meant in its deeper, more spiritual meaning—German Idee—it can be distinguished by the use of a capital.)
• 2. Note by Editor: This plane is inclined at an angle of about seven degrees to the plane of the ecliptic.

[ 1 ] Someone who sets himself the task of presenting the spiritual development of a thinker has to explain that thinker's particular direction in a psychological way from the facts given in his biography. But in presenting Goethe the thinker the task does not end there. What is asked for here is not only a justification and explanation of his specific scientific direction, but rather, and primarily how this genius came at all to be active in the scientific realm. Goethe had to suffer much through the incorrect views of his contemporaries who could not believe it possible that poetic creativity and scientific study could be united in one soul. The important point here is above all to answer the question What are the motives that drive the great poet to science? Did the transition from art to science lie purely in his subjective inclinations, in personal arbitrariness? Or was Goethe's artistic direction of such a kind that it had to drive him necessarily to science?

[ 2 ] If the first were the case, then his simultaneous devotion to art and science would merely signify a chance personal enthusiasm for both these directions of human striving; we would have to do with a poet who also happened to be a thinker, and it might very well have been the case that, if his course in life had been somewhat different, he would have taken the same path in his poetry, without concerning himself with science at all. Both sides of this man would then have interested us separately, each in its own right; each on its own would perhaps have helped the progress of mankind a good deal. All this would still be the case if the two directions in spirit had also been divided between two personalities. Goethe the poet would then have had nothing to do with Goethe the thinker.

[ 3 ] If the second were the case, then Goethe's artistic direction was of such a kind that, from within outward, it necessarily felt the urge to be supplemented by scientific thinking. Then it is utterly inconceivable that the two directions could have been divided between two personalities. Then each of the two directions interests us not only for its own sake but also because of its relationship to the other. Then there is an objective transition from art to science; there is a point at which the two meet in such a way that perfection in the one realm demands perfection in the other. Then Goethe was not following a personal inclination, but rather the direction in art to which he devoted himself awakened needs in him that could be satisfied only by scientific activity.

[ 4 ] Our age believes itself correct in keeping art and science as far apart as possible. They are supposed to be two completely opposing poles in the cultural evolution of mankind. Science, one thinks, is supposed to sketch for us the most objective picture of the world possible; it is supposed to show us reality in a mirror; or, in other words, it is supposed to hold fast purely to the given, renouncing all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world determines the laws of science; science must subject itself to this world. Science should take the yardstick for what is true and false entirely from the objects of experience.

[ 5 ] The situation is supposedly quite different in the case of artistic creations. Their law is given them by the self-creative power of the human spirit. For science, any interference of human subjectivity would be a falsifying of reality, a going beyond experience; art, on the other hand, grows upon the field of the subjectivity of a genius. Its creations are the productions of human imagination, not mirror images of the outer world. Outside of us, in objective existence, lies the source of scientific laws; within us, in our individuality, lies the source of aesthetic laws. The latter, therefore, have not the slightest value for knowledge; they create illusions without the slightest element of reality.

[ 6 ] Whoever grasps the matter in this way will never become clear about the relationship of Goethean poetry to Goethean science. He will only misunderstand both. Goethe's world historic significance lies, indeed, precisely in the fact that his art flows directly from the primal source of all existence, that there is nothing illusory or subjective about it, that, on the contrary, his art appears as the herald of that lawfulness that the poet has grasped by listening to the world spirit within the depths of nature's working. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the mysteries of the world just as science is also, in a different sense.

[ 7 ] And Goethe always conceived of art in this way. It was for him one of the revelations of the primal law of the world; science was for him the other one. For him art and science sprang from one source. Whereas the researcher delves down into the depths of reality in order then to express their driving powers in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to imbue his medium with these same driving powers. “I think that one could call science the knowledge of the general, abstracted knowing; art, on the other hand, would be science turned into action; science would be reason, and art its mechanism; therefore one could also call art practical science. And finally then science could be called the theorem and art the problem.” What science states as idea (theorem) is what art has to imprint into matter, becomes art's problem. “In the works of man, as in those of nature, it is the intentions that are primarily worthy of note,” says Goethe. He everywhere seeks not only what is given to the senses in the outer world, but also the tendency through which it has come into being. [ 8 ] To grasp this scientifically and to give it artistic form is his mission. In its own formations, nature gets itself, “in its specific forms, into a cul-de-sac”; one must go back to what ought to have come about if the tendency could have unfolded unhindered, just as the mathematician always keeps his eye, not upon this or that particular triangle, but always upon that lawfulness which underlies every possible triangle. The point is not what nature has created but rather the principle by which nature has created it. Then this principle is to be developed in the way that accords with its own nature, and not in the way this has occurred in each particular entity of nature in accordance with thousands of chance factors. The artist has “to evolve the noble out of the common and the beautiful out of the unformed.”

[ 9 ] Goethe and Schiller take art in all its full profundity. The beautiful is “a manifestation of secret laws of nature, that, except for the phenomenon of the beautiful, would have remained forever hidden to us.” A look into the poet's Italian Journey suffices for us to know that this is not an empty phrase, but rather deep inner conviction. When he says the following, one can see that for him nature and art are of the same origin: “The great works of art have at the same time been brought forth by human beings according to true and natural laws. just as the greatest works of nature are. Everything that is arbitrary, thought-up, falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” Relative to the art of the Greeks, he says in this direction: “I have the impression that they proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds and whose tracks I am following.” And about Shakespeare: “Shakespeare allies himself with the world spirit; he penetrates the world like it does; nothing is hidden to either; however, if it is the world spirit's business to preserve mysteries before, and often after, the fact, so the poet is of a mind to give the secret away.”

[ 10 ] Here we should also recall the statement about the “joyful epoch in life” that the poet owed to Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment ⁴⁷ and for which he actually has only the fact to thank that he here “saw creations of art and of nature each treated like the other, and that aesthetic and teleological powers of judgment illuminated each other reciprocally.” “I was happy,” says the poet, “that the art of poetry and comparative natural science are so closely related, through the fact that both of them are subject to the same power of judgment.” In his essay, The Significant Benefit of a Single Intelligent Word ⁴⁸ Goethe juxtaposes, with exactly the same thought in mind, his objective poetizing and his objective thinking.

[ 11 ] Thus, to Goethe, art seems to be just as objective as science. Only the form of each is different. Each appears to flow forth from one being, to be the necessary stages of one evolution. Any view was antithetical to him that relegates art or what is beautiful to an isolated position outside of the total picture of human evolution. Thus he says: “In the aesthetic realm, it is not good to speak of the idea of the beautiful; in doing so, one isolates the beautiful. which after all cannot be thought of as separate.” Or: “Style rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge, upon the being of things, insofar as we are allowed to know this being in visible and tangible forms.” Art rests therefore upon our activity of knowing. The latter has the task of recreating in thought the order according to which the world is put together; art has the task of developing in detail the idea of this order that the world-all has. The artist incorporates into his work everything about the lawfulness of the world that is attainable to him. His work thus appears as a world in miniature. Herein lies the reason why the Goethean direction in art must supplement itself with science. As art, it is already an activity of knowing. Goethe, in fact, wanted neither science nor art: he wanted the idea. And he expresses or represents the idea in the direction from which the idea happens to present itself to him. Goethe sought to ally himself with the world spirit, and to reveal to us how it holds sway; he did this through the medium of art or of science as required. What lay in Goethe was not any one-sided artistic or scientific striving, but rather the indefatigable urge to behold “all working forces and seeds.”

[ 12 ] In this, Goethe is still not a philosophical poet, for his literary works do not take any roundabout path through thought in arriving at a sense-perceptible form; rather they stream directly from the source of all becoming, just as his scientific research is not imbued with poetic imagination, but rather rests directly upon his becoming aware of ideas. Without Goethe's being a philosophical poet, his basic direction seems, for the philosophical observer, to be a philosophical one.

[ 13 ] With this, the question as to whether Goethe's scientific work has any philosophical value or not takes on an entirely new form. It is a question of inferring, from what we have of Goethe's work, the underlying principles. What must we postulate in order for Goethe's scientific assertions to appear as the results of these postulates? We must express what Goethe left unexpressed, but which alone makes his views comprehensible.

• 47. Kritik der Urteilskraft
• 48. Bedeutende Fördentis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort

[ 1 ] Let us draw one step nearer to thought. Hitherto we have been considering the place of thought in relation to the rest of the world of experience. We have reached the conclusion that it holds a unique position in that world, that it plays a central role. We shall for the present turn our attention elsewhere. We shall here restrict ourselves to a consideration of the inner nature of thinking. We shall investigate the very character of the thought-world itself, in order to perceive how one thought depends upon another; how thoughts are related to one another. From this inquiry we shall derive the means requisite for reaching a conclusion as to the question: “What is cognition in general?” Or, in other words, what is the meaning of forming thoughts about reality? What is the meaning of wishing to interpret the world by means of thinking?

[ 2 ] Here we must keep our minds free from any preconceived opinion. We should be holding such a preconception if we should assume that a concept (thought) is an image within our consciousness by means of which we reach a solution concerning an object existing outside of consciousness. Here we are not concerned with this and similar preconceptions. We take thoughts just as we find them. The question as to whether they sustain a relationship to anything else whatever and, if so, what sort of relationship is just what we shall investigate. Therefore, we must not posit such a relationship here as our point of departure. This very opinion concerning the relationship between concept and object is very widespread. Indeed, the concept is often defined as the mental counterpart of an object existing outside the mind. The concept is supposed to reproduce the object, mediating to us a true photograph of it. Very often, when thinking is the subject of discussion, what people have in mind is only this preconceived relationship. Practically never does any one consider the idea of traversing the realm of thoughts, within their own sphere, in order to discover what is to be found there.

[ 3 ] We will here investigate this realm just as if nothing whatever existed outside its boundaries, as if thought were the whole of reality. For a certain time we shall turn our attention away from all the rest of the world.

[ 4 ] The fact that this sort of research has been neglected in those investigations concerning the theory of knowledge which are based upon Kant has been ruinous to this science. This omission has given an impulse to this science in a direction which is the very opposite of our own. This scientific trend can never, by reason of its whole character, comprehend Goethe. It is, in the truest sense of the word, un-Goethean to take as point of departure an assumption which is not found through observation, but actually injected into the thing observed. But this is what actually occurs when one sets at the very culmination of scientific knowledge the preconception that the relation mentioned above does exist between thinking and reality, between the idea and the world. The only way to treat this matter after the manner of Goethe is to enter deeply into the nature of thinking itself and then observe what relation comes about when thinking, thus known according to its own nature, is brought into relationship with experience.

[ 5 ] Goethe always takes the path of experience in the strictest sense. He first takes the objects as they are, and, while banishing entirely every subjective opinion, seeks to penetrate into their nature; he then creates the conditions under which the objects can appear in reciprocal action and watches to see the results. He seeks to give Nature the opportunity to bring her laws into operation under especially characteristic circumstances, which he brings about—an opportunity, as it were, to express her own laws.

[ 6 ] How does our thinking appear to us when observed in itself? It is a multiplicity of thoughts which are woven and bound organically together in the most complicated fashion. But, when we have once penetrated this multiplicity from all directions, it becomes again a unity, a harmony. All the elements are related one to another; they exist for one another; one modifies another, restricts it, etc. The moment our mind conceives two corresponding thoughts, it observes at once that these really flow together to form a unit. It finds everywhere in its whole realm the interrelated; this concept unites with that, a third illuminates or supports a fourth, and so on. If, for example, we find in our consciousness the concept “organism,” and we then scan our conceptual world, we meet with another concept, “systematic evolution, growth.” It becomes clear that these two concepts belong together; that they represent merely two aspects of one and the same thing. But this is true of our entire thought-system. All individual thoughts are parts of a great whole which we call our conceptual world.

[ 7 ] When any single thought emerges in consciousness, I cannot rest until this is brought into harmony with the rest of my thinking. Such an isolated concept, apart from the rest of my mental world, is entirely unendurable. I am simply conscious of the fact that there exists an inwardly sustained harmony among all thoughts; that the thought-world is of the nature of a unit. Therefore, every such isolation is an abnormality, an untruth.

[ 8 ] When we have arrived at that state of mind in which our whole thought-world bears the character of a complete inner harmony, we gain thereby the satisfaction for which our mind is striving. We feel that we are in possession of truth.

[ 9 ] Since we perceive truth in the thorough-going agreement of all concepts in our possession, the question at once forces itself upon us: “Has thought, apart from all perceptible reality of the phenomenal world of the senses, a content of its own? When we have removed all sense-content, is not the remainder an utter emptiness, a mere phantasm?”

[ 10 ] It might well be a widespread opinion that this is true; hence we must consider this opinion a little more closely. As we have already remarked above, it is very frequently assumed that the whole system of concepts is merely a photograph of the external world. It is firmly maintained that knowledge evolves in the form of thought; but it is demanded of “strictly scientific knowledge” that it shall receive its content from without. According to this view, the world must provide the substance which flows into our concepts; without that, these are mere empty forms void of content. If the external world should vanish, then concepts and ideas would no longer have any meaning, for they exist by reason of that world.

[ 11 ] This point of view might be called the negation of the concept; for there it no longer possesses any significance in relation to objectivity. It is something added to the latter. The world would thus exist in all completeness even were there no concepts whatever, for these contribute nothing new to the world. They contain nothing which would not be there without them. They are there only because the cognizing subject wills to use them in order to possess in a form suitable to him what is otherwise already there. They are mere mediators to the subject of a content which is of a non-conceptual character. Such is the point of view under discussion.

[ 12 ] If it were well founded, one of the following assumptions would necessarily be true.

[ 1 ] That the conceptual world stands in such a relationship to the external world that it merely repeats the whole content of this in another form. (Here the term “external world” means the sense-world). If such were the case, one could not perceive any necessity for lifting oneself at all above the sense-world. In this latter everything relating and pertaining to knowledge would already be given.

[ 13 ] That the conceptual world takes as its content merely a part of the “appearance for the senses.” We may imagine the thing somewhat like this. We make a series of observations. We meet in these the most diverse objects. We discover in the process that certain characteristics which we observe in a certain object have already been observed by us. A series of objects pass in survey before our eyes: A, B, C, D, etc. Suppose A had the characteristics p q a r; B shows i m b n; C, k h c g; D, p u a v. Here in the case of D we meet again the characteristics a and p previously observed in connection with A. We designate these characteristics as essential. And, in so far as A and D possess essential characteristics in common, we say they are of the same kind. Thus we unite A and D in that we lay hold of their essential characteristics in our thinking. Here we have a thought which does not entirely coincide with the sense-world and to which the charge of superfluity mentioned above cannot be applied, and yet it is far from bringing anything new to the sense-world. Against this, we may say, first of all, that to determine which characteristics of a thing are essential requires, to begin with, a certain norm which will enable us to distinguish between essential and unessential. This norm cannot exist in the object itself for this includes both the essential and the unessential in inseparable unity. This norm must belong to the very content of our thinking.

[ 14 ] But this objection does not wholly refute this point of view. One holding this view might meet the objection thus. He might admit that we have no justification for classifying any characteristic as essential or unessential, but might declare that this need not disturb us; that we simply classify things together when we observe similar characteristics in them without any regard to the essential or unessential nature of these characteristics.

This view, however, requires a presupposition which by no means squares with the facts. So long as we confine ourselves to sense-experience, there is nothing really in common between two things of the same class. An example will make this clear. The simplest is the best because it can best be surveyed.

[ 15 ] Let us observe the two triangles above. What is there really in common between them when we confine ourselves to sense-experience? Nothing whatever. That which they possess in common—that is, the principle on which they are formed and which causes them to be classed under the concept triangle—is attained only when we cross over the boundary of the sense-experience. The concept triangle comprises all triangles. We do not attain to it by merely observing all individual triangles. This concept always remains the same, however frequently I may conceive it, whereas it will scarcely ever happen that I shall see two identical triangles. That by reason of which a single triangle is “this” triangle and no other has nothing to do with the concept. A specific triangle is this specific one, not because it corresponds to the concept, but because of elements which lie entirely outside the concept:—the length of its sides, the measurements of its angles, its position, etc. Yet it is quite incorrect to maintain that the content of the concept is borrowed from the external sense-world, since it is evident that its content is not to be found in any sense-phenomenon.

[ 16 ] a third view is possible. The concept may be the mediator through which to apprehend certain entities which are not perceptible to the senses but which possess a self-sustaining character. This character would be the non-conceptual content of the conceptual form of our thought. Whoever assumes such entities existing beyond the boundaries of experience, and attributes to us the possibility of a knowledge of these entities, must necessarily see in the concept the interpreter of this cognition.

[ 17 ] The inadequacy of this point of view we shall later make especially clear. For the moment we need only remark that, in any case, it does not run counter to the contentual character of the conceptual world. For, if the object about which we think really lay beyond the boundaries of experience and of thinking, thought would all the more have to contain within itself the content upon which it rests. It could still not think about objects of which no trace could be found within the thought-world.

[ 18 ] In any case it is clear that thought is no empty vessel, but that in and of itself it is possessed of content and that its content does not square with that of any other form of phenomenon.

[ 1 ] One cannot achieve a full understanding of Goethe's inner life, his view of the world and of life, merely by commenting on his works from the outside. Rather, one must go back to the philosophical core of his entire being. Goethe was not a philosopher in the scientific sense, but he was a philosophical nature.

[ 2 ] I would like to capture this nature here with a few thoughts in order to then characterize Goethe's position on Christianity. In our reactionary present, it seems to me not unjustified to reflect on the relationship of this leading spirit to religious questions.

[ 3 ] Man is not satisfied with what nature voluntarily offers to his observing mind. He feels that in order to bring forth the diversity of her creations, she needs driving forces which he himself must acquire through observation and thought. In the human spirit itself lies the means of revealing the driving forces of nature. From the human spirit arise the ideas that shed light on how nature brings about its creations. How the phenomena of the outer world are connected is revealed within the human being. What the human spirit conceives of the laws of nature: it is not added to nature, it is nature's own essence; and the spirit is only the arena in which nature makes the secrets of its workings visible. What we observe in things is only a part of things. What wells up in our spirit when it confronts things is the other part. It is the same things that speak to us from the outside and that speak within us. Only when we hold the language of the outside world together with that of our inner world do we have the full reality.

[ 4 ] The mind sees what experience contains in a coherent form. It seeks laws where nature offers it facts.

[ 5 ] Philosophers and artists have the same goal. They seek to create the perfect that their minds see when they allow nature to work on them. But they have different means at their disposal to achieve this goal. A thought, an idea, lights up in the philosopher when he confronts a natural process. He expresses it. In the artist, an image of this process emerges that shows it more perfectly than it can be observed in the outside world. The philosopher and the artist develop observation in different ways. The artist does not need to know the driving forces of nature in the form in which they reveal themselves to the philosopher. When he perceives a thing or a process, an image immediately arises in his mind in which the laws of nature are expressed in a more perfect form than in the corresponding thing or process in the outside world. These laws in the form of thought need not enter his mind. Cognition and art are, however, inwardly related. They show the laws of nature that prevail in it as facts.

[ 6 ] If, in addition to perfect images of things, the driving forces of nature also express themselves in the form of thoughts in the mind of a true artist, then the common source of philosophy and art becomes particularly clear to us. Goethe is such an artist. He reveals the same secrets to us in the form of his works of art and in the form of thought. What he creates in his poetry, he expresses in the form of thought in his essays on the natural sciences and the arts and in his "Proverbs in Prose". The deep satisfaction that emanates from these essays and sayings is due to the fact that one sees the harmony of art and knowledge realized in a personality. There is something uplifting about the feeling that arises with every Goethean thought: here is someone speaking who can at the same time see in the picture the perfection that he expresses in ideas. The power of such a thought is strengthened by this feeling. What comes from the highest needs of a personality must belong together inwardly. Goethe's wisdom teachings answer the question: what kind of philosophy is in accordance with genuine art?

[ 7 ] What springs from the human spirit when it confronts the outside world in observation and thought is truth. Man can demand no other knowledge than that which he himself produces. He who still seeks something behind things that is supposed to signify their actual essence has not brought himself to realize that all questions about the essence of things arise only from a human need: to penetrate with thought that which one perceives. Things speak to us, and our inner being speaks when we observe things. These two languages come from the same primordial being, and man is called to bring about their mutual understanding. This is what is called knowledge. And this and nothing else is sought by those who understand the needs of human nature. Those who do not attain this understanding remain strangers to the things of the outside world. He does not hear the essence of things speaking to him from within. He therefore assumes that this essence is hidden behind things. He believes in an outer world still behind the world of perception. But things are only alien to us as long as we merely observe them. For man, the contrast between objective outer perception and subjective inner world of thought only exists as long as he does not recognize that these worlds belong together. The human inner world is a part of the world process like any other process.

[ 8 ] These thoughts are not refuted by the fact that different people have different ideas about things. Nor by the fact that people's organizations are different, so that one does not know whether one and the same color is seen in quite the same way by different people. For what matters is not whether men form exactly the same judgment about one and the same thing, but whether the language which the inner man speaks is precisely the language which expresses the essence of things. The individual judgments differ according to the organization of man and the standpoint from which he views things; but all judgments spring from the same element and lead to the essence of things. This may be expressed in different shades of thought, but it remains the essence of things.

[ 9 ] The human being is the organ through which nature reveals its secrets. The deepest content of the world appears in the subjective personality. "When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being" (Goethe, Winckelmann: Antikes). Modern natural science expresses the same idea through its means and methods. "But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Indeed, one could say, what are the elementary phenomena of nature itself compared to man, who must first tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?" (Goethe, Proverbs in Prose.)

[ 10 ] If a thing expresses its essence through the organ of the human mind, then the full reality only comes about through the confluence of observation and thought. Neither through one-sided observation nor through one-sided thinking does man recognize reality. It does not exist as something finished in the objective world, but is only brought about by the human spirit in connection with things. Those who praise experience alone must reply with Goethe that "experience is only half of experience". "Everything factual is already theory" (Proverbs in prose), that is, a law is revealed in the human mind when it observes a fact. This view of the world, which recognizes the essence of things in ideas and understands knowledge as a living into the essence of things, is not mysticism. What it has in common with mysticism, however, is that it does not regard objective truth as something existing in the external world, but as something that can really be grasped within man. The opposite view of the world places the causes of things behind appearances, in a realm beyond human experience. It can now either indulge in a blind faith in these reasons, which contains its content from a positive religion of revelation, or it can put forward intellectual hypotheses and theories about how this otherworldly realm of reality is constituted. The mystic as well as the confessor of Goethe's world view rejects both the belief in an otherworldly realm and the hypotheses about such a realm and adheres to the real spiritual realm that expresses itself in man himself. Goethe writes to Jacobi: "God has punished you with metaphysics and put a stake in your flesh, but blessed me with physics... I hold firmly and more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave to you everything that you call and must call religion. You hold to faith in God, I to seeing." What Goethe wants to see is the essence of things expressed in his world of ideas. The mystic also wants to recognize the essence of things by immersing himself in his own inner being; but he rejects the world of ideas, which is clear and transparent in itself, as unsuitable for the attainment of a higher knowledge. He believes that he must develop not his faculty of ideas but other inner powers in order to see the primal causes of things. It is usually vague sensations and feelings in which the mystic believes he grasps the essence of things. But feelings and sensations only belong to the subjective nature of man. They do not express anything about things. Only in the ideas of natural law do the things themselves speak. Mysticism is a superficial view of the world, even though the mystics give themselves much credit for their "depth" compared to rational people. They know nothing about the nature of feelings, otherwise they would not regard them as expressions of the essence of the world; and they know nothing about the nature of ideas, otherwise they would not regard them as shallow and rationalistic. They have no idea what people who really have ideas experience in them. But for many, ideas are just words. They cannot assimilate the infinite abundance of their content. No wonder they find their own unimaginative words empty.

[ 11 ] Those who seek the essential content of the objective world in their own inner being can also only relocate the essence of the moral world order in human nature itself. Whoever believes that there is an otherworldly reality behind human nature must also seek the source of morality in it. For the moral in the higher sense can only come from the essence of things. The believer in the beyond therefore accepts moral commandments to which man must submit. These commandments either come to him by way of revelation, or they enter his consciousness as such, as is the case with Kant's categorical imperative. Nothing is said about how this comes from the otherworldly "in itself" of things into our consciousness. It is simply there, and we have to submit to it.

[ 12 ] Goethe allows the moral to emerge from the natural world of man. It is not objective norms or the mere world of instinct that guides moral action, but the natural instincts of animal life that have become moral ideas, through which man gives himself direction. He follows them because he loves them as one loves a child. He wants their realization and stands up for them because they are part of his own being. The idea is the guiding principle; and love is the driving force in Goethe's ethics. For him, "duty is where one loves what one commands oneself" (Proverbs in prose).

[ 13 ] Action in the sense of Goethean ethics is naturally conditioned, but ethically free. For man is dependent on nothing but his own ideas. And he is responsible to no one but himself. In my "Philosophy of Freedom" I have already refuted the cheap objection that the consequence of a moral world order in which everyone obeys only himself must be the general disorder and disharmony of human action. Anyone who raises this objection overlooks the fact that people are similar beings and that they will therefore never produce moral ideas which, due to their essential differences, will cause disharmony.

Initially, people became acquainted with their religion through the scriptures, which they understood literally. Today, it is considered enlightened to have outgrown religious documents. Regarding the Old Testament, it has always been said that it is impossible to reconcile the biblical concepts with an enlightened consciousness. People started to understand the scriptures figuratively; they still held on to the symbols. This understanding of biblical symbolism then led people to still take the biblical spirit with a certain seriousness. But even theologians today can hardly decide on anything other than to take the first chapters of the Old Testament only as a figurative representation. A rather cozy view can arise from it, but as man progresses, he cannot remain with this view. It is a kind of path of development: first to move away from the orthodox view, then from the figurative view and to move on to another, again in a sense literal view.

But for this we must learn to understand the language of the old wisdom teachings and recognize that the old teachers did not invent stories, did not create fantasies, but that they had a different conception of the truth than we have today. They wrote down the eternal truth in their teachings. This cannot be brought directly to every person, while the sensual truth can be brought to everyone.

The great teachers of old had themselves undergone an inner development. Their vision was a spiritual one. They knew that what they saw in the spirit could not be seen by everyone around them. The nations were still childlike in their perception. Accordingly, the great truths had to be given to them in a special form suitable for their understanding. Now all great teachers approached people with the awareness that the soul is immortal. It must be developed towards the truth. Moses, for example, knew that when he linked to the ideas of the people, he was planting something lasting in the soul, in the causal body. The materialistic thinker believes that the soul perishes at death. But Moses said to himself: If I communicate the truth to man today in a certain form, it will have an effect in his soul. Later he will be ripe to recognize the truth in its true form. Moses knew that later others would come who would interpret what he taught. He prepared the form. That which he prepared has gone through the incarnations of the souls. He did not consider it right to tell people the final form of the truth right away.

He himself had the truth in the background. He expressed this in the seven days of creation. He brought the truth into the form that corresponded to people's childlike understanding at the time. If he had spoken of the “round” days, he would not have been understood. He therefore spoke of days, as in ancient India one speaks of the days and nights of Brahma.

On the moon, man had a dream-like consciousness. There he had developed dream consciousness to its highest level. Each of us had come there in a kind of germinal state; there he had perceived in a dream-like way, absorbed it and developed it into a germ. These germs slept over from the moon to the earth. A spiritual germ was the human being who came to earth. He had slept through a [pralaya] into the earthly state.

Now his destiny is to come to clear consciousness. He has to go through a long series of states. In the first three rounds, what he had gone through on earlier planets was repeated. Moses speaks of the rounds. During the first round, man is in the first elementary realm. The dream state gently transitions into a state that man has now reached. The moon man did not distinguish between himself and the other objects. For him there was a dream-like pictorial reality in the way the external world is there for us in a dream. He did not perceive through the senses. The contrast between himself and his world was to be developed by man in the first round on earth. Moses calls it the difference between heaven and earth. He was to recognize himself as an earthling next to heaven. That is what happens in the first cycle of development.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Man did not distinguish between himself and the individual objects. It was all still chaos. Then, after the first round, man went through an intermediate state again and then came to the second round. There the objects already got more definite boundaries. He can already distinguish what is around him. It is no longer desolate and confused. He can distinguish between what is spiritual and what is an external object. Before that it was dark on the face of the deep; the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. All that was human was water. The human germs together formed the waters. The Spirit of God brooded over the human germs, which He called forth into forms. There was light.

As soon as we see the outside world, when the entities confront us, only then can they reveal themselves to us. There was light.

God divided the light from the darkness; he made day and night. [Genesis 1:5]

Man perceived the objects. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now followed the Rupic round, the formative round, in which one could perceive existence. There shall be a difference between the waters; each should have its own Kama. Every single human being was set apart by God setting a boundary and dividing the waters above and below the firmament. He implanted in the individual human germ the ability to distinguish between the spiritual and the physical. The two souls were laid in the human being; the soul that looks up and the soul that looks into the earthly, that lives in the earthly.

In the third round, man enters the third elementary realm. The individual astral bodies of human beings became more and more distinct. Now man becomes independent. He steps out of the mother soil of the earth. He reaches the plant existence. These are not our present plants. Man was in the plant existence himself. All the separated astral bodies gained the ability to bring forth astral beings like the plant. During the third round, man was called to the animal existence, but in a plant-like nature, because the animal had not yet developed the body of passion. He had no warm blood yet. This was formed in the third round of the third elementary realm. The insemination indicates that fertilization has not yet taken place.

God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear.

In the beginning, the astral body was not visible. Now it is becoming distinct. The dry land is only the special, more solid form that forms a boundary around itself. The gathering of the waters signifies the general astral world in its entirety.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass and herbs.” [Genesis 1:11]

This was man. The ancient Germans also believed that man emerged from ash and elm, and the ancient Persians also believed that man emerged from a tree.

And have his own seed with himself [...] [Genesis 1:11]

means that each species carried its own seeds within itself and that there was no sexual reproduction.

The fourth round is the one in which the physical human being prepares himself as he is now. Man entered the mineral kingdom, he took on a body that was subject to chemical and physical laws. In the next round, he will no longer have that, but will then control his astral body just as he now controls his physical body. He will then have astral organs, he will be able to develop his organs himself when he needs them, when the astral body will control everything physical. But now, in the fourth round, man can only act with regard to the laws of the mineral world. In the physical, mineral body we are enclosed as in a house. It was only through our becoming physical ourselves that the whole world became physical. Previously, he gained knowledge of the world around him through a kind of clairvoyance. With the fourth round, the whole world of sensual objects has emerged around him. Moses could therefore say:

There are lights in the firmament of the heaven, which divide the day and the night, and give signs, times, days, and years. [Genesis 1:14]

Kant says that space and time come from man himself. Moses said that even then. Everything that can be perceived by the senses only came into being when man became physical, mineral. Through the physical round, we make the mineral body more and more perfect and also develop our astral body. In the next round, it will be developed in the same way as the physical body is today. Man will then float as if in an airy realm. Then man will have become a free being, then he will truly have become an animal being. Only then will animality be expressed in man. The astral body of man is meant here in the image of animals because the astral man moves freely in the astral world, like whales in the water, birds in the air and so on. - That is the fifth round or the fifth day.

In the sixth round, the human Kama-Manas body is formed, the lower mind body, which we now wear hidden in the physical shell. In the sixth round, man will stand as a human being in the true sense of the word, no longer enclosed in a shell. At the same time, the higher animals are formed with man. The Kama-Manas body then reaches the higher level of animal life.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Only then will man become what he is meant to become.

So God created man in his own image, in the likeness of himself; male and female he created them.

Through sexuality, the human being develops into a being that will be male and female. The original text reads: He created man male-female. Only now does man truly gain dominion over the animals. He only acquires power, magic, when the actual human being is liberated on the sixth day. - On the seventh day, man had become God-like. In the seventh round, man is in the aupa state again; he has become creative himself, has become God himself, hence it says:

God rested on the seventh day. [Genesis 2:2]

The fourth round is the most important for human life. Man used to be less dense. Moses says:

He took the solid substances of the earth. [corresponds to Genesis 2:7]

He was surrounded by dust. He adopted the mineral laws. He was formed from the dust of the earth, and the living soul was formed in him. When the human being in the Lemurian race acquired solid forms — a skeleton — sexuality also arose. The solidification went hand in hand with the division into the sexes. In the second chapter, Moses describes the human being who later emerged in the Lemurian race, in the two-sexedness. This was taught in all mysteries. It was only in the fourth round that the plant and animal forms emerged as they are today. During the development of man, the plants and animals split off from him. The lower animals had arisen before. Warm-blooded animals only arose with humans. The animals developed as a result of retarded humans splitting off. The animals are the decadent human nature. They no longer fit into today's conditions. They are creatures that have remained at earlier stages. The original animal forms split off first, only then did the two sexes of humans arise.

In the beginning, man used his entire productive power externally. In the beginning, man reproduced from within himself. When he had lost the ability to penetrate dense matter, he used half of his productive power as a thinking organ.

On the one hand, man became a sexual being, while on the other, he developed half of his productive power internally into a thinking organ. He now acquired the ability to process the spirit with his brain. The spirit now fertilized him. At the same time as the division into two sexes, the thinking human being emerged. He recognized good and evil. During this period, the spinal cord and the brain also developed.

This is the snake that originated in man himself. He went through the amphibian stage. This being was his own seducer. It began to develop with the beginning of its passage through sexuality. Spinal cord and brain first developed in amphibians, and in man in the amphibious state.

When children come to the age of puberty, it is necessary to awaken within them an extraordinarily great interest in the world outside of themselves. Through the whole way in which they are educated, they must be led to look out into the world around them and into all its laws, its course, causes and effects, into men's intentions and goals—not only into human beings, but into everything, even into a piece of music, for instance. All this must be brought to them in such a way that it can resound on and on within them—so that questions about nature, about the cosmos and the entire world, about the human soul, questions of history—so that riddles arise in their youthful souls.

When the astral body¹ becomes free at puberty, forces are freed which can now be used for formulating these riddles. But when these riddles of the world and its manifestations do not arise in young souls, then these same forces are changed into something else.

When such forces become free, and it has not been possible to awaken the most intensive interest in such world-riddles, then these energies transform themselves into what they become in most young people today. They change in two directions into urges of an instinctive kind: first into delight in power, and second into eroticism.

Unfortunately pedagogy does not now consider this delight in power and the eroticism of young people to be the secondary results of changes in things that, until the age of 20 or 21, really ought to go in an altogether different direction, but considers them to be natural elements in the human organism at puberty. If young people are rightly educated, there should be no need whatsoever to speak about love of power and eroticism to them at this age. If such things have to be spoken about during these years, this is in itself something that smacks of illness. Our entire pedagogical art and science is becoming ill because again and again the highest value is attributed to these questions. A high value is put upon them for no other reason than that people are powerless today—have grown more and more powerless in the age of a materialistic world-conception—to inspire true interest in the world, the world in the widest sense ...

When we do not have enough interest in the world around us, then we are thrown back into ourselves. Taken all in all, we have to say that if we look at the chief damages created by modern civilization, they arise primarily because people are far too concerned with themselves and do not usually spend the larger part of their leisure time in concern for the world but busy themselves with how they feel and what gives them pain ... And the least favorable time of life to be self-occupied in this way is during the ages between 14, 15 and 21 years old.

The capacity for forming judgments is blossoming at this time and should be directed toward world-interrelationships in every field. The world must become so all-engrossing to young people that they simply do not turn their attention away from it long enough to be constantly occupied with themselves. For, as everyone knows, as far as subjective feelings are concerned, pain only becomes greater the more we think about it. It is not the objective damage but the pain of it that increases as we think more about it. In certain respects, the very best remedy for the overcoming of pain is to bring yourself, if you can, not to think about it. Now there develops in young people just between 15, 16 and 20, 21, something not altogether unlike pain. This adaptation to the conditions brought about through the freeing of the astral body from the physical is really a continual experience of gentle pain. And this kind of experience immediately makes us tend towards self-preoccupation, unless we are sufficiently directed away from it and toward the world outside ourselves ...

If a teacher makes a mistake while teaching a 10 or 12 year old, then, as far as the mutual relationship between pupil and teacher is concerned, this does not really make such a very great difference. By this I do not mean that you should make as many mistakes as possible with children of this age ...

The feeling for the teacher's authority will flag perhaps for a while, but such things will be forgotten comparatively quickly, in any case much sooner than certain injustices are forgotten at this age. On the other hand, when you stand in front of students between 14, 15 and 20, 21, you simply must not expose your latent inadequacies and so make a fool of yourself ...

If a student is unable to formulate a question which he experiences inwardly, the teacher must be capable of doing this himself, so that he can bring about such a formulation in class, and he must be able to satisfy the feeling that then arises in the students when the question comes to expression. For if he does not do this, then when all that is mirrored there in the souls of these young people goes over into the world of sleep, into the sleeping condition, a body of detrimental, poisonous substances is produced by the unformulated questions. These poisons are developed only during the night, just when poisons ought really to be broken down and transformed instead of created. Poisons are produced that burden the brains of the young people when they go to class, and gradually everything in them stagnates, becomes “stopped up.” This must and can be avoided. But it can only be avoided if the feeling is not aroused in the students: “Now again the teacher has failed to give us the right answer. He really hasn't answered us at all. We can't get a satisfying answer out of him.” Those are the latent inadequacies, the self-exposures that occur when the children have the feeling: “The teacher just isn't up to giving us the answers we need.” And for this inability, the personal capacities and incapacities of the teacher are not the only determining factors, but rather the pedagogical method.

If we spend too much time pouring a mass of information over young people at this age, or if we teach in such a way that they never come to lift their doubts and questions into consciousness, then the teacher—even though he is the more objective party—exposes, even if indirectly, his latent in-adequacies ...

You see the teacher must, in full consciousness, be permeated through and through with all this when he deals with the transition from the ninth to the tenth grades, for it is just with the entire transformation of the courses one gives that the pedagogy must concern itself. If we have children of six or seven, then the course is already set through the fact that they are entering school, and we do not need to understand any other relationship to life. But when we lead young people over from the ninth to the tenth grade, then we must put ourselves into quite another life-condition. When this happens, the children must say to themselves: “Great thunder and lightning! What's happened to the teacher! Up to now we've thought of him as a pretty bright light who has plenty to say, but now he's beginning to talk like more than a man. Why, the whole world speaks out of him!”

And when they feel the most intensive interest in particular world questions and are put into the fortunate position of being able to impart this to other young people, then the world speaks out of them also. Out of a mood of this kind, verve (Schwung) must arise. Verve is what teachers must bring to young people at this age, verve which above all is directed towards imagination; for although the students are developing the capacity to make judgments, judgment is actually borne out of the powers of imagination. And if you deal with the intellect intellectually, if you are not able to deal with the intellect with a certain imagination, then you have “mis-played,” you have missed the boat with them.

Young people demand imaginative powers; you must approach them with verve, and with verve of a kind that convinces them. Scepticism is something that you may not bring to them at this age, that is in the first half of this life-period. The most damaging judgment for the time between 14, 15 and 18 is one that implies in a pessimistically knowledgeable way: “That is something that cannot be known.” This crushes the soul of a child or a young person. It is more possible after 18 to pass over to what is more or less in doubt. But between 14 and 18 it is soul-crushing, soul-debilitating, to introduce them to a certain scepticism. What subject you deal with is much less important than that you do not bring this debilitating pessimism to young people.

It is important for oneself as a teacher to exercise a certain amount of self-observation and not give in to any illusions; for it is fatal if, just at this age, young people feel cleverer than the teacher during class, especially in secondary matters. It should be—and it can be achieved, even if not right in the first lesson—that they are so gripped by what they hear that their attention will really be diverted from all the teacher's little mannerisms. Here, too, the teacher's latent inadequacies are the most fatal.

Now if you think, my dear friends, that neglect of these matters unloads its consequences into the channels of instinctive love of power and eroticism, then you will see from the beginning how tremendously significant it is to take the education of these young people in hand in a bold and generous way. You can much more easily make mistakes with older students, let us say with those at medical school. For what you do at this earlier age works into their later life in an extraordinarily devastating way. It works destructively, for instance, upon the relationships between people. The right kind of interest in other human beings is not possible if the right sort of world-interest is not aroused in the 15 or 16 year old. If they learn only the Kant-Laplace theory of the creation of the solar system and what one learns through astronomy and astrophysics today, if they cram into their skulls only this idea of the cosmos, then in social relationships they will be just such men and women as those of our modern civilization who, out of anti-social impulses, shout about every kind of social reform but within their souls actually bring anti-social powers to expression. I have often said that the reason people make such an outcry about social matters is because men are antisocial beings.

It cannot be said often enough that in the years between 14 and 18 we must build in the most careful way upon the fundamentally basic moral relationship between pupil and teacher. And here morality is to be understood in its broadest sense: that, for instance, a teacher calls up in his soul the very deepest sense of responsibility for his task. This moral attitude must show itself in that we do not give all too much acknowledgement to this deflection toward subjectivity and one's own personality. In such matters, imponderables really pass over from teacher to pupil. Mournful teachers, un-alterably morose teachers, who are immensely fond of their lower selves, produce in children of just this age a faithful mirror picture, or if they do not, kindle a terrible revolution. More important than any approved method is that we do not expose our latent inadequacies and that we approach the children with an attitude that is inwardly moral through and through ...

This sickly eroticism which has grown up—also in people's minds—to such a terrible extent appears for the most part only in city dwellers, city dwellers who have become teachers and doctors. And only as urban life triumphs altogether in our civilization will these things come to such a terrible—I do not want to say “blossoming” but to such a frightful—degeneracy. Naturally we must look not at appearances but at reality. It is certainly quite unnecessary to begin to organize educational homes in the country immediately. If teachers and pupils carry these same detrimental feelings out into the country and are really permeated by urban conceptions, you can call a school a country educational home as long as you like, you will still have a blossoming of city life to deal with ...

What we have spoken about here today is of the utmost pedagogical importance and, in considering the high school years, should be taken into the most earnest consideration.

• 1. A term used to designate all that is sentient in man and in animals.

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

You will have seen that the soul experiences of those who appear in The Souls' Awakening take place on the boundary between the physical sense world and the super-sensible spiritual worlds. It is of great significance to the science of the spirit to seize this border region with the inner eye, for it is only natural that at first everything of the super-sensible world that the human soul can experience is an unknown territory from the viewpoint of our faculties and soul experiences in the physical sense world.

When a person has become familiar with the spiritual world by means of the various methods we have apprehended, that is, when the soul has learned to observe, explore and perceive outside the physical body, then such existence and perception in the spiritual world makes it necessary for the soul to develop quite special capacities, special strengths. When during its earth existence the soul is striving towards clairvoyant consciousness, whether already clairvoyant or wishing to become so, it should of course be able to stay outside the body in the spiritual world and then as an earth being come back again into the physical body, living as a human earth person, a normal sense-being within the sense world.

We may therefore say that the soul in becoming clairvoyant must be able to move in the spiritual world according to its laws, and it must ever and again be able to step back over the threshold into the physical sense world, behaving here—to put it in plain terms—correctly and sensibly. Since the faculties of the soul for the spiritual world must be and are different from those the soul employs for the physical senses and the rest of the physical body, the soul has definitely to acquire mobility, if it wants to become clairvoyant. Then it can perceive and take in the spiritual world with the necessary faculties for it, returning across the border and now experiencing the sense world with what is necessary here. The gaining of this adaptability, the capacity of transformation, is never easy. If we are to estimate correctly, however, the differences between the spiritual and physical sense world, we must keep clearly within our mind's eye precisely this border region between the two worlds and the threshold itself over which the soul must pass when it wants to leave one world and enter the other. We shall see in the course of these lectures how injurious it can be for the soul in many different ways to carry the habits of one world into the other, when—in one or the other direction—the threshold has to be crossed.

Our conduct when passing over this threshold is made especially difficult by the presence of beings within the world order that play a certain role in the happenings shown in The Souls' Awakening and the other dramas: the luciferic and the ahrimanic beings. Indeed, in order to gain the right relationship to the transition between one and the other world that we've been speaking about, it is necessary to know how to conduct ourselves in the right way towards both kinds of beings, the luciferic and the ahrimanic. Now it would certainly be convenient—and this solution is chosen at least theoretically by very many souls—to say: “Yes, indeed, Ahriman seems to be a dangerous fellow. If he has such an influence on the world and on human affairs, the simplest thing to do is to banish from the human soul all the impulses that come from him.” This might seem to be the most convenient solution, but to the spiritual world it would be about as sensible as if someone, in order to restore the balance to a pair of scales, were to take off whatever was weighing down the lower one. These beings we call Ahriman and Lucifer are right here in the world, they have their task in the universal order, and one cannot sweep them away. Besides, it is not a question of annihilating them, but—as in the case of the weights on both sides of the scales—the ahrimanic and luciferic forces must balance each other in their influence on human beings and on other beings. We do not bring about the true activity of any of the various forces by removing it but by placing ourselves in the right relationship to it. We have the wrong attitude to these luciferic and ahrimanic beings if we simply say that they are bad and harmful. Although these powers rebel in a certain sense against the general order of the universe—which had already been designed before they entered it—this does not stem from the fact that they invariably have to exercise a harmful activity, but rather that—like the others whom we have met as lawful members of the higher worlds—they have a definite sphere of activity in the sum total of the universe. Their opposition to and rebellion against the cosmic order consists in their going beyond their own sphere; they exert beyond this sphere the forces they should employ only within their lawful domain. From this standpoint let us consider Ahriman or the ahrimanic beings.

We can best characterize Ahriman by saying: he is the Lord of Death, far and wide the ruler of all the powers that have to bring about in the physical sense world what this world has to have, the annihilation and death of its entities. Death in the sense world is a necessary part of its organization, for otherwise the beings in it would accumulate to excess, if destruction of life were not at hand. The task of regulating this in a lawful way fell to Ahriman from the spiritual world; he is the ruler of the ordering of death. His sovereign domain is the mineral world, a world that is utterly dead. One can say that death is poured out over the whole of the mineral world. Furthermore, because our earth world is constituted as it is, the mineral world and its laws pervade all the other kingdoms of nature. Plants, animals, human beings—all are permeated, as far as they belong to the earth, by the mineral; they absorb the mineral substances and, with them, all the forces and laws of the mineral kingdom; they are subject to these laws insofar as they are part of the being of the earth. Therefore whatever belongs justifiably to death extends also into the higher regions of the lawful rule of Ahriman. In what surrounds us as external nature, Ahriman is the rightful Lord of Death and should not be regarded as an evil power but as one whose influence in the general world order is fully legitimate. We will enter into a right relationship with the sense world only when we bring a creditable interest to bear upon it, when our interest in the sense world is so reasonable that we can see everything in it without greedily demanding eternal life for any of its physical forms; on the contrary, that we can do without them when they meet their natural death. To be able to rejoice rightly in the things of the sense world but not to be so dependent on them as to contradict the laws of death and decay—this is the right relationship of the human being to the sense world. To bring about this right relationship to growth and decay, the human being has the impulses of Ahriman within himself; for this reason they pulsate in him.

Ahriman, however, can overstep his bounds. In the first place, he can so far overdo that he sets to work on human thinking. A man who does not see into the spiritual world and has no understanding of it will not believe that Ahriman can put his fingers upon human thinking in a very real way—nevertheless, he does! Insofar as human thinking lives in the sense world, it is bound to the brain, which according to universal law is subject to decay. Ahriman has to regulate the passage of the human brain towards decay, but when he oversteps his territory, he develops the tendency to loosen this human thinking from its mortal instrument, the brain, in order to make it independent. He tries to detach the physical thinking directed to the sense world from the physical brain, into whose current of decay this thinking should merge when the human being passes through the gate of death. Ahriman has the tendency, when he admits man as a physical being into the stream of death, to snatch his thinking out of the current of decay. Throughout a man's whole life Ahriman is always fastening his claws into this thinking activity and working on the human being so that his thinking will tear itself away from destruction. Because Ahriman is active in this way in human thinking and because men bound to the sense world naturally perceive only the effects of the spiritual beings, those who are thus in the clutches of Ahriman feel the impulse to wrench their thinking out of its place in the great cosmic order. The result is the materialistic frame of mind; this is the reason men want to apply their thinking only to the sense world, and the people who refuse to believe in a spiritual world are the ones particularly obsessed by Ahriman: it is he who enters their thinking and prevails upon its remaining in the sense world. First of all, if a person has not become a practical occultist, the result for his inner attitude will be that he becomes a rank, coarse-grained materialist who wants to know nothing about spiritual matters. It is Ahriman who has enticed him into this, only he doesn't notice it. For Ahriman, however, the process is the following: when he succeeds in severing the physical thinking from its brain-bound foundation, he throws shadows and phantoms out into the world which swarm then through the physical world; with these, Ahriman is continually trying to establish a special ahrimanic kingdom.

Unremittingly he lies in wait when man's thinking is about to pass into the stream wherein man himself will journey through the gate of death; there Ahriman lurks, on the watch to snatch away and hold back as much of this thinking as possible, and to form out of it, to tear from its mother-soil, shadows and phantoms that will people the physical world. Occultly observed, these phantoms drift around in the physical world disturbing the universal order; they are creations that Ahriman brings about in the way just described. We will have the right feeling for Ahriman when we appreciate his lawful impulses, for when he lets them enter our souls, we have a correct relationship to the sense world. However, we must be watchful that he does not tempt us in the way I have indicated. Certainly the policy some people choose is more convenient when they say: “Very well, we shall push every ahrimanic impulse out of our souls.” But nothing will be accomplished with this dislodgment except that the other side of the scales will be brought right down—and whoever through mistaken theories succeeds in driving ahrimanic impulses out of his soul falls prey to those of Lucifer.

This shows itself particularly when people, shying away from the right relationship to the ahrimanic powers, despise the sense world and root out their joy in it. Then they reject their former good relationship and in order not to become attached to it, they crush all their interest in the physical world. With this comes a false asceticism, which in its turn offers the most powerful handle to the entrance of the unlawful luciferic impulses. The history of asceticism could very well be written by presenting it as a continuous allurement of Lucifer. In false asceticism a person exposes himself to this kind of seduction because instead of rightly balancing the scales, using thus the polarity of forces, he does away with one side altogether.

However, when the human being makes a correct estimate of the physical sense world, Ahriman is fully justified. The mineral world is his very own kingdom, the kingdom over which death is poured out continuously. In the higher kingdoms of nature Ahriman is the regulator of death insofar as he affects the course of events and the creatures lawfully. What we can trace as super-sensible in the external world, we call for certain reasons spiritual; what is more active inwardly within the human being, we assign to the soul. Ahriman is a more spiritual being; Lucifer is more soul nature. Ahriman can be called the lord of all that takes place in external nature; Lucifer penetrates with his impulses into the inner nature of man.

Now there is also a lawful task belonging to Lucifer, one quite in accordance with the universal cosmic order. In a certain way Lucifer's task is to tear man and everything in the world pertaining to the soul away from living and being absorbed in the physical-sensory alone. If there were no luciferic power in the world, we would dream along in the perceptions streaming into us from the external world and in what comes to us from that world through the intellect. That would be a kind of dreaming away of human soul existence within the sense world. There are indeed impulses which will not tear our souls away from the sense world as long as they are bound temporarily to it but which raise our souls to a different sort of living, feeling and rejoicing from the kind the sense world can offer. We need merely to think of what humanity has been seeking as artistic development. Wherever the human being creates something through his imagination and his soul life of feeling, no longer clinging dully to the sense world but rising above it, Lucifer is the power that tears him out of that world. A large part of what is uplifting and liberating in the artistic development of mankind is inspired by Lucifer. We can designate something else as the inspiration of Lucifer: the human being has the chance through luciferic powers to free his thinking from a mere photograph-like copying of the sense world; he can raise himself above this in freedom, which he does, for instance, in his philosophy. From this point of view, all philosophizing is the inspiration of Lucifer. One could even write a history of the philosophical development of mankind, insofar as this is not pure positivism—that is, does not keep to the external materialistic—and could say: the history of the development of philosophy is a continual testimony to the inspiration of Lucifer. All creative work, in fact, that rises above the sense world we owe to Lucifer's rightful activities and powers.

However, Lucifer too can overstep his domain, and the rebellion of the luciferic beings against the cosmic order is due to their overstepping their place. Lucifer has the tendency continually to do this by contaminating the feeling life of the soul. Ahriman has more to do with our thinking, Lucifer with the feelings, with the life of the emotions, passions, impulses and desires. Lucifer is lord over everything of soul feeling in the physical sense world. He has the tendency to detach and separate this feeling life of the soul from the physical world, to spiritualize it, and to set up, one can say, on a specially isolated island of spiritual existence a luciferic kingdom composed of all the soul feeling he can seize and carry off from the sense world. Whereas Ahriman wants to hold back thinking to the physical sense world and make shadows and phantoms of it, visible to elementary clairvoyance as floating, wafting shadows, Lucifer does the opposite: he takes what is soul feeling in the physical sense world, tears it out and puts it in a special luciferic kingdom set up as an isolated kingdom similar to his own nature, in opposition to the general cosmic order.

We can form an idea about how Lucifer can get at human beings in this way by considering with all our heart and soul a phenomenon in human life that we will speak about later in more detail: the phenomenon of love in the widest sense of the word, the foundation of a true moral life in the world order of humanity. Concerning love in its widest sense, the following has to be said: when love appears in the physical sense world and has its effect on human life, it is absolutely protected from every unlawful luciferic attack if the love is for another person and for that other person's own sake. When we are met by some other human being or by one belonging to another kingdom of nature in the physical world, that being meets us with certain qualities. If we are freely receptive to these qualities, if we are capable of being moved by them, they then command our love and we cannot help loving that other being. We are moved by the other being to love it.

Where the cause of love lies not in the one who loves but in the object of love, this form and kind of love in the sense world is absolute proof against every luciferic influence. But now if you observe human life, you will soon see that another kind of love is playing its part, in which a person loves because he himself has certain qualities that feel satisfied, or charmed, or delighted, when he can love this or that other being. Here he loves for his own sake; he loves because his disposition is thus or so, and this particular disposition finds its satisfaction in loving someone else.

This love, which one can call egoistic love, must also exist. It really has to be present in mankind. Everything we can love in the spiritual world, all the spiritual facts, everything that love can cause to live in us as a longing for and an impulse upwards into the spiritual world, to comprehend the beings of the spiritual world, to perceive the spiritual world: all this springs naturally from a sentient love for that world. This love for the spiritual, however, must—not may but must—come about necessarily for our own sake. We are beings whose roots are in the spiritual world. It is our duty to make ourselves as perfect as we can. For our own sake we must love the spiritual world in order to draw as many forces as possible out of it into our own being. In spiritual love a personal, individual element—we can call it egoistic—is fully justified, for it detaches man from the sense world; it leads him upwards into the spiritual world; it leads him on to fulfill the necessary duty of continually bringing himself further and further towards perfection.

Now Lucifer has the tendency to interchange the two worlds with each other. In human love whenever a person loves in the physical sense world for himself with a trace of egoism, it occurs because Lucifer wants to make physical love similar to spiritual love. He can then root it out of the physical sense world and lead it into his own special kingdom. This means that all love that can be called egoistic and is not there for the sake of the beloved but for the sake of the one who loves, is exposed to Lucifer's impulses.

If we consider what has been said, we will see that in this modern materialistic culture there is every reason to point out these luciferic allurements in regard to love, for a great part of our present-day outlook and literature, especially that of medicine, is permeated by the luciferic conception of love. We would have to touch on a rather offensive subject if we were to treat this in greater detail. The luciferic element in love is actually cherished by a large section of our medical science; men are told again and again—for it is the male world especially pandered to in this—that they must cultivate a certain sphere of love as necessary for their health, that is, necessary for their own sake. A great deal of advice is given in this direction and certain experiences in love recommended that do not spring from a love for the other being but because they are presumed indispensable in the life of the male. Such arguments—even when they are clothed in the robes of science—are nothing but inspirations of the luciferic element in the world; a large portion of science is penetrated simply by luciferic points of view. Lucifer finds the best recruits for his kingdom among those who allow such advice to be given to them and who believe that it is imperative for the well-being of their person. It is absolutely necessary for us to know such things. Those words I quoted yesterday must be emphasized again and again: People never notice the devil, either in luciferic or ahrimanic form, even when he has them by the collar! People do not see that the materialistic scientist who gives the advice just mentioned is under the yoke of Lucifer. They deny Lucifer because they deny all the spiritual worlds.

We see therefore that what is great and sublime on the one hand, what carries and uplifts the evolution of humanity depends on Lucifer. Mankind must understand how to keep the impulses that come from him in their rightful place. Wherever Lucifer makes his appearance as the guardian of beauty and glory, as the patron of artistic impulses, there arises in humanity from his activity great and sublime power. But there is also a shadow-side to Lucifer's activity. He tries everywhere to tear the emotional side of the soul away from the sense organism and make it independent, permeated with egoism and egotism. Thus there enters into the emotional soul nature the element of self-will and other such tendencies. A person can then form for himself in freewheeling activity—with a generous hand, one can say—all sorts of ideas about the universe. How many people indulge in philosophizing, shake it out of their sleeves, without troubling themselves in the least as to whether their speculations are in accord with the general course of universal order! These eccentric philosophers are actually found in great numbers all over the world. In love with their own ideas, they fail to counterbalance the luciferic element with the ahrimanic one that always asks whether everything man acquires by his thinking in the physical sense world actually squares with the laws of the physical world. So we see these people running around with their opinions, which are just a lot of fanatic enthusiasms incompatible with the cosmic order. It is from the shadow side of the luciferic impulse that all these fanatic enthusiasms, the egoistic and confused opinions, the eccentric ideas and false, extravagant idealism arise. Most significantly, however, it is on the borderland or threshold between the sensible and the super-sensible that these luciferic and ahrimanic elements confront us, when we look with the eyes of clairvoyant consciousness.

When the human soul takes on the task of making itself capable of looking into the spiritual world and gaining insight there, it takes on itself, more than anything else, a task that otherwise is carried out by the subconscious guidance of soul life. Nature and its laws take care that in everyday life man does not often transfer the customs and regulations of one kingdom into another; the natural order would be entirely out of control if the separate worlds were to get mixed up together. We emphasized a moment ago that love for the spiritual world must evolve in such a way that the human being develops in himself first and foremost an all-pervasive inner strength, as well as a craving for self-improvement. He has to fix his eye on himself when he nurtures his love for the spiritual world. If, however, he transfers to the senses the kind of ardour that can guide him in the spiritual world to what is most sublime, it will lead him into what is most detestable. There are people who have in their outward physical experience and in their everyday activities no special interest in the spiritual world. It is said such people today are not uncommon. But nature does not permit us to use the ostrich strategy in her affairs. The ostrich strategy, as you know, consists in the bird sticking his head in the sand and believing that the things he doesn't see are not there. Materialistic minds believe that the spiritual world is not there; they do not see it. They are true ostriches.

Nevertheless, in the depths of their souls, the craving for the spiritual world does not cease to exist merely because they deaden themselves and deny its reality. It is actually there. In every human soul, however materialistic, the desire and love for the spiritual world is alive, but people who deaden their soul nature are unconscious of the craving.

There is a law that something repressed and deadened at one point will break out at another. The consequence of the repression of the egoistic impulse towards the spiritual world is that it thrusts itself into the sensual desires. The kind of love due the spiritual world hurls itself away from there into the sensual impulses, passions and desires, and these impulses become perverse. The perversity of the sensual impulses and their repellent abnormalities are the mirror image of what could be noble virtues in the spiritual world, were human beings to use for the spiritual world all the forces poured out into the physical world. We must consider this seriously: what finds expression in the sense world as loathsome impulses could—if they were used in the spiritual world—accomplish there something of the most sublime character. This is immensely significant.

You see how in this regard the sublime is changed into the horrible when the boundary between the physical sense world and the super-sensible world is not observed or valued in the right way. Clairvoyant consciousness should develop so that the clairvoyant soul can live in the super-sensible worlds according to the laws of those worlds; then it must be able to return to its life in the body without letting itself be led astray in the everyday physical sense world by the laws of the super-sensible worlds.

Suppose a soul could not do this—then the following would take place. We shall see that the soul in passing the boundary region between one world and the other learns most of all how to conduct itself in the right way through meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. But suppose a soul, having made itself clairvoyant (this can very well happen) had through various circumstances become clairvoyant without rightfully meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. Such a soul could see into the super-sensible worlds clairvoyantly and have perceptions there, but it would return then to the physical sense world after entering wrongfully the spiritual world and merely nibbling at dainties there. Such eaters of sweet things in the spiritual world are numerous and it can truly be said that nibbling there is far more serious than it is in the sense world. After nibbling at the spiritual world, it happens very often that a person takes back into the sense world what he has experienced, but the experience shrinks and condenses. A clairvoyant of this kind, one who does not conduct himself according to the laws of the universal order, returns to the physical sense world bringing with him the condensed pictures and impressions of the super-sensible worlds. He will no longer merely look out and ponder the physical world but while he lives within his physical body he will have before him the after-effects of the spiritual world in pictures quite similar to those of sense except that they have no relation to reality, are only illusions, hallucinations, dream pictures.

A person who is able to look in the right way into the spiritual world will never again confuse reality and the fantastic. In this the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in so far as it is erroneous, refutes itself. In the case of its greatest mistake—that our whole environment is nothing but our mental picture—it refutes itself even in the sense world. If you press Schopenhauer's statement, it will show itself up as a fallacy, for you will be guided by life itself to distinguish between iron heated to 900 degrees that is actually perceptible and the imagined iron of 900 degrees that will cause no pain. Life itself reveals the difference between reality and fancy when one lives in the real world with the capacities belonging to it. Even Kant's statement by which he formulated his so-called proof of God, that is, that a hundred imagined dollars are just as valuable as a hundred real ones—that, too, will be contradicted by life. Certainly a hundred imagined dollars contain just as many pennies as a hundred real ones, but for all that there is a difference that comes strongly to the fore in real life. I would recommend anyone who considers Kant's statement to be correct to try to pay a hundred dollar debt with imagined currency; he will notice the difference at once.

If this is the case in the physical sense world when one really stands firmly in it and observes its laws, it is the same for the super-sensible worlds. If one only nibbles at the latter, one will have no protection against mistaking illusion for truth; when the pictures shrink and condense, one takes what should be merely picture for reality. The sweets, too, that such a person carries within himself out of the spiritual world are a special booty for Ahriman to pounce on. From what he can pull out of ordinary human thinking he gets only airy shadows, but—to put it plainly—he gets well padded shadows and plump phantoms when he presses out of human body-individualities (as well as he can) the false illusory pictures created by nibbling on the sly in the spiritual world. In this ahrimanic fashion the physical sense world is populated by spiritual shades and phantoms that offer serious resistance to the general cosmic order.

From all this, we see how the ahrimanic influence can encroach most strongly when it oversteps its boundaries and works against the general cosmic order; it turns to evil, especially in the perversion of its lawful activity.

There is no essential evil. Everything evil arises from this, something that is good in one direction is put to use in the world in another direction and thereby turned into evil. In a somewhat similar way the luciferic influence, the inducement to so much that is noble and sublime, may become dangerous, exceedingly dangerous, particularly to the soul that has become clairvoyant. This happens in just the opposite situation. We looked before at what happens when a soul nibbles at the spiritual world, that is, perceives something there, but then on returning to the physical sense world does not tell itself: “Here you may not use the same kind of thought pictures that are right for the spiritual world.” In this case the soul is exposed in the physical world to the influence of Ahriman. But the opposite can take place. The human soul can carry into the spiritual world what should belong only to the physical sense world, namely the kinds of perception, feeling, and passion that the soul must necessarily develop to a certain degree for the physical world. None of the emotions cultivated here, however, should be carried into the spiritual world if the soul is not to fall victim to the temptations and allurements of Lucifer to an unusual degree.

This is what was attempted to some extent in Scene Nine of The Souls' Awakening in presenting Maria's inmost soul attitude. It would be quite wrong for anyone to require in this scene something as dramatically tumultuous and exciting as what one likes to have in superficial physical drama. If Maria's inner nature were such that at the moment of receiving the memories of the devachanic world and of the Egyptian period, her soul had experienced disturbing passions, disturbing desires, it would have been hurtled back and forth by these waves of emotion. A soul that cannot receive the impulses of the spiritual world with inner calm, in absolute tranquillity, rising above all outward physical drama, will suffer in the spiritual world a fate that I can only render in the following picture: Imagine to yourselves a being made of rubber flying in all directions in a space enclosed on all sides, flying against a wall and thrown back from it, flying against another wall, thrown back again, flying back and forth like this in turbulent movement on the waves of the emotional life. This actually happens to a soul that carries into the spiritual world the kind of perception, feeling and passion belonging to the sense world. Something further happens. It is not pleasant to be thrown back and forth like a rubber ball as if one were in a cosmic prison. Therefore in such a case the soul that is clairvoyant follows chiefly the special policy of the ostrich; as a matter of fact, the soul stupefies itself in regard to this being thrown back and forth; it dulls its consciousness so that it is no longer aware of it. It therefore believes that it is not being thrown back and forth. Lucifer can then come all the closer, because the consciousness is dulled. He lures the soul out and leads it to his isolated kingdom. There the soul can receive its spiritual impressions but, received in this island kingdom, they are completely luciferic.

Because self-knowledge is hard to come by and the soul has the greatest difficulty in becoming clear about certain of its qualities, because, too, people are bent on getting as quickly as possible into the spiritual world, it is not at all to be wondered at that they say to themselves: I am already mature enough; I will of course be able to control my passions. As a matter of fact, it is more easily said than done. There are certain qualities that particularly challenge our control. Vanity, ambition, and similar things sit so deeply entrenched in human souls that it is not easy to admit to oneself: You are vain and ambitious! You want power! When we look into ourselves, we are usually deceived about just those emotions that are the very worst ones. To carry them into the spiritual world means that a person will most easily become the prey of Lucifer. And when he notices how he is thrown hither and thither, he does not willingly say: This comes from ambition or from vanity—but he looks for the way to deaden the soul. Then Lucifer carries him off into his kingdom. There, of course, a person may receive insights but these do not correspond to the cosmic order, which had already been designed before Lucifer began his meddling.⁸ They are spiritual insights of a thoroughly luciferic nature. He may receive the most extraordinary impressions and judge them to be absolute truths. He may tell people about all sorts of incarnations of this person or that, but these will simply be purely luciferic inspirations.

In order that the right relationship should come about at her “Awakening,” Maria had to be presented, at the moment when the spiritual world was to rush in on her with such vehemence, as a person who could well appear absurd to someone like one of our fine young theater critics. A dainty little modern critic might well say: “After finishing the Egyptian scene, there sat Maria as if she had just had breakfast, experiencing these things without a bit of lively drama.” And yet anything else would be untrue at this stage of her development. Only Maria's quiet calmness can represent the truth of her development, as the rays of spiritual light fall upon the scene. We see from this how much depends on the soul mood, mastering within itself all the emotions and passions that are significant only for the physical sense world, if the soul is to cross the threshold of the spiritual world in the right way; otherwise it will experience there the necessary consequence of what remains of sensual feeling. Ahriman is the more spiritual being; what he carries out in the way of unlawful activity, of the unlawful activity he can create, flows more or less into the general world of the senses. Lucifer is more a being of soul; he tries to draw emotional soul elements out of the sense world and embody them in his special luciferic kingdom, where for every human being—according to the egoism rooted in his nature—Lucifer wants to ensure the greatest possibility of segregated independence.

We see from this that when we want to form a judgment of such beings as Ahriman and Lucifer, it cannot be a question of simply calling them good or bad. Instead we have to understand what is the lawful activity, what is the right domain of these beings and where their unlawful activity, the overstepping of their limits, begins. For through the fact that they go beyond their limits, they entice human beings to an unlawful overstepping of the boundary into the other world, taking with them the faculties and laws of this world. The scenes of The Souls' Awakening deal particularly with what is experienced in passing back and forth across the boundary between the physical sense world and the super-sensible world. In this lecture today I wanted to make a beginning by describing some of the things that must be carefully watched in the borderland between the two worlds. Tomorrow we will go further into this.

• 8. See Rudolf Steiner, The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 7. Contained in The Four Mystery Dramas.

To-day I want to make various comments on matters that have been mentioned lately, and to fill in certain gaps. If you follow with attention current trends, you will have noticed a feeling that the thoughts and impressions and impulses which for a long time have led to such “splendid progress” are no longer capable of helping us to cope with the immediate future. Yesterday one of our members gave me a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung for last Wednesday, November 21st. There speaks a very learned gentleman ... he must be very learned, for he is not only a Doctor of Philosophy but also a Doctor of Theology, and also a Professor, so naturally he is a very clever man. He has written an article which deals with all sorts of spiritual needs of the present time, and in the course of it he says:

“The experience of the form of being which lies behind things does not require pious dedication or a religious evaluation, for it is itself religion. We are concerned not with feeling and grasping a particular content, but with the great Irrational which lies hidden behind all existence ... Anyone who makes contact with this, so that the divine spark leaps across, goes through an experience which is of primal character and may be called the primordial experience. Anyone who experiences this one thing, together with all that is stirred by the same flow of life, is imbued with—to use a favourite modern phrase—a feeling of cosmic existence.”

Excuse me for reading this to you: I am quoting it not in order to arouse in you any magnificent ideas, but so as to bring before you a sign of the times:

“A cosmic religiosity is coming to birth among us, and how strong is the demand for it is shown by the evident spread of the theosophical movement, which undertakes to discover and unveil the phases of this life beyond the range of the senses.”

It is really difficult to stumble through all these wishy-washy ideas, but you will agree that the article is remarkable as a symptom of the times! He goes on: “In this cosmic piety there is no question of a mysticism which turns away from the world ...” and so on.

It would be hard to discover anything intelligent in all this, but since it is written by a man with all these degrees, one must suppose that some intelligence is there! Otherwise we should have to take it as the obscure stammering of a learned man who has reached a dead end on his own path and now feels impelled to call attention to something which certainly exists and evidently appears to him as not wholly unattainable.

There is no cause for satisfaction in such remarks; we must above all take care not to let them lull us into a comfortable slumber just because it has again been noticed, from some point of view or other, that something lies behind the spiritual-scientific movement. That would be really harmful. People who write in this way are often quite satisfied with having written it. With these misty thoughts they point to something which is trying to make its way into the world, but they are far too complacent to go in for the serious study that Spiritual Science requires. Nothing less than that must lay hold of men's minds if some reality is to be brought into the trends of the times, so that healing can come of it. Of course it is easier to talk of this “surge” of “cosmic feeling” than to give serious attention to those things that are demanded by the signs of the times and must be made known to mankind. For this reason it seems to me necessary to repeat here the remarks I have made in public lectures and shall make again, with particular emphasis now on the distinction between the worn-out ideas which have led into these catastrophic times and those which must take hold of human souls if any sort of progress is to be accomplished.

The old wisdom, through which mankind has been guided up to our time, may give rise to thousands of congresses, world-congresses, people's congresses and so on; thousands and thousands of societies may be founded; but we must be clear that all these congresses and societies will accomplish nothing unless the life-blood of Spiritual Science flows through them. What is lacking among people to-day is the courage to embark on real research into the spiritual world. Strange as it may sound, it must be said—as a first step nothing else would be needed than to spread the little booklet, Human Life in the light of Anthroposophy, in the widest circles. Something would thereby be done to evoke knowledge of a connection between man and the cosmic order. The booklet calls attention precisely to this knowledge by showing in concrete terms how throughout the year the earth undergoes changes in its state of consciousness—and so on. What is said in that booklet and in this lecture is said with full consideration for the needs of our time. Acceptance of it would signify more than all this wishy-washy talk on cosmic feeling and surges and I know not what. I have just read this to you and I can't bring myself to repeat it—it is all put in such a senseless way.

This should of course not prevent us from taking note of such things: they are important and real. What I want to bring home to you is that we must not befog ourselves: we must be absolutely clear as to what we wish to do on behalf of Spiritual Science.

Now I will turn again to the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch humanity will have to find ways of dealing with great life-problems which in a certain sense were veiled by the wisdom of the past. I have already called your attention to them. One of these great problems will be concerned with finding out how to place the spiritual etheric forces at the service of practical life. I have told you that in this epoch we have to solve the problem of how the radiations from human states of mind are carried over into machines; of how human beings are to be brought into relation with an environment which must become increasingly mechanised. A week ago I pointed out how superficially this mechanisation is treated in a certain part of the world. I gave you the example of how an American way of thinking tries to extend the realm of the machine over human life itself. I told you of the rest-pauses which were used in order to enable a given number of workmen to load up to 47½ tons, instead of a much lower figure; this involves simply the application of Darwinian natural selection to human life.

Where this kind of thing goes on, the wish to yoke up human strength with the strength of machines is always involved. It would be quite mistaken merely to oppose these things. They are not going to fade away; they are on the march. The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group's selfish ends. That is the issue. The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens—how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.

I have often pointed out, even in public lectures, that human consciousness depends on destructive forces. During public lectures in Basle I twice said that in our nerve-system we are always in process of dying. These forces of death will become stronger and stronger, and we shall find that they are related to the forces of electricity and magnetism, and to those at work in machines. A man will be able in a certain sense to guide his intentions and his thoughts into the forces of the machines. Forces in human nature that are still unknown will be discovered—forces which will act upon external electricity and magnetism.

That is one problem: the bringing together of human beings with machines, and this is something which will exert ever-increasing influence on the future.

The other problem is concerned with calling in spiritual relationships to our aid. This can be done only when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are rightly prepared for it. But we must come to the stage when spiritual forces are brought into action for the governance of life in relation to illness and death.

Medicine will be spiritualised—very highly spiritualised. These things will be caricatured from various standpoints, but the caricatures only show what has to come. Again, the question is whether or not this problem—like the other problem I have mentioned—is handled in an egotistic way by individuals or by groups.

The third great question concerns ways of thinking about human birth and upbringing. I have told you how congresses on this subject have already been held, and how a materialistic form of science will be brought to bear in the future on procreation and the union of man and woman. These things indicate the great significance that attaches to this process of becoming. It is easy enough to ask why those who have the right knowledge in these matters do not apply it. In the future it will be clear enough what the state of affairs is regarding this application, and what are the forces which are even now opposing, for example, a more generous provision for a spiritualised medicine or a spiritualised economic life. All that can be done at present is to speak of these things, until people—I mean those who are ready to accept them selflessly—understand them sufficiently. There are many who think they have already got as far as that, but many hindrances arise from the circumstances of life to-day. These will be overcome in the right way only if understanding goes deeper and deeper, and if we actually refrain, for a time at least, from attempting practical applications on any large scale.

Things have developed in such a way that one can say: Little is known of all that lay behind the old atavistic searchings which continued up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. People talk a great deal about the old alchemy; sometimes they call to mind the creation of Homunculus and so on. But most of this talk misses the point. If people would come to understand what can be said about the Homunculus scene in Faust, for instance, they would be better informed: the essential thing is that a mist has been spread over these subjects since the sixteenth century. They have receded into the background of human consciousness.

The law which prevails here is the same law which governs the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping in man. Just as a person cannot do without sleep, so mankind could not dispense with the sleep regarding spiritual knowledge which has marked the whole period since the sixteenth century. Man had to fall asleep to the spiritual, so that it could reappear in a new form. These necessities must be clearly seen, but without letting them depress us. We must realise clearly that the time for awakening has now come, that we have to play our part in it, that events often run ahead of our knowledge and that we shall not understand the events going on around us unless we are willing to receive the knowledge and to act in accordance with it.

I have repeatedly told you that certain groups are working esoterically in the direction I have indicated. It was first of all necessary that certain forms of knowledge—called nowadays by such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, etc.—should fall into abeyance, so that men should no longer be able to discern the soul-element in outer Nature and should rather be thrown back on themselves. And in order that they should awaken their inward forces, certain things had to appear as abstractions. Now these things must again take on a concrete spiritual form.

During the last centuries three ideas have gradually emerged in abstract guise. They were incorrectly named by Kant, and correctly by Goethe. Kant called them God, Freedom and Immortality; Goethe called them God, Virtue and Immortality. If we look into what lies behind these three words, we find that the same words are taken abstractly by modern man and were taken more concretely—but also more materially in the old atavistic sense—up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Experiments in the old style were carried out: the alchemists sought to observe processes in which the working of God could be seen. And they tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Something concrete lies behind all these things. The Philosopher's Stone was to enable men to become virtuous—but this was thought of in a more material sense. It was also to lead to an experience of immortality: to bring a man into such a relationship to the cosmic whole that he would experience in himself what lies beyond birth and death. All the nebulous ideas by which people nowadays try to grasp these things no longer correspond with what was really intended. It has all become abstract, and it is of abstract ideas that modern men speak. They want to understand God through an abstract theology, and virtue also as something abstract—the more abstract it is, the better people like it. And it is the same with immortality. Speculation turns on what in man could be immortal. In my first Basle lecture [23rd November, 1917. (Not translated into English.)] I said that the kind of learning which under the name of philosophy occupies itself with such questions as that of immortality is a starveling, under-nourished kind of learning. That is merely another way of describing the abstract terms in which such matters are pursued.

In certain Western brotherhoods, however, a connection with the old traditions has been retained, and endeavours are made to use it for the egotistic interests of the group. It is time to call attention to these things. Of course, if from this Western quarter anything is said about God, virtue or freedom, and immortality, the words are given an abstract sense, but in the circle of initiates it is well known that all this is not mere abstract speculation. For their own part, they look for something much more concrete behind these abstract formulae, and in their own schools these terms are accordingly translated. God is translated as gold, and an endeavour is made to arrive at what lies behind the secret of gold, as it may be called. For gold, the representative of the sun-like within the earth's crust, does in fact enshrine an important secret. Gold stands in the same material relationships to other substances as the thought of God does to other thoughts. The only question is what is made of this secret.

This is linked up with the egotistic use of the mystery of birth, and here, real cosmic understanding is sought. All such understanding has been replaced for modern men by a purely earthly understanding. If someone wants to investigate, for example, how the embryonic life-cell of animal or man develops, he studies it through a microscope and is concerned only with what lies there directly under his lens. But that is far from being the whole thing. It will be realised—and some groups are very near this already—that the forces at work are not contained in the cell but come from the cosmos and its constellations. When a seed of life arises, it does so because the living creature which harbours the seed is receiving forces, cosmic forces, from all sides of the cosmos. And when fertilisation occurs, the results depend on which cosmic forces enter actively into the process.

One thing, not yet seen, will be recognised. To-day the idea is that we have a living creature, a hen, let us say. When a new seed of life appears in the hen, the biologist investigates how the egg arises out of the hen; he looks within the hen itself for the forces which cause the seed to grow. That is nonsense. The egg does not grow out of the hen; the hen is merely the substratum for it. The growth-forces work from out of the cosmos on to the soil which has been prepared in the hen for engendering the egg. The biologist to-day believes that the relevant forces are all to be found within the field of his microscope. Actually, what he sees there depends on stellar forces which work together in a certain pattern at a given point. When we discover the cosmic at this point, then for the first time we shall have got at the reality and the truth: it is the cosmic whole which conjures up the egg in the hen.

All this is connected especially with the secret of the sun, and in earthly terms with the secret of gold. To-day I can give you only a sort of schematic indication of it; these things will become much clearer in the course of time.

When “virtue” is discussed in these same schools, they call it simply “health,” and try to learn how the cosmic constellations are connected with health and sickness in men. By this means they come to know the particular earthly substances, the juices and so on, which are in their turn connected with sickness and health. We shall see develop increasingly from a certain direction a more material form of medical knowledge, but it will rest on a spiritual foundation.

From this side also will be spread the idea that man cannot be made good by learning all sorts of ethical principles, but by ingesting copper, for example, under a certain constellation, and arsenic under another. You can well imagine how ideas of this kind can be used by egotistic groups for enhancing their own power. They need only withhold this knowledge from others, and this will be the best means of dominating large numbers of men. They will not need to talk about such things; it will be enough to bring forward some new titbit. Then they will find openings for this titbit, having first flavoured it appropriately, and they will achieve their purpose when these novelties are accepted in a materialistic sense. We have only to remember that spiritual potencies are hidden in everything material. Only he who knows that in a true sense there really is nothing material, but only the spiritual—only he will penetrate behind the secrets of life.

Similar endeavours are made from the same quarter to transpose the problem of immortality into a materialistic frame, and this, too, can be done by making use of the cosmic constellations. This method certainly does not yield the immortality that is the subject of so many speculations, but immortality of another sort. Given a brotherhood lodge, then—at least so long as life cannot be lengthened by working on the physical body—preparations are made for subjecting a soul to such experiences as will enable it to remain within the lodge after death, so that it may contribute its forces to those at the disposal of the lodge. In these circles, accordingly, immortality is called simply “lengthening of life.”

External signs of all this can indeed be seen. I don't know if some of you may have noticed a book which also came from the West and caused a little stir for a while; it was called “On the Nonsense of Death.” These things all move in the same direction. They are still at their beginnings, for everything beyond that is kept as a closely guarded esoteric secret by the egotistic groups. But these things are really possible if they are given a materialistic colouring; if the abstract ideas of God, virtue and immortality are turned into the concrete ideas of gold, health and lengthening of life, and if what I have called the great problem of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is utilised for the purpose of an egotistic group. You see, this “cosmic feeling,” which the learned Professor and Doctor of Theology talks about, is already being widely presented to people—and often, unfortunately, in an egotistic sense—as cosmic knowledge. For centuries science has kept its eyes fixed on earthly processes, and has ignored all the most significant influences that come from beyond the earth, but it is precisely in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch that extra-terrestrial forces from the cosmos will be put to use.

And so, just as it is essential for an orthodox professor of biology to have the most powerful microscope available and the most efficient laboratory methods, so, in the future, when science has been spiritualised, it will be of the utmost importance whether certain processes are carried through in the morning or in the evening, or at midday, and whether what has been done in the morning is allowed to be further influenced by an evening activity, or whether the cosmic influences are cut out, paralysed, from the morning until the evening. Processes of this kind will of necessity come to light and will run their course. Naturally, a great deal of water will have to flow under the bridges before the professional chairs and laboratories, at present organised on purely materialistic lines, are handed over to spiritual scientists, but this replacement must come about if humanity is not to sink into utter decadence. For example, if the question is one of doing good in the immediate future, existing laboratory methods must give way to methods whereby certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day, so that the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening and is in turn rhythmically withheld again until morning. So the processes would take their course: certain cosmic workings would always be interrupted by day, and the cosmic morning and evening processes would be brought in. All sorts of arrangements would be necessary for this. You will realise that if one is not in a position to take any public action about these things, all one can do is to speak of them.

However, just as gold, health and the prolongation of life are put in the place of God, virtue and immortality, so from the same quarter efforts will be made to work not with the morning and evening processes, but with others. Last week I told you how an attempt will be made to set aside the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha, while for the West another impulse, a sort of Anti-Christ is introduced; and from the East an attempt will be made to paralyse the twentieth-century manifestation of the Christ Impulse by diverting attention from the coming etheric Christ.

Those concerned to present an Anti-Christ as the real Christ will try also to make use of something that works through the most material forces, but in this very way can work spiritually. Above all they will strive to make use of electricity and earth-magnetism in order to produce effects all over the world. I have shown you how earth-forces rise up into what I have called the human Double, the Doppelgänger. This secret will be opened up. An American secret will be to make use of earth-magnetism, with its north-south duality, and by this means to send over the earth guiding forces which will have spiritual effects. Look at the magnetic chart of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe where the magnetic needle deviates to East and West and where it does not deviate. I can give only hints about all this. From a certain direction in the heavens, spiritual beings are continually active, and they have only to be put into the service of the earth, and—because these beings working in from the cosmos can mediate the secret of the earth's magnetism—it will be possible for egotistic groups to get behind this secret and to accomplish a great deal in connection with gold, health and the prolongation of life. It will be necessary for them only to pluck up their faltering courage—and in certain circles that will be done readily enough!

From the East an endeavour will be made to strengthen what I have already explained: to place in the service of the earth the beings which work in from the opposite side of the cosmos. In the future there will be a great battle. Human science will stretch out to the cosmic, but will try to get there by different paths. It will be the task of good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces which can reach the earth through the co-operation of two cosmic streams, those of Pisces and Virgo. The great secret to be discovered will be how the influence which works from the direction of Pisces as a power of the sun unites itself with the influence working from the direction of Virgo. It will make for good when it is learnt how the morning and evening forces from the two sides of the cosmos can be brought into the service of humanity. (See diagram at end of lecture.)

These forces, however, will be left aside by those who try to achieve their whole purpose through the polaric duality of positive and negative forces. The forces which enable the spiritual to stream down to earth with the aid of positive and negative magnetism come from Gemini; they are the midday forces. In ancient times it was known that cosmic influences were involved in this, and to-day even exoteric scientists are aware that in some or other way positive and negative magnetism lie behind Gemini in the Zodiac. The aim will be to paralyse all that could be gained through a revelation of the true duality in the cosmos—to paralyse it in a materialistic, egotistic way by means of the forces which stream in particularly from Gemini and can be placed entirely at the service of the human “Double.”

Other brotherhoods, concerned above all to divert attention from the Mystery of Golgotha, will try to make use of the duality in human nature—the duality which in our epoch embraces man as a unity, but includes within him his lower animal nature. A human being is really a centaur in a certain sense: his humanity rests on his lower animal nature in its astral form. This working together of the duality in man gives rise to a duality of forces. This duality of forces will be utilised particularly by certain egotistic brotherhoods, chiefly from the side of India and the East, in order to mislead eastern Europe, whose task it is to prepare for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And this will be done with the aid of the forces which work in from Sagittarius.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way—that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality—gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

With regard to all this, the essential thing is that people should prepare themselves for it by not treating realities as illusions and by coming to a genuine spiritual conception and understanding of the world. To see things as they are—very much depends on that! But we can see them as they are only if we are in a position to bring the ideas of Spiritual Science to bear on reality. For the rest of the earth's existence the dead will be co-operating actively in the highest degree, and it is how they co-operate that will matter. Here, above all, a great distinction will arise. On one side the attitude of men on earth can rightly lead the co-operation of the dead in such a direction that the dead will be active out of their own impulse, an impulse coming from the spiritual world which the dead are themselves experiencing. But from the other side many endeavours will be made to introduce the dead into human existence by artificial means. Along the indirect path through Gemini the dead will be led into human life, with the result that human vibrations will pass over into the mechanism of machines and will continue to vibrate there in a quite definite way. The cosmos will impart motion to the machines by the indirect path I have indicated.

It will thus be essential, when these problems emerge, that no improper methods should be applied to them, but only those elemental forces which belong to nature on their own account, and great care will have to be taken not to introduce improper forces into the realm of machines. In this occult sphere the human element must not be related to machinery in such a way that the Darwinian natural selection theory is used to determine the working capacity of human beings, in the way of which I gave you an example last week.

I am making these remarks—obviously they cannot exhaust the subject in so short a time—in the belief that you will meditate on these things and will try to build a bridge between them and all those experiences of life which can be encountered, particularly in this difficult time. You will see how things become clear to you if you contemplate them in the light that can come from such ideas as those I have been placing before you. The real point is not that in our time powers and constellations of powers are standing opposed to each other, as we are always being told in external exoteric life. The real point is quite different. It is that a kind of veil is now meant to be spread over the true impulses at work. Certain human powers are intent on saving something for themselves—what is it? Their aim is that impulses which up to the time of the French Revolution were justified, and were represented also by certain occult schools, shall now be taken charge of in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic sense, so as to maintain a form of society which is generally thought to have been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

Two powers, especially, stand in opposition to each other: the power representing the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the power representing the new age. A great many people, of course, are instinctively supporters of the new age. Therefore the representatives of the old impulses, those of the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, must be yoked by artificial means to the forces which emanate from certain brotherhoods who are working for group-egotistic ends. The most effective principle for extending power over as many men as may be needed is to-day the principle of economic dependence. But that is only an instrument: the real thing is quite different. The real issue you can gather for yourselves from all the various hints I have given. The economic principle is connected with everything which seeks to enlist a great number of men all over the world as a kind of army in the service of these principles.

These are the powers which stand opposed to each other. And this indicates what it is that is really battling in the world to-day. In the West we have the principle which is really rooted in the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, but which passes unnoticed because it clothes itself in the phrases of revolution and democracy. It wears them as a mask and by this means strives to gain all possible power for itself. These endeavours are favoured if as many people as possible do not exert themselves to see things as they are, and in this field allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again by the illusion that to-day there is a war between the Entente and the powers of Central Europe.

In reality there is no such war; only by going behind this illusion can one get at the real struggle, but light can be thrown on it if it is approached along the lines which, for certain reasons, I only hint at. At least we should endeavour not to take illusions for realities: then gradually the illusion will be dispelled as far as it need be. Above all we must strive to see these things objectively, as they really are.

If you bring together all that I have been saying, you will see that an apparently casual remark I made in the course of these lectures was not so at all. When I quoted something that Mephistopheles said to Faust, “I see you know the Devil” (he would certainly not have said this to Woodrow Wilson), it was by no means a casual remark: it can throw a great deal of light on the present situation. We must really look at these things objectively, without sympathy or antipathy; above all, we must be able to see how much in a particular case depends on the setting and how much on the capacity of an individual, for behind an individual's capacity there often lies something quite different from what lies behind the setting. Ask yourselves without prejudice—how much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if it were not throned on the Presidency of the United States? Consider how it would be if this brain had a quite different setting: then its individual capacity would be revealed! The setting is what matters.

Let me now speak abstractly and radically, of course without discussing in detail the particular case I have mentioned—in a neutral country that would not be appropriate. If you take any individual brain, it can be revealing to ask whether it is worth something because it is illuminated and activated by a particular spiritual soul-force—whether it has the kind of spiritual significance I have been speaking of here—or whether it is worth no more than its weight, measured on a pair of scales.

In the eyes of people to-day, all this is grotesque; but what seems grotesque to them must come to seem obvious, if certain things are to be diverted from an unhealthy stream into a health-giving one. And what good is it to be always talking about them? You must come to see that there is no point in wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “how strong the striving for it is,” or of “the movement which aims at discovering and revealing the circulation of the life behind the senses,” and so on. All this does is to spread a mist over things which must be brought out clearly in the world, and should above all be carried as practical moral-ethical impulses into human life.

I can give you only indications. I leave you to build on them in your own meditations. I have been speaking aphoristically in many respects. But you will have the possibility of drawing a great deal out of the relationships shown in this picture of the Zodiac, if you truly use it as a subject for meditation.

When I tried in the last lecture to explain the influence exercised on man by the part of the Earth on which he as physical man develops, I had chiefly in mind to point out very distinctly that the whole Earth is an organism, an ensouled organism, permeated by spirit. For, as an organism has its separate, distinct differentiated members, each of which has a special task,—the arms have not the task of the legs, nor the heart that of the brain, and so on, if we consider the Earth as one whole, as an ensouled organism permeated by spirit, each part of the Earth has its own special task. The special task of the separate human organic members is perceptible in the form of these separate members. The arms are formed differently from the legs, the heart from the brain. This difference is not so marked as regards the Earth with respect to the physical. To an external materialistic geographer, who observes the separate continents or any other parts of the Earth arranged according to this or that point of view, it does not occur straight away that these different parts of the Earth have different sorts of activity; that only occurs to one who can, to a certain extent, grasp the nature of the psychic and spiritual element of the Earth. To understand this, really signifies rising concretely to the perception that the Earth is an ensouled, spiritual organism, and that man, living on Earth as physical man, is a member of this organism. All kinds of questions arise if one takes this into account, and he looks at the life of man as if it only ran its course once between birth and death, will not come to any very reasonable conclusions about them. For man, as physical man, can indeed only become a member of a particular part of the Earth. He would therefore be condemned to be quite specialized and differentiated by this particular part of the Earth, and would in a sense not be able to be in any way a complete whole, but only a part of the Earth's organism. On the other hand an important discovery results from this insight into the ensouled spiritualized part of the Earth; the discovery that the real deeper being of man, to which he says “I,” can in the real sense, only be connected indirectly with this differentiation of man over the Earth, that's the psycho-spiritual kernel of man's being in a sense only dwells in what is in us specialized through the peculiarity of the Earth. Thus man can obtain, from this very circumstance, the knowledge that his spiritual-psychic kernel cannot subsist in what immediately confronts us in man; that with which, in a sense, man confronts us, can only be the “dwelling place,” the dwelling place of man determined by virtue of the special circumstances of the Earth. I do not mention this because it might appear to those already acquainted with spiritual science as a very weighty truth; of course it cannot be that. But it is to show that a real searching into and pondering over the relationships of the Earth can lead man to build himself up in spiritual science, by this means, in a purely logical manner. For the belief that Spiritual Science can only be comprehensible to one who sees into the spiritual world, must be swept away as one of the most fatal prejudices. This is a prejudice which has over and over again to be taken into account. I might say, for the satisfaction of all the comfort-loving ones who, because they like to believe that they could never acquire clairvoyant cognition, would like to represent Spiritual Science chiefly as a kind of provisional arrangement, or as something which does not concern mankind at all, that in truth, comprehensive, penetrating thought can really understand the spiritually scientific. Only the thought must be really accurate and comprehensive! It must be prepared to relate the phenomena of life to what Spiritual Science confirms. He who brings what is within his grasp in the way of knowledge of the characteristic traits of the different nations of the Earth, and of the different inhabitants of the Earth, to bear upon what Spiritual Science says, will soon acknowledge that what was here explained in the last lecture is verified. We must really relate what life offers to this knowledge; we must be ready to test, free from prejudice, the teachings of Spiritual Science by the experience of life; then a reasonable penetration of the matter will lead to the acknowledgment of Spiritual Science.

It is very important to emphasize this at the present day. For we may say that traditions, containing many of the truths of Spiritual Science, are far more numerous than is usually believed. There is a certain opinion, however, which was fully justified up to the approach of the recent historical age—but which has also been propagated in our own times by many who possess Spiritual Scientific knowledge—the opinion that one should not communicate publicly certain deeper knowledge about life. I have often explained the reasons which people who know something of these things have, for thus withholding these communications, and I have also pointed out why these reasons no longer hold good at the present day. In a certain respect however these facts present a difficulty. For not only have we the opposition to Spiritual Science of by far the greatest part of mankind to contend with, but we also have to contend with the opinion of those who do know something;—the opinion that one who gives publicity to things which come from the fountain of Spiritual Science as one gives publicity to other truths, is wrong. Those who believe that the veil of secrecy over certain things must not be raised, will be healed of this error when they recognize the importance of what has been said, certainly in a somewhat scientific form, but clearly enough, it seems to me, in the foreword and introduction to my book “Riddles of Man.”

It is necessary to comprehend that the conception of truth and righteousness which most men still have today, will indeed have to be overcome. Most men have the idea: One thing is right—and another is wrong. But I must emphasize the fact over and over again, and have also done so more particularly in the preface to “Riddles of Man,” the man's separate view of things from one particular side is like a photograph of an object from one side only. If one photographs a tree, first from the one side and then another, the second picture is still a picture of the same tree, only it looks different. Now today, when men have become so very abstract, when they have become so accustomed to the theoretical, in spite of believing themselves to be men of reality, one view of a thing is reckoned as all-comprehensive, as comprising the whole reality. People believe that it is possible to express reality in thoughts—or in something else. They are particularly arrogant in this belief of being able to express the reality by means of thought. I mean the “arrogant” somewhat in the following sense. People say, “We today have the Copernican world-conception ... but with regard to the men who lived before Copernicus (this is not expressed so abruptly, but still they think it) they were all children (indeed we might say ‘duffers’), for they did not yet have the Copernican world-conception. That alone is correct, all the other world-conceptions are false.” This is an attitude which must be overcome. Even the Copernican world-conception is just one view, it is one definite way of making pictures, thoughts and ideas of things. Certainly there are men to-day, who oppose Spiritual Science as soon as they observe that it gives one a view, a real and regular view of a thing, by placing something else in opposition to it. No one will contest this who knows that there are different points of view about a thing. Today, however, many people wish for something else, something quite special, which may be compared somewhat to the person in the room saying: “When we have lighted up the room from one point and look at it from there, this gives only the view in perspective; it is not the reality; let us turn out the light and make the room quite dark and touch everything separately, then all who have thus touched the things will have the same opinion.” We all know that when we look at the room in the light, one who stands there has this view, and another who stands somewhere else has that view and so on. So today certain ideal of natural science would be to turn out the light and only ‘touch’ everything. Spiritual Science must certainly “turn the light” on to that. Thus the different points of view implies something surveyed from different places.

Now more especially by us should the effort be made to go about trying to form opinions from different points of view. This has already been striven after for many years. Many might object that the one contradicts the other, but that is precisely the essential thing, that in the above-mentioned sense one view should contradict another; for thereby we get an all-round view of a thing, which is what we want. But this is not at all easy, or people would prefer to have a little book, as slender as possible, in which a whole world-philosophy is tabulated. Or, if they wish to have world-philosophies discussed, they would like to have the same thing reeled off, over and over again. Of course this cannot be. Our printed cycles are increasing, are becoming more and more numerous, so that things may be illuminated from different sides, that we may obtain concepts and views from various sides, which only then give a complete picture of reality. We must certainly offend people in a certain respect (and what has just been said will make this comprehensible to you) if we have to repudiate more and more the accepted prejudices, by the truths of Spiritual Science. But chiefly when we thus ‘sin’ against the demand of certain occultists not to communicate important things publicly, we must speak about things which shock people, perhaps even anger and excite them; for these things, like many others, give offense for instance to all those who say that things can only be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’ Rather must we acquire the view that in the successive stages of the evolution of mankind there can never be a condition in which one can really say: “Now we have the absolute truth in regard to any particular matter for thought,” or: “We now know, what is absolute untruth.” There cannot be absolute truth or absolute truth. Searching great conceptions of life do not originate in order at last to give men what is ‘correct,’ so that they may now look arrogantly upon their forefathers as upon children; they spring up from very different reasons.

Let us call to mind something we all know. In the 15th century of our era, mankind entered the fifth cultural epoch of the Post-Atlantean development, which we call that of the “development of the human Consciousness or Spiritual Soul.” What especially appeared in the fifth cultural epoch began with the 15th century A.D. Till then it was the Intellectual or Rational Soul which, in the course of the cultural development of mankind was specially developed. In order then that the Spiritual Soul might arise, certain thoughts, certain kinds of concepts, took on a quite distinct character. Not because the Copernican world-philosophy is the absolutely correct one—I have affirmed often enough that it had to appear; and that in a certain respect it is the right one for us in accordance with the times. I shall declare again and again—not because it is the absolutely correct one did it appear, but because it serves the evolution of man, in that he can best attain the development of the Spiritual Soul if he allows the Copernican world-philosophy to enter his flesh and blood, if he reaches the point of being able to calculate certain constellations of stars through the Copernican world-philosophy, as has been done in more recent times.

What is then really good in the Copernican world-philosophy? Not that at last it has told us the truth in contradistinction to the ‘untruth’ of former centuries, but that it erected a spiritual wall between Earth and Heaven, between the physical world and the spiritual world. Of course this appears frightfully paradoxical, something which excites opposition as a matter of course among those who have the above-mentioned prejudices. But it is true that man has begun to conceive the circumference, a cosmic circumference of the Earth in the Copernican manner, in that by transferring the Copernican conceptions into the circumference of the Earth, he has constructed this spiritual wall which he cannot get through. He is cut off from the spiritual thereby, and can remain with his concepts limited to the environs of the Earth, and there he develops the Spiritual Soul. Thus, in order that man should limit himself as ‘egotistically’ as possible to what is earthly, the Copernican world-philosophy, which erects its virtual wall around the Earth, fell to his lot. The more completely the Copernican world-philosophy is developed, the more certain is it that, through external perception, man is cut off from the spiritual world; but it also becomes the more necessary that he should again through inner perception, and by animating his inner life, find the connection with the spiritual. Remarkable things, very remarkable things run parallel. When such things are uttered, it is rather difficult to follow them, but if in the whole wide world there are none but the anthroposophists to understand them, they must take all the more trouble to do so.

There exists today a something like a “Theory of Knowledge;” that particular philosophical science which is based on Kant is called “Theory of Knowledge.” Yet this theory of knowledge is really—one might say—a nail in the coffin of human knowledge. Take a main thought about the ordinary theory of knowledge which as a rule runs in the minds of people today. It is said: Over there is an object: but what is out there is really only the vibration of ether, it has nothing to do with color or sound but is the movement of the smallest particles in space. The air moves out there, soundless; these concussions of the air approach our ear,—Schopenhauer spoke somewhat disrespectfully of the theory of knowledge, he said that these concussions ‘drum’ on the ear—and afterwards become what we call ‘sound.’ All is silent without, there are merely ‘concussions’ in the air. Then there are waves of ether outside. They strike upon the eye. But the matter does not end there; the waves strike upon the eye and the image is produced on the retina. Man knows nothing of this image, however, until it is investigated by science. The processes continue further with the optic nerve. These can only be of a material nature however; they go as far as the membrane covering the brain and there a quite mysterious process takes place. Then the soul comes in to make a concept of what is outside, of what is ‘dark and silent,’ a shining and colored concept, a warm and cold concept and so on; it creates the objects there within itself, and ‘dreams’ the whole world.

It is very remarkable that that is the road along which the Theory of Knowledge would penetrate from the external material world to the human spirit. But what is really the substance of this Theory of Knowledge? It is strange: if one remains at the things which have sound and color (the Theory of Knowledge calls what uneducated people believe ‘simple realism’), then at least one has a resounding and a colored world. But now, through the Theory of Knowledge, one brings this world for example before one's eyes. One has the image on the retina; within one has only the continuation of the image in the workings on the optic nerve; in the cerebrum there is nothing of the outer world, but the inner being charms forth the whole world again from the ‘vibrations.’ This makes one feel it is Baron Münchhausen again drawing himself up by his own tuft of hair! First, everything is eliminated and one has nothing left but brain-vibrations; and afterwards the soul recreates the outer world which has first been put away; then like Münchhausen, one lays hold of oneself by one's own tuft of hair and draws oneself up. But this is ‘basic philosophical knowledge,’ anyone who has not this, does not stand at the height of present-day knowledge.

If we try to follow up the whole diversified world as far as man himself, what have we finally? The processes in the membrane covering the cerebrum are not nearly as complicated as those in the optic nerve; they are the simplest of all. If we investigate how the world is in man we come to something extremely simple. We look for the spirit, but yet only come to a spirit which ‘dreams’ the world. There we must make a leap for so far no one has succeeded in distilling the spirit. In the quest of the spirit we come first to the brain vibrations, and we must then make something, which is nothing. This is the method science has followed in order to get to the spirit from the external sense-world.

On the earth we have many different conditions of life, and of life-influences, before the manifold variety of which we stand in respect and awe. Then we observe the difference in human beings in the different parts of the world—no matter whether the individual human characters are sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—if we consider the differentiations in mankind, we find that it is really as diversified as the sense-world outside is in its relation to man. In that bygone period in which the so-called childish ‘duffers’ lived, men try to understand the multiplicity of the Earth by rising to Heaven, by rising from the sensible to the spiritual. This they no longer do today. As we ascend farther and farther away from the diversified Earth, we have the same feeling as if we were coming from the external sense-world to the human Spirit through the eye and the brain; we come to what Copernicanism represents to us as the great Spiritual Cosmos. Just as the physiological theory of knowledge adopted the method of erecting a barrier in the vibrations of the brain in order to avoid coming to the human soul by way of the outer world, so in the same way does Copernicanism board up the world spiritually in the direction of the spiritual world. If we wish to realize the value of a world-conception we must know the point of view from which it is conceived. The point of view of Copernicanism does not pretend to place the true in the place of the false, once and for all; but it ‘boards up the world with planks’ so that man shall cultivate his consciousness soul within this ‘earthly tenement.’ This is the secret of the matter. We must look at these things in cold blood and with energy. We must first be able to shatter in our own selves that on which the easy-going people, who accept the world-philosophies of today, believe themselves to stand so firmly. As long as we are not able to shatter this in ourselves, as long as we are not able to see that really through Copernicanism the world is ‘boarded up with planks’—so long shall we not reach the point of acquiring a relationship to Spiritual Science, for which many things are necessary.

Just imagine for a moment what the Cosmos consists of, apart from the Earth. According to the Copernican world-conception, it is a calculation! It can never be that to Spiritual Science but something that presents itself to spiritual cognition. Why have we a geology which believes that the Earth has only evolved from the purely mineral world? Because the Copernican world-conception has to produce the present-day materialistic geology. For it has nothing in itself which could prove that the Earth, from the point of view of the Cosmos or spiritual world, might be conceived as an ensouled, spiritualized being. A universe as conceived by Copernicus could only be a dead Earth! An animated ensouled and spiritualized Earth must be conceived as coming from a different Cosmos, really from quite another Cosmos from that of Copernicus. But of course one can only mention a few features of the Earth's being, as it appears when viewed from the Cosmos

Is it a quite unreal conception to imagine the Earth's being as coming from the Cosmos? It is no unreal conception, it is a very ‘real’ one. A conception which, for example, once existed in the imagination of Herman Grimm, but he excused himself immediately after having written it. In an essay written in 1858 he says: “One might imagine—(but he immediately adds: I am not presenting an article of faith, this is only a fancy picture)—that when the soul of man is freed from the body it moves around the Earth freely in the Cosmos and that in this free movement it would observe the Earth from the outside; what happens on the Earth would then appear to man in quite another light.” That was the fancy of Hermann Grimm.‘Man would become acquainted with all occurrences from a different point of view. For instance he would look into the human heart “as into a glass beehive.’ The thoughts arising in the human heart would spring up as from a glass bee-hive!” That is a fine picture. And he pictured further that this man who had hovered around the Earth for a time, and had looked at it from the outside, now reincarnated on the Earth. He would have a Father and Mother, a Fatherland and everything usual on the Earth, and would have to forget everything he had experienced from another point of view. And if he were perhaps an historian in the sense of today (Hermann Grimm is here describing from a subjective point of view) he could not then do otherwise then forget what went before, for one cannot write history with the other concepts.

This is a fancy which comes very close to the truth. For it is absolutely true that the human soul between death and rebirth is, as it were, floating around the Earth, and—as I have often depicted—conditioned by karmic relations, it looks down upon the Earth. The soul that has altogether the feeling that this Earth is an ensouled and spiritualized organism—and the prejudice that considers it as something without soul, something purely geological, ceases. And then the Earth becomes very greatly differentiated; to man's perception between death and rebirth it becomes so differentiated that in fact the East looks different from the American West. It is not possible to speak about the Earth to the dead, as one would to geologists; for the dead do not understand the geological conceptions. But they know that looking down from cosmic space at the East—from Asia across into Russia—the Earth appears as if covered with a bluey sheen; blue or bluish-mauve. Thus does that side of the Earth appear, seen from cosmic space. When we come towards the Western Hemisphere, to the American side, it then appears as more or less a fiery red. There we have a polarity of the Earth, as seen from the Cosmos. Of course the Copernican world-conception cannot of itself give this; but it is another perception, from a different point of view. It will be comprehensible to anyone who has this point of view, that this Earth, this ensouled Earth-organism, appears different in its Eeastern half from its Western half, when viewed from outside. In its Eastern half it has a blue covering, in its Western it has something like a flashing-forth from within outwards; hence the fiery red seen externally. Here you have one example by which man between death and rebirth can direct himself by what he then learns. He learns to know the configuration of the Earth, it's a different appearance when seen from the Cosmos and the spiritual world; he learns to realize that on one side it is bluish-violet, on the other fiery red. And in accordance always with the spiritual needs which he will develop from his karma, this knowledge decides for him where he will reincarnate. Of course one must imagine things as being much more complicated than this; but from such conditions does man between death and rebirth, develop the forces which occasion him to reincarnate in a child body having a certain inheritance.

I have only mentioned two modifications of color, but there are of course other modifications besides those of color, many others. For the present I will only mention that in the center between the East and the West, for example, in our regions, the Earth is more of a green shade when seen from outside. So that this gives us a three-foldness which can throw a deal of light on the way in which man can determine, by what he beholds between death and rebirth, whether he is to appear in the East or West or elsewhere on the Earth.

If we bear this in mind we shall gradually gain the idea that in the relations between the man incarnated here in the physical body and the discarnate man, certain things come into play which, for the most part, are not taken into consideration at all. If we go into a foreign land and wish to understand the people, we must learn their language. If we wish to understand the dead you must gradually acquire the language of the dead. But this is at the same time the language of Spiritual Science, for it is spoken by all the so-called living and all of the so-called dead. It is this which passes to and fro between us and the beyond. It is particularly important to acquire pictures such as these of the universe, and not mere abstract concepts. We get a picture of the Earth if we imagine a sphere hovering in space, on the one side glowing bluish-mauve, on the other burning a flashing reddish-yellow, and between these a green zone. Pictorial representations gradually carry man over into the spiritual world. That is the point. One is of course obliged to set up pictorial representations when speaking seriously of the spiritual world, and it is further necessary not merely to think of such pictorial representations as a sort of fiction, but to make something out of them. Let us once again recall the bluish-violet glimmering Orient and the reddish-yellow flashing Occident. Here various differentiations come in. When a dead person in our present era observe certain places, then from the place which here on Earth is known as Palestine, as Jerusalem, something with a golden form, a golden crystal form, is to be seen in the middle of the bluish-mauve color and this becomes animated. That is the Jerusalem as seen from the spirit! This it is which also in the Apocalypse (speaking of imaginative conceptions) figures as the heavenly Jerusalem. These are not ‘thought-out’ things, they are things which can be observed, seen spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha appeared like what physical observation precedes when the astronomer directs his telescope to space and beholds something which fills him with wonder like, for example the flashing-up of new stars. Seen spiritually, from the Universe, the Event of Golgotha was the flashing-up of a star of gold in the blue aura of the Eastern half of the Earth. Here you have the Imagination for what I developed at the close of my lecture the day before yesterday. It is really a question of acquiring, by means of such Imaginations, ideas of the Universe which bring the human soul into union with the Spirit of the Universe.

Try to think with someone who has passed over, of the crystal form of the heavenly Jerusalem building itself up into golden splendor in the bluish-violet aura of the Earth, and that will bring you near to him; for that is something which belongs to the realm of the Imaginations into which she entered at death: “Out of God we are born, and in Christ we die.”

There are means by which we can shut ourselves off from the spiritual reality and there are means by which we can draw near to it. We can shut ourselves off from spiritual reality by trying to ‘calculate’ it. Certainly mathematics do belong to the realm of the spirit, pure spirit; but in their application to physical reality they are the means of cutting us off from the spiritual. In so far as you calculate, just so far do you cut yourself off from the spirit. Kant once said: “There is just the same amount of science in the world as there is mathematics.” But one might also say, from the other point of view, which is equally justifiable, that there is darkness in the world to the same degree as man has succeeded in judging the world by means of calculation. We approached the spiritual life when we press on from external perception, and particularly from abstract concepts, towards Imaginations, to pictorial ideas. Copernicus has led man to calculate the universe; the opposite perception must lead men once more again to picture the universe, to imagine a universe with which the human soul can identify itself, so that the Earth appears as an organism shining into the universe, blue-violet, with the heavenly Jerusalem radiating golden light on the one side, and the yellowish-red flashing on the other side.

Whence comes the blue-violet on the one side of the Earth-aura? When one sees this side of the Earth-sphere, the physical part of the Earth disappears from external view, the aura of light becomes transparent, and the dark part of the Earth disappears. This creates the blue which penetrates through. You can explain the phenomenon from Goethe's theory of color. But because in the Western Hemisphere the inner part of the Earth flashes up—flashes up anyway which verifies what I described the day before yesterday: namely, that in America man is determined by the subterranean element, by what is under the Earth—for that reason the inner part of the Earth rays out and flashes like a red-yellow shimmer, like a reddish-yellow sparkling fire radiating into the Cosmos. This is only meant to be a picture sketched in quite fine outlines, but it should show you that it is indeed possible to speak, not merely in ordinary abstract thoughts, but in very, very concrete concepts about the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Finally, all this is adapted to prepare our souls to obtain a connection with the spiritual world, with the higher Hierarchies; with that world in which man lives between death and rebirth. But I intend to speak specially about this tomorrow; today I should only like to mention just one other thing.

The present era of human evolution, the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, which exists for the development of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul, contains manifold secrets. One of these is especially well guarded by those who believe that such truths should not yet be communicated to the humanity of to-day. This again is somewhat difficult. But since in the whole wide world there is no one else inclined to receive such things, you must really condescend to recognize them. In the course of this culture epoch, which began in the 15th century of our era, a remarkable longing began to make itself felt in men, along which lives chiefly in the subconsciousness, but must ever more and more be brought up into consciousness. This longing proceeds from a very definite cause.

I have often said that man is a twofold being. He is a being composed of many more than two parts; but particularly he is a twofold being, and consists as such as head and the rest of the body. The head is in particular that to which we should apply the Darwinian theory, the head is that which can be traced back to animal forms. During the Old Moon period man had animal forms, not those of the present animal kingdom, but a more spiritual, etherical animal form. This has hardened into the human head, and now, when animals on the Earth are developing as they are, man is not developing under the same conditions as were suitable for the head, for that he has inherited; but, according to the requirements of the rest of his body. This however does not descend from the animals. The head descends from the animals, but only from the etheric animals. We therefore carry an animal nature in our head, but it is an etheric animality. That entered men's unconscious nature in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They noticed more and more that there is something of the animal in man, but they could no longer think of it as anything spiritual. They got it into their heads that man must have ‘animal’ feelings, and this culminated in the Darwinian theory of the descent of man from the animal. This was not only expressed in the Darwinian doctrine of descent. The animal has a different perception from man; it stands in a more intimate connection with things than does man. Man is the superior being of the Earth just because he has cut himself off from the things so as to be obliged to build a bridge again from himself to them. The animal experiences the outer world much more inwardly than does man; if it were philosophically inclined it would not speak of ‘boundaries of knowledge,’ because there are no boundaries to knowledge for the animal such as those of which man speaks; these only exist because of the higher organization of man. The animal feels in a sense the whole universe within it through its group-soul; it has no boundaries of knowledge, knows nothing of them. Man began to feel more and more that he carries an animal within him. He did not wish to conceive this relation spiritually, supersensibly, etherically; he thought man was related to the animals physically. He then wanted to have a knowledge subconsciously, such as the animal has. He was however obliged to prove that he could not have that. The animal lives with the ‘thing in itself.’ The ‘thing in itself’ is unknown to man, when he says: “I should really like to be an animal, I should like to be as well off as the animal, but I cannot be as well off.” To affirm a ‘thing in itself’ which limits our knowledge, proceeds from the longing of man to feel himself animal, while he yet knows that he cannot have such a knowledge as the animal. This is the secret of Kantism. What can be said of the boundaries of knowledge is intimately connected with the impulse of modern humanity towards the consciousness of the animal. The Ancients knew that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge; for that reason they considered it good fortune to understand, for example, the language of the animals. You all know the fable connected with this.

That is one thing which the Ancients knew: that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge, in the sense in which man has them in modern times. But they knew something else as well: they knew that the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels are free beings, beings with freedom of will. And they knew that man is on the way to become an Angel. When the Earth shall have completed the Jupiter-stage man will have reached the stage of the Angel. He is now on the way to freedom. Freedom is developing within him. But what is left for the epoch which is gradually appearing with the evolution of the Spiritual Soul, if mankind turns away from his evolution to the stage of the Angels? There remains only the thought: freedom is an illusion! Man, in respect to his activity, is subject to the necessities of nature. To the degree in which boundaries of knowledge are erected does man turn away from his development to freedom. This is intimately connected with what has appeared—only in a coarser way—in the declaration of the descent of man from the animals; whereas in reality man has a very complicated descent, as I have often explained.

Today I have burdened you with some of the more difficult concepts. But they were necessary, and tomorrow we shall be able to speak principally on the connection between the present earthly life in the physical body and the life between death and rebirth, from a certain point of view. The concepts will then not be so difficult; but what you were so good as to listen to today in respect to more difficult concepts will help you tomorrow in regard to others.