The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] There is much talk nowadays about the fruitful development of natural science in the nineteenth century. I believe that one can rightfully speak of significant natural-scientific experiences that one has had, and of a transformation of our practical life by these experiences. But with respect to the basic mental pictures by which the modern view of nature seeks to understand the world of experience, these I consider to be unhealthy and, to an energetic thinking, inadequate. I have already expressed myself on this subject on page 201 ff. of this book. Quite recently a well-known scientist of the present day, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, has expressed the same view.⁷⁷ He says: “When asked how he thinks the world to be ‘inwardly’ constituted, every scientifically-thinking person, from the mathematician to the practical physician, will summarize his view in the direction that the things are composed of moving ‘atoms,’ and that these atoms, and the forces working between them, are the ultimate realities of which the individual phenomena consist. In hundreds of repetitions one can hear and read this statement, to the effect that no other understanding of the physical world can be found except by tracing it back to a ‘mechanics of atoms;’ matter and motion seem to be the ultimate concepts to which the manifoldness of the natural phenomena must be related. One can call this view scientific materialism.” On page 201 ff. of this book I have said that the basic views of modern physics are untenable. Ostwald (on page six of his lecture) says the same thing in the following words: “that this mechanistic world view does not fulfill the purpose for which it was developed; that it comes into contradiction with undoubted and universally known and recognized truths.” The agreement between Ostwald's expositions and my own goes still further. I say on page 214 of this book: “The sense-perceptible world picture is the sum total of metamorphosing perceptual contents without an underlying matter.” Ostwald says (p. 12 ff.): “But when we reflect upon the fact that everything we know about a particular substance is a knowledge of its characteristics, we then see that it is not very far from pure nonsense to assert that a particular substance is indeed present but no longer has any of its characteristics. In fact, this purely formal assumption serves only to unite the general facts of chemical processes, especially the stoichiometric laws of mass, with the arbitrary concept of a matter that in itself is unchanged.” And on page 199 of this book appears the statement: “It is these considerations that compelled me to reject as impossible any theory of nature that in a principle way goes beyond the realm of the perceived world, and to seek the sole object of natural science exclusively within the sense world.” I find the same thing expressed in Ostwald's lecture on page 25 and 22: “What do we experience then of the physical world? Obviously only that which our sense instruments allow to come to us from it.” “The task of science is to bring realities, demonstrable and measurable magnitudes, into a definite relationship to each other, in such a way that when certain realities are given the others can be deduced; and this task cannot be accomplished by basing things on some hypothetical picture or other, but only by demonstrating the reciprocal relationships of dependency between measurable magnitudes.” If one disregards the fact that Ostwald is speaking in the sense of a natural scientist of the present day and therefore sees in the sense world nothing other than demonstrable and measurable magnitudes, then his view corresponds entirely with mine, in the way I have expressed it, for example, in the statement p. 234): “Thinking consideration must encompass what is perceptible ... and must seek the interrelationships within this area.”

[ 2 ] In my discussion of Goethe's colour theory, I have carried on the same battle against the basic mental pictures of present-day natural science as Professor Ostwald does in his lecture “The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism.” What I have put in the place of these basic mental pictures does not, to be sure, agree with what Ostwald has set up. For, as I will show later on, he takes his start from the same superficial presuppositions as do his opponents, the adherents of scientific materialism. I have also shown that the basic mental pictures of the modern view of nature are the cause of the unhealthy judgments that were, and continue to be, passed on Goethe's colour theory.

[ 3 ] I would now like to deal somewhat more exactly with the modern view of nature. I will seek to know, from the goal that this modern view of nature sets itself, whether this view is a healthy one or not.

[ 4 ] It is not without justification that one has seen in the following words of Descartes the basic formula by which the modern view of nature judges the world of perceptions: “When I examine corporeal things more closely, I find that very little is contained in them that I can understand clearly and definitely, except: magnitude, or extension in length, depth, and breadth; shape, that results from the limits of this extension; location, that the variously shaped bodies have relative to each other; and motion, or change in this location; to which one may add substance, duration, and number. As for other things—such as light, colors, sounds, odors, sensations of taste, warmth, cold and the other qualities that the sense of touch experiences (smoothness, roughness)—they arise within my spirit in such an obscure and confused way that I do not know whether they are true or false, i.e., whether the ideas that I grasp of these objects are in fact the ideas of some real things or other, or whether they represent only chimerical entities that cannot exist.” The adherents of the modern view of nature have become so habituated to thinking along the lines of this statement of Descartes that they find every other way of thinking to be scarcely worthy of their attention. They say: What is perceived as light is caused by a process of motion that can be expressed in a mathematical formula. When a colour arises in the phenomenal world, they trace it back to an oscillating motion and calculate the number of oscillations in a specified time. They believe that the entire sense world will be explained when they have succeeded in tracing all perceptions back to relationships that can be expressed in such mathematical formulas. A mind that could give such an explanation would, according to the view of these natural scientists, have attained the utmost that is possible for man with respect to knowledge of natural phenomena. Du Bois-Reymond, a representative of these learned men, says of such a mind: for it, “the hairs of our heads would be numbered, and not a sparrow would fall to earth without its knowledge.” (Limits to Knowing Nature)⁷⁸ To make the world into a mathematical problem is the ideal of the modern view of nature.

[ 5 ] Since, without the presence of forces, the parts of their assumed matter would never come into motion, modern scholars of nature also include force among the elements by which they explain the world; and Du Bois-Reymond says: “Knowing nature is a tracing back of changes within the corporeal world to the motion of atoms that is caused by the atoms central forces that are independent of time; or, in other words, knowing nature is a breaking down of nature processes into the mechanics of atoms.” Through the introduction of the concept of force, mathematics passes over into mechanics.

Today's philosophers stand so much under the influence of nature scholars that they have lost all courage to think for themselves. They accept without reservation what nature scholars set up. One of the most respected German philosophers, W. Wundt, says in his Logic: “With reference to ... and in the employment of the basic proposition—that because of the qualitative changelessness of matter, all natural processes are, in the last analysis, motion—one regards the goal of physics to be its complete transference into ... applied mechanics.”

[ 6 ] Du Bois-Reymond finds that: “It is a psychological fact of experience that, where such a breaking down (of natural processes into a mechanics of the atoms) succeeds, our need for causality feels itself satisfied for the time being.” That may be a fact of experience for Du Bois-Reymond. But it must be stated that there are other human beings as well who absolutely do not feel themselves satisfied by a banal explanation of the corporeal world such as Du Bois-Reymond has in mind.

[ 7 ] Goethe belongs to these other human beings. Someone whose need for causality is satisfied when he has succeeded in tracing the processes of nature back to the mechanics of atoms lacks the organ by which to understand Goethe.

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[ 8 ] Magnitude, shape, location, motion, force, etc., are perceptions in exactly the same sense as light, colors, sounds, odors, sensations of taste, warmth, cold, etc. Someone who isolates the magnitude of a thing from its other characteristics and looks at it by itself no longer has to do with a real thing, but only with an abstraction of the intellect. It is the most nonsensical thing imaginable to ascribe a different degree of reality to an abstraction drawn from sense perception than to a thing of sense perception itself. Spatial and temporal relationships have no advantage over other sense perceptions save their greater simplicity and surveyability. It is upon this simplicity and surveyability that the certainty of the mathematical sciences rests. When the modern view of nature traces all the processes of the corporeal world back to something that can be expressed mathematically and mechanically, it does so because the mathematical and the mechanical are easy and comfortable for our thinking to deal with. And human thinking does have an inclination toward being comfortable. One can see that precisely in the above-mentioned lecture of Ostwald. This nature scholar wants to set energy in the place of matter and force. Note what he says: “What is the determining factor needed for one of our (sense) instruments to become active? No matter how we look at this, we find no common element except that the sense instruments react to differences in energy between themselves and their environment. In a world whose temperature were everywhere the same as our body's, we would in no way be able to experience any warmth, just as we have no sensation at all of the constant atmospheric pressure under which we live; only when we establish spaces with different pressures, do we arrive at any knowledge of this pressure.” (p. 25f. of his lecture) And furthermore (p. 29): “Imagine that you were struck by a stick! What would you feel then, the stick or its energy? There can be only one answer: its energy. For a stick is the most harmless thing in the world as long as it is not swung. But we can also hit against a motionless stick! Quite right; but as we have already emphasized, what we feel are differences in states of energy against our sense apparatus, and it therefore makes no difference whether the stick strikes us or we hit against the stick. But if we both have the same velocity and are moving in the same direction, then the stick no longer exists for our sensation, because it cannot come into contact with us and effect an exchange of energy.” These statements prove that Ostwald isolates energy from the realm of the world of perceptions, i.e., abstracts it from everything that is not energy. He traces everything perceptible back to one single characteristic of the perceptible, to the manifestation of energy—to an abstract concept, therefore. Ostwald's entanglement in the natural-scientific habits of the present day is clearly recognizable. If asked, he could also not offer anything more in justification of his procedure than that it is a psychological fact of experience, that his need for causality is satisfied when he has broken down the processes of nature into manifestations of energy. Essentially it makes no difference whether Du Bois Reymond breaks down the processes of nature into a mechanics of atoms or Ostwald breaks them down into manifestations of energy. Both spring from human thinking's inclination toward being comfortable.

[ 9 ] Ostwald says at the end of his lecture (p. 34): “Is energy, as necessary and useful as it might be for understanding nature, also sufficient for this purpose (of explaining the corporeal world, namely)? Or are there phenomena which cannot be completely described by the laws of energy we know so far? ... I believe that I cannot meet the responsibility I have assumed toward you today through my presentation, better than by emphasizing that the answer to this question is no. As immense as the advantages are that the energistic world view has over the mechanistic or materialistic one, still several points can already be indicated today, it seems to me, that are not covered by the known main principles of energistics and that therefore point to the existence of principles that transcend them. Energistics will continue side by side with these new principles. But in the future it will not, as we must still regard it today, be the most comprehensive principle for mastering natural phenomena, but presumably will appear as a particular case of still more general conditions, of whose form, to be sure, we hardly have an inkling today.”

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[ 10 ] If our nature scholars also read the books of people outside of their guild, Professor Ostwald would not have been able to make a statement like this. For in 1891, in the previously mentioned introduction to the Goethean colour theory, I have already expressed how we in fact do have an inkling and more than an inkling of such “forms,” and that the task of natural science in the future lies in the developing of Goethe's basic natural-scientific conceptions.

[ 11 ] Just as little as the processes of the corporeal world can be “broken down” into a mechanics of atoms, so just as little into states of energy. Nothing further is achieved by this approach than that attention is diverted from the content of the real sense world and directed toward an unreal abstraction, whose meager fund of characteristics, after all, is also only drawn from the same sense world. One cannot explain one group of characteristics of the sense world—light, colors, sounds, odors, tastes, warmth conditions, etc.—by “breaking them down” into another group of characteristics of the same sense world: magnitude, shape, location, number, energy, etc. The task of natural science cannot be to “break down” one kind of characteristics into another kind, but rather to seek out the relationships and connections between the perceptible characteristics of the sense world. We then discover certain determining factors according to which one sense perception necessarily follows from the other. We find that a more intimate relationship exists between certain phenomena than between others. We then no longer connect phenomena in the way they present themselves to chance observation. For we recognize that certain relationships of phenomena are necessary ones. Other relationships, in contrast to them, are coincidental. Goethe calls the necessary relationships between phenomena “archetypal phenomena.”

[ 12] The expression of an archetypal phenomenon consists in the statement about a particular sense perception that it necessarily calls forth another one. This expression is what one calls a law of nature. When one says, “through heating, a body is expanded,” one has given expression to a necessary relationship between phenomena of the sense world (warmth, expansion). One has recognized an archetypal phenomenon and expressed it in the form of a natural law. Archetypal phenomena are the forms Ostwald sought for the most general relationships of inorganic nature.

[ 13 ] The laws of mathematics and mechanics are also only expressions of archetypal phenomena like the laws that bring other sense-perceptible relationships into a formula. When G. Kirchhoff says that the task of mechanics is “to describe, completely and in the most simple way, the motions occurring in nature,” he is mistaken. Mechanics does not describe the motions occurring in nature merely in the simplest way and completely, but rather seeks certain necessary processes of motion that it lifts out of the sum total of the motions occurring in nature, and sets forth these necessary processes of motion as fundamental laws of mechanics. It must be regarded as the height of thoughtlessness that this statement of Kirchhoff is brought forward again and again as something quite significant, without any feeling for the fact that the statement of the simplest basic law of mechanics refutes it.

[ 14 ] The archetypal phenomenon represents a necessary relationship between the elements of the perceptual world. One could hardly say something wider of the mark than what H. Helmholtz presented in his address to the Weimar Goethe Conference on June 11, 1892: “It is a pity that Goethe, at that time, did not know the undulation theory of light that Huyghens had already presented; this would have provided him with a far more correct and surveyable ‘archetypal phenomenon’ than the scarcely adequate and very complicated process that he finally chose to this end in the colors of turbid mediums.”⁷⁹

[ 15 ] So, the unperceivable undulating motions that the adherents of the modern view of nature have thought up and added to the phenomena of light would supposedly have provided Goethe with a far more correct and surveyable “archetypal phenomenon” than the process—that is not at all complicated, but rather plays itself out before our very eyes—which consists in the fact that light, seen through a turbid medium, appears yellow and darkness, seen through an illuminated medium, appears blue. The “breaking down” of sense-perceptible processes into unperceivable mechanical motion has become so habitual to modern physicists that they seem to have no inkling at all of the fact that they are setting an abstraction in the place of reality. Statements like that of Helmholtz can be made only when all of Goethe's statements like the following have first been eliminated from the world: “The highest would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the heavens reveals to us the basic law of the science of colors. Only do not seek anything behind the phenomena; they are themselves the teaching.” Goethe remains within the phenomenal world; modern physicists gather up a few scraps from the phenomenal world and transfer them behind the phenomena, in order then to derive the phenomena of really perceptible experience from these hypothetical realities.

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[ 16 ] Individual younger physicists maintain that they do not attach to the concept of moving matter any significance transcending experience. One of these, Anton Lampa, Nights of the Seeker⁸⁰ who accomplishes the remarkable feat of being an adherent of mechanistic natural science and of Indian mysticism at the same time, states, in opposition to Ostwald's expositions, that the latter is “waging a battle with wind mills like the brave Don Quixote of yore. Where then is the giant of scientific (Ostwald means natural-scientific) materialism? There is no such thing. There was at one time a so-called natural-scientific materialism of Messieurs Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott—in fact there still is—but this does not exist in natural science itself, and has also never been at home in natural science. Ostwald overlooked this fact, otherwise he would have taken the field merely against the mechanistic view, which because of this misunderstanding, he only does incidentally, but which, without this misunderstanding, he would probably not have done at all. Can one believe then that an investigation in nature following the paths opened by Kirchhoff can grasp the concept of matter in the sense that materialism has done so? That is impossible; that is a contradiction lying clearly open to view. The concept of matter, just like that of force, can only have a meaning precisely determined by the demand for a simplest possible description, i.e., expressed in the Kantian way; it can only have a merely empirical meaning. And if any natural scientist attaches to the word “matter” a meaning that goes beyond this, then he does so, not as a natural scientist, but rather as a materialistic philosopher.” (Die Zeit, Vienna, Nr. 61, Nov. 30, 1895).

[ 17 ] According to these words, Lampa must be characterized as typical of the normal natural scientist of the present day. He applies the mechanistic explanation of nature because it is comfortable to deal with. But he avoids thinking about the true character of this explanation of nature, because he fears getting tangled up in contradictions before which his thinking feels inadequate.

[ 18 ] How can someone who loves clear thinking attach any meaning to the concept of matter without going beyond the world of experience? Within the world of experience there are objects of certain magnitude and location; there are motion and forces; furthermore there are the phenomena of light, colour, warmth, electricity, life, etc. As to whether magnitude, warmth, colour, etc., are attached to some matter, experience says nothing. Matter is nowhere to be found within the world of experience. Whoever wants to think matter must think it up and add it to experience.

[ 19 ] This kind of a thinking up of matter and adding it to the phenomena of the world of experience is apparent in the physical and physiological reflections that have found a home in modern natural science under the influence of Kant and Johannes Müller. These reflections have led to the belief that the outer processes that allow sound to arise in the ear, light in the eye, warmth in the sense for warmth, etc., have nothing in common with the sensations of sound, of light, of warmth, etc. Rather, these outer processes, supposedly, are certain motions of matter. The researcher of nature then investigates what sort of outer processes of motion allow sound, light, colour, etc., to arise in the human soul. He comes to the conclusion that, outside of the human organism, red, yellow, or blue are nowhere to be found in all of world space, but rather that there is only a wave-like motion of a fine elastic matter, the ether, which, when it is sensed by the eye presents itself as red, yellow, or blue. The modern teacher about nature believes that if no sensitive eye were present, then there would also be no colour present, but rather only moving ether. The ether is supposedly what is objective, and the colour is merely something subjective, something created within the human body. The Leipzig professor Wundt, whom one sometimes hears acclaimed as one of the greatest philosophers of the present day, says therefore about matter that it is a substratum “which never becomes visible to us itself; but always only in its effects.” And he finds that “an explanation of phenomena that is free of contradictions will be achieved only” when one assumes such a substratum (Logic, Vol. 2, p. 445). The Cartesian delusion about definite and confused mental pictures has become physics' fundamental way of picturing things.

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[ 20 ] Someone whose ability to picture things has not been thoroughly ruined by Descartes, Locke, Kant, and modern physiology will never understand how one can regard light, colour, sound, warmth, etc., to be merely subjective states of the human organism and yet still assert that there is an objective world of processes outside of this organism. Someone who makes the human organism into the creator of the happenings of sound, warmth, colour, etc., must also make it the producer of extension, magnitude, location, motion, forces, etc. For, these mathematical and mechanistic qualities are, in reality, inseparably united with the rest of the content of the world of experience. The separating out of conditions of space, number, and motion, as well as manifestations of force, from the qualities of warmth, sound, colour, and the other sense qualities, is only a function of our abstractive thinking. The laws of mathematics and mechanics relate to abstract objects and processes that are drawn from the world of experience and that therefore can find an application only within the world of experience. But if the mathematical and mechanistic forms and relationships are also explained as merely subjective states, then nothing remains that could serve as content for the concept of objective things and events. And no phenomena can be derived from an empty concept.

[ 21 ] As long as modern scholars of nature and their train bearers, the modern philosophers, hold fast to the view that sense perceptions are only subjective states that are called forth by objective processes, a healthy thinking will always point out to them in reply that they are either playing with empty concepts, or are ascribing to what is objective a content that they are borrowing from that world of experience which they have declared to be subjective. In a number of books, I have demonstrated the absurdity of the assertion that our sense impressions are subjective.⁸¹

[ 22 ] Still, let us turn from the question as to whether or not a different form of reality is ascribed to the processes of motion and to the forces that bring them forth—from which recent physics derives all the phenomena of nature—than to sense perceptions. Let me now merely ask what the mathematical-mechanistic view of nature can accomplish. Anton Lampa maintains (Nights of the Seeker, p. 92): “Mathematical methods and mathematics are not identical, for the mathematical method is applicable without the use of mathematics. The experimental research on electricity by Faraday, who hardly knew how to square a binomial, offers us a classic proof of this fact in physics. Mathematics, in fact, is nothing more than a means of abbreviating logical operations and therefore of proceeding in very complicated cases where ordinary logical thinking would let us down. But at the same time it accomplishes far more still: through the fact that every formula implicitly expresses its processes of development, it builds a living bridge back to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point for the investigation. A method, however, that cannot make use of mathematics—which is always the case when the magnitudes that apply in an investigation are not measurable—must therefore, in order to match the mathematical method, not only be strictly logical, but also must be particularly careful in the business of tracing things back to the basic phenomena, since, lacking mathematical supports, it can precisely here make a false step; but if a method does achieve this, it can quite rightly lay claim to the title “mathematical,” insofar as this is meant to express the degree of exactitude.”

[ 23 ] I would not concern myself with Anton Lampa at such length if he were not, in one respect, a particularly suitable example of a natural scientist of the present day. He satisfies his philosophical needs by Indian mysticism and therefore does not taint the mechanistic view of nature like others do with all kinds of supplementary philosophical conceptions. The theory of nature that he has in mind is, so to speak, the chemically pure view of nature of the present day. I find that Lampa left one main characteristic of mathematics completely out of consideration. Every mathematical formula does indeed build a “living bridge” back to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point for the investigations. But those elementary phenomena are of the same kind as the non-elementary ones from which the bridge is built. The mathematician traces the characteristics of complicated numerical and spatial configurations, as well as their reciprocal relationships, back to the characteristics and relationships of the simplest numerical and spatial configurations. The mechanical engineer does the same thing in his field. He traces composite processes of motion and force-effects back to simple, easily distinguishable motions and force-effects. In doing so, he makes use of mathematical laws, to the extent that motion and manifestations of force are expressible through spatial configurations and numbers. In a mathematical formula that brings a mechanical law to expression, the individual parts no longer represent purely mathematical configurations, but rather forces and motion. The relationships in which these parts stand to one another are not determined by a purely mathematical lawfulness, but rather by characteristics of force and motion. As soon as one disregards this particular content of the mechanical formulae, one no longer has to do with a mechanical lawfulness, but solely with a mathematical one. Physics relates to mechanics in the same way that mechanics relates to pure mathematics. The task of the physicist is to trace complicated processes in the realm of colour, sound, and warmth phenomena, of electricity, of magnetism, etc., back to simple happenings within the same sphere. He has, for example, to trace complicated colour occurrences back to the simplest colour occurrences. In doing so, he has to make use of mathematical and mechanical lawfulness, to the extent that the colour processes occur in forms that can be determined spatially and numerically. What corresponds to the mathematical method in the realm of physics is not the tracing back of processes of colour, sound, etc., to phenomena of motion and to relationships of force within a colorless and soundless matter, but rather the seeking out of relationships within the phenomena of colour, sound, etc.

[ 24 ] Modern physics skips over the phenomena of sound, colour, etc., as such and considers only unchangeable attracting and repelling forces and motion in space. Under the influence of this way of picturing things, physics today has already become applied mathematics and mechanics, and the other fields of natural science are on the way to becoming the same thing.

[ 25 ] It is impossible to build a “living bridge” from the one fact—that a particular process of motion of colorless matter is occurring at this location in space—and the other fact—that the human being sees red at this spot. From motion only other motion can be derived. And from the fact that a motion acts upon a sense organ and through it upon the brain, it follows only—according to the mathematical and mechanical method—that the brain is stimulated by the outer world into certain processes of motion, but not that the brain perceives the concrete phenomena of sounds, colors, warmth, etc. Du Bois-Reymond also recognized this. You can read on page 35f. of his book Limits to Knowing Nature: “What conceivable connection can exist between certain motions of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and the immediate, undefinable, and undeniable fact for me, on the other hand, that I feel pain, feel pleasure, taste something sweet, smell the fragrance of a rose, hear organ music, see red ...” And, on page 34: “Motion can only produce motion.” Du Bois-Reymond is therefore of the opinion that one must designate this as a limit to our ability to know nature.

[ 26 ] The reason why the fact that I see red cannot be derived from a particular process of motion is, in my view, easy to indicate. The quality “red” and a particular process of motion are in reality an inseparable unity. The separation of the two occurrences can only be a conceptual one, carried out within the intellect. The process of motion that corresponds to the “red” has no reality in itself; it is an abstraction. To want to derive the fact that I see red from a process of motion, is just as absurd as deriving the real characteristics of rock salt, in its crystallized cube form, from the mathematical cube. It is not because a limit of knowledge hinders us, that we cannot derive any other sense qualities from motion, but rather because the demand that we do so makes no sense.

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[ 27 ] The endeavor to skip over colors, sounds, warmth phenomena, etc., as such, and to consider only the mechanical processes corresponding to them can spring only from the belief that a higher degree of comprehensibility is attributable to the simple laws of mathematics and mechanics than to the characteristics and reciprocal relationships of the rest of the configurations of the perceptual world. But this is absolutely not the case. The simplest characteristics and relationships of spatial and numerical configurations are stated to be immediately comprehensible because they can be easily and completely surveyed. All mathematical and mechanical understanding is a tracing back to simple factual situations that are obvious the moment one becomes aware of them. The principle that two magnitudes which are equal to a third must also be equal to each other, is known the moment one becomes aware of the factual situation that this principle expresses. In the same sense, the simple occurrences of the world of sound and colour and of the other sense perceptions are known the moment one looks upon them.

[ 28 ] Only because modern physicists are led astray by the preconception that a simple mathematical or mechanical fact is more comprehensible than an elementary occurrence of a sound or colour phenomenon as such, do they eliminate what is specifically sound or colour from the phenomena, and consider only the processes of motion that correspond to the sense perceptions. And since they cannot conceive of motion without something that moves, they take matter, that has been stripped of all sense-perceptible characteristics, to be the bearer of these movements. Whoever is not caught up in this preconception of the physicists must see that the processes of motion are states that are bound up with the sense-perceptible qualities. The content of the wave-like movements that correspond to the occurrence of sound are the qualities of sound themselves. The same holds true for all the other sense qualities. We know the content of the oscillating movements of the phenomenal world through immediate awareness of this content and not by thinking up some abstract matter and adding it to the phenomena.

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[ 29 ] I know that I am expressing something with these views that sounds completely impossible to physicists' ears of the present day. But I cannot take the standpoint of Wundt, who in his Logic (Vol. 2, Part 1) presents the thought-habits of modern natural scientists as binding logical norms. The thoughtlessness of which he is guilty there becomes particularly clear in the passage where he is discussing Ostwald's attempt to replace moving matter with energy in oscillating movement. Wundt presents the following: “From the existence of phenomena of interference there arises the necessity of presupposing some sort of oscillating movement. But since a movement is unthinkable without a substratum that moves, the unavoidable demand is therefore also made that one trace light phenomena back to a mechanical process. Ostwald, to be sure, has tried to get around this latter assumption by not tracing ‘radiant energy’ back to the vibrations of a material medium, but rather by defining it as energy existing in a state of oscillating movement. But precisely this double concept, which is composed of an observable component and of a purely conceptual one, seems to me to be striking proof that the concept of energy itself demands a division that leads back to elements of observation. A real movement can be defined only as the changing in location of a real substratum given in space. This real substratum can reveal itself to us merely through the force-effects that go forth from it, or through functions of force whose bearer we consider this substratum to be. But the demand that such merely conceptually established functions of force themselves move, seems to me something that cannot be fulfilled without thinking up some sort of substratum and adding it.”

[ 30 ] Ostwald's energy-concept stands much nearer to reality than the supposedly “real” substratum of Wundt. The phenomena of the perceptual world—light, warmth, electricity, magnetism, etc.—can be brought under the general concept of force-output, i.e., of energy. When light, warmth, etc., call forth a change in an object, an energy-output has thereby taken place. When one designates light, warmth, etc., as energy, one has disregarded what is specifically characteristic of the individual sense qualities, and is considering one general characteristic that they share in common.

[ 31 ] This characteristic does not, indeed, include everything that is present in the things of reality; but it is a real characteristic of these things. The concept of the characteristics, on the other hand, that physicists and their philosophical defenders suppose their hypothetically assumed matter to have, includes something nonsensical. These characteristics are borrowed from the sense world and yet are supposed to belong to a substratum that does not belong to the sense world.

[ 32 ] It is incomprehensible how Wundt can assert that the concept of “radiant energy,” because it contains an observable and a conceptual component, is therefore an impossible one. The philosopher Wundt does not understand, therefore, that every concept that relates to something in sense-perceptible reality, must necessarily contain an observable and a conceptual component. The concept “rock salt cube” has, after all, the observable component of the sense-perceptible rock salt and the other purely conceptual component that solid geometry establishes.

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[ 33 ] The development of natural science in the last few centuries has led to the destruction of any mental pictures by which this science could be a part of a world conception that satisfies higher human needs. This development has led to the fact that “modern” scientific heads call it absurd for anyone to speak as though concepts and ideas belong just as much to reality as the forces working in space and the matter filling space. Concepts and ideas, to such minds, are a product of the human brain and nothing more. The scholastics still knew how matters stand in this respect. But scholasticism is held in contempt by modern science. It is held in contempt but one does not know scholasticism. One especially does not know what is healthy and what is sick about it. What is healthy about it is a feeling for the fact that concepts and ideas are not only a chimera of the brain that the human mind thinks up in order to understand real things, but rather that they have something to do with the things themselves, more, in fact, than substance and force do. This healthy feeling that the scholastics had is our inheritance from the great world view perspectives of Plato and Aristotle. The sick aspect of scholasticism is the mixing up of this feeling with mental pictures that entered into the medieval development of Christianity. This development finds the source of everything spiritual, including therefore also concepts and ideas, to lie in an unknowable, because otherworldly, God. It needs to believe in something that is not of this world. A healthy human thinking, however, keeps to this world. It does not bother about any other. But at the same time, it spiritualizes this world. It sees in concepts and ideas realities of this world just as much as in the things and events perceptible through the senses. Greek philosophy is an outflow of this healthy thinking. Scholasticism still took up into itself an inkling of this healthy thinking. But it sought to reinterpret this inkling in accordance with the belief in the beyond that is considered Christian. It was not concepts and ideas that were supposed to be the deepest thing that man beholds within the processes of this world, but rather God, the beyond. Whoever has grasped the idea of something is not compelled by anything to seek yet some further “origin” of that something. He has attained that which satisfies the human need for knowledge. But what did the scholastics care about the human need for knowledge? They wanted to rescue what they regarded as the Christian picture of God. They wanted to find the origin of the world in that God in the beyond, although their seeking for the inner life of things provided them only with concepts and ideas.

9.

[ 34 ] In the course of centuries, the Christian picture took effect more than the dim feelings inherited from Greek antiquity. One lost the feeling for the reality of concepts and ideas. But one also lost therefore one's belief in the spirit itself. There began the worship of the purely material: the era of Newton began in natural science. Now it was no longer a question of the unity that underlies the manifoldness of the world. Now all unity was denied. Unity was degraded into a “human” mental picture. In nature, one saw only the multiplicity, the manifoldness. The general basic picture was what misled Newton to see in light not a primal unity, but rather something composite. In his Data for the History of Colour Theory,⁸² Goethe has presented a part of the development of natural scientific mental pictures. One can see from his presentation that recent natural science has arrived at unhealthy views in colour theory through the general mental picture that it uses in grasping nature. This science has lost its understanding for what light is within the series of nature's qualities. Therefore, it also does not know how, under certain conditions, light appears colored, how colour arises in the realm of light.

• 77. “The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism” (“Die Überwindung des Wissenschaftlichen Materialismus”); a lecture held in the third general session of the meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Lübeck on September 20, 1895. (Leipzig 1895)
• 78. Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 13.
• 79. H.L.F. v. Helmholtz, Goethe's Pre-inklings of Future Scientific Ideas (Goethes Vorahnungen kommender wissenschaftlicher Ideen usw.), p. 34. (Berlin 1892)
• 80. Nächte des Suchenden (Braunschweig 1893)
• 81. The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View with Particular Reference to Schiller (1886) (Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller); Truth and Science, Prelude to a Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1892) (Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, Vorspiel einer ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’); Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Basic Features of a Modern World View (1894) (Philosophie der Freiheit, Grundzüge einer modernen Weltanschauung).
• 82. Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre

As Anthroposophy spreads to fields where men usually seek their religious and, maybe, their moral impulses also, it encounters many persons who feel drawn towards such a spiritual stream. The modern spirit, which yesterday I allowed myself to call “the scientific spirit”, has, in many respects, shaken old, traditional beliefs, and although many people approach the anthroposophical line of research somewhat sceptically, there are, nevertheless, very many to-day whose souls have at least an inclination towards it. But it is correct to say that, in one respect, Anthroposophy encounters difficulties when it would enter the fields of the various sciences. That is the particular aim of this course, and it will be my task to present here, in the main, the general, more comprehensive principles and results of our research, while the other lecturers will deal with special scientific fields.

But precisely such an arrangement must arouse all the antipathies—I use this word more in a theoretical than in a moral sense—which Anthroposophy encounters from scientific quarters. I can only assure you that one who is engaged in anthroposophical research fully understands how difficult it is for a man involved in scientific work to-day to pass from the scientific attitude into Anthroposophy. Although Anthroposophy has certainly much to correct in present-day science, and, at the same time, when organic and spiritual fields are included, very much to add to the present material for research, it does not of itself come into conflict with current science. It accepts the justified results of science and deals with them in the way I have just described. The reverse, however, does not occur; at least, not yet—as one may well understand. Anthroposophy is rejected; its results are not regarded as satisfying the strictly scientific criteria that one feels entitled to impose to-day.

In a short lecture I shall not, of course, be able to go into all that Anthroposophy can itself bring forward to serve as an effective foundation for its results. But I should like in to-day's lecture to attempt to characterise the position of Anthroposophy among the sciences, and to do this in a way that will enable you to understand that Anthroposophy, in laying its foundations, is as conscientious as any science with its own precise technique. For this, however, I shall have to inflict upon you somewhat remote discussions—things which in ordinary life may be called difficult but which are necessary in order to provide a certain basis for what I shall have to offer in an easier and, perhaps, more agreeable form in the next few days.

*

Many people to-day imagine that Anthroposophy starts somehow from the nebulous attitude of soul to be found in present-day movements that are really “mystical” or “occult”. But to ascribe to Anthroposophy such a very questionable foundation is a complete mistake. Only one who knows Anthroposophy only superficially, or, indeed, through its opponents, can do that.

The fundamental attitude of consciousness in Anthroposophy has been drawn from that branch of present-day science which is least of all attacked in respect to its scientific character and importance. I admit, however, that many of our adherents—and opponents too—fail to perceive correctly what I have now to characterise by way of introduction.

The position of mathematics among the sciences has already been mentioned. Kant's pronouncement, that in every science there is only as much real knowledge—real cognition—as there is mathematics, is widely known. Now I have not to deal here with mathematics itself, with its value for the other sciences and in human life, but rather with the mental attitude a man assumes when “mathematicising”—if I may use this word; that is, when actively engaged in mathematical thinking. His attitude of soul is then, indeed, quite distinctive. Perhaps we may best characterise it by speaking, first, of that branch of mathematics which is usually called geometry and, at least in those parts of it known to the majority of people, has to do with space, is the science of space.

We are accustomed to speak of three-dimensional space; we picture it so constituted that its three dimensions, as they are called, stand at right angles to one another. What we have before our mind's eye as space is, in the first place, quite independent of man and the rest of the world. And because man as an individual being orientates himself in accordance with spatial laws, he pictures space before his eyes, independent of himself. He can certainly say that he is at this or that distance from any selected point; thus he inserts himself into space, as a part of space. And by regarding himself as an earthly being and assigning to himself certain distances from this and that star, he inserts himself into cosmic space. In a word, man regards space as something objective, independent of his own being. It was this that led Kant to call space an a priori intuition (eine Anschauung a priori), a mode of intuition given to man prior to experience. He cannot ask how he comes to have space; he must simply accept it as something given; he must fit himself into it when he has attained full earthly consciousness.

But it is not so in reality. We human beings do actually build space out of our own being. More correctly: we build our idea (Vorstellung), our mental perception (Anschauung), of space from out of ourselves. Only, we do not do this consciously, because we do it at a time of life when we do not think about our own activities in the way that would be necessary if we were to come to a clear understanding of the nature of space in relation to our own being. Indeed, we should not have our intuition of space (Raumanschauung) if, in our earthly life, we did not first experience its three dimensions.

We do experience them. We experience one of them when, from out of our inability to walk upright from birth, we raise ourselves into the vertical position. We learn this dimension from the way in which we build it. And what we learn to know is not just any dimension, set at right angles to the other two. We learn to know this quite definite dimension of space—standing vertically, so to speak, upon the earth's surface—from the fact that we human beings are not born upright, but, in accord with the formative laws of our earthly life, must first raise ourselves into the vertical position.

We learn to know the second dimension of space in an equally unconscious manner. You will be well aware that man—to mention what pertains more to his inner than to his outer being—in developing the capacities which serve him in later life, learns to orientate himself from left to right, from right to left. One need only recall that we have our organised speech centre in a certain area of the brain, the so-called Broca convolutions, while the other side of the brain has no such organisation. One also knows to-day—and from accepted science—that the development of the speech centre on the left side of the human body is connected with the mobility, spontaneous at first, of the right hand. One knows, too, that an orientation from right to left develops, that this activity excited on the left by an activity on the right, or vice-versa, is experienced by us within the laws that form us—just as we experience our achievement of the upright position. It is in this co-ordinated orientation of right with left, or left with right, that we human beings experience the second dimension of space.

The third dimension of space is never really experienced by us completely. We first focus this so-called “depth-dimension” as we try to gauge it. We are constantly doing this, though deep down in the unconscious. When we make the lines of vision of our eyes intersect at a point and focus both eyes on this point, we expand space, which would otherwise have only two dimensions for us, into the third dimension. And with every estimate of spatial depth we build the third dimension unconsciously out of our own being and the laws that form us.

Thus one might say: we place, in a certain way, the three dimensions of space outside us. And what we conceive as space, the space we use in geometry—Euclidean geometry, at first—is nothing more than an abstraction from what we learn to know concretely, with our own organism, as the three dimensions linked to our own subjective being. In this abstraction the quite definite configuration of space is ignored; the definite directions—vertical, horizontal and depth—have equal value. (This is always done when we make abstractions.) And then, when we have constructed, by abstracting from the three-dimensional space experienced within, the external space we speak of in geometry, we extend our consciousness through this external space alone.

We now come to the important thing. What we have won from out of ourselves is now applicable to external nature; in the first place, to inorganic, lifeless forms, though it can also be applied to the spatial and kinetic relations between organic structures. Briefly, this fact largely determines the character of our external world. Having accomplished this transition (this metamorphosis of space) from one domain, which really lives in us, to space commonly so called, we now stand with our spatial concepts and spatial experiences within the outer world and are able to determine our position and motion by spatial measurements. We actually go out of ourselves when we construct space in this way. We lift out of our body what we have first experienced within ourselves, placing ourselves at a point of view from which we look back upon ourselves as filled with space. In thus objectifying space we are able to study the external movements and relative positions of objects with the help of ideas formed geometrically within space; we feel thereby that we are on firm scientific ground when we enter into objects with what we have formed so earnestly from out of ourselves. In these circumstances we cannot doubt that we can live within things with what has come from us in this way. When we judge the distance, or the changing distance, between two bodies in the outer world according to spatial relations, we believe we are determining something completely objective and independent of ourselves. It does not occur to us that this could be otherwise.

Now, however, a fundamental and important problem confronts us here. What we have experienced subjectively in ourselves, transforming it, in the case of space; simply by making from it a kind of abstraction, now becomes something permeating—to a certain extent—the outer world and appearing to belong there.

Anyone who considers impartially what confronts us here must say: In his subjective experience of space in its three dimensions and in his subsequent objectifying of this experience, man stands within the external world with his own experiences. Our subjective experiences, being experiences of space, are at the same time objective. After all, it is not at all difficult, but trivial and elementary, to see that this is so. For when we move ourselves through space, we accomplish something subjective, but at the same time an objective event occurs in the world. To put it another way, whether we see an automaton or a man move forwards, subjectivity does not come into consideration. What occurs when a human being lives spatially is, for the external disposition of the world, quite objective.

If we now focus attention on the human being as, in this way, he objectifies something of his subjective experience, moving himself in an objective domain by himself traversing space—for, in objectifying space, he really bears this space within himself also—we are led to say: If man could do with other experiences what he does when “mathematicising”, he would be able to transfer, to some extent, the mathematical attitude of soul to other experiences. Suppose we could shape other experiences—our mode of perceiving the qualities of colours and tones, for example—in the same way that we create and shape our experience of space from out of ourselves! When we look at a cube of salt we bring the cubical shape with us from our geometry, knowing that its shape is identical with the spatial concept we have formed. If we could create from out of ourselves, let us say, the world of colour, and then confront external coloured objects, we should then, in the same way, project (as it were) into the outer world what we first build up in ourselves. We should thus place ourselves outside our body and even look back upon ourselves. This has been accomplished in mathematics, although it remains unnoticed. (I have given a geometrical illustration; I could give others also.) Neither mathematicians nor philosophers have paid attention to this peculiar relationship that I have just put before you.

In regard to sense perceptions, however, science has become really confused. In the nineteenth century physiologists joined hands here even with epistemologists and philosophers, and many people think with them as follows:

When we see red, for example, the external event is some vibration which spreads itself out until it reaches our organ of vision, and then our brain. The specific sensation of red is then released. Or the tone C sharp is evoked by an external wave motion in the same way.

This confusion has arisen because we can no longer distinguish what lives in us—within the confines of our body—from what is outside. All sense qualities (colours, tones, qualities of warmth) are said to be actually only subjective, while what is external, objective is said to be something quite different.

If now, in the same way in which we build the three dimensions of space from out of ourselves and find them again in things (and things in them)—if we could, in the same way, draw from ourselves what appears in us as sensation, and then set it before us, we should likewise find in things what we had first found in ourselves. Indeed, looking back upon ourselves we should find it again—just as we find in the outer world what we have experienced within us as space, and, looking back at ourselves, find that we are a part of this space. As we have the space world around us, so we should have around us a world of intermingling colours and tones. We should speak of an objectified world of flowing colours and singing tones, as we speak of the space around us.

Man can certainly attain to this and learn to know as his own construction the world which otherwise only confronts him as the world of effects (Wirkungen). As we, albeit unconsciously, construct for ourselves the form of space out of our human constitution and then, having transformed it, find it again in the world, so we can train ourselves, this time by conscious effort, to draw from out of ourselves the whole gamut of qualities contained in the world, so as to find them again in things, and then again in looking back upon ourselves.

What I am here describing is the ascent to so-called “imaginative perception” (imaginative Anschauung). Every human being to-day has the same space-world—unless he be abnormally mathematical or unmathematical. What can live in us in like manner, and in such a way that we experience with it the world as well, can be acquired by exercises. “Imaginative perception”—a technical term that does not denote “fancy” or “imagination” in the usual sense—can be added to the ordinary objective perception of objects (in which mathematics is our sure guide), and will open up a new region of the world.

I said yesterday that I would have to expound to you a special method of training and research. I must describe what one has to do in order to attain to such “imaginative perception”. In this we come to perceive as a whole the qualitative element in the world—just as, in a sense, we come to perceive space (which has, at first, no reality that engages our higher interests) as a whole. When we are able to confront the world in this way, we are already at the first stage of super-sensible perception. Sense-perception may be compared to that perception of things in which we do not distinguish between triangular and rectangular shapes, do not see geometrical structures in things, but simply stare at them and only take in their forms externally. But the perception that is developed in “Imagination” is as much involved with the inner essence of things as mathematical perception is with mathematical relationships.

If we approach mathematics in the right frame of mind, we come to see precisely in the mathematician's attitude when “mathematicising” the pattern for all that one requires for super-sensible perception. For mathematics is simply the first stage of super-sensible perception. The mathematical structures we “perceive” in space are super-sensible perceptions—though we, accustomed to “perceive” them, do not admit this. But one who knows the intrinsic nature of “mathematicising” knows that although the structure of space has no special interest at first for our eternal human nature, mathematical thinking has all the characteristics that one can ask of clairvoyance in the anthroposophical sense: freedom from nebulous mysticism and confused occultism, and the sole aim of attaining to the super-sensible worlds in an exact, scientific way.

Everyone can learn from a study of “mathematicising” what clairvoyance is on a higher level. The most astonishing thing is that mathematicians, who of all people ought to know what takes place when a man is “mathematicising”, do not show a deeper understanding of what must be presented as a higher, qualitative “mathematicising”—if I may use this word—in clairvoyant research. For “imaginative” cognition, the first stage in this research, is only a perception that penetrates other domains of existence than those accessible to “mathematicising”; and it has been gained by exercises. In respect to human perception, however, much is understood differently once one is able to survey, in genuine self-knowledge, the whole inner nature of “mathematicising”. For example, one arrives at the following:

On looking back to the way in which we came to know in early childhood the structure of space—by walking and standing upright, by orientating ourselves to right and left, by learning to gauge the depth-dimension, by connecting all this with the abstractly perceived space of geometry (which the child learns to know from inner experience)—we realise the serious and important consequences that follow if we cannot look back to the living origin, within our own being, of space—of our conception and perception of space—but simply accept it in its already transformed shape, independent of ourselves. For example, in recent times we have come to regard this space (with its three dimensions) in such a way that we have gone on to postulate a fourth and higher dimensions. These spaces and their geometries are widely known to-day. Anyone who has once learnt to know the living structure of space finds it most interesting to follow such an extension of mathematical operations (applicable to three dimensions) and to arrive at a fourth dimension that cannot be visualised, and so on. These operations are logical (in the mathematical sense) and quite correct. But anyone who knows the genesis of our idea of space, as I have described it, will detect something quite special here. We could take a pendulum, for example, and watch it oscillate. Watching it purely externally, we might expect it to swing further and further out. But it does not. When it has reached a definite point, it swings back again to the opposite side. If we know the relation between the forces involved, we know that the pendulum oscillates and cannot go further because of the relation between the forces.

In respect to space, one learns to know (to some extent) such an interplay of forces in the constitution of our soul. Then one views these things differently. From the logical, mathematical standpoint one can certainly keep step with those who extend their calculations from three-dimensional to four-dimensional space. But there one must make a halt. One cannot pass on into an indefinite fourth dimension; one must turn back at a certain point, and the fourth dimension becomes simply the third with a minus sign before it. One returns through the third dimension. The mistake made in these geometrics of more than three dimensions is in going on abstractly from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth dimension, and so on. But what we have here, if I may express it in a comparison, is not simple progression but oscillation. Our perception of space must return into itself. By taking the third dimension negatively, we really annihilate it. The fourth dimension is the negative third and annihilates the third, making space two-dimensional. And in like manner we can find a quite real progression, even though, logically, mathematically, algebraically, these things can be carried further and further. When we think in accordance with reality, we must turn back at the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions to the space that is simply given us. With the sixth dimension, we have abolished space and reach the point.

What really confronts us in the culture of our age? This—that its thinking has become abstract; that one simply continues along the line of thought that takes us from planimetry, stereometry, etc., whereas reality leads us back at the fourth dimension into space. But, in turning back then, we are by no means where we were when we found our way into the third dimension by gauging distances. We return spiritually enriched. If we can think of the fourth dimension (the negative third) in such a way that we return with it into space, then space becomes filled with spirit, whereas three-dimensional space is filled with matter. And we find space filled with ever loftier spiritual configurations when we pass along the negative third and second and first dimension and reach the point where we no longer have spatial extension but stand within the unextended—the spiritual.

What I am now describing is not formal mathematics, but the reality of spiritual perception. It is a path in real conformity with the spiritual and in contrast to the path that has adapted itself so closely to material appearances alone. This latter path, even though keeping close to mathematics—which does not, of course, work in a material way in the soul—leads nevertheless to an imperceptible world in which one can, at most, only calculate and construct imaginary mathematical spaces.

You see here that, by penetrating the mathematical domain completely, we are led to apprehend the inner nature of the spiritual present everywhere in the world. To understand the mathematical attitude of soul is to be led directly to the concept of clairvoyant experience. And then we raise ourselves to “Imagination” and, in the way I have still to describe, come thereby to a comprehensive survey of the spiritual that can be perceived, not in the ordinary way, but in the way I have put it here—that is: by going out of the third and into the fourth dimension, and so on, and coming to the domain of no-dimensions—that is, the point. This leads us spiritually to the highest if we apprehend it, not as an empty point, but as a “filled” point.

I was once—it made a great impression on me—regarded with astonishment by an elderly author who had written much on spiritual matters. Seeing me for the first time, he asked: “How did you first become aware of this difference between perceiving the sense-world and perceiving the super-sensible world?” Because I always like to express myself about these things with radical honesty, I replied: “In the moment when I learnt to know the inner meaning of what is called modern or synthetic geometry.” You see, when one passes from analytic to synthetic geometry—which enables us, not only to approach forms externally, but to grasp them in their mutual relationships—one starts from forms, not from external co-ordinates. When we work with spatial coordinates, we do not apprehend forms but only the ends of the co-ordinates; we join up these ends and obtain the curves. In analytical geometry we do not lay hold of the forms, whereas in synthetic geometry we live within them. This induces us to study the attitude of soul which, developed further, leads us to press on into the super-sensible world.

*

I have now described the extent to which Anthroposophy can be sure that it proceeds from “mathematicising” as strictly as the natural science of to-day—though from another point of view. Natural science applies mathematics as it has been elaborated to date. But anyone who wishes to understand clairvoyant activity must seek it where it is present in its most primitive form: in the construction of mathematical forms. If he can then raise this activity to higher domains, he will be developing something related to elementary, primitive “mathematicising” as the more developed branches of mathematics are related to their axioms. The primary axioms of clairvoyance are living ones. And if we succeed in developing our “mathematicising” by exercises, we shall not only see spatial relationships in the world around us, but learn to know spiritual beings revealing themselves to us, even with spiritual inwardness—as we learn to know the “cubicity” of a salt crystal. We learn to know spiritual beings when, in this way, we raise to higher domains what we develop by “mathematicising”.

This is what I wished to say, at the outset, about the basis of what must receive recognition as “clairvoyant research” in Anthroposophy. We shall go on to see how, with such clairvoyant research, one can enter different fields of knowledge—the natural sciences as well as therapy, medicine, history, etc. We shall see that the sciences are not to be attacked; they are to be enriched by the introduction of what can be known by super-sensible perception.

A consideration of the course of human evolution over a certain period—how it developed and led at last to the elaboration of our present scientific thinking—can help to a right understanding of what our aims here are.

Let us focus our attention upon scientific thinking to-day. It is able to see clearly the formalism of mathematics, while it nevertheless learns from mathematics inner certainty and exact observation, regarding natural laws as valid only if they can be formulated mathematically. This is, at least, a kind of ideal for scientific method to-day. But it was not always so. The scientific spirit, as acknowledged to-day, has been elaborated in the course of human evolution. I should like to draw your attention to three stages only—of which the present is the third—in this development, and I shall do so in a more narrative form. I shall also touch on some of the things that can be said in support of what I shall relate.

*

As we look back on human evolution, we do not, in fact, always find the same disposition of soul that man has to-day. He cultivates the scientific spirit as, in a sense, a most lofty thing. If we look back at the ancient Orient—not necessarily so far back as the most ancient Indian times, but to times more recent—we found much of what had been handed down as cognitive principles still retained. The path to knowledge was named quite differently then. In those ancient times—even the history of language can support this—man did not think of himself as he does to-day. Modern man has, on the one hand, his consciousness of self firmly established within him, and, on the other hand, a grasp, through observation, of what is mechanistic. But the man of the Orient, for example, could not have this feeling of himself. (As I have said, the history of language can prove this.) He felt himself, in the first place, as a breathing human being. To him, man was a breather. In self-contemplation he focussed his attention chiefly upon the respiratory process. He even related immortality to the respiratory process: death came to him as a kind of expiration of his soul.

Man a breather! Why did man in this former disposition of soul feel the human being as a breathing being? Because he did actually feel life in the respiratory process (which did not proceed so unconsciously as it does to-day). He felt the vibrations of life, life's rhythm, in his breathing; he felt breathing as one feels hunger and thirst to-day. But this was a continuous feeling in the waking state. When he looked with his eyes, he knew: the process of breathing now enters right into my head and into my eyes. He felt his perceptions permeated by the flow of the breath. It was just the same when the will stirred. He stretched out his hand and felt this movement as if it were something linked up with the respiratory movements. An expansion of the breath through the whole body was felt as an inner life-process. He even felt the more theoretical perception of the outer world through the senses to be ensouled with breath, just as he felt the breath ensouling the movements of the will.

Man felt himself a breathing being, and because he could have said: “My breath is modified in this and that way when I see through my eyes, hear through my ears and receive through the effects of heat”—because in his sensations of all kinds he “saw” differentiated, modified, refined respiratory processes—because of all this the path of knowledge was for him a systematic training of the respiratory process. And this systematic training was for those earlier epochs in the evolution of man's cognition what university study is for us to-day.

We study in a different way now. But in those times, when one sought religious satisfaction or wished to acquire knowledge, one “studied” by systematically modifying the respiratory process; in other words, by developing what was later called Yoga Breathing, Yoga Training. And what did one develop? If we investigate what was attained by one who practised Yoga Breathing in order to reach higher stages of cognition, we find something striking. Those who came to be “savants” through Yoga exercises—the word “savant” is not quite appropriate to these earlier conditions, but perhaps one can use it—required as long for this as we do for a university course. In the knowledge so acquired they had grasped in the disposition of their souls what, in a later age—the Graeco-Roman, for example—was regarded as a world of ideas and present of itself in the soul, thus making Yoga unnecessary.

*

This is really a very interesting thing—that what men had to strive for in earlier epochs through all kinds of exercises is present of itself in later epochs of evolution. It has then no longer the same significance as before. When Socrates, when Plato were alive, their philosophies had no longer the same significance as they would have had for the ancient pupils or teachers of Yoga, had they reached Socratic or Platonic truths. By this Yoga-breathing the pupil did not acquire exactly the same inner organisation as Plato, Aristotle or Scotus Erigena, but he came to the same disposition of soul [Seelenverfassung]. Thus we find systematic breathing exercises practised in ancient times, and we see that this cognitive path led to a certain vivid world of ideas.

One really gains a correct idea of what lived later in Parmenides and Anaxagoras if one says to oneself: What was given to men in this age as something self-understood, had been achieved in still earlier times through Yoga. It was always through exercises that men strove for the higher knowledge required by their own age. Thus in the perception of the world in later epochs, men were no longer aware of their breathing in self-contemplation, but they perceived as the Greeks perceived (I have given more details of this in my Riddles of Philosophy). At that time one did not construct for oneself isolated thoughts about the world, for ideas and sense-experiences were one. One saw one's thoughts outside, as one saw red or blue and heard C sharp, G or B natural. Thoughts were in the world outside. Without knowing this, nobody understands the Greek view of the world. But the Greeks perceived only spirit permeated with sense-perceptions, or sense-perceptions permeated by spirit, and no longer differentiations in the process of breathing.

*

Then once again men sought to attain a higher stage of cognition in all domains in which they were seeking higher knowledge. This stage was also gained through exercises. To-day we have rather vague ideas about the early Middle Ages and their spiritual life. A mediæval student did not learn so abstractedly as we do to-day. He, too, had to do exercises, and ordinary study was also combined with the doing of exercises. Inward exercises had to be carried out, though not so strenuously as with Yoga breathing; they were more inward, but still a set of exercises.

From this there remains a kind of deposit, little understood now, in what were called then the Seven Liberal Arts. They had to have been mastered by everyone who claimed to have received a higher education. Grammar meant the practical use of language. Rhetoric meant more: the artistic use of language. Dialectic was the use of language as a tool of thought. And when the student had practised these inwardly, as exercises, Arithmetic followed; but this, again, was not our abstract arithmetic, but an arithmetic which entered into things and was clearly aware that man shapes all things inwardly. In this way the student learnt Geometry through inward exercises, and this geometry, as something involving the human being, was the pupil's possession—a tool he could use.

All this then passed over into what was called Astronomy: the student integrated his being with the cosmos, learnt to know how his head was related to the cosmos, and how his lungs and heart resulted from the cosmos. It was not an astronomy abstracted from man, but an astronomy in which man had his place. And then, at the seventh stage, the pupil learnt to know how the Divine Being weaves and rules throughout the world. This was called Music; it was not our present music but a higher, living elaboration of what had been elaborated in thought-forms in Astronomy.

It was in this way that men of a later epoch trained themselves inwardly. The breathing exercises of earlier times had been replaced by a more inward training of the soul.

And what did one attain? In the course of the history of civilisation men came gradually to have thoughts apart from sense-perceptions. This was something that had to be acquired. The Greeks still saw thought in the world, as we see colours and perceive tones. We grasp thought as something we produce, not located within things. The fact that men came to feel this in the constitution of their souls, that we can feel this to-day—that is the result of the training in Grammar, Rhetoric and so on to Music. Thought was thereby released. Men learnt to move freely in thoughts. In this way was achieved what we take for granted to-day, possessing it without these exercises—what we find when we go to school, what is offered in the separate sciences (as described yesterday). And precisely as man in different epochs had to advance by means of exercises—in ancient times by breathing exercises (Yoga) which gave him the Graeco-Latin conception of the world as something he took for granted; in later times by exercises that went from Grammar to Music and gave him the scientific standpoint we have to-day—so to-day he can again advance. He can best advance by setting out from what is most certain: namely, mathematics, recognised as certain to-day.

My reply to that author was true, although it so astonished him. It was mainly through synthetic geometry that I became clear about the clairvoyant's procedure. Naturally, not everyone who has studied synthetic geometry is a clairvoyant, but the procedure can be clearly presented in this way. Though that author was so astonished at not being told the sort of thing that people who “prophesy” are wont to relate, it is nevertheless true that Anthroposophy, setting out from the firm base on which science stands to-day, seeks to extend this base; and from this base, which science itself has laid, to carry further, into super-sensible domains, what reliable science brings before us.

From here we must proceed more inwardly. And a still more inward procedure is the path to clairvoyant research which I had to describe in my books Geheimwissenschaft (“Occult Science”) and Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der Höheren Welten (“How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”). But precisely such an historical survey as I have given can show you that anyone who stands to-day with full consciousness within Anthroposophy derives this consciousness from standing within the course of human evolution. My historical survey can also show you that I do not speak from personal predilection or subjective partiality when I assert that we need to undertake exercises in order to carry further the historical movement that has brought humanity to its present standpoint. Anyone who knows the course of history up to the present, and knows how it must continue, stands consciously within the whole historical process, and to this consciousness he adds the insight acquired by taking—inwardly, not outwardly—the spirit of modern science into the constitution of his soul.

Thus one may well say: Anthroposophy knows its position in respect to the science of to-day. It knows this in an absolute sense, because it knows the special character of contemporary science and rejects all that is dilettantish and amateurish. It builds further on genuine science. On the other hand, Anthroposophy knows the historical necessities; knows that man's path must go beyond present achievements—if we do not wish to stand still, unlike all our forerunners, who wanted to advance beyond the stage of civilisation in which they shared. We, too, must go forward. And we must know what steps to take from the present standpoint of the scientific spirit.

In the next few days I shall have to depict what this actually involves. The foundations I have laid to-day will then appear, perhaps, in a more understandable form. But I may have been able to show that Anthroposophy knows from its scientific attitude—from an attitude as scientific as that of science—what its aims are in face of the contemporary world, of human evolution as a whole, and of the separate sciences. It will get to work because it knows how it has to work. Perhaps its path will be very long. If, on the other hand, one sees, in the subconscious depths of human souls, the deep longings for the heights that Anthroposophy would climb, one may surmise that it is necessary for the welfare of humanity that the path Anthroposophy has to take should not be too slow. But whether the pace be slow or fast may be less important for Anthroposophy than for human progress. In many domains we speak of being caught up in the “rapid tempo” of our time. May all that mankind is intended to attain by cognition of the super-sensible be attained as rapidly as the welfare of mankind requires.

Translated by V. C. Bennie.

If you put together what I told you yesterday with the other lectures (Dornach 23, 24, 29 May 1915) which I gave here, a week ago, you will obtain an important key, as it were, to many things in Spiritual Science. I will now give you only the chief ideas needed for the further course of our considerations, in order to enable you to find your bearings. About a week ago I pointed out the significance of the processes which are called, from the aspect of the physical world, destructive processes I pointed out that, from the aspect of the physical world, reality is attributed generally only to what arises and forms itself, as it were, out of nothing and attains a perceptible existence. Thus people speak of reality when they see the plant shoot up from the root and develop from leaf to leaf toward the blossom, and so on. But they do not speak of reality in the same sense when they look upon the gradual withering and dying, upon the last streaming out, one might say, towards nothingness.

But for one who wishes to understand the world, it is necessary in the strictest sense of the word to look also at so-called destruction, at processes of dissolution, at what finally arises, as far as the physical world is concerned, as a streaming-out toward nothingness.

For in the physical world consciousness can never arise where sprouting, germinating processes alone take place; consciousness begins only where what has sprouted in the physical world is in its turn eliminated, destroyed. I have shown that those processes which life brings forth in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. Indeed, the truth of the matter is that when we perceive something external, our soul-spiritual has to bring about destructive processes in our nervous system, and these destructive processes mediate consciousness. Whenever we become conscious of something, these processes of consciousness must come from destructive processes. And I have shown that the most important process of destruction for the life of the human being, the process of death, creates the consciousness which we possess during the time after death. Through the fact that our soul-spiritual experiences the complete dissolving and separation of the physical and etheric bodies, the merging of the physical and etheric bodies with the general physical and the general etheric world, through this, and out of the process of death, our soul-spiritual creates the power to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The saying of Jacob Böhme “Thus death is the root of all life” takes on thereby a higher significance for the whole interrelation of world phenomena.¹No doubt the following question has often arisen before your souls: ‘What happens during the time through which the human soul passes between death and a new birth?’ It has often been pointed out that this period of time is a long one for the normal human life, compared to the time which we pass here in the physical body between birth and death. The period of time between death and a new birth is short only in the case of human beings who have applied their life in a manner inimical to the world, and have done only what may be called, in a true sense of the word, criminal. In this case there is a short lapse of time between death and a new birth. But, in the case of people who have not given themselves up to egoism alone, but who have spent their life between birth and death in a normal way, the period passed between death and a new birth is usually relatively long.

But the following question should burn, as it were, in our souls: ‘By what is the return of a human soul to a new physical incarnation regulated?’ The reply to this question is connected intimately with everything which can be learned with regard to the significance of the destructive processes which I have mentioned. Picture to yourselves that when we enter physical existence we are born with our souls into quite specific conditions. We are born into a particular age and impelled towards particular people. So we are born into quite specific conditions. You should consider deeply that our life between birth and death is, in reality, filled with everything into which we are born. What we think, what we feel, in short the whole content of our life, depends on the time into which we are born.

Now you will readily understand that what thus surrounds us when we are born into physical existence is dependent on preceding causes, on what took place previously. Suppose that we are born at a certain moment and go through life between birth and death. But if you also take into consideration what surrounds you, this does not stand there by itself but is the result of what went before. I would say, you are brought together with what went before, with people. These people are children of other people, who are in turn children of still others, and so on. If we consider only these physical conditions of the succession of the generations, you will say: ‘When I enter physical existence, and during my education, I receive much from the people who surround me.’ But these, in their turn, have received a great deal from their ancestors, and from their ancestors' friends and relations, and so on. Human beings must go further and further back in order to find the causes of what they really are.

If we then allow our thoughts to continue, we may say that we are also able to pursue a certain current which goes beyond our birth. This current hp brought with it, as it were, everything that constitutes our environment during the life between birth and death; and if we pursue it still further back, we come to a point where our preceding incarnation can be found. Thus, when retracing the time before our birth, we would have a long period during which we dwelt in the spiritual world. Many things happened on Earth during this time. But these things brought about the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then at last we come in the spiritual world to the time when we were on the Earth in an earlier incarnation. When we speak of these conditions we mean of course average conditions. Exceptions are naturally very numerous, but they all lie in the direction which I indicated before for types who come more quickly to earthly incarnation.

On what does it depend that, after a time has passed, we are born again just here? If we look back to our former incarnations, we were surrounded during our time on Earth by conditions; these conditions had their effects. We were surrounded by people; these people had children and passed on to the children their feelings and ideas. The children in turn did the same with their own descendants, and so on. But if you study historical life you will say that there comes a time in historical evolution when we are no longer able to trace in the descendants anything identical with or even similar to the ancestors. Everything is passed on; yet the fundamental character which is there in a particular time appears diminished in the children and yet more so in the grandchildren and so on until a time comes when nothing more can be found of the fundamental character of the environment in which one lived during the preceding incarnation. Thus the stream of time works at the destruction of what was once the fundamental character of the environment.

We observe this destruction in the time between death and a new birth; and, when the character of the earlier period has been extinguished, when nothing more of it is there, when the things which, as it were, mattered to us in previous incarnations have been destroyed, the moment comes when we re-enter earthly existence. Just as, in the second half of our life, our life is a kind of erosion of our physical existence, so there must occur, between death and a new birth, a wearing-away of earthly conditions, an annihilation, a destruction. And new conditions, a new surrounding must be there, into which we are born.

So we are born anew when everything for the sake of which we were born before has been destroyed and annihilated. Consequently this idea of the destructive process is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on Earth. And what creates our consciousness at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our soul-spiritual, is intensified in this moment of death, at this beholding of destruction; this beholding of the process of annihilation must take place in earthly conditions between our death and a new birth.

Now you will understand that someone who takes no interest at all in what surrounds him on Earth, who is really not interested in anyone or any being but only in what suits him and who simply lives for the moment, is not strongly connected with the conditions and things on the Earth. He also has no interest in following their gradual erosion, but returns very soon in order to make amends, in order now really to live with the conditions with which he must live in order to learn to understand their gradual destruction. Someone who has not lived with earthly conditions does not understand their destruction and disintegration. Those people, however, who have lived quite intensely and in the fundamental character of any one period have the tendency above all, if nothing interferes with this, to bring about the destruction of what they were born into and to appear again when something quite new has emerged. Of course, there are exceptions in an upward direction, and it is important for us to consider these in particular. Let us suppose that we become familiar with a movement such as the present spiritual-scientific movement, at this time when it is not in harmony with what surrounds it, when it is completely alien to its environment. The spiritual-scientific movement is in this case not something which we are born into, but something which we have to work at, of which we will that it should enter the spiritual development of earthly culture. Above all, it is a question of living with conditions which are in opposition to Spiritual Science and of appearing again when the Earth is changed to such an extent that spiritual-scientific conditions can really take hold of the life of culture.

Here we have an exception trending upward. There are exceptions in an upward and in a downward direction. Certainly the most earnest co-workers of Spiritual Science prepare themselves to appear in earthly existence again as soon as possible, in that they work at the same time to the end that the conditions into which they are born disappear. If you can grasp this last thought, you will realise that, to a certain extent, you help the spiritual beings to guide the world by devoting yourselves to what lies in their intentions. When we look upon our present time, we must say that on the one hand we have eminently what goes into decadence and downfall. Those who have a heart and a soul for Spiritual Science were placed into this period in order to see how it is ripe for downfall. Here on Earth you are made acquainted with things which one can get to know only on Earth. But you bear that up into the spiritual world, you behold the downfall of the epoch and you will return again when that calls forth a new epoch, which lies in the innermost impulses of spiritual-scientific striving. Thus to a certain extent the plans of the spiritual leaders and guides of earthly evolution are furthered through what people take up into themselves who concern themselves with something which is not, so to speak, the culture of our time.

Perhaps you will be acquainted with the reproaches which are levelled at the adherents of Spiritual Science by people of the present time; that they concern themselves with something which often appears outwardly unfruitful, which does not intervene in the conditions of our time. It is really necessary that people in Earth-existence busy, themselves with something which has a significance for subsequent evolution, but not directly for our time. When objections are raised, the following should be born in mind. Imagine that these are the successive years, 1915, 1914, 1913, 1912, and that these are the cereal grains (centre) of the successive years. What I draw here (right) are the mouths which consume the grains.

Now someone could come along and say that the only important thing is the arrow which goes from the grain into the mouths (→), for that is what supports the people of the successive years. He might say that whoever thinks realistically would look only at these arrows, which go from the grains to the mouths. But the grains of cereal care little for that, for this arrow. They do not bother about that at all. Rather they have only the tendency to develop each grain on into the next year. The grains of cereal are interested only in this arrow (↑), they do not concern themselves with the fact that they will also be eaten; that does not bother them at all. That is a side effect, something that arises by the by. Each grain of cereal, if I may put it like this, has the will, the impulse, to pass over into the next year, in order to become there a grain of cereal once more. It is a good thing for the mouths that the grains follow the direction of these arrows (↑); for if all the grains were to follow the direction of these arrows (→), then the mouths here in the next year would have nothing left to eat. If the grains of 1913 had all followed this arrow (→), then the mouths of the year 1914 would have had nothing left to eat.

If someone wanted to apply materialistic thinking consistently, he would examine the grains to see how they are composed chemically so that they yield the best possible nutritional products. But such a study would not be worthwhile, for this tendency does not lie in the grains of cereal; rather they have the tendency to care for their further development and to develop over into the grain of the following year.

It is similar also with the development of the world. Those people truly follow the course of the world who care for it that evolution proceeds, while those who become materialists follow the mouths that only look at this arrow (→). But those who care for it that the course of the world continues need not be led astray in this striving of theirs to prepare the immediately following times, just as little as the cereal grains let themselves be distracted from preparing those of the next year, even though the mouths demand the arrows which point in a quite different direction.

Towards the end of my book Riddles of Philosophy I referred to this thinking and pointed out that what is generally called materialistic cognition can be compared with the consumption of the cereal grains and that what really takes place in the world can be compared with what happens through propagation from one grain of cereal to that of the following year. Consequently what one calls scientific cognition is of just as little significance for the inner nature of things as eating is for the continuing growth of the grains of cereal. And today's science, which concerns itself only with the way in which one gets into the human mind what one can know from the things, does exactly the same as the man who utilises the grains of cereal for food; for what the grains are when they are eaten has nothing at all to do with their inner nature. Just as little does external cognition have anything to do with what develops within things.

In this way I have tried to toss a thought into the philosophical hustle and bustle and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood or whether even such a very plausible thought will be met again and again with the foolish rejoinder: ‘Yes, but Kant has already proved that cognition cannot reach things.’ However, he proved it only for a cognition which can be compared with the consumption of the grains and not for a cognition which arises with the progressive development which is in things. But we have to realise that we must repeat in all possible forms to our age and to the age which is coming—but not rashly, fanatically or by agitation—what the principles and essence of Spiritual Science are, until it has sunk in. It is just the characteristic trait of our time, that Ahriman has made skulls very hard and dense and that they may be softened again only slowly. So no one, I would say, must draw back in fear and trembling from the necessity to emphasise in all possible forms what is the being and the impulse of Spiritual Science.

• 1. Jacob Böhme: Six Theosophical Points (1620).

A few aphoristic remarks about the relationship between anthroposophy and science, which are to be made because the present situation suggests that we direct our consideration in this direction. People today are extremely proud of the fact that they do not believe in authority; but they only claim this. Of course, people talk about old authorities in such a way that they are criticized externally, often in a phrase-like way.

But the newer authorities, on which one depends in the most eminent sense, are not noticed at all. One of them is what we call science today. Ask yourselves, my dear friends, how much of what people hear today as something scientifically established they are able to absorb, and in how few cases they feel that it still needs to be examined in terms of its scope, its basis and its sources.

One could talk for hours about the unrecognized yet intensely present modern belief in authority. The purpose of spiritual science is to free people from this belief in authority. Spiritual science should enable people to penetrate to such foundations of knowledge that can be grasped in a certain sense and that offer the possibility - certainly not of everything, but of much of what so-called science offers - of forming one's own independent judgment. One will not be able to study the individual specialized sciences. But one can ask oneself whether there are not comprehensive points of view that are accessible to the human being and yet allow one to form an opinion about what the sciences present. Today's reflection is based on this. A direction is to be indicated, characterized by the fact that importance is attached to showing that there are uncertainties in today's sciences, unexamined things that are not considered and escape scientific attention.

First of all, I would like to draw attention to something that applies to many exact sciences: the old opinion that in the sciences, especially those related to physics, there is as much true science as there is mathematics in them; that what can be expressed mathematically is believed to form a secure foundation.

On the other hand, however, there is the way in which mathematics develops its theories. Mathematics actually has nothing to do with external reality; for many, it is precisely this that makes it safe and necessary, that you do not need experience to do it. This results in a discrepancy: how does mathematical thinking, which is alien to reality, relate to the configuration of nature to which it is applied?

So far, nothing has been done that could lead to a solution of this question, for example with the concept of space. It is important to me to point out that a correct analysis of space leads us to the conclusion that we humans are not dealing with one space when observing the world, but with two spaces. And by imagining spatially, we always identify one space with another. Every judgment of space consists in this. It is not true that one is subjective and the other objective space.

This will only be understood when we have a proper science of the senses. In the philosophical debates about sensory activity, one sense is always referred to in the singular. In general, this is not even present in reality. We cannot summarize the eye and the ear according to today's pattern by saying that these are two senses in which the external world is given and so on. The two [senses] are too radically different to be summarized as sensory perceptions. The scope of what must be understood as abstract sensory activity is divided into twelve senses: sense of I, sense of thinking, and so on. Each one must be studied.

And what about the concept of space that intrudes on everything? Here we do not get subjective and objective space, but the result that space is conveyed to us through one half of these senses, and through the other half of these senses. We never perceive with just one sense; another sense is always involved, for example, the eye and the sense of movement. Both are brought into spatial alignment.

One must be very precise in the investigation. In today's abstract way of looking at things, everything is mixed up. Concepts are applied without realizing whether one is entitled to such application. For example, something that, although not unexamined, is always forgotten: the concept of division or division. This is only possible from two points of view. You can only divide a named number by an unnamed number; say \(12\) apples by \(3\). This distinction is not made in kinematics. Velocity \(v: s = v \times t\). Physics uses this formula in a way that is not allowed in reality: \(s/t = v\), \(s/v = t\). According to physics, this would also apply. This approach can only be one of the two possible types of division; in \(s/t\) you can only divide \(s\) by an unnamed number, time can only have the value of an unnamed number. One can ask the question: Which is more essential, \(s\) or \(v\)? Which adheres to reality? Not the path, but the speed. The path is only the result of the speed. We must consider its reality to be the primary one; it is the inner essence of the movement process.

Today, investigations are carried out by only looking at the result. These are often not decisive. Consider the comparison of the two people who stand next to each other at nine o'clock and then at three o'clock, and yet have experienced very different things in the meantime. Through these simple considerations regarding \(s\) and \(t\), the whole theory of relativity is reduced to absurdity because it only considers entities such as \(s\) and \(t.

Those who study physics today will, on the one hand, rightly encounter the law of the conservation of energy, but on the other hand they will not. This has become a dogma that has been extended far beyond physics, even to physiology. When it comes to metabolic experiments, the matter is shaky. Those who go back purely historically will have an uncomfortable feeling. Julius Robert Mayer was far removed from the modern interpretation of his theory. In “Überweg” a summary is given of Julius Robert Mayer's works, which is a lie. As a law, the law of conservation of energy must be limited to the limits of its application. It is just like a bank. A certain amount of money goes in and a certain amount comes out, just as a certain amount of energy goes in and out of an animal. But what happens to the capital in the bank, how it participates in the general circulation of capital during this passage, nothing can be said about that, of course. You can, of course, make such a law, but you have to realize that reality is not affected by such a law. One has to wonder how such laws have any effect on reality! Do they serve at all to say anything about the particular? There are laws that have a stronger reality effect in one area and none at all in another. The laws here are as applicable as a mortality table at an insurance company. On average, they are correct. But someone who insures a death in the 47th year on this basis does not act on it, does not feel obliged to die.

These things can be applied to many natural laws that are made today. However, one should never draw conclusions without being aware of the limits of validity. These laws must stop where, at some point in reality, something enters from a completely different sphere than what the application of the laws in question refers to, for example in the case of humans. In his inner activity, something comes in from a completely different sphere, which is just as little taken into account if I take the law of the conservation of energy as a basis as what the bank officials do when they put the money into circulation. The naturalists have real laws, the monists draw conclusions: that is just nonsense. The more one comes across this, the more it shows how necessary it is to respond to such an analysis of the nonsense that is made because there is no connection with reality. One must not separate oneself from reality and reason further; then one has no sense at all for the concise.

In the field of genetics, something is always disregarded that is of the greatest importance. A simple consideration says: If any being is sexually mature, then it must have all the force impulses that enable it to pass on some property to the next generation. Not the whole human or animal development may be considered, but only the time until the sexual maturity of the individual. All impulses that may have an influence after sexual maturity must be treated radically differently from the former.

The science of development achieved a great deal in the nineteenth century, but it proceeded in a much too straightforward manner. A major stumbling block for the unbiased conception of a realistic science of development is that one does not distinguish between what lies in the direct line of development and what are appendages. The main organs arise in a straight line, and only then do other organs attach themselves. If you look at the human being from the point of view of linear development, you cannot get beyond the head. Only the head can be derived in a straight line from the animal kingdom; the other organs cannot. In this case, the other organs must be developed from the head as appendages. One must come to realize this difference between the head and the other organs. The head is fully developed by the age of 28; one can only continue to live because the head is refreshed by the rest of the organism. This is related to the pedagogical question. We educate only the head; as a result, the person grows old prematurely. The development of the head is three times faster than that of the other organs. The rest of the organism is only a metamorphosis of the head. This is a physical truth that can be seen. In the case of inner qualities, speed is of the essence, even in the organic sciences. You get to the core of a person by examining the different speeds at which the structures of the organs develop. This also applies to psychology.

In the 1980s, I had a scientific dispute with Eduard von Hartmann, who at the time was drawing up his life account and wanted to prove the predominance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure. I tried to show that this calculation is not done by people themselves, but only afterwards by philosophers. It doesn't correspond to life at all. If someone were to keep a toy store's account of his own appreciation of toys, it would mean nothing for the store itself. Life itself is not based on it either, not on the difference between pleasure and displeasure. How did anyone come up with the idea of doing the math and judging the value of life by it?

This is related to the question that Kant already posed, the question of synthetic judgments. When adding \(7 + 5 = 12\), is \(12\) already included in \(7\) and \(5\) or not? This is not the right way to ask the question at all. It is not possible to ask the question at all in this way. You have to ask yourself: What is the first thing? When calculating, the result is always present first, and only to have a certain overview, one splits the result. I have \(12\) apples; the countrywoman brought me \(7\) and another brought me \(5\). All operations are based on the result being split somehow. The subject is the sum, the addends are the predicate, and so on. This is of great importance because it also appears where calculation occurs in a more complicated way: in life. Eduard von Hartmann's calculation “\(w = I - u\)” is wrong. Life attaches a value to it emotionally: most people don't care about \(w = I - u\); \(u\) can be taken as large as one wants, \(w\) remains finite and becomes only \(0\) if /=0 or \(u = \infty\).

In the recently published book “Vitalism and Mechanism”, the consequences of a purely mechanistic worldview are drawn and the connections between certain social affectations are pointed out. Why do people talk such nonsense in the social field in particular? Because they are accustomed to transferring such scientific ideas, which are unrealistic, to this field? It is different than when one starts from such concepts in natural science. In natural science, reality gives one the lie when one applies incorrect concepts. For example, a bridge built according to incorrect ideas collapses, and so on. In medicine, it is more difficult to keep track of things: patients die, but one can put that down to other reasons. In social policy, it cannot be proven at all. If you carry such incorrect concepts into politics, ethics and so on, then you create incorrect realities by embodying incorrect concepts. Today, this can be seen particularly in addiction, in the transfer of scientific concepts into social considerations.

This started back in Schäffle's time. He was the mayor of Mödling and an Austrian member of parliament in the 1880s. He wrote a book in which he dismissed socialism in an amateurish way: “The Futility of Socialism.” At the time, Herman Bahr responded with “Mr. Schäffle's Lack of Insight,” a book that Bahr now, however, disowns.

Kjellén, a very ingenious historian, compares the state to an organism. That is not correct. First of all, it is only an analogy. But quite apart from that, an analogy can lead in the right direction. You can compare social life with an organism, but not the European states. Many organisms live side by side, but in a living organism there is a medium between them, which is not the case with neighboring states. At most, the individual states can be compared to cells, and life over the whole earth to a single organism. Then we would have a fruitful theory of the state or fruitful politics. But I do not want to talk about such non-existent things. But such areas should be examined to see how important realistic thinking is. If we had remained mindful of this, humanity would have been spared the horrific social theories of the last four years.

With regard to Wilson, I pointed out at the time that in his work he characterized the application of Newton's theory of gravitation to the theory of the state in the seventeenth century as an outdated point of view and that today Darwinism should be used instead. In doing so, Wilson overlooks the fact that he is making the same mistake he criticizes: extending a current scientific theory to other areas. Similar unreality is displayed by Lujo Brentano, Schmoller in Munich and others.

A realistic social science only considers wages, capitalism and rent as factors of reality; these three must be considered. Each of these three has a different economic effect and is a different powerful factor. If these three are treated correctly, twelve new relationships will be found for economics through the correct combination of these three, not just the ones that are currently valid. Only then will a fruitful economics arise.

In particular, there is a lack of interest in our time in seeking a secure foundation for the individual sciences. If there are people who try to go through the individual sciences from the point of view that spiritual science will provide, it will be extremely fruitful. The working method must be directed in such a way that one takes a critical view of the concepts used. The above is also to be applied, for example, to the concept of force. One must start from \([v] = p/m\). The mass can be an unnamed number, \(p\) must be equivalent to the mass. This point of view alone, that mass, even in the smallest mass point, is equivalent to gravity, is something tremendously fruitful. Even in mass there is something gravity-like.

The question is never put at the forefront: What happens inside things? No unrealities may be introduced into the scientific consideration, for example a clock that moves at the speed of light. You must not necessarily draw conclusions about a property if another property is altered.

The subject of the final discussion was: The earth follows the sun in a spiral.

The correction factor, which is empirically applied in Bessel's tables, would disappear if Copernicus' third theorem were also applied.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! First of all, allow me to express my heartfelt thanks to the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science for giving me the opportunity to speak about the relationship between certain scientific peculiarities of the present day and anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. Furthermore, I must ask you today to bear in mind that there is a certain difficulty in such a first, orienting lecture. This is because, of course, much of what needs to be said about a comprehensive topic can only be hinted at and therefore, necessarily, only suggestions can be made that will require further elaboration later on and that, by their very nature, must leave out some of the questions that inevitably arise.

But there are also certain difficulties in a factual sense with today's topic. The first is that in the broadest circles today, especially when the topic is discussed – the relationship between science and anthroposophy in any respect – a widespread prejudice immediately arises, namely that the anthroposophy meant here wants to take up an opposing position to science – to the kind of science that has developed in the course of human history in recent centuries, and which reached its zenith in the last third of the 19th century, at least in terms of its way of thinking and methodology. But it is not the case that there is such an oppositional position, because this anthroposophy, as I mean it here, is precisely concerned with bringing to bear the best fundamental principles of the scientific will of modern times. And it endeavors to further develop precisely that human outlook and scientific human attitude that is needed in order to truly validate the recognition of conventional science.

And in this further development, one finds that precisely from the secure foundations of the scientific way of thinking, if these are only correctly understood and pursued not only in their logical but also in their living consequences, then the path is also found to those supersensible regions of world existence with which the human being must feel connected precisely in their eternal foundations. In a certain respect, simply by continuing the fundamental principles of science, the path to the supersensible realms through anthroposophy is to be found.

Of course, when I speak to you about the relationship between anthroposophy and science, I will speak in such a way that you will not deviate from what you are accustomed to recognize as scientific conscientiousness and thinking. But I will not have to speak about individual fields, but rather, to a certain extent, about the entire structure of the scientific edifice of the present day. And since I have to assume that among you, dear fellow students, there are members of the most diverse fields of science, I will naturally not be able to do justice to the individual needs, and some things will have to be said in a way that is not meant to be abstract, but which is looking in an abstract way, so that perhaps the individual will have to draw the consequences from what I have to say for the individual fields. Agnosticism is a word that is not often used today, but it denotes something that is indeed related to the foundations of our scientific way of thinking. This agnosticism was established, I would say, as a justifiable scientific way of thinking, or perhaps better said, a philosophical way of thinking, by personalities such as Herbert Spencer. It was he who preferred to use this term, and if we want to find a definition of agnosticism, we will have to look for it in his work. But as a basis, as a fundamental note of scientific thought, agnosticism exists in the broadest fields of knowledge in the present day. If we are to say in the most abstract terms what is meant by agnosticism, we could say something like the following: we recognize the scientific methods that have emerged as certain in recent centuries, we use them to pursue appropriate science, as we must pursue it today in certain fields - through observation, through experiment, and through the process of thinking about both experiment and observation.

By pursuing science in this way – and I am well aware that this is absolutely justified for certain fields today – one comes to say to oneself: Of course, with this science one achieves a great deal in terms of knowledge of the laws that underlie the world. And then efforts are made to extend these laws, which have been assimilated, to man himself, in order to gain that which everyone who has healthy thinking within him ultimately wants to gain through knowledge: an insight into man's place in the universe, into man's destiny in the universe.

When one pursues science in this way, one comes, in the course of science itself, to say: Yes, these laws can be found, but these laws actually only refer to the sum of external phenomena as they are given to the senses or, if they are not given to the senses, as they can be inferred on the basis of the material that results from sensory observation. But what is discovered in this way about nature and man can never extend to those regions that are regarded in older forms of human knowledge as the supersensible foundation of the world, with which the deepest nature of man, his eternal nature, if it may be called that, must still have a certain connection.

Thus, it is precisely through the scientific approach that one comes to an acknowledgment of the scientifically unknowable - one comes to certain limits of scientific research. At most, one comes to say to oneself: the human soul, the inner spiritual being of man, must be connected with something that cannot be attained by this science alone. What is connected with it in this way cannot be investigated scientifically; it belongs to the realm of the unknowable. Here we are not faced with Gnosticism, but with an agnosticism, and in this respect contemporary spiritual life, precisely because of its scientific nature, has placed itself in a certain opposition to what still existed at the time when Gnosticism was the attitude of knowledge and was called Gnosis.

Now, what is advocated here as Anthroposophy is not, as some believe, a revival of the old Gnosticism, which cannot be resurrected. That was born out of the thinking of its time, out of the whole science of its time, so to speak. Today we are in an age in which, if we want to found a science on supersensible foundations, we have to take into account what has been brought forth in human development through the work of such minds as Copernicus, Galileo and many others whom I will not name now. And in saying this, one implicitly declares that it is impossible to take the standpoint of Gnosticism, which of course had nothing of modern science. But it may be pointed out that this Gnostic point of view was in a certain respect the opposite of what is often regarded today as the basic note of science. This Gnostic point of view was that it is very well possible for man to penetrate to the supersensible regions and to find there that which, though not religion, can be the basis of knowledge for religious life as well, if he turns to his inner powers of knowledge not applied in ordinary life.

Now, we will most easily come to an understanding of what I actually have to say today in this introductory lecture if I first remind you of something well known that can point to the transformation that the human cognitive process has undergone in the course of human development.

You all know, of course, what a transformation philosophy has undergone in terms of external scientific life. It encompasses – even in this day and age – the full range of scientific knowledge. As a human activity, philosophy was simply something that, as the name itself suggests, has a certain right to exist. Philosophy was something that did not merely flow from the human intellect, from observation and experiment, although philosophy also extended to the results that intellect, observation and even primitive experiment could arrive at. Philosophy was really that which emerged from the whole human being to a much greater extent than our present-day science, and again in a justified way. Philosophy emerged from a certain relationship of the human being's mind and feelings to the world, and in the age that also gave the name to philosophy, there was no doubt that the human being can also arrive at a certain objectivity in knowledge when he seeks his knowledge not only through experiment, observation and intellect, but when he applies other forces - forces that can be expressed with the same word that we use to describe the “loving” of something - when he therefore makes use of these forces.

And philosophy in the age of the Greeks also included everything that we today summarize in the knowledge of nature. Over the course of the centuries, philosophical endeavor has developed into what we know today as knowledge of nature. In recent times, however, this knowledge of nature has undergone an enormous transformation – a transformation that has made it the basis for practical life in the field of technology to the extent that we experience it in our lives today. If we take an unprejudiced survey of the scientific life of the present day, we cannot but say that what science has done especially well in recent times is to provide a basis for practical life in the field of technology. Our natural science has finally become what corresponds to a word of Kant - I quote Kant when he has said something that I can acknowledge, although I admit that I am an opponent of Kant in many fields. Kant said that there is only as much real science in science as there is mathematics in it. In scientific practice, especially in natural scientific practice, this has been more and more recognized.

Today we do natural science while being aware that we connect what we explore in space and time through observation and experiment with what mathematics reveals to us through pure inner vision. And it is precisely because of this that we feel scientifically certain that we are able to interweave something that is so very much human inner knowledge, human inner experience, as is mathematical, with what observation and experiment give us. By encompassing that which comes to us from outside through the mathematical certainty given to us in pure inner experience, we feel that we are connected to this outside in the process of knowledge in a way that is enough for us to experience scientific certainty. And so we have come more and more to see the exactness of the scientific in precisely the scientific prerequisites, to mathematically justify what we do in scientific work.

Why do we do this? My dear fellow students, why we do it is actually already contained in what I have just said. It lies in the fact that, by doing mathematics, we are merely active within our own mental experience, that we remain entirely within ourselves. I believe that those who have devoted themselves specifically to mathematical studies will agree with me when I say: in terms of inner experience, the mathematical, the process of mathematization, is something that, for those who do it out of inner ability and I would say, can do it out of inner enthusiasm, can give much more satisfaction than any other kind of knowledge of the external world, simply because, step by step, one is directly connected with the scientific result. And when you are then able to connect what is coming from outside with what you know in its entirety, whose entire structure you have created yourself, then you feel something in what is scientifically derived from the interweaving of external data and mathematical work that can be seen as based on a secure foundation. Therefore, because our science allows us to connect the external with an inner experience through mathematics, we recognize this as scientific in the Kantian sense, insofar as mathematics is in it.

Now, however, this simultaneously opens the way for a very specific conception of the scientific world view, and this conception of the scientific world view is precisely what anthroposophical research pursues in its consequences. For what does it actually mean that we have come to such a view of our scientific knowledge? It means that we want to develop our thinking inwardly and, by developing it inwardly, arrive at a certainty and then use it to follow external phenomena, to follow external facts in a lawful way. This principle is now applied to anthroposophy in the appropriate way, in that it is applied to what I would call pure phenomenalism in relation to certain areas of external natural science, in relation to mechanics, physics, chemistry, in relation to everything that does not immediately reach up to life. In the most extreme sense, we hold fast to this phenomenalism for the domains that lie above the inanimate. But we shall see in what way it must be supplemented there by something essentially different.

By visualizing the mathematical relationship to the external world, one gradually comes to realize that in inorganic sciences, thinking can only have a serving character at first, that nowhere are we entitled to bring anything of our own thoughts into the world if we want to have pure science. But this leads to what is called phenomenalism, and which, though it may be criticized in many details, has, in its purest form, been followed by Goethe.

What is this phenomenalism? It consists in regarding phenomena purely, whether through observation or through experiment, just as they present themselves to the senses, and in using thinking only to see the phenomena in a certain context, to line up the phenomena so that the phenomena explain themselves. But in so doing, everything is initially excluded from pure natural science that regards hypotheses not merely as auxiliary constructions, but as if they could provide something about reality. If one stops at pure phenomenalism, then one is indeed justified in assuming an atomistic structure from observation and experiment – be it in the material world or in the world of forces – but this tendency towards an atomistic structure can only be accepted to the extent that one can pursue it phenomenologically, that one can describe it on the basis of phenomena.

The scientific world view that constructs an atomism that postulates something actual behind the phenomena that can be perceived with the senses, but that cannot fall into the world of phenomena itself, sins against this principle.

But anthroposophy draws the final conclusion, to which everything in modern natural science actually tends. Even in this modern natural science, we have recently come to a high degree of development of this phenomenalism, which is still little admitted in theory but is applied in practice, by simply not concerning ourselves with the hypothetical atomic worlds and the like and remaining within the phenomena. But if we stop at the phenomena, we arrive at a very definite conclusion. We arrive at the conclusion that we really come to agnosticism. If we merely string together phenomena by thinking, if we bring order into phenomena, we never come to man himself through this ordering, through this tracing of laws. And that is the peculiar thing, that we must simply admit to ourselves: If you draw the final, fully justified conclusion of modern science, if you go as far as pure phenomenalism, if you put unjustified hypotheses of thought behind the veil of the sensory world, you cannot help but arrive at agnosticism. But this agnosticism is something quite different for knowledge than what humanity has actually hoped for and sought through knowledge within its course of development, within its history.

I do not wish to lead you into remote supersensible regions, although I will also hint at this, but I would like to point out something that should show how knowledge has nevertheless been understood as something quite different, for example in ancient times, from what knowledge can become today if we conscientiously build on our scientific foundations. And here I may again point to that Greek period in which all the sciences were still united within philosophy. I may point out that each of us has the deepest reverence for Greek art, to take just one example, for example for what lives in Greek tragedy.

Now, with regard to Greek tragedy, the catharsis that occurs in it has been spoken of as the most important component of it - the crisis, the decisive element that lives in tragedy. And an important question, which at the same time is a question that can lead us deep into the essence of the process of knowledge, arises when we tie in with what the Greek experienced in tragedy. If we define catharsis in such abstract terms, then it is said, following Aristotle, that tragedy should evoke fear and compassion in the spectator, so that the human soul, by evoking such or similar passions in it, is cleansed of this kind of passion. Now, however, it can be seen – I can only mention this here, the evidence for it can certainly also be found through ordinary science – from everything that is present in Greek tragedy, that thinking about this catharsis, about this artistic crisis, was very closely connected in the Greek mind, for example, with medical thinking.

What was present in the human soul through the effect of tragedy was thought of only as a healing process for something pathological in man, which was elevated into the scenic. From this artistic point of view, one can see how the Greeks understood therapy, the healing process. He understood it to mean that he assumed that something pathological was forming in the diseased organism. What is forming there - I must, of course, speak in very abstract terms in an introductory lecture - the organism takes up its fight against that. The human organism overcomes the disease within itself by overcoming the disease process through excretion. This is how one thought in the field of pathological therapy. Exactly the same, only raised to a higher level, was the thinking in relation to the artistic process. It was simply thought that what tragedy does is a kind of healing process for the soul. Just as the remnants of a cold come out of the organism, so the soul, through the contemplation of tragedy, should develop fear and compassion, then take up the fight against these products of elimination and experience the healing process in their suppression.

However, one can only understand the fundamentals of this way of thinking if one knows that even in Greek culture – in this Greek culture, which was healthy in some respects – there was the view that if a person merely abandons himself to his nature with regard to his psychological development, it will always lead to a kind of illness, and that the spiritual life in man must be a continuous process of recovery. Anyone who is more familiar with Greek culture in this respect will not hesitate for a moment to admit that the Greeks conceived of their highest spiritual life in such a way that they said to themselves: This is a remedy against the constant tendency of the soul to wither away; it is a way of counteracting death. For the Greeks, the spiritual life was a revival of the soul in the direction of its essence. The Greeks did not see only abstract knowledge in their science; they saw in their science something that stimulated a healing process in them. And that was also the special way of thinking, with a somewhat different coloring, in those world views that are based more on Judaism, where there is talk of the Fall of Man, of original sin. The Greeks also had this view - only in a different way - that it is necessary for the human soul to devote itself to an ongoing process of healing in life. Within this Greek spiritual life, it was generally the case that man did not juxtapose the activities to which he devoted himself and the ways of thinking that he held. They were rather combined in him, and so, for example, the art of healing was just an art to him - only an art that remained within nature. And the Greeks, who were eminently artistic people, did not regard art as something that could be profaned or dragged down into a lower realm when compared to that which is a healing process for the human being.

And so we see how, in those older times, knowledge was not actually separated from all of human nature, how it encompassed all human activity. Just as philosophy encompasses knowledge of nature and everything that should now arise from science, by developing it further and further, it also encompasses the artistic life. And finally, religious life was seen as the comprehensive, great process of recovery of humanity, so that, in understanding knowledge in the old way, we must actually say: there knowledge is understood as something that comes from the whole human being. Thought was already there, but humanity could not stop at this phase of the development of knowledge. What was necessarily connected with this phase of the development of knowledge? This can be seen quite clearly if one, equipped with today's scientific spirit, delves a little into some work, let us say in the 13th or 14th century, that was considered scientific in the natural sciences, for example. If you want to understand such a work, you not only have to familiarize yourself with the terminology, but you also have to immerse yourself in the whole spirit.

I do not hesitate to say that if you are steeped in today's scientific spirit and have not first done intimate, honest historical studies, you will inevitably misunderstand a scientific work from a period such as the 13th and 14th centuries AD, for the simple reason that even in those days – and the further back we go in human development, the more this is the case – man not only brought mathematics into the external world, but also a whole wealth of inner experiences in which he believed just as we believe in our mathematics. Thus we address nature quite differently today when we chemists speak of sulfur, phosphorus or salt than when people of that time spoke of sulfur or salt. If we apply today's concepts, we do not in the least touch the meaning that was then in a book, even one meant to be scientific, because at that time more and something other than the mathematical or the similar to mathematics was carried into the results of observation of the external world. Man brought a whole wealth of inner experience – qualitatively and not merely quantitatively – into the outside world.

And just as we express a scientific result with a mathematical formula, just as we seemingly connect subject with object, so in those days subject was connected with object even more, but the subject was filled with a wealth that we no longer have any idea of today and that we dare not allow ourselves to carry back into nature in the same way. Man at that time saw much in the external world that he himself put into it, just as we today put mathematics into nature. He did not think about nature in the same way as we do today, but he projected a great deal into it. In doing so, however, he also projected the moral into nature. Man projected the moral into nature in such a way that in four millennia the moral laws arose in the same way as the laws of nature arose in his knowledge. Man, who projected into nature what in ancient times was thought of as salt, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., was also allowed to project into nature what he experienced as moral impulses, because inwardly he was not doing anything different.

Now, however, we have rightly separated from such a view of the external world, through which we carry all that has been suggested into it. We only carry the mathematical into the external world, and our science therefore becomes a very good basis for technical practice. But by only bringing the mathematical into the external world, we no longer have the right to transfer the moral into objectivity through our science. And we must of necessity – precisely when we are very scientific in the sense that has emerged in recent centuries – fall prey to a moral agnosticism, because we have no other choice than to see only the subjective in moral principles, to see something that we cannot claim comes from nature in the same objective way as the course of a natural process itself.

And so we are obliged to ask ourselves: How do we found moral science and with it the basis of all spiritual science, including all social science? How do we found moral science in an age in which we must justifiably recognize phenomenalism for external nature? That was the big question for me at the time I wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom.” I stood on the ground - completely on the ground! on the ground of modern natural science, yes, on the ground of a phenomenalism regarding what can be fathomed by the process of knowledge from the external world of the senses. But then, if one follows the consequences with all honesty to the end, one must say: If morality is to be justified objectively, then another knowledge must be able to stand alongside this knowledge, which leads to phenomenalism and thus to agnosticism - a knowledge that does not thinking to devise hypothetical worlds behind the phenomena of the senses, but a knowledge must be established that can grasp the spiritual directly in intuition, after it - except for the mathematical - is no longer carried out into the world in the old way. It is precisely agnosticism that, on the one hand, compels us to fully recognize it in its own field, but at the same time also compels us to rouse our minds to activity in order to grasp a spiritual world from which we can, in the first instance, if we do not want to remain merely in the subjective, find moral principles through objective spiritual observation.

My Philosophy of Freedom has been called, with some justification, ethical individualism, but that only captures one side of it. We must, of course, arrive at ethical individualism because what is now seen as a moral principle must be seen by each individual in freedom. But just as in the inner, active process of the mind, mathematics is worked out in pure knowledge and yet proves to be well-founded within objectivity, so too can that which is the content of moral impulses be grasped in pure spiritual insight - not merely in faith, but in pure spiritual insight. And that is why one is compelled, as I was in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” to say: Moral science must be based on moral intuition. And I said at the time that we can only arrive at a real moral view in the modern style if we realize that Just as we extract individual natural phenomena from the whole of nature, we must extract the moral principles, which are only intuitively grasped spiritually but nevertheless objectively grasped quite independently of us, from a contemplated spiritual world, from a supersensible spiritual world.

I spoke first of moral intuition. This brings the process of knowledge into a certain line. Through the process of knowledge — especially if it is to remain genuinely scientific — the soul is driven to muster its innermost powers and to push this mustering so far that the intuition of a spiritual world really becomes possible. Now the question arises: Is only that which can be grasped as moral impulses to be seen in the spiritual world, or is perhaps that which leads us to our moral intuitions merely one area among many? The answer to this, however, arises when one grasps what has been experienced inwardly in the soul as moral intuitions and then continues this in an appropriate way.

Exactly the same thing that the soul experiences when it rises to the purely spiritual grasp of the moral – it has only become necessary in modern times through natural science – exactly the same thing that is lived through there can now also be lived through for further areas. Thus it may be said that anyone who has once practiced self-observation of this inner experience that leads to moral intuition can indeed develop this inner experience more and more. And the exercises presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” serve to develop this inner experience. And these exercises then lead to the fact that one does not stop at thinking and forming hypotheses with it, but that one regards this thinking in its liveliness and develops it further - to what I will now explain in the second part of my lecture and what can be called an exact looking at the supersensible world. What is meant is not the lost mystical vision of earlier times, but an exact vision of the supersensible world, in accordance with science, which can be called exact clairvoyance. And in this way we gradually arrive at those forms of knowledge which I characterized only recently here in a public lecture: imagination, inspiration and the higher intuition — forms of knowledge that illuminate the inner human being.

If we now ask ourselves how we can still have an objectively based moral science and thus also a social science, precisely when we are firmly grounded in natural science, then in these introductory words I wanted to show you first of all how, by honestly place oneself on the ground of today's science, but still wants to turn to life - to life as it simply must be for the person who is to achieve an inner wholeness - how one is thereby rubbed into spiritual research. This now differs from ordinary research in that ordinary research simply makes use of those soul powers that are already there, in order then to spread over the wide field of observation and experiment. In contrast to this, anthroposophical research first turns to the human being so that he may develop higher soul forces, which, when they are precisely developed, lead to a higher vision, which in the supersensible provides the complement to what we find in the sensual through our exact scientific methods.

How this exact higher vision is developed, how one can now penetrate from the sensual into the supersensible outside the moral realm, that will be the subject of my discussions after the break.

Short break

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! The first step in attaining supersensible knowledge is achieved through what we may call meditation, combined with a certain concentration of our thinking. In my last public lecture here in Leipzig, I described the essential point of this from one perspective. Today I would like to characterize it from a different perspective, one that also leads us to a scientific understanding of the world. The essence of this meditation, combined with concentration of thought, consists precisely in the fact that the human being does not remain, for example, with that inner handling of thinking that has been formed once through inheritance, through ordinary education and so on, but that at a certain point in his mature life he regards this thinking, which he has acquired, only as a starting point for further inner development.

Now you know that there are mystical natures in the present day who speak somewhat contemptuously of thinking and who resort to all kinds of other powers of cognition that are more tinged with the subconscious in order to gain a kind of view of the world that is supposed to encompass what ordinary thinking cannot grasp. This dream-like, fantastic immersion in an inner soul life, which crosses over into the pathological realm, has nothing to do with what is meant by anthroposophy. It moves in precisely the opposite direction: every single step that is taken to further develop thinking, to reeducate it to a higher ability, can be pursued with such an inner free and deliberate vividness that can otherwise only be applied to the inner experiences of the soul, which we develop through such a deliberate cognitive activity as that practiced by mathematicians.

Thus one can say: precisely that for which modern man has been educated through his scientific education – mathematical thinking – is taken as a model, not only for seeking out some external connections, but for developing a higher thinking process itself. What mathematics undertakes in the horizontal plane, if I may express myself figuratively, is undertaken in the vertical plane, I would say, by carrying out an inner soul activity, a soul exercise itself, in such a way that you give an account of yourself inwardly with every single step, just as you give an account of yourself with mathematical steps, by placing a certain content of ideas at the center of your consciousness when you control your thoughts, which should simply be a content of thoughts. It does not depend on the content; it depends on what you do with it. You should not suggest something to yourself in any way. Of all these more unconscious soul activities, anthroposophical practice is the opposite.

But if you further develop what you have already acquired as a certain form of thinking by resting with all your soul activity on a manageable content, and if you this resting on a certain soul activity, this attentiveness to this soul activity with the exclusion of everything else that can otherwise penetrate into the soul, is undertaken again and again, the thinking process becomes stronger. And only then do you notice what was, so to speak, the good side of materialism, of the materialistic world view. Because you now realize that all the thinking that you do in ordinary life, especially the thinking that continues in memory, leads us to the fact that what we have experienced in thought can later be brought up again through memory. One notices that all this can only be accomplished by man between birth and death by using his body as a basis - I do not want to say as an instrument, but as a basis. And it is precisely by developing thinking through inner development that we realize that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the human body and its organs, and that the process of memory in particular cannot be explained without recourse to a more subtle physiology. Only now do we realize that thinking is freeing itself from the body, becoming ever freer and freer from the body.

Only now do we ascend from thinking that takes place with the help of the body to thinking that takes place in the inner processes of the soul; only now do we notice that we are gradually moving into such inner experience, which does not occur, but - I would like to say - is preparing itself. When we pass from the waking state of ordinary consciousness into the state of sleep, our organism simply becomes such that it no longer performs those functions that live out in imagining and in the perceiving associated with imagining.

But because in our ordinary life we are only able to think with the help of our body, thinking ceases the moment it can no longer be done with the help of the body – that is when we fall asleep. The last remnants remain in the pictorial thinking of dreaming, but if one again and again and again pushes thinking further and further through an inner, an exact inner exercise - that is why I speak of exact clairvoyance in contrast to dark, mystical clairvoyance -, through an exact exercise, one learns to recognize the possibility of thinking that is independent of the body. It is precisely because of this that the anthroposophical researcher can point to his developed thinking with such inner certainty, because he knows - better even than the materialist - the dependence of ordinary thinking on the bodily organization, and because he experiences how, in meditation, in practice, the actual soul is lifted out of its bondage to the body. One learns to think free of the body, one learns to step out of the body with one's I-being, one gets to know the body as an object, whereas before it was thoroughly connected with the subjectivity.

This is precisely what is difficult for contemporary education to recognize, because on the one hand, through anthroposophical knowledge, the bondage of the imagination to bodily functions has been understood in modern science, and this is actually becoming more and more apparent through anthroposophical knowledge. But we must be clear about the fact that, despite this insight, we cannot stop at this thinking, but that this thinking can be detached from the body by strengthening it inwardly through meditation. But then this thinking is transformed.

At first, when this body-free thinking flashes, when the experience flashes: you are now in a soul activity that you carry out as if you had simply withdrawn from your body - when this inner experience flashes, then the thinking becomes inwardly more intense. It acquires the same inner satiety that one otherwise has only when perceiving a sensual object. Thinking acquires pictorial quality. Thinking remains in the sphere of composure, just like any other thinking that is bound to the body, but in the body-free state it now acquires pictorial quality. One thinks in images. And this thinking in images was also present in its beginning in what Goethe had developed in his morphology. That is why he claims that he can see his ideas with his eyes. Of course, he did not mean the physical eyes, but what arose in him, so to speak, from an elementary natural process, but which can also be developed through meditation. By this he meant that he saw with the “spiritual” eye what was just as pictorial as otherwise only the physical perceptions, but which was thoroughly mental in its inner quality. I say “thought-like,” not thought, because it is a thought that has been further developed, a metamorphosed thought - it is thought-like.

In this way, however, one rises to the realization of what one is as a human being in one's life on earth - at least initially to the moment in which one is currently living. In ordinary consciousness, we have before us the present moment with all the experiences that are in the environment. Even in ordinary science, we have before us what comes as a supplement to this - there are the thoughts that arise in our minds, which we connect with the experiences of the present moment. This body-free, pictorial thinking, to which we rise and of which I have just spoken and which I call imaginative thinking - not because it is an imagination, but because it proceeds in images and not in abstractions - this thinking encompasses our past life on earth as a unity, as in a single tableau that stands before us. And we now recognize that in us, alongside the spatial organism, there lives a temporal organism - an organism in which the before and after stand in just as organic a connection as the side by side in the outer, physical spatial organism that we carry on us. This organism is recognized as a supersensible organism - in my books I have called it the “etheric body”; one can also call it the life body.

What it comprises is not at all identical with the unwarranted assumption of a “vital force” by an earlier science, which arrived at this vital force only by hypothetical means, whereas this life body comes to the developed imaginative thinking as a real intuition. In this way, one arrives at the fact that what is past for ordinary consciousness in the inner being of man - as something that I experienced ten years ago, for example, and that now emerges in my memory - that this does not now appear as something past, but one experiences it as something directly present, one looks at it with the intensity with which one looks at something present. But as a result, what would otherwise have been lost in the passage of time is suddenly revealed to you in its entirety; your whole life is a single image, one whose individual parts belong together. And one realizes that in reality the past is a present thing, that it only appears as past because we, with our knowledge attuned to present observation, have it only as a memory at this moment. But in objectivity it is an immediate present, a reality.

Thus one comes to the recognition of what is the first supersensible in man. But it also leads to the recognition of something that is present in the entire living world, which inorganic science cannot provide up to the level of chemistry: we come to the insight that is the further development of Goethean morphology; we come to the insight that the individual plant form is only a particular manifestation of that form, which also exists in other plants; we come to what Goethe calls the primordial plant, which is not a cell, but a concretely formed, supersensible form that can be grasped only by imaginative cognition, but which can live in every single plant form — can live in a changed, metamorphosed way. We come to an appreciation of what we find in the vegetable world when we want to understand it fully. And we must realize that if we do not develop this imaginative knowledge, which shows a supersensible, dynamic element in everything vegetable, we learn to recognize only the mechanical, physical, chemical processes that take place in the plant form.

It is to the credit of modern natural science, insofar as it is botany, that it has carefully studied what takes place in the plant form, or rather, in the part of space enclosed by the plant form, what takes place in the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These processes are no different from those that are also out there, but they are grasped by something that cannot be grasped by the same methods as the physical and chemical ones. They are grasped by that which lives as a real supersensible and can only be recognized in imagination – in that imagination in which we also find ourselves at the same time as human totality in our experience since birth as if standing before us in a single moment.

We learn, on the one hand, to recognize why we, especially when we apply the modern, exact scientific methods as they have developed, must come to a certain agnosticism with regard to the understanding of the vegetable. And so we can see why there must be a certain field of agnosticism; and so we can also see how anthroposophy adds precisely that which must remain unknown to this agnosticism. We see how anthroposophy leads beyond agnosticism while allowing it full validity in its own realm. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that at this stage we are acquiring a more detailed understanding of the interaction between the human being and the external world. Physics, mechanics, chemistry are rightly being developed in the present day in such a way that we carry as little of the human as possible into this external world, in that we say: only that has objectivity in which we contain all subjectivity. - Certainly, anthroposophy will not fight the justification of this method in a certain field, but will recognize it. But when we use what we also recognize in the imagination to grasp and behold what lives in the vegetable kingdom, we attain on the one hand an intimate knowledge of our own supersensible being — at least as it is between birth and death — but we also thereby gain a vision of the fluctuating, metamorphosing processes in the world of living forms. In this way we connect ourselves as human beings with the outer world, initially at a first level, in imagination. We incorporate the human element into our world view.

The next level of supersensible knowledge is inspiration. It is attained by developing more and more, I would say, the opposite pole of meditation and concentration. Anyone who has acquired a certain practice in meditation and concentration knows that when you energize thinking, you also get the inner inclination to dwell on what arises as a part of the soul as energized thinking. One must exert oneself more when leaving these energized imaginative thoughts than when leaving any other thought. But if one can now really throw these energized thoughts out of consciousness again - this whole imaginative world that one has first appropriated -, if one can empty consciousness, not cannot be emptied from the ordinary point of view, but can be emptied after one has first inwardly strengthened it, then this emptiness of consciousness becomes something quite different from what the emptiness of consciousness is in ordinary life. There the emptiness of consciousness is sleeping.

The emptiness of consciousness, however, which occurs after one has first strengthened this consciousness, is very soon filled by the phenomena of an environment that is now completely different from all that one has previously known. Now one gets to know a world to which our ordinary ideas of space and time can no longer be applied. Now we get to know a world that is a real external world of soul and spirit. It is just as concrete as our real world of the senses. But it can only flow into us if we have emptied our consciousness at a higher level. After one has first come to imagination, by concentrating on a spiritual content and now being able to perceive outside one's body because one has activity within oneself - not the passivity that is present in ordinary consciousness - and by having gone through the appropriate preparations, the spiritual outer world now penetrates through the developed activity of the freed consciousness, just as the appearances of the world of colors or the world of sounds otherwise penetrate through the senses.

On the one hand, through this spiritual outer world, we arrive at an understanding of what we were as human beings before we descended from a spiritual and soul world into the physical world, before we united with what had been prepared in the mother's womb through conception as the physical human germ. One gains an insight into what first lived in a spiritual-soul world and then united with the physical human being. So one gets to know that which, between birth and death, is basically quite ineffective, which is, so to speak, excluded from our sensory perception, but which was effective in us and which worked in its purity before we descended into a physical body. That is one thing: we gain a deeper knowledge of human nature by ascending to this second stage of supersensible vision, which is developed just as precisely as the other, the imaginative stage. And this knowledge, through which a spiritual world flows into us, just as pure air flows from outside into our lungs and is then further processed, this knowledge, which we process in the subconscious for ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious for the developed consciousness, fully consciously, I have allowed myself to call this influx “inspirative knowledge”.

This is the second step. Through it, we first come to recognize our eternal as pre-existing. But with this we also have the possibility to penetrate into what now not only lives in the external world, but what lives and feels, what thus lives out in the living formation of the inner life in such a way that this inner life becomes present to itself in feeling. Only through this do we learn to recognize what lives around us as animalistic. We supplement our knowledge with what we can never attain through an ordinary view, as we have developed it in physics and chemistry. We come to look at what lives in the sentient being as a higher, supersensible reality. We now learn through observation, not through philosophical hypotheses in the modern sense, to actually follow a new, higher world: the world of the spiritual and soul in the sentient physical. But in doing so, we move a step further away from agnosticism. This must exist if we only follow the chemical processes in the sentient living. We must follow these, and it is the great merit of modern natural science that these can be followed, but with that, this natural science must become agnostic. This must find its completion in the fact that precisely now, in free spirituality, one experiences through inspiration that which must be added in order to arrive at the full reality of sentient life. But in this way one achieves something else, of which I would like to give you an example. In this way one comes to recognize that the process that takes place in the human being, for example - it is similar for the animal - that this process is not only an ascending one, but at the same time also a descending one. Only now are we really learning to look at ourselves properly from within; we learn, by ascending to this inspired realization, to know more precisely what is actually going on in our ordinary consciousness. Above all, one learns to recognize that it is not a process of building up, but of breaking down, that our nervous life is essentially a life of breakdown. If our nerves could not be broken down - and of course rebuilt from time to time - we could not develop ordinary thinking. Vital life, when it appears in abundance, is basically a numbing of thought, as it occurs in every sleep. The kind of life that is interspersed with feeling and thinking must, at the same time, carry within it a process of decomposition, I would say a differential dying process.

This process of disintegration is first encountered in healthy life, that is, in the life in which it occurs in order for human thinking in the ordinary sense of the word to come about at all. Once one has acquired an understanding of the nature of these processes, one also becomes familiar with the abnormal occurrence of these processes. There are simply certain organs or organ systems in the human organism in which parallel processes to ordinary thinking occur. But if the catabolic processes, which are otherwise the physical basis of thinking, extend to organs to which they are not otherwise assigned, so to speak, through an internal infection – the word is not quite used in the actual sense – then disease states arise in these organs.

It is absolutely necessary that we develop pathology in such a way that we can also find the processes that we recognize in physiology in pathology. However, this is only possible if we can see the essence of these processes in our human organization; it is similar in the animal organization, but still somewhat different - I say this again so that I am not misunderstood. By observing the processes in our human organism in such a way that we recognize one polarity as an organization that is designed for breakdown and the other polarity as one that cannot be affected by this breakdown in a healthy state, we learn to see through these two aspects in inspired knowledge.

If we learn to see through this and can we then connect this seeing through of our own organism with an inspired recognition of the outer world, of the processes in the plant kingdom, if we learn to see through this mineral kingdom and also the animal kingdom through inspired knowledge, then we learn to recognize a relationship between human inner processes and the outer world that is even more intimate than that which already existed at the earlier stage of human history. I have shown how, at this earlier stage, man felt related to external nature by seeing in all that appears in the most diverse metamorphoses in the vegetable world something that he found in the soul, in his own life between birth and death.

But if, through inspired knowledge, he now learns to see that which he was in his pre-existent life, then at the same time he sees through that in the outer realm which not only lives in feeling, but which has a certain relation, a certain connection, to that which lives in the human organization, which is oriented towards feeling, towards thinking. And one learns to recognize the connections between the processes outside and the processes inside, and also the connections with the life of feeling. One learns to recognize what is brought forth in man when the organs are seized by the breakdown, which actually should not be seized by it, because the breakdown in this sense must only be the basis for the thinking and feeling process. When, as it were, the organic activity for thinking and feeling seizes members of the human organism that should not be seized, then what we have to grasp in pathology arises. But when we grasp the outer world with the same kind of knowledge, then we find what must be grasped by therapy. Then we find the corresponding process of polar counteraction, which - I would express it this way - normal internal breakdown. In short, through an inner vision we find the connection between pathology and therapy, between the disease process and the remedy. In this way we go beyond medical agnosticism – not by denying present-day medicine but by recognizing what it can be – and at the same time we find the way to add to it what it cannot find by itself.

If anyone now believes that anthroposophy wants to develop some kind of dilettantism in the most diverse fields of science, then I have to say: that is not the case! It consciously wants to be the continuation of what it fully recognizes as the result of today's science, but it wants to supplement it with higher methods of knowledge. She wants to go beyond the deficiencies of mere trial and error therapy, which basically everyone who is also active in practice has already sensed, to a therapy gained from observation that has an inner, organic connection with pathology, which is, so to speak, only the other side of pathology. If one succeeds in finding pathology simply as a continuation of physiology in the way described, then one also succeeds – by getting to know the relationship between man and his natural environment – in extending pathology into therapy in a completely rational way, so that in the future these two need not stand side by side as they do today in a more agnostic science.

These are only suggestions that I would like to make in the sense that they could show a little – I know how incomplete one has to be in such an orienting lecture – how far it is from anthroposophy to ant opposition to recognized science, but rather that it is precisely important for it to draw the final consequence from the agnostic form of science and thereby arrive at the view of what must be added to this science. This is already being sensed, and basically there are many, especially members of the younger generation, who are learning to feel that science as it exists now is not enough, who feel: we need something else, because it is not enough for us. Precisely when we are otherwise honest about it, then we have to come to something else through it. And it is precisely for those who get to know science not just as an answer but, in a higher sense, as a question that anthroposophy wants to be there — not to drive them into dilettantism, but to progress in exactly the right, exact way from science to what science itself demands if it is pursued consistently.

But then there is a third higher stage of knowledge. This is attained when we extend the exercises to include exercises of the will. Through the will, we initially accomplish mainly what a person can do in the external world. But when we apply the same energy of the will to our own inner processes, then a third stage of supersensible knowledge arises on the basis of imagination and inspiration. If we are completely honest with ourselves, we will have to admit at every moment of our lives: We are something completely different today than we were ten or twenty years ago. The content of our soul has changed, but in changing it, we were actually quite passively surrendered to the outside world. It is precisely in relation to our inner transformation that a certain passivity reigns in us.

But if we take this transformation into our own hands, if we bring ourselves to radically change what is habitual in us, for example, in a certain relationship - where a change seems possible - if we behave inwardly towards ourselves in such a way that we make ourselves into a different person in a certain direction through our own will, then we have to actively intensify our inner experience over years, often decades, because such exercises of will take time. You make up your mind: you will develop a certain quality or the form of a quality in yourself. After months you notice how little you succeed in doing this, in this way, what otherwise the body makes out of you. But if you make more and more effort, then you not only see your inner, supersensible human being, but you also manage to make this inner human being, so to speak, completely transparent. A sense organ such as our eye would not be able to serve us as a visual organ if it did not selflessly - if I may use the term - withdraw its own substantiality. As a result, it is transparent, physically transparent. Thus, through exercises of will, we become, so to speak, inwardly transparent to the soul.

I have only hinted at a few things here. You will find a very detailed account in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” We really do enter a state in which we see the world without ourselves being an obstacle to fully penetrating into the supersensible. For, in fact, we are the obstacle to entering fully into the supersensible world because, in our ordinary consciousness, we always live in our body. The body only imparts to us what is earthly, not what is soul-spiritual. We now look, by being able to disregard our body, into a stage of the spiritual world through which that appears to us before the spiritual gaze, which becomes of our soul, when it has once passed through the gate of death. Just as we get to know our pre-existent life through the other way I described earlier, so now we get to know our life in the state after death. Once we have learned to see the organism no longer, we now learn, as it figuratively presents itself to us, the process by which we find ourselves when we discard this physical organism altogether and enter the spiritual-soul world with our spiritual-soul organism. The demise of our physical existence, the awakening of a spiritual-soul existence: this is what we experience in the third stage of supersensible knowledge, in the stage that I have called higher intuitive knowledge.

By having this experience, by being able to place ourselves in a spiritual world without being biased by our subjectivity, we are able to recognize this spiritual world in its full inwardness. In inspiration, it is still as it flows into us; but now, in higher intuition, we get to know it in its full inwardness. And now let us look back at what first presented itself to us as a necessity: moral intuition. This moral intuition is the only one for ordinary consciousness that arises out of the spiritual world during proper self-contemplation of pure thinking - I have presented this in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But if we now go through imagination and inspiration, we do exercises that teach us to completely detach ourselves from ourselves, to develop the highest activity of the spiritual and soul, and yet not to be subjective, but to be objective, by living in objectivity itself. Only when we have achieved this standing in objectivity is it possible to do spiritual science.

Only then is it possible to see what is already living as spiritual in the physical world; only then does one gain a real understanding of history. History as a series of external facts is only the preparation. What lives as spiritual driving forces and driving entities in the historical can only be seen through intuitive knowledge. And it is only at this level of intuitive knowledge that we truly see what our own ego is. At first, our own ego appears to us as something we cannot see through. Just as a dark space within a brightness appears to us in such a way that we see the brightness from the darkness with our eyes, so we look back at our soul, see its thoughts, feel further inner processes, live in our will impulses. But the actual I-being is, so to speak, like a dark space within it. This is now being illuminated. We are getting to know our eternal being. But with that, we are only getting to know the human being in such a way that we can also fully understand him as a social being. Now we are at the point where the complement to social agnosticism occurs.

This is where things start to get really serious. What is social agnosticism? It arises from the fact that we apply the observation that we have learned to apply correctly to external, natural phenomena, and that we now also want to apply this trained observation to social phenomena. This is where the various compromise theories in social science and sociology come from – in fact, all the theories about the conception of social life that we have seen arise. This is where the approach to the conception of social life that starts from the natural sciences comes from, but which must therefore disregard everything cognizable, everything that is alienated from thought and only present in the life of instincts. The extreme case of this occurred in Marxism, which regards everything that is spiritual as an ideology and only wants to see the impulses of social life realized if these impulses develop out of the instinctive, which belongs to agnosticism. Class consciousness is actually nothing more than the sum of all that is not rooted in a knowledge of man, but that comes from the instincts - only it must be recognized by those who develop such instincts in certain life circumstances.

If you look at our social life with an unbiased eye, you will find that we have come to agnosticism precisely in the social sphere. However grotesque and paradoxical it may still appear to modern man, in this field of spiritual science we can only go beyond this kind of knowledge, insofar as it is agnostic, if we rise to truly intuitive knowledge and thus to the experience of the human being. We humans today actually pass each other by. We judge each other in the most superficial way. Social demands arise as we develop precisely the old social instincts most strongly. But an inner, social soul mood will only come about if the intuitions from a spiritual world permeate us with life. In the age of agnosticism, we have necessarily come to see everything spiritual more or less only in ideas. However, ideas, insofar as they are in ordinary consciousness, are not alive. Today's philosophers speak to us of logical ideas, of aesthetic ideas, of ethical ideas. We can observe them all, we can experience them all inwardly and theoretically, but they have no impulsive power for life. The ideas only become a reality of life when they are wrung out in intuitive experience of the spiritual. We cannot achieve social redemption and liberation, nor can we imbue our lives with a religiosity that is appropriate for us, if we do not come to an intuitive, vitalized grasp of the spiritual.

This life-filled comprehension of the spiritual will differ significantly from what we call spiritual life today. Today, we actually call the ideational life spiritual life; in other words, life in abstract ideas that are not impulses. But what intuition provides us with will give us as humanity a living spirit that lives with us. We have only thoughts, and because they are only thoughts, we have lost the spirit altogether. We have thoughts as abstractions. We must regain the life of thoughts. But the life of thought is the spirit that lives among us - and not the spirit that we merely know. We will only develop a social life if, in turn, spirit lives in us, if we do not try to shape society out of the spiritless - out of what lives in social agnosticism - but if we shape it out of that attitude that understands through intuition to achieve the living spirit.

We may look back today on earlier ages - certainly, we have overcome them, and especially those of us who stand on anthroposophical ground are least likely to wish them back in their old form. But what these earlier ages had, despite all the mistakes we can easily criticize today, is that in certain epochs they brought the living spirit - not just the spirit of thought - among people. This allowed the existing basis of knowledge to expand to include artistic perception of the world, religious penetration of the innermost self, and social organization of the world. We will only achieve a new social organization of the world, a new religious life, and new artistic works on the basis of knowledge, on which they have always fundamentally stood, when we in turn gain a living knowledge, so that not only the thoughts of the spirit, but the spirit itself lives in humanity. It is this living spirit that Anthroposophy seeks. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory or a theoretical world view; Anthroposophy wants to be that which can stir the spirit in its liveliness in the life of the human being, that which can permeate the human being not only with knowledge of the spirit, but with the spirit itself.

In this way we shall go beyond the age that has brought phenomenalism to its highest flowering. Of course, one can only wish that it will continue to flourish in this way, one can only wish that the scientific way of thinking will continue to flourish in the conscientiousness in which it has become established. But the life of the spirit must not be allowed to exist merely by continuing to live in the old traditions. Fundamentally, all spiritual experiences are built on traditions, on what earlier humanity has achieved in the way of spirit.

In principle, our art today is also built on traditions, on the basis of what an earlier humanity has achieved. Today, we cannot arrive at new architectural styles unless we reshape consciousness itself, because otherwise we will continue to build in Renaissance, Gothic, and antique styles. We will not arrive at creative production. We will arrive at creative production when we first inwardly vitalize knowledge itself, so that we do not merely shape concepts but inner life, which fills us and can form the bridge between what we grasp in thought and what we must create in full life.

This, dear attendees, dear fellow students, is what anthroposophy seeks to achieve. It seeks to bring life into the human soul, into the human spirit, not by opposing what it recognizes as fully justified in the modern scientific spirit, as it is often said to do. It seeks to carry this spirit of science further, so that it can penetrate from the external, material and naturalistic into the spiritual and soul realms. And anyone who can see through people's needs in this way today is convinced that in many people today there is already an inner, unconscious urge for such a continuation of the spirit of science in the present day. Anthroposophy seeks only to consciously shape what lives in many as a dark urge. And only those who get to know it in its true light, not in the distortions that are sometimes created of it today, will see it in its true light and in its relationship to science.

Pronunciation

Walter Birkigt, Chairman: I would like to thank Dr. Steiner for the lecture he has given here, and I would now like to point out that the discussion is about to begin. Please submit requests and questions in writing.

Dr. Dobrina: Dear attendees! After such a powerful picture of the present and past intellectual history of humanity has been presented, it is not easy to give a sharp summary in a few words. But I think that before proceeding to a critique, one must first appreciate the depth of the whole presentation. One must appreciate and admit that a synthesis is sought between natural science with its exact trains of thought and spiritual science with its partly antiquated forms.

In the last few centuries, natural science has indeed managed to rise to the throne and even to push philosophy down from the throne as antiquated. Now, however, those who cannot be satisfied with the philosophy that has been overthrown and deified are again looking for an impetus to bring philosophy back to the old podium on which it stood in Greece. And I believe that anthroposophy, as developed for us by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is an attempt to shape the synthesis in such a way that, although it only recognizes natural science in the preliminary stages and makes every effort not to object to its exactness, it then goes beyond it to penetrate into the supersensible realm. However, the step into the supersensible world seems to me to be based on very weak foundations, especially since Dr. Rudolf Steiner works with concepts such as preexistence. Those who have more time could ask more pointed questions about what he means by this preexistence or what he has to say about the “post-mortem” life, about life after death.

Applause.

In any case, I believe that from this point of view we can and must immediately enter into a sharp discussion with him, and it will probably show that basically the whole conceptualization of Dr. Rudolf Steiner breaks down into two quite separate areas. On the one hand, he makes an effort to plunge into therapy and to consider Greek thinking from the point of view of therapeutic analysis, while on the other hand he works with concepts that come from the old tools of theosophy and are very reminiscent of antiquated forms of spiritual life.

Applause

For this reason, I would like to say very briefly that the whole picture that Dr. Rudolf Steiner has developed here, as well as in the previous public lecture, seems to me to be quite inadequate and that on this basis one can in fact arrive at no criticism of modern life, nor of modern economic struggles, nor of the position that is taken today against the spiritual powers that have fallen into decline.

Applause.

Perhaps Dr. Rudolf Steiner would be kind enough to

respond to this shortly.

Walter Birkigt: Does the assembly understand the statement as a question, that Dr. Steiner should respond immediately? I would therefore ask Dr. Steiner to respond.

Applause.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, dear attendees, I said in my lecture that it should be an orienting one. And I said that an orienting lecture faces the difficulty of being able to only hint at certain things that would require further elaboration, so that a whole flood of unsatisfactory things naturally arise in the soul of the listener, which of course cannot be cleared away in the first lecture either. The point of the comments – I cannot say objections – made by the esteemed previous speaker is that he found that I had used words that he considers old terms.

Now, my dear audience, we can put all our words – even the most ordinary ones – into this category. We must, after all, use words when we want to express ourselves. If you were to try to see what is already available today in contemporary literature, which often seems outrageous to me – I mean outrageous in terms of its abundance – if you were to read everything that I myself have written, for example, ...

Heiterkeit

... when faced with this abundance, it is quite natural that in a first, introductory lecture, only some aspects can be touched upon. So let us take a closer look at what the esteemed previous speaker has just said. He said that pre-existence reminds him of old concepts. But now, he is only reminded of old terms because I have used words that were there before. Of course, when I say that by elevating imaginative knowledge, which I have characterized, to inspired knowledge, which I have also characterized, I arrive at the concept of preexistence. If I merely describe how one comes to the vision of the pre-existent life, then it does not depend on the term “preexistence,” but only on the fact that I describe how a precise practice takes place to arrive at an insight into what was there in the human being before this human being — if I may put it this way — united with a physical body, with what was being prepared in the mother's body through the conception. So, I only used the word pre-existence to point to something that can only be seen when supersensible knowledge has been attained in the way I have described. In Gnosticism one finds a certain attitude towards knowledge. As such, Gnosticism has nothing to do with the aims of modern anthroposophy, but this attitude towards knowledge, as it was present in ancient Gnosticism and which aims at recognizing the supersensible, is reviving in our age - in the post-Galilean, post-Copernican age - but in a different form.

And now I will describe to you in more detail what should follow – I will describe it in a few sentences. You see, if we look from a knowledge that is sought on the basis of the methods I have spoken of, if we look from this kind of knowledge to an older one that is very different from it, we come to an oriental form of knowledge that could in fact be called “theosophical”. Only after this had developed in older times could a philosophy arise out of a theosophy, and only then could anthroposophy arise out of a philosophy. Of course, if you take the concepts in such a way that you only hold them in their abstractness, not in what matters, then you will mix everything up, and the new will only appear to you as a rehash of the old. This theosophy was achieved by completely different methods of knowledge than those I have described.

What were the essentials of this method of knowledge? I do not mean everything, but just a certain phase of it. For example, the ancient Indian yoga process, which should truly not be experienced as a warm-up in anthroposophy. We can see this from the fact that what I am describing initially seems very similar to this yoga process, doesn't it? But if you don't put it there yourself, you won't find that what I am describing is similar to the yoga process. This consisted in the fact that at a stage of human development in which the whole human life was less differentiated than it is today, it was felt that the rhythmic breathing process was connected with the thinking process. Today we look at the matter physiologically. Today we know: When we breathe, when we inhale, we simultaneously press the respiratory force through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breathing process continues in a metamorphosed way, so that, physiologically speaking, we have a synthesis of the breathing process and the thinking process.

Yoga is based on this process, transforming ordinary breathing into a differently regulated breathing. Through the modified breathing process – that is, through a more physical process – thinking was transformed. It was made into what a certain view in the old, instinctive sense yielded. Today, we live in a differentiated human organization; today we have to go straight to the thought process, but today we also arrive at something completely different as a result. So when you go into the specifics, you will be able to clearly define each individual phase of cognition as it has occurred in succession in human development. And then you will no longer think that what is now available in the form of anthroposophy, as a suitable way of acquiring higher knowledge in the present day, can somehow be lumped together with what was available in older times. Of course, we cannot discuss what I have not talked about at all on the basis of what I have told you in an introductory lecture. I would now, of course, have to continue with what pre-existent life is like. I could say nothing else in my introductory lecture except that the realization of pre-existent life is attained through the processes described, which are indeed different from anything that has ever emerged in history as inner development.

And now I would really like to ask what justification there is for criticism when I use the word pre-existence in the sense in which everyone can understand it. It means nothing other than what it says through the wording. If I understand existence as that which is experienced through the senses, and then speak of pre-existence, then it is simply existence in the spiritual and soul life before sensual existence. This does not point to some old theosophy, but a word is used that would have to be further explained if one goes beyond an orienting lecture. You will find that if you take what may be called Theosophy and what I have described in my book, which I have also entitled “Theosophy” - if you take that, then it leads back to its beginnings in ancient forms - just as our chemistry leads back to alchemy.

But what I have described today as a process of knowledge is not at all similar to any process of knowledge in ancient times. It is therefore quite impossible to make what will follow from my lecture today and what has not yet been said the subject of a discussion by saying: Yes, preexistence, that leads back to old tools. If you have followed it, it does not lead back to old tools, but it does continue certain attitudes of knowledge that were present at the time when the old tools were needed, and which today only exist in their remnants and project into our present as beliefs, whereas in the past they were reached in processes of knowledge. Now, through processes of knowledge that are organized in the same way as our scientific knowledge, we must again come to insights that can fill the whole human being, not just the intellectually oriented one.

Dear attendees, if you want to criticize something, you have to criticize what has been said directly, not what could not be discussed in the lecture and of which you then say that it is not justified or the like. How can something that is just a simple description not be justified? I have done nothing but describe, and that is precisely what I do in the introductory lectures. Only someone who knew what happens when one really does these things could say that something is not explained. If one really does these things, that is, if one no longer merely speaks about them from the outside, then one will see that they are much more deeply grounded than any mathematical science, for they go much more closely to the soul than mathematical processes do. And so such a criticism is an extraordinarily superficial one. And the fact that anthroposophy is always understood only in this external way makes its appearance so extraordinarily difficult. In no other science is one required to give everything when a lecture is given. Only in anthroposophy is one required to give everything in a lecture. I have said from the beginning that I cannot do that.

Applause

But it is not a matter of my describing what is available as old tools of the trade, for example how gnosis has come to such knowledge in inner soul processes or how, for example, the oriental yoga school comes to knowledge. If one knows these tools, if one does not just talk about them, ...

Applause

... then people will no longer claim that anthroposophy reminds them of the old days. This is only maintained as long as one allows reminiscences to come in the form of abstract concepts that arise only from the fact that they are not compared with the concrete, with the real. Of course, I could go on for a very long time, but this may suffice as an answer.

Lively applause

Mr. H. Schmidt: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to criticize something, or rather put a question mark over it: Dr. Steiner said this evening that every scientific world view is dualistic in the sense that it must add to what is immediate and certain something uncertain. It is clear that in anthroposophy this other is the supersensible world. But the scientific value of a philosophy is shown to us in how far it succeeds in presenting the inner relationship between the supersensible and the sensible - I say “scientific” value on purpose, not cultural or psychological. Platonism, for example, which in this respect has not so often succeeded in constructing the relationship between idea and reality, had an enormous cultural significance.

Now, in anthroposophy, Dr. Steiner attempts to describe the relationship between the supersensible and the sensible, that is, he attempts to prove the necessary transition from the immediate sensory world to the supersensible world, or - seen subjectively - from empirical and rational knowledge, from scientific knowledge, to what I would call super-scientific knowledge. He used anthroposophy for this. I am only relying on Dr. Steiner's lecture, and more specifically on the first part – frankly, I didn't have enough strength for the second.

Applause

Anthroposophy is based on the analogy of mathematics. Dr. Steiner explained how we project mathematics into nature. This has already been established in Greek science, and in fact the ideal of mathematical science is at least to mathematize nature, as they said in ancient times. But in what sense can we even talk about this? That is precisely the problem.

Dr. Steiner explained with what affect, with what passion, with what sympathy the individual mathematician imposes his ideas of conceptual things in empirical reality. But what are the structures that the mathematician deals with? They are not his representations at all. The circle, for example, that a mathematician draws on the blackboard to demonstrate his geometric theorems is not his representation. He has nothing to do with the circle as a human being – rather, he has nothing to do with it as a mathematician, but he does have something to do with it as a human being, in that he uses his two eyes to perceive the circle. Restlessness

The concept of a circle, which the mathematician does deal with, cannot be represented in reality at all; it is never perceived by the senses. The concept of a circle is much more general.

Now anthroposophy needs something personally real that it wants to project into nature. The general, which I have in my mathematical head, so to speak, does not exist in reality. If the supersensible world is to be founded on the sensory world in such a way that conclusions can be drawn from the subject to the object, then this can never be done by projecting subjective ideas into nature in the manner of mathematics. In my opinion, the analogy of mathematics is not appropriate for this, because mathematics deals with conceptual things that never occur as such in reality. In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general. On the other hand, today's lecture emphasizes the reality of supersensible things.

So, what matters to me: I cannot see how mathematics is supposed to serve here to explain the bridge from the sensory to the supersensible. The main value of the lecture now obviously lay in the fact that personal experience, personal excitement, the totality of personal experience, is to be active in thinking. But that must immediately raise a concern for everyone. The personal, the individual, is precisely what is unnecessary. Yes, anyone can tell me: “That is your imagination, that is your idea, I have nothing to do with it.” In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general.

Applause

Then, what Dr. Steiner was particularly concerned about, in the inner participation that his lecture had at this point and that was actually moving for the opponent: the starting point for higher knowledge for Dr. Steiner is moral intuition. Anthroposophy requires a supersensible to derive moral principles from it, and it gains this derivation by looking at the supersensible. To be honest, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Let's assume that there is a supersensible faculty of knowledge, or rather, such faculties of knowledge that we ordinary mortals do not yet have, and that it would also be possible to actually see the supersensible with this higher faculty of knowledge - the supersensible as an existing thing: how can I see from that what I should do? We can never deduce what we should do from what is. We can never build a bridge from the sphere of being to the sphere of ought.

Walter Birkigt: Since there are no further requests for the floor for the time being, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner to respond. Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I would like to say the following first: The very nature of the remarks I made this evening prevented me from speaking of analogy where I spoke of mathematics, and I ask you to reflect carefully on the fact that I did not use the word analogy. This is no accident, but a thoroughly conscious decision. I could not use the word 'analogy' because there was no question of an analogy with mathematics, but mathematical thinking was used to arrive at a characteristic of the inner experience of certainty. And by trying to explain how one can arrive at an inner experience of certainty in mathematics, I wanted to show how one can acquire this same degree of certainty in a completely different field, where one tries to arrive at certainty in the same way. It is therefore not about an analogy with mathematics, but about citing two real experiences of the soul that are to be compared with each other in no other way than by pointing to the attainment of inner certainty. Dear attendees, what the previous speaker said is not a reference to my lecture, because then he could not have used the word analogy. I avoided it because it does not belong.

Furthermore, it was said that I spoke of the passion of the individual mathematician. I could not do that either, because I simply referred to the nature of mathematical experience as it is known to those who are initiated into and trained in mathematics. How anyone can even think of speaking of some kind of personal involvement in mathematics is beyond me. On the other hand, I would like to make the following comment: It sounds very nice to say that the inner concept of the circle has absolutely nothing to do with the circle that I draw on the blackboard. I am not going to claim that it has anything to do with it, because it would never occur to me to say that the inner concept of the circle is made of chalk. I don't think that's a very profound truth that is being expressed.

But when we pass from abstract thinking to thinking in terms of reality, we must say the following. Let us take something that we construct mathematically within ourselves, for example, the sentence: If we draw a diameter in a circle and from one end of the diameter a line to any point on the circumference and from this point a further line to the other end of the diameter, then this angle is always a right angle. I do not need to draw this on the board at all. What I recognize there, namely that in a circle every angle through the diameter with the vertex on the periphery is a right angle, that is a purely internal experience. I have no need to use the circle here on the board.

Interjection: That is not true! Only when you have also looked at it, can you construct it afterwards!

But there is no doubt that what I draw on the board is only an external aid.

For anyone who can think mathematically, it is out of the question that they cannot also construct such mathematical truths purely through inner experience, even if they are the most complicated mathematical truths. There is no question of that. Even if I had to draw them with chalk, that would still have no significance for the simple reason that what constitutes the substantial validity of the proposition is to be illustrated in the drawing, but does not have to be concluded in it. If I use the drawing on the board to visualize that the angle is a right angle, then this visualization does not establish anything specific for the inner validity of the sentence. And that is what ultimately matters. There can be absolutely no question of my first needing the drawing on the board. But even if I needed it, that would be completely irrelevant to what I have said about the nature of mathematization – not about solving individual problems, but about mathematization in general. What is important here lies in a completely different area than what has been mentioned here, because when we look at mathematization, we are simply led to say that we experience inner truths.

I did not say that we already experience realities in mathematics. Therefore, it is completely irrelevant to object that mathematics as such does not contain any reality. But in the formal it contains truths, and these can also be experienced. The way in which one comes to truth and knowledge is important, even if these do not initially have any reality within mathematics itself. But when this mathematical experience is transferred to a completely different area, namely to the area where the exactness of mathematics is applied to the real life of the soul, the character of exactness, which is initially experienced in the mathematical-formal, is carried into the real. And only through this am I entitled to carry over into reality what applies to mathematics as merely formal.

I have first shown how to arrive from within at truths which we — of course only in an external way — apparently transfer as unrealities to observation, to experiment, or with which experiment is interwoven. And then I also showed how this formal character is transformed into a real one. But then, what is apparently so plausible still does not apply: what is mathematical only lives in me; the concept only lives in me, it does not live outside in reality. What has been mathematically explored and mathematically worked out would have nothing to do with reality as such. Well, does the concept of a circle really only live in me?

Imagine – I don't draw a circle on the board, but I have my two fingers here. I hold a string with them and make the object move in a circular motion, so that this lead ball moves in a circle. The laws that I now recognize for the movement by mathematically recognizing them – do they have nothing to do with reality? I proceed continually in such a way that I determine behavior in the real precisely through mathematics. I proceed in such a way when I go from induction to deduction that I bring in what I have first determined by induction and then process it further with mathematics. If I introduce the end term of an empirical induction into a mathematical formula and then simply continue calculating, then I am counting on the fact that what I develop mathematically through deduction corresponds to reality. It is only through this that the mathematical is fruitful for reality, not through such philosophical arguments as have been presented.

Let us look at the fruitfulness of the mathematical for reality. One can see the fruitfulness simply when, for example, someone says: I see the irregularities that exist in relation to what has been calculated, and therefore I use other variables in the calculation. And so he initially comes to assume a reality by purely mathematical means; reality arises afterwards – it is there. Thus I have, by continuing my empirical path purely through mathematics, also shown the applicability of the inner experience to the outer world. At least I expect it. And if one could not expect that the real event, which one has followed in sensory-descriptive reality to a certain point, continues in the calculation, then what I just meant would not be possible at all: that one feels satisfied in mathematics. The point is to take the concepts seriously, as they have been dealt with.

Now to what I said about moral intuition. You may remember that I said in my lecture that the intuition that I established as the third stage of supersensible knowledge occurs last. But moral intuition also occurs for ordinary consciousness. It is the only one that initially arises for a consciousness that has advanced to our level from the supersensible world. Moral intuition is simply an intuition projected down from a higher level to our level of knowledge. I illustrated this clearly in the lecture. That is why I spoke of this moral intuition first, not afterwards. I have described it as the starting point. One learns to recognize it; and when one has grasped it correctly, then one has a certain subjective precondition for also understanding what comes afterwards. For in experiencing moral intuition, one experiences something that, when compared with what is otherwise real, has a different kind of reality, and that is the reality of ought. If you go into what I have said, then the difference between being and ought is explained simply by the fact that moral intuition projects into our ordinary sphere of consciousness, while the other intuition is not a projection, but must first be attained. It was not at all implied that moral intuition is only a special case for the process of knowledge of general intuition, but it is simply the first case where something occurs to us intuitively in our ordinary consciousness, in today's state of consciousness.

So, it is important to understand exactly the concepts that are developed here for anthroposophy. I wanted to give suggestions. I fully understand that objections are possible because, of course, one cannot explain everything in such detail, and so I assume that there are still many doubts and so on in the souls of those present. But imagine how long my lecture would have been if I had already dispelled in the lecture all the doubts that I am now trying to dispel in my answer. That is what one has to reckon with in a first exploratory lecture, not only in anthroposophy but in all fields. That is what it was about today. I did not want to give anything conclusive, and I must say that some people do not want to go into anthroposophy at all. But I have found that the best recognizers of what anthroposophy is were often not those who fell for it right from the start, but that the best workers in anthroposophy became those who had gone through bitter doubts.

Therefore, please do not take what I said with a certain sharpness in the reply as if it were meant with hatred. Rather, I am basically pleased about everything that is objected to, because it is only by overcoming these obstacles of objection that one actually enters into anthroposophy. And I have always had more satisfaction from those who have come to anthroposophy via the reefs of rejection and doubt than from those who have entered with full sails at the first attempt.

Lively applause.

Mr. Wilhelm: I do not wish to criticize, but only to ask a question to which I would find Dr. Steiner's answer very interesting. Dr. Steiner replied to the criticism of the first speaker, who compared Theosophy with Anthroposophy, by saying that the method of knowledge of Anthroposophy is quite different from that of Theosophy, especially the old one, and that in the whole history of Theosophy there is no trace, not a single reference, to the method of knowledge presented by Dr. Steiner this evening. I would just like to ask whether Dr. Steiner is familiar with the passages in 'The Green Face' – a book that has a very strong Theosophical slant and where this method of knowledge actually forms the basis of the whole work. I would be very interested to hear Dr. Steiner's position on this.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would first like to point out that it would be possible, if there were indeed echoes in the “Green Face”, which appeared a few years ago, of what I have said this evening, to be fundamentally traced back to anthroposophy. Shout: Never!

I only said in general that it would not contradict itself, but since someone here shouted “Never!”, I completely agree with that, because I find nothing anthroposophical in “The Green Face”, but I find that what is said about anthroposophy in “The Green Face” is based on methods of knowledge that I would not want to have anything to do with. That is what I have to say about it.

As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties.¹ It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.

It may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”

We might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.

Is it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?

Whatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism—the actual gazing into the spiritual—is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.

In order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.

Not merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man—at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.

Something more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light—so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.

Now, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays—the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought—did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science. The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.

Observation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?

These were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism—the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.

Thus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.

Such were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.

The evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.

Thus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.

He who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).

The connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.

Thus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.

The connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science. There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.

In my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”

That is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.

Herewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.

All this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”

The Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.

This path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world.

• 1. Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy.

In the idea which I developed here yesterday, I wished to point out that it is necessary for the evolution of humanity to impress very clearly upon ourselves certain ideas in Spiritual culture which have not as yet appeared in the present era. This is something that is of main importance, that certain ideas now non-evident, or least not in current use, should again come into the spiritual life of man. If we follow up the spiritual life of modern times in its various ramifications, we see that its characteristic is that in spite of all the arrogance, all the self-conceit which comes to light at times, the spiritual life does not contain any new ideas. Although all sorts of world-conceptions have appeared, of an ethical, artistic, and even philosophical or scientific nature, they all deal with old ideas which have been in use for a long time, and which are then mixed together, as in a kaleidoscope. We need new conceptions, yes new conceptions such as should rise are lacking. For that reason certain old truths cannot be understood to-day, truths which appeared among the Ancients and which are handed down traditionally; for instance, ideas which appeared in Plato or Aristotle as being the latest in this respect. In earlier times they appeared with still more significance; but today they are either not understood at all or else rejected, but only because they are not understood. I will give you an illustration of such a conception. When a man today sees something, he thinks: “The object is outside, it sends the light to me; the light comes into the eye, and in that passive—one may not say mysterious—manner, is produced with the soul experiences as the sensation of color.” In Plato another conception is found. There something appears which we cannot understand otherwise, if we take it literally, than as if the eye sent forth something to the object which grasps it in a mysterious manner; as if the eye stretched out a feeler which grasps the object. This can be found in Plato. The more recent ideas of natural science can of course make nothing of this, can understand nothing of it. It is the kind of idea which you can find recorded in the ordinary textbooks—or even in the ‘scholarly’ books—on the History of Philosophy. But you cannot do much with such books either, because such ideas rests upon something which existed in ancient times in a certain atavistic second-sight or second-feeling, which has gradually died out, but which must be rediscovered in our time, in another way. Since olden times certain ideas have been lost which must be recovered.

These concepts have been lost chiefly because what one may call the Latin or Roman culture had to pour over Europe, especially over Western Europe. The study of this Latin, Roman culture in its expansion over Europe would yield very illuminating results, if we observed it aright. We must be clear on the point that as regards blood, nothing is left in Italy today of the race which we call the “Ancient Roman.” The present-day battalions, although they may be responsible for many things in our time, are certainly not responsible for what I'm about to relate now. What streamed forth from the Roman Empire merely streamed forth into Europe in a cultural way, but it had a parching, burning effect on certain fundamental, basic ideas; ideas which must, as it were, again be redeemed from their grave. We need only call to mind the following fact. With the overthrow of Alesia, that town which was destroyed in the last era before the birth of Christ and is situated in what is now the province of the Côte d'Or in France, a piece of old Celtic-Gaelic culture was entirely rooted out by the Romans. (On the scene of the old ruined Alesia, Napoleon III ordered a monument erected to Vercingetorix!) Perhaps today Alesia would be called a gigantic “Academy.” Ten-thousand Europeans studied there in the way in which science and knowledge was studied at that time. All that was done away with, and in its place came what was spread abroad as the Roman culture. This is only an historical observation, intended to show that in Europe, also, older concepts existed in the old places of culture which have since been destroyed.

Today I wish to draw your attention to two ideas which must be incorporated into science as well as into everyday life, in order that a better understanding of the world may become possible. One of these is that an idea exists that really the perception of the world comes about through the senses. This happens in the following way.

If we stand opposite a color object it certainly impresses us; what takes place between the colored object and the human organism is a destructive process in the latter. I have often laid stress on this. It is in a sense a death in miniature, and the nervous system is the organ for continuous destructive processes. These disturbances, which are continually being brought about through the action of the outer world on our own organism, and balanced again, however, by the action of the blood. In the human organism there is a continual counteracting process between blood and nerves. This process comes about because the blood furnishes a quickening process and the nerves a sort of death-process, a destructive one. For instance if we stand opposite a colored object which works on us from the outer world, a destructive process takes place in our nervous system. Something is destroyed in a physical body as well as in the etheric body, a sort of canal is hollowed out in our organism through the destructive process which runs along a definite course. Thus when we “see” something, a canal is bored from the eye to the edge of the brain. Not that something takes place that has to be analysed and solved, from the brain-covering to the eye; but, on the contrary, a hole is bored and through this hole the astral body slips, so as to be able to see the object. Plato was still able to see this. It could still be perceived through atavistic clairvoyance, and we must re-acquire it through learning really know the human organism with the newer clairvoyance, learning to know this canal, this hole which is bored, leading from the eye to the brain-covering, through which the Ego unites itself with what works from outside. Mankind must learn not to form such concepts as are customary in the present-day theory of knowledge or physiology, but must learn to say: “A canal, a tunnel, is forward from the brain-covering to the eye, and by this means a door opens through which the astral body and the ego come into connection with the outer world.” This is a concept of which the present day has no idea! For that reason it does not know what physiological facts result from this. Today students learn physiology at the Universities, and learn very exactly the customary concepts which I have just mentioned, but they do not learn how things are really related, they learn just the opposite, which has no sense. This is one such concept.

Another is very frequently found today if we go into that sphere which is called the sphere of learning and scholarship—of course with full justification. It is they are described (and this is of course unavoidable today) how man is born as an undeveloped being; how then gradually his ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ develop, and in this gradual development of soul and spirit are produced through the organism of the body becoming finer and more complicated. You can find this idea introduced by psychologists and especially by scholars, as also in all the popular books. Thus it appears to man; but what appears to thus is Maya. In many respects what we first encounter is the opposite of truth. This idea too is the opposite of what is true. Instead of this, we ought really to say (I may just remind you of what you said in “The Education of the Child,” where what I am about to say is expressed, though put somewhat differently): “While the child is quite young, soul and spirit are still ‘psychic’ and ‘spiritual,’ and as the child grows, his soul and spirit are gradually transformed into the material, the bodily. Soul and spirit gradually become of a bodily nature, man gradually becomes a complete image of soul and spirit.” It is very important that we should hold this idea. For if we do, we shall no longer say that what runs about on the ground on two legs is man; we shall become conscious of the fact that that is only the image of man, that man after being born in a super-sensible manner gradually grows in unity with the body and creates a full image of himself in his body. Spirit and soul disappear into the body, and appear less and less in their own nature. Thus we must adopt exactly the opposite concept to the customary one. We must know why, for instance, we really become “20 years old;” it is because spirit has descended into the body, because it has transformed itself into the body, because that which is body is an external image of the spirit. Then we shall also understand that gradually, when we are growing “old,” the reverse transformation is going on. The body becomes chalky and salted, but the spirit becomes more psychic and spiritual. Only man has not then the power of holding on to it, because while here, he stands face-to-face with the physical world and wishes to express himself through the body. What thus becomes more and more independent, only appears in its entirety after death. Thus it is not the case that the soul and spirit becomea blunted in old age; on the contrary, they become ever freer and freer. Of course the materialistic thinker, when these things are put before him, will frequently object that even Kant, for instance, who was a very clever man, grew weak in his old age; so that they are at any rate the soul and spirit could not have made themselves free. Materialistic thinker only makes that objection because he cannot observe the soul and spirit nature, and see how it had already grown gradually into the spiritual world. For very many people it will be a hard nut to crack if they are told to believe that when men grow old they do not become weak or even feeble-minded, but more psychic and more spiritual. Only, when the body is worn out, we can no longer express the psycho-spiritual which we have cultivated, through the body. It is like the case of a pianist: he might become a better and better player, but if his piano is worn out we cannot perceive this. If you were only to know his capabilities as a pianist from his plane, you will not be able to gather much if the piano is out of tune and has broken strings. So that Kant, when he was an old man and “feeble-minded” was not weak minded as regards the spiritual world; there he had become glorious.

Thus when we get the truth we have exactly to reverse certain conceptions. We must take it quite seriously that in the world we have to do with Maya, with the great illusion, for we must exactly reverse many of our ideas. If we seriously consider that in the external physical reality we are face to face with the great illusion, we shall also be able to accept the fact that external physical man when 70 years of age and apparently weak has his spirit somewhere else than on the physical plane. The obstacles in the way of understanding the teachings of Spiritual Science to a great extent consist in the fact that we are not able to form correct ideas as to what is happening on the ordinary physical plane. We form false ideas about what is happening on the physical plane, and the consequences is that these separate us from the true and right world and do not allow us to reach it. If we form such concepts as the second one to which I referred, we shall then no longer be very far from the knowledge which Spiritual Science is now giving out from its investigations concerning man immediately after death.

When man enters physical life through birth, he gradually enters more and more closely into relationship with his physical body. We have now become acquainted with a correct idea of this relationship. We do not always notice, because it would require too much explanation, that something similar also takes place between death and a new birth. The matter can be presented in a similar manner as regards the time between death and rebirth. We may say that man then gradually enters into relation with something similar to this physical body here on earth. Our physical bodily nature is not merely physical; it embraces, as we know: the physical body, the etheric body or body of formative-forces, and the astral body, the outer psychic or soul-body. As we have to appropriate these three ‘skins’ or ‘shells’ for physical life, so have we to put on coverings between death and rebirth, indeed three such coverings which, I will call: “Soul-Man,” “Soul-Life” or “Life-Soul,” and “Soul-Self.” As we take on the physical body here for use in the physical world, so do we take on the “Soul-Life” or the “Life-Soul.” Just as we take on the astral body, the Soul-body for our life Earth, so do we take on after death the “Individual Soul” or “Soul-Self.” I select these expressions for the reason that they should not be confused with what men will appropriate in another way for the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan time; there is a resemblance, but, because it belongs to another stage of being, it must in consequence be differentiated. But names are not the important thing in this matter. It is only necessary for us to study a little how these coverings are appropriated.

When man enters that life which runs its course between death and rebirth, the first characteristic is that he finds himself surrounded by a number of pictures. These pictures all proceed from his experiences between his last birth and last death, or even from earlier times; but we will first of all limit ourselves to what happened in the last earth-life. Thus first of all appear pictures which proceed from the last life; they are to be found in the environment of man. The essential point is that these are in the environment of the dead. The remarkable thing is that at first he has a certain difficulty in developing a consciousness that these pictures are connected with himself. This world of pictures is what is referred to in the book “Theosophy” as the experiences in the Soul World; but this retrospect in pictures is only a part of the collective picture-world which surrounds him there. Other pictures besides these are present; and the life of the dead consist in gradually recognizing these pictures as belonging to himself. Consciousness has to set to work to make them fully recognize in the right way that these pictures belong to him. We can only thoroughly understand what is here in question when we become conscious that the life which we lead here between birth and death is much richer than we are aware of. Suppose you live in certain circumstances, in company with certain people—what takes place consciously between you is really only one part of what goes on. Things are continually happening. You must recollect that life here so runs its course that we observe but a small part of what we experience. Take an ordinary occurrence for instance. You have gathered together here this evening, each one of you present has entered into some relationship with the others. Did you probably consider how much of this you have carried over into your consciousness, you will find it is indeed but very little. For if you are three yards away from another person and then approach him, this drawing three yards nearer to him represents a whole sum of facial impressions; you see his face differently the nearer you approach and so on. The ordinary physical intellect is quite unable to grasp what we are really always experiencing during physical life. What we experienced consciously is but a quite small part of it; by far the most important part remains subconscious. For instance, if you read a letter; as a rule you become conscious of the content, but in your subconsciousness much more than that goes on; there is not only happens that you are always either slightly vexed or pleased by the beautiful or ugly handwriting, but with every feature of the handwriting something passes from the writer into you which you do not observe with your ordinary consciousness but which lives as a dream, continuously through your whole life. We indeed find it so difficult to really to understand dreams for the reason that much appears in them which is not taken into consideration at all in our waking consciousness. Suppose one lady sits here and another there. If the one lady does not particularly notice that another is sitting over there and does not look at her very closely, it may occur that she does not observe the other at all, does not become aware of her gestures, or what she's doing. But all that remains in the subconscious soul, and into our dreams may enter just that which we hardly observed or noticed in our waking consciousness. This may very easily happen when in waking consciousness one directs one's attention to a particular subject, for instance, if when walking along the street plunged in thought and a friend passes by; perhaps one may not even have noticed him, yet one may dream of him, in spite of not knowing that he had passed one in the street. A great deal happens in life, of which but very little enters the waking consciousness. But all the enormous amount that goes on in the life of man, especially what is concerned with the soul and which remains in the subconsciousness, all this becomes pictures around a man. The fact that you come here today and will go away again causes the picture of the whole room to remain bound up with you, and all the more so inasmuch as it has all made a more psychic impression; psychically it is not confined in rigid boundaries.

Thus innumerable pictures are connected with human life. They are all rolled up—I can find no other expression for it—within the life of man. You carry millions of pictures which are being rolled up all through your life; and the first thing that happens after death is the “unrolling of the pictures,” as one might call it; the unrolling of posthumous imaginations. Around each man a world of imaginations gradually forms; and his consciousness consists in recognizing himself in this imaginative world. This is described from somewhat different point of view in the Vienna lectures of life between death and rebirth; but one must observe things from the most varied points of view. The unrolling of the pictures: here we can draw a comparison with what we are, as little children just born, when we still have a somewhat unformed body. Many people (though not precisely the mothers of the children concerned) say that every little child looks like a frog; it is not yet quite human but gradually shapes itself. Just as the child shapes itself, and that grows of which we may say that we have it in us when we lived materially, so does the growth take place in life which we might call the “unrolling of life's pictures.” For in this unrolling of the pictures the “Soul-Man” is formed, one of the principles of man. You must absolutely imagine that this, which is there after death, spreads out, and that the Soul-Man, the picture-man, the imaginative spiritual-body, forms itself thus; it first of all develops in the imaginative images.

Herein we can help the dead tremendously if we go through such ideas together with him as are at the same time those of Spiritual Science, or such ideas as we evolved yesterday of the bluish-red Earth with the golden Jerusalem. These are concepts for which the dead man longs, for he yearns for well-directed and ordered Imaginations. By means of these we can help him, and especially do we help him if we go through with him what we have experienced together with him, for the pictures can hold onto that they may wish to unroll. If we live call up things which have passed unnoticed, and go through these with the dead man, he gains enormously thereby. For instance, I mean by this, if you call to mind the picture of him while he was still alive, how he went through the door as he came out of his office and reached home, how you greet him—incidents wherein the Soul came to expression in a visible pictorial manner. There may be loving memories connected with these things—and of course it may also be otherwise. You will by this means come together with the dead man in thought. I have shown in many different ways how we can mingle this picture-world, in which the dead man must develop, and in which his consciousness must expand, with our own concepts. Concepts and ideas which the dead man strove to attain but could not fully reach and which make something clear to him—these become his picture world. You must work with him at the forming of his Soul-Man.

Of course, in the time which follows on death, the other bodies, the Soul-Life or the Life-Soul and also the Soul-Self, are already formed in the dead. But these very principles form themselves more and more definitely, in such a way that at first, immediately after death, the dead feels them as something for the future which he will only gradually developed by and by. In this respect the deceased has the feeling that he must work out the “Soul-Man,” he must work upon that, but the “Life-Soul” he must allow to develop, that must develop itself gradually. It is of course already present, as is the intelligence in the child; but it must develop gradually as the intelligence does in the child. Thereby an inspirational force appears in the dead man immediately after his death, but this develops and becomes ever stronger and stronger; and when we help the dead, we help them to develop this inspirational force. For gradually something must speak to the deceased from out of the pictures. They must become more than merely the remembrance of life; they must tell him something new, something which life could not yet tell him; for what they now say to him must become the germ for what he builds up as his next Earth-life.

Thus the Soul-Life, the Life-Soul, begins to develop and the pictures become more and more speaking. The dead man first of all directs his attention chiefly to the Earth—if I may express myself thus. As we here on Earth direct our thoughts to the Spirit-world, so does the dead man turn his soul downwards to the Earth, which is seen by him, for example, as I described yesterday, as blue in the Eastern hemisphere and reddish in the Western hemisphere; into this come these pictures, they are interwoven in it. He always sees his own life within the universal picture of the Earth; he sees his life among us. Therefore we can help him to understand these pictures aright. He certainly leaves the Earth, but with the eye of his soul does not leave it. And as inspiration develops more and more, gradually the Earth begins to sound, the pictures gradually tell him more and more.

The question is often asked whether this help can only be given to the dead soon after death or can it also be given after years or tens of years. It never ceases! No one can live on Earth long enough for it to have become unnecessary to help someone who died before us. Even if a person has been dead for 30 or 40 years, the connection, if it was karmic, still exists. Of course we must clearly realize that when the soul of the friend who is still here is undeveloped, he may have a clearer consciousness of disconnection at the beginning. At the beginning the consciousness of the connection with the dead friend may be felt and experienced very strongly, because the pictures are still passive and chiefly still contain what they contained on earth. Later on, they begin to sound; the music of the spheres sounds forth from them. That is something strange and unknown, and we can only gain information about it from Spiritual Science, through which we learn what will take place on the Earth in the future epochs. But it is not very frequent that there is such an active need to approach the dead man after decades, as immediately after his departure. Gradually the inclination towards the dead disappears in the living (experience proves this)—the living feeling for them dies out . This is too a reason why a later time the connection with the dead is felt less actively. This calls our attention to the fact that the first part of life between death and rebirth is chiefly devoted to the formation of the “Soul-Man,” which floats around man is a world of Imagination. Later on, his time is devoted to the inspirational force of the soul: the Life-Soul—though of course it was there from the beginning. And before him, as an ideal, is what we may call the Soul-Self. That too was there from the beginning, fir the Soul-Self gives him individual consciousness. As the intelligence of the child must be cultivated, although present within him from the beginning, so does man develop the Soul-Self in his life between death and rebirth. The time when the soul is again slowly approaching the earth life is chiefly devoted to the cultivation of the Soul-Self. Between death and rebirth man's Soul-Self reaches its highest development in the time when he becomes, spiritually, blooming with youth. Here on Earth we speak of growing old; in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, we have to speak of growing young. Here we speak of becoming gray with age, there we speak of one becoming blooming with youth. These things were well known not so very long ago. Let me remind you of Goethe's “Faust;”, where it says: “He grew young in the Land of the Mist,” which means: “He was born in the Northern World.” In former times they did not say: “someone was born,” but “he has become young,” which referred to his life before birth. Goethe still used this expression “become young in the Land of the Mist.

Thus the last part of the time between death and rebirth is that in which the soul chiefly works out the intuitive side. The first part of the time after death the imaginative part of the soul is active; that is the Soul-Man. Then the inspirational part of the soul, the Life-Soul, develops gradually to its full height, and afterwords that which gives full individuality to the soul is developed, the Soul-Self, the intuitive part, the capacity of entering something different and other than oneself and of finding one's way into it. Into what does the soul find its way? From what do its intuitions chiefly proceed?

At a certain point of the life between death and rebirth the soul begins to feel itself related to the succession of generations which lead down to Father and Mother. It gradually feels itself related to the ancestors, as they are brought together in marriage and have children and so on. Immediately after death, we feel the unrolling of the pictures and looking down upon the Earth, we see these pictures grouped together in their great imaginative connections. And as we turn again to the Earth-life we become more and more intuitive, and the pictures which I called forth yesterday appeared before the soul in larger outlines: the sphere of the Earth gleaming bluish over Asia, India and East Africa; and on the other side where lies America (one circles around the earth) glittering reddish; between these there is green and other shades. The Earth also ‘sounds’ in manifold tones: melodies, harmonies, courses of the music of the spheres. Amidst all this, the pictures we had gradually began to move—the pictures of the successive generations which we had first of all. Gradually one learns no one's 36th and 35th pair of ancestors, then the 34th, 33rd, 32nd and 31st, right down to one's own father and mother. One learns to know this; it is interwoven into the imaginative images. Intuition is impressed into it until one comes to father and mother. This ‘impression’ is really an entering into what lives through the generations. The second half of life between death and rebirth is of such a nature that during this time a man becomes quite accustomed to live in what is below, to live in the outer world already in advance, in that which then becomes his nearest as well as his less near environment, to live not in himself but in this other world. That living in the other is the first experience of life after death. Then one is born again and that first one still retains something of this other life. For this reason we must say that in the first seven years the human being is an “imitator,” he imitates everything that he perceives. Read the book “The Education of the Child” on this subject . Imitation is like the last impression of this “living in the other”which continues into physical life. It is the pre-eminent quality when transformed into the spiritual element, between death and rebirth, and it is the first quality which appears in the child: to imitate everything it sees. This imitative faculty of the child will never be understood unless we know that it proceeds from the magnificent intuitive life in the psycho-spiritual world during the latter part of the time between death and rebirth.

Here is again a concept which the spiritual development of the future must grasp. In olden times—chiefly because men knew of the Spirit through atavistic clairvoyance—the belief in immortality, which has become doubtful to men who think materialistically, was actuated by direct perception; men knew that life continued. But in the future the thought of immortality must be aroused from the other end. Men will understand that life here is the continuation of the spiritual life. As formally in conformity with the nature of the times, men looked first to the continuation of life after death, so in the future they will learn more and more looked chiefly at all life here as a continuation of the life between death and rebirth. Certainly the churches have erected barriers against this. For nothing is considered so great a heresy by the church as the thought of the “pre-existence of the soul” and, as is well known, the old Church Father Origen was looked at askance, principally because he still knew of the pre-existence of the soul. It was not only because—as I have already said—the “spirit” was done away with in the ninth century by the Church Council at Constantinople, by setting up the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but only of ‘body and soul,’ though it conceded that the soul has something of a spiritual nature in it. “It is forbidden to think,” said the Council, “that man consists of body, soul and spirit; he has a soul-like in the spirit-like soul, but he only consists of body and soul.” That is of course still the law of the church today. But something else is bound up with this, which is at the same time “unprejudiced science.” And this is the more interesting part. Among philosophers you find men everywhere divided into body and soul; a threefold division into body, soul and spirit is still very little supporter. Read the “celebrated Wundt” and you will see that it is “unprejudiced science” to divide man into body and soul. It is not unprejudiced science. It is the last remnant of the dogma of the eighth Ecumenical Council! Only the philosophers have forgotten that and look upon it as unprejudiced science. That is the one barrier: the doing away with the spirit. The other barrier which the church has erected is the suppression of the believe in pre-existence. I recall the celebrated philosophical theologian or theological philosopher—whichever you like to call him—Frohschammer in Munich. His books are on the Index. But that has not prevented him, however, from turning against the thought of a pre-existence of the soul, because, he says, that if really the soul did not exist beforehand, if it were not conceived at the same time as the body, then the parents would only produce a “little animal”which later receives the soul. That to him is an uncomfortable concept. (I have introduced this as a note in my ”Riddles of the Soul.”) But it is not so. When we know the fact that man is connected for more than thirty generations with the blood running through the generations, we cannot say that the parents only produce a little animal; for the whole process of the spirit which passes through more than thirty generations, belongs to it. Only one must become conscious of this.

Thus in the future men will not only turn their minds to the question of whether this life lasts after death; they will be able to say, if they study the physical earth-life correctly, that this physical earth-life is the continuation of a spiritual life! Close attention will be directed to this in the future. It will be recognized that the spiritual life continues into the mortal one, and the mortal into the immortal one; and when men recognize the mortal in the immortal, they will have therewith a sure foundation for the knowledge of the immortal. If they understand this earth-life properly, they will no longer try to explain it out of itself alone. Of course it would then be necessary to acquire other ideas such as I have just now set forth. It is indeed necessary to correct many an idea. One acquires with much difficulty ideas which count in life, and popular language is a great hindrance in this respect. We must indeed reckon with popular language first of all, because otherwise we should not be understood at all. But it is a great hindrance to think that we acquire a “likeness” direct from the parents. That is nonsense. I have said in the public lecture that our method of science is suffering very much because what is acknowledged in regard to the science of the inorganic is not also apply to the organic. No one will seek to refer the magnetic power in the magnet to the horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, but will explain the magnetism in the magnet or in the magnetic needle by what pertains to the Cosmos; but the origin of the egg in the hen or the embryo in man—these are not explained from the Cosmos! The Cosmos, however, works everywhere. And strange as it may appear, just as though a sense-impression a canal is poured into the eye in order to open the door for the Ego to come out, so does propagation rest on the fact that in reality room is made for it. What happened is that the organism of the mother is so prepared that room is created and what originates therein is derived from the Cosmos, from the whole Macrocosm. It is a complicated process; but in the being of the mother the room only is prepared; the organization of the mother is so far disturbed as to provide a cavity into which the macrocosm can enter. That is the essential point and even embryology will grasp this before long. They will understand that the most important part connected with embryo is where there is nothing, where the substance of the mother is pushed back because the macrocosm wishes to enter. But man is already united with and beholds the forces which work from the Cosmos through this macrocosmic element, which prepared itself ever since he was intuitively bound up with his ancestors—in the longest case from 32 to 35 generations ago. From the sphere of his stars, to which he is assigned, man beholds the ray fall upon the Earth, he beholds the place where he will be incarnated. Then he gradually approaches the Earth.

These are things which—as I think—can fill our minds with a significant impression. We cannot take up Spiritual Science as we might perhaps take up mathematics, but we shall accept it as something deeply connected with our higher feelings, which makes us in reality different beings, and which deeply enriches human life and lays the foundation of a real cosmic consciousness. This vivifying, in the best sense of the word “quickening” effect of spiritually-scientific knowledge is both essential and important. We certainly should not fail to recognize that at the present time we are to a certain extent in a state of transition with regard to the things here meant. Our age must take this on itself, as its Karma. Today people still say lightly: “Must I indeed except such complicated ideas in order to understand your teaching of the destiny of man? Other teaching makes it easier for people.” the point is that we are living in a time of transition and these ideas are still strange to people; but you will have to become accustomed to them. The time must come when these things will even be taught to children and thereby the discovery will be made that children will understand them surprisingly well. They will understand much better than others what comes from the pictures of Spiritual Science, for they bring much imaginative faculty with them out of the spiritual world, which we set to work to drive out of them, do not take into account and sometimes brutally ignore; otherwise we should admit that many a child says uncommonly clever things, much cleverer than grown-up people. Sometimes what a child says is much more interesting than what the professor says, because it is more connected with the real being of the world. These things should really be taken with a certain coloring, then it will no longer be difficult to introduce things in a suitable manner to the child-mind. The transition to this is naturally not easy and therefore people very willingly abandon the thought. But just from many questions of a child-mind we can recognize, if we pay attention to the direction and tone of the question, that reminiscences of a former life are present in the child.

We must take what is called Spiritual Science absolutely in earnest and must be of the opinion that it must find its way into the social life to which education and instruction also belong. In this respect much more might be done today than is usually considered possible. For what I recently remarked is absolutely true: when those who wish to become teachers or educators are examined today, attention is paid above all to what they have acquired in the way of knowledge—which really is quite unnecessary, for when they are preparing themselves, they can always read up in a suitable compendium what it is necessary for them to have for teaching purposes. What is learnt on examination is very soon forgotten again. We can see this best when we remember how our own school life was carried on. I once had to go through an examination. At the appointed time the professor was ill. I went to the assistant who said: “Yes, the Professor is ill, and his illness may last another week; I can sympathize with you; if you have to go about in this grand condition for a week, you will have forgotten everything, but there is no help for it.” It is therefore reckoned that what one has to give out in the examination will very soon be forgotten! It is simply a comedy! But what will have to be taken into account will be to consider what sort of man is being let loose on the young. The question is to study the human being in each one, not only what he has squeezed into the mechanism of his life of ideas. The question is whether the real man is in a position to establish that mysterious relationship to youth which is necessary. It will then not be at all so difficult really to bring to youth what Spiritual Science can evolve for it.

I want chiefly to draw your attention today to such facts of the human collective life as can make clear to your consciousness that we must not only preserve old ideas, but that man needs new ideas, that our legacy of ideas must be enriched by many things. You will see how it will be sought after when once such a thing as Spiritual Science is spread abroad. Mankind has been longing for it for a long time. Most people wish to spare themselves from taking in too many ideas; for that reason they go so willingly to lime-light lectures, or other illustrative lectures, where they can look on and need not take in many ideas. As a rule when something new is offered to people they ask: “Now what does he really want?”But what do these people themselves want when they ask: “What is he really after?” they would like the matter to be translated into what they already know! But in the domain of Spiritual Science there can be no question of that; there one must take up new ideas which do not already exist, which once in olden times were partly present in another form, but which are not yet here today. One must resolve to penetrate into new ideas. This is often very difficult, for if men would really take up new ideas they would not ask: “What is he really after?” but would accept it. In future a much more useful question will be: “What ought I really think?” and not “What does he really want?” Then we should see how that which is developed as “opinion,” also sets free life-forces within us, so that we come to the truth; we should see that although vision is certainly subtle, it is not at all so far away. First, however, prejudices will have to be overcome. There is, for example, a popular little book called “Introduction to Philosophy.” In it are ideas which I criticized both yesterday and today. But the compiler is especially remarkable when he speaks about “Supernaturalism.” He considers the supernatural, the super-sensible as particularly harmful, for the reason that he is of the opinion that “what is natural”is something which every man can judge and test for himself, but with the super-sensible, supernatural, the danger would be in the fact that everybody would not be able to judge for himself but would have to accept a thing on the authority of others. Of course this is related to the other statement, that the priesthood of all times had made use of this and that men have become spoiled by supernaturalism, because they thereby became dependent on the belief in authority. If however we observe the true circumstances, we can say that when the official philosophies of today come to speak of the super-sensible, they simply become childish. For it is a childish conception, and implies that the man had no idea of how universally prevalent the belief in authority is, just as in our present time, even though people wish to hold themselves free from it. How many people are there who know upon what the Copernican teaching is based? They learn it by someone illustrating it to them by placing some spirit or other on a chair as it were in the universe and showing from there how the Sun moves and how the planets revolve around it. All that is nonsense. If men were shown all that really can be disclosed to them, they would have a quite different concept and would see how uncertain all the hypotheses are. But just think what an enormous amount men believe in authority today! How happy they are today in another sphere (to remind you of a side-phenomena) when secret acts are discovered through a Bolshevik Government, upon which the fate of countless people depend! There is a proof of the matter as regards what is “natural,” everyone can prove it; but as regards the supernatural, it is believed that men would lose their independence! This is really turning things upside down. And one of the tasks of Spiritual Science will in many respects consistt in setting things on their feet again. That things should have been turned upside down is quite natural, for the Consciousness Soul had to be developed. Now however they must again be set on their feet, in a proper manner.

In the next lecture we will follow this up and we shall see that this picture of “setting things on their feet” is by no means untrue, but has indeed an even deeper significance.

In the first of these lectures I endeavored to set forth how Michael's Conflict with the Dragon persisted into the 18^th Century as a determining idea, really a determining impulse in mankind; and in the second lecture I tried to show how a productive revival of this impulse may and really must be brought about. But now, before discussing particulars for a Michael Festival at the beginning of autumn, I should like today to speak about several prerequisites involved in such an intention.

The core of the matter is this: all impulses such as the Michael impulse depend upon man's attaining to super-sensible enlightenment concerning his connection not only with earthly but with cosmic conditions: he must learn to feel himself not only as an earth citizen but as a citizen of the universe, as far as this is perceptible either spiritually or, in image, physically. Nowadays, of course, our general education offers only the most meager opportunities for sensing our connection with the cosmos. True, by means of their materialistically colored science men are aware of earth conditions to the point of feeling connected with them, at least as regards their material life in the wider sense. But the knowledge of this connection certainly engenders no enthusiasm, hence all outer signs of such a connection have become very dim. Human feeling for the traditional festivals has grown dim and shadowy. While in former periods of human evolution festivals like Christmas or Easter exerted a far-reaching influence on the entire social life and its manifestations, they have become but a faint echo of what they once meant, expressing themselves in all sorts of customs that lack all deeper social significance.

Now, if we intend in some way to realize the Michael Festival with its particularly far-reaching social significance, we must naturally first create a feeling for what it might signify; for by no means must it bear the character of our modern festivities, but should be brought forth from the depths of the human being. These depths we can only reach by once more penetrating and entering into our relationship with the extra-terrestrial cosmos and with what this yields for the cycle of the seasons.

To illustrate what I really mean by all that, I need only ask you to consider how abstract, how dreadfully out of touch with the human being, are all the feelings and conceptions of the extraterrestrial universe that today enter human consciousness. Think of what astronomy, astro-physics, and other related sciences accomplish today. They compute the paths of the planets—the positions of the fixed stars, if you like; and from the results of research in spectral analysis they arrive at conclusions concerning the material composition of these heavenly bodies. But what have all the results of such methods to do with the intimate inner soul life of man? This man, equipped with all such sky-wisdom, feels himself a hermit on what he thinks of as the planet earth. And the present habits of thinking connected with these matters are at bottom only a system of very circumscribed concepts.

To get a better light on this, let us consider a condition of consciousness certainly present in ordinary life, though an inferior one: the condition of dream-pervaded sleep. In order to obtain points of contact for today's discussion I will tell you in a few words what relates to this condition. Dreaming may be associated with inner conditions of the human organism and transform these into pictures resembling symbols [See: Rudolf Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (Anthroposophy) as a Demand of the Age; Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life, Anthroposophic Press, New York.]—the movements of the heart, for example, can be symbolized by flames, and so forth: we can determine concretely and in detail the connection between dream symbols and our inner organic states and processes. Or alternatively, outer events of our life may be symbolized, events that have remained in us as memories or the like. In any case it is misleading to take the conceptional content of a dream very seriously. This can be interesting, it has a sensational aspect, it is of great interest to many people; but for those who see deeper into the nature of man the dream content as it pertains to the conception proper is of extraordinarily little significance. The dramatic development of a dream, on the other hand, is of the greatest import. I will illustrate this:

Suppose a man dreams he is climbing a mountain. It is an excessively difficult climb and becomes ever more so, the higher he goes. Finally he reaches a point where his strength fails him and conditions have become so unfavorable that he cannot proceed: he must come to a halt. Something like fear, something of disappointment enters his dream. Perhaps at this point he wakes up.—Now, something underlies this dream that should really not be sought in the pictures themselves as they appeal to the imagination, but rather in the emotional experiencing of an intention, in the increasingly formidable obstructions appearing in the path of this intention, and in the circumstance of encountering even more insuperable obstacles. If we think of all that as proceeding in an emotional-dramatic way we discover a certain emotional content underlying the actual dream pictures as dramatic content.—This same emotional content could give rise to quite a different dream. The man might dream he is entering a cave. It gets darker and darker as he gropes along until he finally comes to a swamp. There he wades a bit farther, but finally arrives at a quagmire that stops further progress. This picture embraces the same emotional and sentient dramatic content as the other; and the dramatic content in question could be dreamt in still many other forms.

The pictorial content of a dream may vary continually; the essential factor is what underlies the dream in the way of movements, tension and relaxation, hope and disappointment. Nevertheless, the dream presents itself in pictures, and we must ask, How do these arise? They do so, for example, because at the moment of awaking something is experienced by the ego and astral body outside the physical and etheric bodies. The nature of such super-sensible experiences is of course something that cannot possibly be expressed in pictures borrowed from the sense world; but as the ego and the astral body reunite with the physical and etheric bodies they have no choice but to use pictures from the available supply. In this way the peculiar dream drama is clothed in pictures.

Now we begin to take an interest in the content of these pictures. Their conformation is entirely different from that of other experiences. Why? Our dreams employ nothing but outer or inner experiences, but they give these a different contiguity. Why is this? It is because dreams are a protest against our mode of life in the physical sense-world during our waking hours. There we live wholly interwoven with the system of natural laws, and dreams break through this. Dreams will not stand for it, so they rip events out of their context and present them in another sequence. They protest against the system of natural laws—in fact, men should learn that every immersion into spirit is just such a protest.

In this connection, there are certain quaint people who keep trying to penetrate the spiritual world by means of the ordinary natural-scientific method. Extraordinarily interesting in this connection is Dr. Ludwig Staudenmaier's book on Experimental Magic. A man of that type starts with the assumption that everything which is to be comprehended should be comprehended according to the natural-scientific mode of thought. Now, Staudenmaier does not exactly occupy himself with dreams as such but with so-called mediumistic phenomena, which are really an extension of the dream world. In healthy human beings the dream remains an experience that does not pass over into the outer organization; whereas in the case of a medium everything that is ordinarily experienced by the ego, and the astral body, and that then takes shape in the pictures provided by the physical and etheric bodies, passes over into the experiences of the physical and etheric bodies. This is what gives rise to all the phenomena associated with mediumistic conditions.—Staudenmaier was quite right in refusing to be guided by what other mediums offered him, so he set about making himself into a sort of medium. He dreamt while writing, so to speak: he applied the pencil as he had seen mediums do it, and sure enough, it worked! But he was greatly astonished at what came to light: he was amazed at sequences he had never thought of. He wrote all sorts of things wholly foreign to the realm of his conscious life. What he had written was frequently so remote from his conscious life that he asked, “Who is writing this?” And the answer came, “Spirits.” He had to write “spirits!” Imagine: the materialist, who of course recognizes no spirits, had to write down “spirits.” But he was convinced that whatever was writing through him was lying, so he asked next why the spirits lied to him so; and they said, “Well, we have to lie to you—that is our way.” Then he asked about all sorts of things that concerned himself, and once they went so far as to say “muttonhead.” [Kohlkopf—literally “cabbage-head.”] Now, we cannot assume his frame of mind to have been such as to make him label himself a muttonhead. But in any case, all sorts of things came to light that were summed upon the phrase, “we have to lie to you;” so he reflected that since there are naturally no spirits, his subconscious mind must be speaking. But now the case becomes still more alarming: the subconscious calls the conscious mind a muttonhead, and it lies; hence this personality would have to confess, “In my subconscious mind I am an unqualified liar.”

But ultimately all this merely points to the fact that the world into which the medium plunges down registers a protest against the constraint of the laws of nature, exactly as does the world of dreams. Everything we can think, will, or feel in the physical sense-world is distorted the moment we enter this more or less subconscious world. Why? Well, dreams are the bridge leading to the spiritual world, and the spiritual world is wholly permeated by a set of laws that are not the laws of nature, but laws that bear an entirely different inner character. Dreams are the transition to this world. It is grave error to imagine that the spiritual world can be comprehended by means of natural laws; and dreams are the herald, as it were, warning us of the impossibility of merely extending the laws of nature when we penetrate into the spiritual world. The same methods can be carried over if we prepare ourselves to accomplish this; but in penetrating into the spiritual world we enter an entirely different system of laws.

The idea that the world can and should be comprehended only by means of the mental capacities developed in the course of the last three or four hundred years has today become an axiom. This has come about gradually. Today there are no longer such men as were still to be found in the first half of the 19^th Century, men for example, of the type of Johannes Müller, Haeckel's teacher, who confessed that many a bit of research he was carrying on purely as a physiologist refused to be clarified as long as he thought about it in his ordinary waking condition, but that subsequently a dream had brought back to him the whole work of preparing the tissue when awake, all the steps he had taken, and thus many such riddles were solved in his dreams. And Johannes Müller was also one of those who were still fully convinced that in sleep a man dwells in this peculiar spiritual weaving, untouched by inexorable natural laws; where one can even penetrate into the system of physical nature laws, because underlying these there is again something spiritual, and because what is spiritual is fundamentally not subject to natural necessity but merely manifests this on the visible surface.

One really has to speak in paradoxes if thoughts that result quite naturally from spiritual research are to be carried to their logical conclusion. No one who thinks in line with modern natural science believes that a light shining at a given point in space will appear equally bright at a distance. The physicist computes the decrease in the strength of light by the square of the distance, and he calculates gravity in the same way. Regarding these physical entities, he knows that the validity of what is true on the earth's surface diminishes as we pass out into the surrounding cosmos. But he refuses to apply this principle to his thinking. Yet in this respect thinking differs in no way from anything we can learn about earth matters in the laboratories, in the operating rooms—from anything on earth, right down to twice two is four. If gravity diminishes by the square of the distance, why should not the validity of the system of nature laws diminish in a similar ratio and eventually, beyond a certain distance, cease altogether?

That is where spiritual science penetrates. It points out that when the Nebula of Orion or the Canes Nebula is to be the subject of research, the same course is followed as though, with tellurian concepts, Venus, for example, were to be illuminated by the flame of a candle. When spiritual science reveals the truth by means of such analogies people think it is paradoxical. Nevertheless, in the state in which during sleep we penetrate into the spiritual world, greater possibilities are offered us for investigating the Nebula of Orion or the Canes Nebula than are provided by working in laboratories or in observatories. Research would yield much more if we dreamt about these matters instead of reflecting on them with our intellect. As soon as we enter the cosmos it is useless to apply the results of our earthly research. The nature of our present-day education is such that we are prone to apply to the whole cosmos what we consider true in our little earth cell; but it is obvious that truth cannot come to light in this way.

If we proceed from considerations of this sort, a good deal of what confronted men in former things through a primitive, but penetrating, clairvoyant way of looking at things takes on greater value than it has for present-day mankind in general. We will not even pass by the knowledge that came into being in the pastoral life of primitive times, which is nowadays so superficially ignored; for those old shepherds dreamt many a solution to the mysteries of the stars better than can be computed today by our clever scientists with their observatories and spectroscopes. Strange as that may sound, it is true. By studying in a spiritual-scientific way what has been preserved from olden times we can find our way into this mysterious connection we have with the cosmos. Let me tell you here of what can be discovered if we seek through spiritual science the deeply religious and ethical, but also social import of the old Druidic Mysteries on the one hand, and those of the Mithras Mysteries on the other; for this will give us points of contact with the way in which we should conceive the shaping of a Michael Festival.

Regarding the Druid Mysteries, the lecture cycle I gave a few weeks ago in Penmaenmawr, [See: Rudolf Steiner, Evolution of the World and Humanity, Anthroposophic Press, New York (actually, Anthroposophic Publishing Company, London, 1926. Also in Evolution of Consciousness, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966.—e.Ed)] Wales—the spot in England that lies exactly behind the island of Anglesea—is of quite special significance because in that place many reminders of the old sacrificial sanctuaries and Mystery temples of the Druids are to be found lying about in fragments. Today these relics, these cromlechs and mounds, are not really very impressive. One climbs up to the mountain tops and finds stones arranged in such a way as to form a sort of chamber, with a larger stone on top; or one sees the cromlechs arranged in circles—originally there were always twelve. In the immediate vicinity of Penmaenmawr were to be found two such sun-circles adjoining each other; and in this particular neighborhood, where even in the spiritual life of nature there is so much that has a different effect from that of nature elsewhere, what I have set forth in various anthroposophical lectures concerning the Druid Mysteries could be tested with the utmost clarity. There is indeed a quite special spiritual atmosphere in this region where—on the island of Anglesea—the Society of King Arthur had a settlement. I must describe it as follows:

In speaking of super-sensible things we cannot form thoughts in the same way as we usually do in life or in science, where abstract thoughts are formed, conclusions drawn, and so forth. But to be reduced, in addition, even to speaking more or less abstractly—our language, which has become abstract, demands this—well, if we want to describe something in a spiritual-scientific way we cannot be as abstract as all that in the inner being of our soul: everything must be presented pictorially. We must have pictures, imaginations, before the mind's eye. And this means something different from having thoughts. Thoughts in the soul are extraordinarily patient, according to the degree of our inner indolence: we can hold them; but imaginations always lead a life of their own: we feel quite clearly that an imagination presents itself to us. It is different from writing or drawing, yet similar. We write or draw with our soul; but imaginations are not abstractly held fast like mere thoughts: we write them. In most parts of Europe where civilization has already taken on so abstract a character these imaginations flit past comparatively very quickly: depicting the super-sensible always involves an inner effort. It is as though we wrote something that would then be immediately wiped away by some demonic power—gone again at once. The same is true of imaginations by means of which we bring the super-sensible to consciousness and experience it in our soul.

Now, the spiritual atmosphere in the region of Wales that I mentioned has this peculiarity: while imaginations stamp themselves less readily into the astral element, they persist longer, being more deeply imprinted. That is what appears so conspicuous in that locality; and indeed, everything there points to a more spiritual way of retracing the path to what those old Druid priests really strove for—not during the decadence of the Druid cults, when they contained much that was rather distasteful and even nefarious, but in the time of their flowering.

Examining one of these cromlechs we find it to close off, in a primitive way, a certain space for a chamber that was covered for reasons having to do with the priest's purposes. When you observe sunlight you have first the physical sunlight. But this physical sunlight is wholly permeated by the spiritual activities of the sun; and to speak of the physical sunlight merely as does the modern physicist would be exactly the same as talking about a man's muscles, bones, blood, and so on, omitting all reference to the soul and spirit holding sway within him. Light is by no means mere phos: it is phosphoros, light-bearing—is endowed with something active and psychic. But this psychic element of light is lost to man in the mere sense-world.—Now, when the Druid priest entered this burying place—like other old cult sanctuaries, the cromlechs were mostly erected over graves—he set up this arrangement which in a certain way was impervious to the physical sun-rays; but the spiritual activities of the sun penetrated it, and the Druid priests were specially trained to perceive these. So he looked through these stones—they were always specially selected—into the chamber where the spiritual activity of the sun penetrated, but from which the physical effect was excluded. His vision had been finely schooled, for what can be seen in a primitive darkroom of that sort varies according to the date, whether February, July, August, or December. In July it is lightly tinged with yellow; in December it radiates a faintly bluish shade from within. And one capable of observing this beholds—in the qualitative changes undergone in the course of the year by this shadow-phenomenon enclosed in such a darkroom—the whole cycle of the seasons in the psycho-spiritual activity of the sun's radiance.

And further: these sun-circles are arranged in the number twelve, like the twelve signs of the zodiac; and on the mountain we had climbed we found a large sun-circle and nearby a smaller one. If one had ascended, perhaps in a balloon, and looked down upon these two Druid circles, ignoring the insignificant distance between them, the same ground plan would have presented itself—there is something profoundly moving about this—as that of the Goetheanum in Dornach which was destroyed by fire.

The old Druid priests had schooled themselves to read from what thus met their soul's eye how, at every time of day and at every season of the year as well, the sun's shadow varied. They could trace these shadow formations and by means of them determine accurately, this is the time of March, this is the time of October. Through the perception this brought them they were conscious of cosmic events, but also of cosmic conditions having significance for life on this earth. And now, think how people go about it today when they want to determine the influence of cosmic life on earthly life—even the peasants! They have a calendar telling what should be done on this or that day, and they do it, too, approximately; for the fundamental knowledge once available concerning these matters has vanished. But calendars there were none at the time of the old Druids, nor even writing: what the Druid priest was able to tell from his observations of the sun constituted men's knowledge of the connection between the heavens and the earth. And when the priest said: The position of the sun now calls for the sowing of wheat, or, it is the time to lead the bull through the herd, it was done. The cult of that epoch was anything but an abstract prayer: it regulated life in its obvious, practical demands in accord with the enlightenment obtained by communicating with the spirit of the universe. The great language of the heavens was deciphered, and then applied to earthly things.

All this penetrated even the most intimate details of the social life. The priest indicated, according to his readings in the universe, what should be done on such and such a day of the year in order to achieve a favorable contact with the whole universe. That was a cult that actually made of the whole of life a sort of divine worship. By comparison, the most mystical mysticism of our time is a kind of abstraction, for it lets outer nature go its way, so to speak, without bothering about it: it lives and has its being in tradition and seeks inner exaltation, shutting itself off and concentrating within itself as far as possible in order to arrive at an abstract connection with some chimerical world of divine spirit. All this was very different in those olden times. Within the cult—and it was a cult that had a real, true connection with the universe—men united with what the Gods were perpetually creating and bringing about in the world: and as earth-men they carried out the will of the gods as read in the stellar script by means of the methods known to the Druid priests. But they had to know how to read the writing in the stars.—It is profoundly affecting to be able, at the very spot, to transport oneself back to conditions such as I have described as prevailing during the height of the Druid culture. Elsewhere in that region as well—even over as far as Norway—are to be found many such relics of the Druid culture.

Similarly, all through Central Europe, in parts of Germany, in the Rhineland, even in western France, relics and reminders of the ancient Mithras Cult are to be found. Here again I will only indicate the most important features. The outer symbol of the Mithras Cult is always a bull ridden by a man thrusting a sword into the bull's neck; below, a scorpion biting the bull, or, a serpent; but whenever the representation is complete you will see this picture of bull and man surrounded by the firmament, and particularly the signs of the zodiac. Again we ask, What does this picture express? The answer will never be found by an external, antiquated science of history, because the latter has no means of establishing the interrelationships that can provide clues to the meaning of this man on the bull. In order to arrive at the solution one must know the nature of the training undergone by those who served the Mithras Cult. The whole ceremony could, of course, be run off in such a way as to be beautiful—or ugly, if you like—without anything intelligent transpiring. Only one who had passed through a certain training could make sense of it. That is why all the descriptions of the Mithras Mysteries are really twaddle, although the pictures give promise of yielding so much. The service of the Mithras Cult demanded in the neophyte a very fine and sensitive development of the capacity for receptive sentience. Everything depended upon the development of this faculty in him.

I said yesterday in the public lecture [See: Rudolf Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (Anthroposophy) as a Demand of the Age; Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life, Anthroposophic Press, New York.] that the human heart is really a subconscious sense organ: subconsciously the head perceives through the heart what goes on in the physical functions of the lower body and the chest. Just as we perceive outer events in the sense-world through the eye, so the human heart is in reality a sense organ in its relation to the functions mentioned. Subconsciously by means of the heart, the head, and particularly the cerebellum, perceives the blood being nourished by the transformed foodstuffs, perceives the functioning of the kidneys, the liver, and other processes of the organism. The heart is the sense organ for perceiving all this in the upper portion of the human being.

Now, to raise this heart as a sense organ to a certain degree of consciousness was the object in the schooling of those who were to be engaged in the Mithras Cult. They had to develop a sensitive, conscious feeling for the processes in the liver, kidneys, spleen, etc., in the human organism. The upper man, the headman, had to sense very delicately what went on in the chest-man and the limb-man. In older epochs that sort of schooling was not the mental training to which we are accustomed today, but a schooling of the whole human being, appealing in the main to the capacity for feeling. And just as we say, on the basis of outer optical perception, There are rain clouds or, the sky is blue, so the sufficiently matured disciple could say, Now the metabolism in my organism is of this nature, now it is of that. Actually, the processes within the human organism seem the same the year round only to the abstractionist. When science will once more have advanced to real truths concerning these things, men will be amazed to learn how they can establish, by means very different from the crude methods of our modern precision instruments, how the condition of our blood varies and the digestion functions differently in January from September, and in what way the heart as a sense organ is a marvelous barometer for the course of the seasons within the human limb-metabolic organism. The Mithras disciple was taught to perceive the course of the seasons within himself by means of his heart organization, his heart-science, which transmitted to him the passage of food transformed by digestion and taken into the blood. And what was there perceived really showed in man—in the motion of the inner man—the whole course of outer nature.

Oh, what does our abstract science amount to, no matter how accurately we describe plants and plant cells, animals and animal tissues, compared with what once was present instinctively by reason of man's ability to make his entire being into an organ of perception, to develop his capacity for feeling into an organ capable of gleaning knowledge! Man bears within him the animal nature, and truly he does so more intensively than is usually imagined; and what the ancient Mithras followers perceived by means of their heart-science could not be represented otherwise than by the bull. The forces working through the metabolic-limb man, and tamed only by the upper man, are indicated by all that figures as the scorpion and the serpent winding around the bull. And the human being proper, in all his frailty, is mounted above in his primitive might, thrusting the sword of Michael into the neck of the bull. But what it was that must thus be conquered, and how it manifests itself in the course of the seasons, was known only to those who had been schooled in these matters.

Here the symbol begins to take on significance. By means of ordinary human knowledge no amount of observation or picturesque presentation will make anything of it. It can only be understood if one knows something about the heart-science of the old Mithras pupils; for what they really studied when they looked at themselves through their heart was the spirit of the sun's annual passage through the zodiac. In this way the human being experienced himself as a higher being, riding on his lower nature; and therefore it was fitting that the cosmos should be arranged in a circle around him; in this manner cosmic spirituality was experienced.

The more a renascent spiritual science makes it possible for us to examine what was brought to light by an ancient semi-conscious, dreamlike clairvoyance—but clairvoyance, nevertheless—the greater becomes our respect for it. A spirit of reverence for the ancient cultures pervades us when we see deeper into them and rediscover, for example, that the purpose of the Mithras Cult was to enable the priest, by penetrating the secrets of the seasons' cycle, to tell the members of his community what should be done on each day of the year. The Mithras Cult served to elicit from the heavens the knowledge of what should take place on earth. How infinitely greater is the enthusiasm, the incentive, for what must be done on earth if a man feels himself to be active in such a way that into his activity there flow the impulses deciphered from the great cosmic script he had read in the universe; that he made such knowledge his starting point and employed the resulting impulses in the ordinary affairs of daily life! However little this may accord with our modern concepts—naturally it does not—it was good and right according to the old ones. But in making this reservation we must clearly understand what it means to read in the universe what should be done in the lives of men on earth, thereby knowing ourself to be one with the divine in us—as over against debating the needs of the social life in the vein of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Only one who can visualize this contrast is able to see clearly into the nature of the new impulses demanded by the social life of our time.

This foundation alone can induce the right frame of mind for letting our cognition pass from the earth out into cosmic space: instead of abstractly calculating and computing and using a spectroscope, which is the common method when looking up to Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and so on, we thereby employ the means comprised in imagination, inspiration, and intuition. In that way, even when only imagination enters in, the heavenly bodies become something very different from the picture they present to modern astronomy—a picture derived partly from sense observation, partly from deductions. The moon, for example, appears to present-day astronomers as some sort of a superannuated heavenly body of mineral which, like a kind of mirror, reflects the sunlight that then, under certain conditions, falls on the earth. They do not bother very much about any of the effects of this sunlight. For a time these observations were applied to the weather, but the excessively clever people of the 19^th Century naturally refused to believe in any relation between the various phases of the moon and the weather. Yet those who, like Gustav Theodor Fechner, harbored something of a mystic tendency in their soul, did believe in it. I have repeatedly told the story in our circles about the great 19^th Century botanists Schleiden and Gustav Theodor Fechner, both active at the same university. Schleiden naturally considered it a mere superstition that Fechner should keep careful statistics on the rainfall during the full moon and the new moon periods. What Fechner had to say about the moon's influence on the weather amounted to pure superstition for Schleiden. But then the following episode occurred. The two professors had wives; and in those days it was still customary in Leipzig to collect rainwater for the laundry. Barrels were set up for this purpose; and Frau Professor Fechner and likewise Frau Professor Schleiden caught rainwater in such barrels, like everybody else. Now, the natural thing would have been for Frau Professor Schleiden to say, It is stupid to bother about what sort of an influence the moon phases have on the rainfall. But although Herr Professor Schleiden considered it stupid to take the matter seriously, Frau Professor Schleiden got into a violent dispute with Frau Professor Fechner because both ladies wanted to set up their barrels in the same place at the same time.—the women knew all about rain from practical experience, though the men on their professorial platforms took quite a different standpoint in the matter.

The external aspects of the moon are as I have described them; but especially after rising from imagination to inspiration are we confronted with its spiritual content. This content of the moon is not just something to be understood in an abstract sense: it is a real moon population; and looked at in a spiritual-scientific way the moon presents itself as a sort of fortress in the cosmos. From the outside, not only the light-rays of the sun but all the external effects of the universe are reflected by the moon down to the earth; but in the interior of the moon there is a complete world that nowadays can be reached only by ascending, in a certain sense, to the spirit world. In older writings on the relation of the moon to other cosmic beings you can find many a hint of this, and compare it with what can now be said by anthroposophy about the nature of the moon.

We have often heard that in olden times men had not only that instinctive wisdom of which I have spoken: they had beings as teachers who never descended into physical bodies—higher beings who occupied etheric bodies only, and whose instruction was imparted to men not by speaking, as we speak today, but by transmitting the wisdom in an inner way, as though inoculating the etheric body with it. People knew of the existence of these higher beings, just as we know that some physical teacher is present; but they also knew that these beings surrounded them in a strictly spiritual state. Everything connected with that “primordial wisdom,” recognized even by the Catholic Church—the primordial wisdom that once was available, and of which even the Vedas and the sublime Vedanta philosophy are but faint reverberations—all this can be traced back to the teaching of these higher spiritual beings. That wisdom, which was never written down, was not thought out by man: it grew in him. We must not think of the influence exerted by those primordial teachers as any sort of demonstrating instruction. Just as today, we learn to speak when we are children by imitating the older people, without any particular instruction—as indeed we develop a great deal as though through inner growth—so the primordial teachers exerted a mysterious influence on people of that ancient time, without any abstract instruction; with the result that at a certain age a man simply knew himself to be knowledgeable. Just as today a child gets his second teeth or reaches puberty at a certain age, so men of old became enlightened in the same way.—Doubtless many a modern college student would be delighted if this sort of thing still happened—if the light of wisdom simply flared up in him without his having to exert himself particularly!

What a very different wisdom that was from anything we have today! It was an organic force in man, related to growth, and other forces. It was simply wisdom of an entirely different nature, and what took place in connection with it I can best explain by a comparison. Suppose I pour some sort of liquid into a glass and then add salt. When the salt is dissolved it leaves the liquid cloudy. Then I add an ingredient that will precipitate the salt, leaving the liquid purer, clearer, while the sediment is denser. Very well: if I want to describe what permeated men during the period of primordial wisdom, I must say it is a mixture of what is spiritually wholly pure and of a physical animalistic element. What nowadays we think, we imagine our abstract thoughts simply as functioning and holding sway without having any being in us: or again, breathing and the circulation seem like something by themselves, apart. But for primeval man in earlier earth epochs, that was all one: it was simply a case of his having to breathe and of his blood circulating in him; and it was in his circulation that he willed.—Then came the time when human thinking moved higher up toward the head and became purer, like the liquid in the glass, while the sediment, as we may call it, formed below.

This occurred when the primordial teachers withdrew more and more from the earth, when this primal wisdom was no longer imparted in the old way. And whither did these primordial teachers withdraw? We find them again in the moon fortress I spoke of. That is where they are and where they continue to have their being. And what remained on earth was the sediment—meaning the present nature of the forces of propagation. These forces did not exist in their present form at the time when primordial wisdom held sway on earth: they gradually became that way—a sort of sediment. I am not implying that they are anything reprehensible, merely that in this connection they are the sediment. And our present abstract wisdom is what corresponds up above to the solvent liquid. This shows us that the development of humanity has brought about on the one hand the more spiritual features in the abstract sense, and on the other, the coarser animalistic qualities as a sediment.—Reflections of this sort will gradually evoke a conception of the spiritual content of the moon; but it must be remembered that this kind of science, which formerly was rather of a prophetic nature, was inherent in men's instinctive clairvoyance.

Just as we can speak about the moon in this way—that is, about what I may call its population, its spiritual aspect—so we can adopt the same course in the case of Saturn. When by spiritual-scientific effort, we learn to know Saturn—a little is disclosed through imagination, but far more through inspiration and intuition—we delve ever deeper into the universe, and we find that we are tracing the process of sense perception. We experience this physical process; we see something, and then feel the red of it. That is something very different from withdrawing from the physical body, according to the methods you will find described in my books, and then being able to observe the effects of an outer object on the human physical organism; to observe how the ether forces, rising from within, seize on the physico-chemical process that takes place, for example, in the eye during optical perception. In reality, the act of exposing ourself in the ordinary way to the world in perception, even in scientific observation, does not affect us very deeply. But when a man steps out of himself in this way and confronts himself in the etheric body and possibly in the astral as well, and then sees ex postfacto how such a sense-process of perception or cognition came about—even though his spiritual nature had left his physical sense-nature—then he indeed feels a mighty, intensive process taking place in his spirituality. What he then experiences is real ecstasy. The world becomes immense; and what he is accustomed to seeing only in his outer circle of vision, namely, the zodiac and its external display of constellations, becomes something that arises from within him. If someone were to object that what thus arises might be mere recollections, this would only prove that he does not know the event in question; for what arises there are truly not recollections but mighty imaginations transfused by intuitions: here we begin to behold from within what we had previously seen only from without. As human beings we become interwoven with all the mysteries of the zodiac; and if we seize the favorable moment there may flash before us, out of the inner universe, the secret of Saturn, for example, in its passage across the zodiac. Reading in the cosmos, you see, consists in finding the methods for reading out of the inwardly seen heavenly bodies as they pass through the zodiac. What the individual planet tells us provides the vowels of the world-script; and all that forms around the vowels when the planets pass the zodiacal constellations gives us the consonants, if I may use this comparison. By obtaining an inner view of what we ordinarily observe only from the outside we really learn to know the essence of what pertains to the planets.

That is the way to become acquainted with Saturn, for example, in its true inner being. We see its population, which is the guardian of our planetary system's memory; everything that has ever occurred in our planetary system since the beginning of time is preserved by the spirits of Saturn as in a mighty cosmic memory. So if anyone wants to study the great cosmic-historical course of our planetary system, surely he should not speculate about it, as did Kant and Laplace who concluded that once there was a primordial mist that condensed and got into a spiral motion from which the planets split off and circled around the sun, which remained in the middle. I have spoken of this repeatedly and remarked how nice it is to perform this experiment for children: you have a drop of oil floating on some liquid; above the liquid you have a piece of cardboard through which you stick a pin, and you now rotate the drop of oil by twirling the pin, with the result that smaller drops of oil split off. Now, it may be a good thing in life to forget oneself; but in a case like this we should not forget what we ourselves are doing in the experiment, namely, setting the drop of oil in motion. And by the same token, we should not forget the twirler in the Kant-Laplace theory: we would have to station him out in the universe and think of him as some great and mighty school teacher twirling the pin. Then the picture would have been true and honest; but modern science is simply not honest when dealing with such things.

I am describing to you how one really arrives at seeing what lives in the planets and in the heavenly bodies in general. By means of Saturn we must study the constitution of the planetary system in its cosmic-historical evolution. Only a science that is spiritual can offer the human soul anything that can seem like a cosmic experience. Nowadays we really think only of earthly experiences. Cosmic experience leads us out to participation in the cosmos; and only by co-experiencing the cosmos in this way will we once more achieve a spiritualized instinct for the meaning of the seasons with which our organic life as well as our social life is interwoven—an instinct for the very different relation in which the earth stands to the cosmos while on its way from spring to summer, and again from summer through autumn into winter. We will learn to sense how differently life on earth flows along in the burgeoning spring than when the autumn brings the death of nature; we will feel the contrast between the awakening life in nature during spring and its sleeping state in the fall. In this way man will again be able to conform with the course of nature, celebrating festivals that have social significance, in the same way that the forces of nature, through his physical organization, make him one with his breathing and circulation. If we consider what is inside our skin we find that we live there in our breathing and in our circulation. What we are there we are as physical men; in respect of what goes on in us we belong to cosmic life. Outwardly we live as closely interwoven with outer nature as we do inwardly with our breathing and circulation.

And what is man really in respect of his consciousness? Well, he is really an earthworm—and worse: an earthworm for whom it never rains! In certain localities where there is a great deal of rain, it is so pleasant to see the worms coming out of the ground—we must careful not to tread on them, as will everyone be who loves animals. And then we reflect: Those poor little chaps are down there underground all the time and only come out when it rains; but if it does not rain, they have to stay below. Now, the materialist of today is just such an earthworm—but one for whom it never rains; for if we continue with the simile, the rain would consist of the radiant shining into him of spiritual enlightenment, otherwise he would always be crawling about down there where there is no light. Today humanity must overcome this earthworm nature; it must emerge, must get into the light, into the spiritual light of day. And the call for a Michael Festival is the call for the spiritual light of day.

That is what I wanted to point out to you before I can speak of the things that can inaugurate a Michael Festival as a festival of especial significance—significant socially as well.

What yesterday I particularly wanted to make clear in connection with Goethe's is “Faust” was that more goes to the making of man's being than can be known or fathomed either by the understanding or by other forces of the human soul. Goethe himself felt deeply that the spiritual forces,that can be developed today in man's conscious life, cannot go so far as man by nature reaches. Those who believe that what is today called science needs only to be extended in order to know, to a certain measure, the possible and the impossible, simply say: It is true that, with what science offers today, one gains only a very limited knowledge of man. But this science will be widened, it will press on over further and further, and then we shall come increasingly near to the knowledge of man.

This is a very short-sighted outlook and is untrue. Knowledge of man does not depend upon whether the scientific outlook accepted today extends more and more widely, but to our having recourse to forces and faculties for knowledge different from any of those applied by modern science. However far modern science may advance on its own lines, what Goethe felt to be unknowable within the being of man can, in no case, ever be penetrated by it.

All science, my dear friends, all officially accepted science that deals with the spiritual, in reality relates only to earthly being—what has being on the earth-planet. What is called science today can never pronounce judgment on anything beyond the processes of the earth-planet. But man is not earthly man alone. As earth-man he has behind him the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and within him is the germinal basis of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions. Science can know nothing of the different planetary life-forms beyond the earthly; for the laws of science apply only to what is earthly. Man in his entirety, therefore, cannot be known by these laws; he can only be know if knowledge, be extended beyond what is earthly.

Now yesterday I pointed out how man exists in states of consciousness lying, as it were, both below and above the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Below the threshold of ordinary consciousness lies much from the regions of which dream experiences spring. But beneath this threshold of consciousness there also lies a very great deal of what a men experiences in waking, life, between waking and falling asleep. For even a little reflection will show you that men would know far more about their dreams if they exerted themselves to know a little more about waking. If they would make an effort to know something about being awake, they would find that, during this waking time, they do a great more dreaming then they suppose. The fixed and solid boundary between waking and sleeping is really only apparent. We might say that not only do men dream during their waking hours, they sleep too—sleep as regards a very great many things. As we all know, we are in a genuinely waking condition only as regards our ideas and part of our feelings, while the greater part of our life of feeling, and above all of our life of will, is wrapped in dreams and sleep. Sleep-life projects itself into waking life. We could be far clearer about dream-life, if we tried to perceive the distinction between those ideas that surge to and fro, evoking all kinds of images as they come and go, ideas that might easily be mistaken for dreams, and those other ideas, in which man is active with his whole will. Only in a small part of the whole world of human ideas does a man find that he uses his will to connect one idea with another; whereas, in his waking life, very often there are moments when he abandons himself to the flow and the caprice of his ideas. Consider how, when you give yourself up in this way to the flow of your ideas, one idea calls up another, how you recall things long forgotten. You begin with an idea which has to do with the present, and this evokes long-forgotten experiences. That is a process often not very distinct from dreaming. Because men have so little inner, technical thinking power, with which rightly to follow their daily waking life, few are able to set the right value on sleep-life and the dream-life arising from it. Nevertheless, my dear friends, we know there are scientifically conceived theories about dreams that maintain something like the following. Freud's school and others, mostly, though not all disciples of the psycho-analysts, say of dreams that they are images evoked in man by certain wishes in his life not having been fulfilled. A man goes throughout life wishing all kinds of things, but—say these people—it is undeniable that many of our wishes are not fulfilled. Then, when consciousness is dimmed, these wishes appear before the soul, and because they cannot be fulfilled in reality, they are fulfilled in idea. So that in the opinion of many people today dreams are wishes fulfilled in phantasy. I should like the people who maintain this just to consider how they manage to dream they have been beheaded. All such things, so often today forming the content of theories, are terribly one-sided. And men's heads are bound to be full of this one-sidedness unless they turn to the investigations of Spiritual Science—investigations into worlds unknown both to the external world of the senses and to external intellectual thinking, and yielding conclusions beyond the grasp of human senses or human intellect.

From what was said yesterday, however, you can gather one thing concerning dreams with the utmost surety, namely, that in them something is living and weaving which is connected with our human past, with the past when we had an existence still associated with earth-fire and water-air. While unconscious in sleep, to a certain extent we call back our past. Today with our brain consciousness and our ordinary free-will, we are not in the position consciously to transport ourselves into that world. While passing through the earlier stages of our evolution we were indeed unconscious or subconscious. Yet relatively it is not particularly difficult to have this experience. If you follow up your dream life, you will certainly find it extraordinarily difficult to give a clear interpretation of your dream pictures. The way they follow one after another is generally completely chaotic. But this chaotic character is only superficial; below the surface man is living in an element that is by no means chaotic, it is merely different, totally different, from the experiences of waking life. We shall immediately see the profound difference if we are clear in just one case as to how far dream-life differs from waking life. It would be very unpleasant if our relations with other people were the same in waking life as they are in dreams. For in dreams we are aware of a bond uniting us with almost all those karmically connected with us; we experience a link with all the human beings with whom we have any karmic connection. From the moment you begin to fall asleep till you wake, a force goes forth from you to innumerable people, and from innumerable people forces come to you. I cannot say that you speak, for speaking is only learnt in waking day life, but if you will not misunderstand me, if you will apply what I am going to say to the communications we have in sleep, then you will know what I mean by saying: In sleep you speak to innumerable people and they speak to you. And what you experience in your soul during your sleep is imparted to you by innumerable people; and what you do during your sleep is to send thoughts to innumerable people. The union between men in sleep is very intimate. It would be highly distressing if this were continued into waking life. You see, it is the beneficent act of the Guardian of the Threshold that he hides from man what is beneath the level of human consciousness. In sleep, as a rule, you know if anyone is lying, you know as a rule if anyone has evil thoughts about you. On the whole, men know one another in sleep comparatively well, but with dimmed consciousness. That is all covered up in waking consciousness, and it must be so, for the simple reason that man would never attain the ego-conscious thinking he is to learn during his earth-mission, nor be able to manage the free will he is to acquire, if he were to continue to live as he lived during the periods of Saturn, Sun, and especially the Moon period. Then, in his external life, he lived as he now lives from falling asleep to waking.

But now we come to something else significant. Out of the unconscious life between falling asleep and waking, dreams emerge. Why then are they not a true picture of life below the threshold of consciousness? Ah! were these dreams direct and true reflections, they would be every possible thing. In the first place they would impart significant knowledge concerning our relation to the world and to men; they would also be stern monitors. They would speak dreadfully severely to our conscience about the various things in life about which we are so willing to give ourselves up to illusion. I might almost say that we are protected from the effect these dreams might have upon us if they were true reflections of life below the threshold of consciousness—we are protected by our waking life permeating us with forces so strongly that a shadow is cast over the whole life of dreams. Thus, we carry the ideas, the images, of waking life into our dream-life, into the life of sleep, and through this dreams arise. Suppose, for instance, you were to dream of some personality who took it upon himself to impress upon you that you had done something really tactless—unfitting. That happens sometimes. Others, too, might admonish us during sleep, and might speak to our conscience. The experiences and customs of waking life have given you the wish—I might even say the strong desire—not to listen to this; during sleep you don't want to hear anything this person says to you. Well then, the wish is transformed into a darkening of experience. But if at the same time, there is such intense activity of the soul that the picture surges up, then something else from waking life is superimposed upon what you were to have experienced as a picture, something said by a kind friend to whom you would rather listen than to the admonisher—What a splendid fellow you are, always ready to will and do what is best and most pleasant!—Sometimes, from waking life and its reminiscences, the very opposite can be hung over what is being experienced. Actually, waking life is the cause of all the illusions and deceptions arising during the life of dreams.

Furthermore it is possible for a man today, in the present cycle of evolution, to come to a knowledge of Spiritual Science. There are, I know, many who do so and say: I have been studying Spiritual Science for many years, and yet am no whit advanced. I am told that I can achieve this or that through Spiritual Science, but it does not help me forward.—I have often emphasized that this thought is not the right one. Spiritual Science brings progress to everyone, even when it does not develop an esoteric life. The thoughts of Spiritual Science on themselves bring progress. But we must be careful about subjective experiences that take place really in the soul, for it is strange that what springs up as new, in the path of anyone beginning to study Spiritual Science, in its picture character is, at first, no different from the world of dreams. What we experience, my dear friends, when we become anthroposophists, appears to differ very little from the world of dreams. But a more subtle differentiation shows a most important distinction between ordinary dreams and those perceptions that flow through spiritual life, when consciously admitted into thought.

Much that is chaotic may also appear in the dream-pictures experienced in the soul of a spiritual scientist. But if these pictures are analysed according to the guidance Spiritual Science can give, they will be found to become, especially as they progress ever truer reflections of man's inner experience. And we must pay heed to this layer of experience, hidden as it is from ordinary understanding and from the ordinary life of the senses. This experience runs its course like a meditation, a meditative dream, yet is full of meaning and, rightly regarded, throws much light on spiritual secrets. We must mark how it gradually creeps into the life of ordinary ideas—this layer of life that closely resembles dreams, but that can lead us into the spiritual world. But we must not merely look at its single pictures, we must look at the meaningful course these pictures take. If we pay attention to such things, we come to the differentiation of the three layers of consciousness which I showed you yesterday. Goethe divined it in a beautiful way. One of these layers of consciousness appears, without any help of ours, when we dream in the ordinary way; if we are not interpreters of dreams, if we are not superstitious but try honestly to find what lies behind the dream-pictures, then this dream-world will be able to reveal that, before these earth-lives, as men we passed through earlier stages of evolution.

And then we have the ordinary waking day consciousness we know, or at least think we know. We know the fact of its existence, we do not always venture to explain it fully but we know it exists.

The third layer is where supersensible knowledge enters in. For the reasons already mentioned, supersensible knowledge is of course something for which man has to strive, both now and into the future.

I pointed out to you yesterday how, in the first half of the scene in the scene in the second part of Faust, which we are now to consider, Goethe embodies the characteristic features of dream-life. And the moment the Oread begins to speak to Mephistopheles, and the philosophers appear, we have to do with the world of ordinary daytime reality. The moment the Dryads point out the Phorkyads to Mephistopheles, we are dealing with a reference to conscious supersensible knowledge. Goethe is directing his thoughts and ideas to the three layers of consciousness when he asks himself the question: How will Homunculus, to whom human knowledge is accessible, become a Homo?—Not through the ordinary knowledge of the understanding of the senses, but only by having recourse to other layers of consciousness. For man in his being is wider than the earth, and intelligence and the senses are adapted only to earthly things. But we explained yesterday how the equilibrium of the Sphinx fails when man plunges into the world of antiquity, how man really feels insecure in it, how Homunculus feels himself insecure. For man knows little more about himself—forgive me but this is true—he knows little more about himself than he does about a Homunculus; and about a Homo he knows nothing. And Homunculus, as Goethe pictures him, does not enter into all the whirl of the Sirens, the Seismos, and so on, because he is afraid of the stormy, surging element into which man dives when he forsakes the world of the senses to enter the world from which dreams arise. Homunculus does not dare to enter there, but wants to find an easier way to become Homo. He is on the track of two philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, from whom he hopes to learn how it is possible to put more into his human nature that can't be given him in a laboratoryby a Wagner. This is what he wants. We already know that Goethe had little hope of what could be experienced through the new philosophers, and had no wish at all to test people's patience by, perhaps, taking Homunculus to Königsberg to get information from Kant on how to become a complete human being, how to widen human nature. But Goethe sought to live himself into the world of the Greeks, believing that by so living in their more pliable and flexible ideas, he could grasp human life out of another layer of consciousness better than through what the more recent philosophers could produce out of understanding and the consciousness of the senses. Thus, he does not introduce Homunculus into the society of Kant, or of Leibnitz, Hume or Locke, but brings him into the company of those philosophers who came nearer the older outlook, the outlook of the ancient Mysteries, where something of man's nature could be known, if not with such clearly experienced consciousness as today, yet with a more all-embracing consciousness. But, at heart, Anaxagoras and Thales our only imitators of the old Mystery wisdom. Everything said by Anaxagoras in this scene, however, goes to show that it is he who has the more knowledge of ancient Mystery wisdom. Thales is really the inaugurator, the initiator, the beginner, of the new tendency in science, and knows but little of the old secrets. Naturally he knows more than his later philistine followers because he lived nearer the time of the ancient Mysteries, but he knows less than Anaxagoras. From what he says we can gather that Thales can only give information about what occurs in the world of the senses around him, how mountain ranges and such physical features were formed by slow and gradual processes. You might think it was Lyell, the modern geologist, speaking. Anaxagoras would explain the present out of the past, explain the earthly from what went before, when earth was not yet earth. He wants to find his explanation in those times to which, in their nature, the ants, the comets, and also the Pigmies belonged. I referred to this yesterday. Anaxagoras lives entirely in that world which today is a supersensible, or if you like, subsensible world, without knowledge of which, however, we cannot understand what has to do with the senses. Anaxagoras here reflects one of Goethe's deep convictions. For Goethe has put this point beautifully into one of his aphorisms, where he says: “What no longer arises, we cannot think of as arising. What has already arisen, we cannot understand”. And in another place: “Reason as applied to what is becoming, understanding to what has become”.

What Thales sees around him is what has become. Anaxagoras enters into all that has gone before the becoming—the actual arising. Hence Goethe distinguishes strictly between understanding that is directed to what is nowadays regarded as the object of science, and reason that extends beyond the obvious and intellectual, to the supersensible, even the supersensible that held sway before the existing conditions of the earth. In Anaxagoras, Goethe sees the representative of a knowledge, a science, that devotes itself to what is still coming into being, and is at home and all that is done by Pigmies, that is to say, at home in all that such beings do that certainly today develop a physical existence, but like the emmets, for example, really belonged by nature to a previous age.

So when Anaxagoras meets with Homunculus' request, he would like to give him the opportunity to enrich human nature through his own (Anaxagoras') knowledge; he wants to take Homunculus into the world of the Pigmies, the emmets, and so forth, and even wants to make him king there. It is already clear to Anaxagoras that the world of which Thales speaks, the world of present conditions, cannot be much help in changing Homunculus into Homo. Could entrance be made into the world of becoming, however, into the world preceding ours, something might be achieved towards that end. But Homunculus is undecided: “What says my Thales?” He still thinks he will not venture into that world. When he encountered it as a dream-world, he dared not enter it, and now it confronts him as the thought of Anaxagoras he still does not summon up sufficient courage, or at least he would first have Thales' advice. And Thales deters him from plunging into the world of Anaxagoras' thought. What kind of world is this? Fundamentally, it is the world of the ancient Mysteries, but flattened, levelled down, for human understanding. It is the shadow form of the concepts of the ancient Mysteries. That is why they cannot hold their own against the world. If we have real, living concepts of becoming, we can arrive at an understanding of this world—grow into it. But Anaxagoras' shadow concepts are no match for Thales' objections, for these come from the present sense-world. And just as fleeting dreams, that are reflections of higher spiritual worlds, fade away from man when a cock crows or a door slams, so everything in the thought-world of Anaxagoras fades when it meets other thoughts drawn from the present world of the senses. Thales has only to draw attention to the presence of the sense-world, and he does this very forcibly. As the present world kills the preceding world that arises before us in dreams, so do the cranes strike dead the Pigmies and the emmets. This is merely an image. Anaxagoras first turns to the world that re-appears in the vague experience of dreams. When he is obliged to realise that this world will be of no advantage to Homunculus, he then turns to the higher world. To begin with, in wonderful words, he invokes among heavenly phenomena, all that has remained of a previous period of he earth—he invokes the Moon. After he has widened his thoughts and ideas concerning what is left over from the Moon period—emmets, pigmies, creatures of a lower kind, and all this has proved useless to Homunculus, he looks upward to where the Moon has still remained from the old Moon period.

Think how clearly in this scene Goethe actually points to all these secrets lying at the basis of earthly evolution. He even makes Anaxagoras address an invocation to the Moon, out of the ancient Mystery-wisdom. It is a wonderful passage in which Anaxagoras turns toward the Moon. It shows most distinctly how, in Anaxagoras, Goethe was wishing to portray a personality standing within the spiritual world but only with his understanding, the understanding that only studying the present can never reach the spiritual at all, but, in Anaxagoras, still preserves the spiritual out of the old Mysteries. Anaxagoras says:

“The powers subterene erstwhile adoring,
This crisis in, I turn above, imploring,
O Thou, that agest not eternally,
Three-named, three-formed, enthroned supernally,
Thee in my people's woe I call on Thee!
Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom-lightener [or bosom-widener], deeply pensive one!
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty intensive one!
Open thy shadows' awful gulf alone!
Thine ancient might without a spell make known.”

But he has still only shadows; instead of achieving anything for Homunculus, he perceives how from the Moon desolation falls upon the earth, and how all the life still left there is destroyed by a phenomenon of the elements. As being characteristic of Anaxagoras it is significant that he addresses the Moon, this remnant of a previous period of the earth, as “Luna, Diana, Hecate ...”

For Anaxagoras, therefore, the Moon is not a unity but a trinity. In so far as it fulfils its course above in the heavens, it is Luna. In so far as it is active in the earth itself, it is Diana. The forces working cosmically through the Moon as it circles the heavens, have—one might say—for brothers and sisters the earthly forces; the Moon is not only present cosmically, it exists also in an earthly way. The same forces that are cosmically associated with the circling Moon in the heavens, also live and weave through what is earthly, and belong to significant subconscious forces in man. They work in man's nature and belong to forces in him that are subconscious but important. What works within the earth through man having a certain relation to Nature out of his subconscious, that never comes to complete consciousness, was called by the Greeks Diana. Diana is generally said to be the goddess of the chase. Certainly she is that too, because this subconscious holds sway in the pleasures of the chase; it does so, however, in countless other human feelings and will-impulses. Diana is not only goddess of the chase, she is the working, creating goddess of all half unconscious, half subconscious striving, such as is gratified in hunting. Man does much of this kind in life, and this is one of the ways.

Then there dwells in man, but also especially in the earth, a third figure, the figure of Hecate, the sub-earthly state of the Moon. It is from within the earth, from what is sub-earthly in it, that those forces work upwards, which—so far as the Moon is a heavenly body, work in her from above downwards. All that the man of today knows of this Moon is the abstract mineral ball he believes to revolve out there, round the earth in four weeks. The Greeks knew a threefold Moon—Luna, Diana, Hecate. And being a microcosm is an image of every trinity, and image of Luna, Diana, Hecate, as the threefold Moon. And we have learnt to know the threefold man. We know the man of the head; this man of the head, since he is the product of the periods of Saturn, Sun, and Moon, the product of all previous ages, can be brought into relation with the heavenly survival, with Luna. So that the head in man would, as a microcosm, correspond to the macrocosm Luna. The man of the centre, the breast, would correspond to Diana; it is in the heart that those subconscious impulses arise of which Diana is the goddess. And all that plays out of the extremity-man and is continued into the sex-man, all the dark, purely organic, bodily feelings and impulses, prevailing in the human being, come from the sub-earthly power of Hecate. And Goethe lets all this sound forth, making it all quite clear for those who wish to hear. To the realm of Hecate belongs, for instance, Empusa who appears in this scene among the Lamiae around Mephistopheles. The Lamiae express rather what belongs to Diana, whereas, in Empusa, all that belongs to the sub-earthly is working, all that dwells microcosmically in the lower nature of man, and is to be awakened in Mephistopheles. This is what Goethe makes ring out for us.

Anaxagoras wishes to show his science to better advantage than he did when alluding to the earthly, to earthly survivals, to the emmets, his myrmidons as he calls them. He turns to the threefold Moon that as macrocosm is the same as man as microcosm. And we ask: Had Goethe a presentiment that, in the threefold Moon, the head-man, chest-man, and limb-man were microcosmically present? Well, my dear friends, read the following lines:

“Thou bosom-widener, (Diana)
Profoundly pensive one, (Luna)
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty, intensive one!” (Hecate)

Here you have, fully expressed by Goethe and made obvious by his description of the middle one as “breast-widener”, the three qualities of Luna, Diana, and Hecate, in so far as these three also apply to threefold man.

You see, my dear friends, there are good grounds for maintaining that Goethe's foreseeing knowledge penetrated deeply in the truths on Spiritual Science. What, however, is written in a work like Goethe's Faust has to be taken in its true character. It when you consider Goethe's characteristic attitude with its foreseeing perception of the truths of Spiritual Science, that you can understand how in a certain sense he repeatedly felt the spiritual, the supersensible—but never the less as something uncanny. As I said yesterday, he lived within his northern world, and felt in sympathy with what this environment offered him in the way on ideas and concepts. However great a genius a man may be, he con only have the same concepts as his fellows; he can combine them differently but he cannot have different concepts. The two layers of consciousness, the subconscious and the superconscious, cannot be approached in this way. The ordinary philistine, my dear friends, can make nothing of all this, and is glad if he is not obliged to deal with the other layers of consciousness. But Goethe, who strove with every fibre of his soul, to penetrate the being of man, often felt it a grievous human limitation that he should have no ideas, no concepts, with which he could see into the would whence man arises, into which, however, no one can look with his understanding or his ordinary knowledge. And then, from all he had felt through his natural ability, or that he had experienced in other ways, and through what he had particularly noticed in Grecian art in Italy, there arose in Goethe the thought that, were man to steep himself in the ideas and life of Greece, he would come nearer to the supersensible than with modern ideas. This was so deeply rooted in Goethe that, from the year 1780 onwards he continually strove to make his ideas as supple as were those of the Greeks. He hoped in this way to reach the supersensible world. But what arose out of this? There arose his strenuous endeavour to come to knowledge of the supersensible world not from the outlook of Greek life, but by gaining ideas through which he would be able to grasp the supersensible world in the life of soul. It is interesting how, while he was writing this scene, Goethe was steeping himself in everything possible to bring Greek life vividly before his soul. Today we are no nearer to Greek life than men were in Goethe's days. And yet such a work as Schlosser's Universal Survey of the History of the Ancient World and its Culture, published in 1826, and immediately read by Goethe among many other works transplanting him into the life of Greece, enabled him, by his sympathetic attitude towards Greek life, to bring it vividly before his soul. But what idea had he in all this? Just think! he writes: We are called upon to look back on what is most universal, but utterly past, in ancient history—what cannot be brought back; and from there to let the different peoples gradually surge up beneath out gaze.

In the last twenty years of the eighteenth century during which these scenes of Faust were being created, Goethe occupied himself intensively with studies that should bring vividly before his spirit the far distant past and show him how it flows into the present. Goethe is not one of those who make poems by a turn of the hand; he plunges deeply into the world leading to the supersensible, so that as a poet he can give tidings of it. And his belief in the Greek world changed to a certain extent his way of representation. Because in his very soul he sought Greek life, the concept of truth, the concept of good, drew near the concept of beauty. And the concept of evil approached the concept of ugliness. That is difficult for present-day man to understand. In Greek thought it was different. Cosmos is a word meaning beautiful world-order, as well as true world-order. Today men no longer think, as did the Greeks, that beauty is so closely allied to truth, and ugliness to evil. For the Greeks, beauty melted into truth, ugliness into error and evil. Through his attitude to the Greek world Goethe acquired the feeling that anyone organised like the Greeks, who stood in such close relation to the supersensible world, would experience the untrue and evil as ugly, and would turn away from this because of his experience of beauty, while he would feel truth to be beautiful. This feeling was developed by Goethe. And he believed he might perhaps draw nearer the supersensible by saturating himself with feeling for the beauty of the world. But just as one can only know light by its shadow, one must also be saturated with feeling for the ugliness of the world. And that too Goethe sought.

For this reason he sets Mephistopheles, who is of course only another side of Faust's life, among the prototypes of gliness, the Phorkyads, who are in very truth the prototypes of what is hideous. And in so doing, my dear friends, Goethe touches on a great mystery of existence. You will have realised, from the lectures I have given here from time to time, that even today there are people in possession of certain secrets. Particularly the leaders of Roman Catholicism, for example, the leaders, are in possession of certain secrets. What matters is how these secrets are used. But certain initiates of the English-speaking peoples are also acquainted with mysteries. Out of a profound misunderstanding, does not only the Roman Church—that is, its leaders—keep these secrets from its adherents, but certain esoteric initiates of the English-speaking peoples do the same. They have various reasons for this, and of one of these I will now speak.

You see, my dear friends, the earth has a past, the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; it has a present, the earth-period; it has a future, the periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. In evolution there is both good and evil. Out of the cosmos, out of cosmic evolution, good can only be recognised from the past, from the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and half the earth-period. Wisdom and goodness are associated, in this looking back into the past. Wisdom and goodness were implanted into human nature by those members of the higher hierarchies who belong to man, at a time when this human nature was not yet awakened to full consciousness, as it is on the earth. For the coming time, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods, and at present on the earth, for the coming half of the earth-period—it is already beginning—man must preserve goodness if he wishes to attain it; he must develop the impulse for goodness out of his own nature. For in his environment,in what is new that approaches him, the forces of evil are revealed. Were these forces for evil not revealed, man could not arrive at free-will. And those initiates to whom I refer know this important secret, my dear friends, and will not impart it because they do not wish to help mankind to maturity. They know this secret. If what arose as human nature on ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon, and still continues further—if what was evolved for us men on Saturn, and possesses a past, were to arise now out of earth-conditions, it would be fundamentally evil, it would only be able to absorb evil. It is only possible to receive evil from external conditions. That man can acquire freedom of will is due to this exposure to evil and his being able to choose between the evil that approaches him, and the good he can develop out of his own nature. This is if he has confidence in what was planted there in previous ages. Hence these initiates say to those wishing to be initiated: There are three layers of consciousness, (that is the formula always used in these English-speaking schools os initiation) three layers of consciousness. When a man plunges into the subconscious, from which dreams spring up, he experiences an intimate relation with other beings (I have described this to you before) also with other men; these beings do not appear in the present world. When, as is the case today, man is living in his day-consciousness in the perceptible, rational world, he is in the world where he goes through birth and death. And when he raises himself to the world—that he will enter as physical man in the future—to which he attains through supersensible knowledge, then that is the world where he first experiences evil. For it is then that a man must find strength to be a match for evil, to hold his own against it. He must learn to know evil.

The natural consequence of this is the necessity for men of the present to shed light on the past, so that they may be prepared for the inevitable encounter with evil; and this can be done only through Spiritual Science. To these three layers of consciousness, the initiates of the English-speaking peoples continually draw attention. This will be the basis of that conflict that is of the utmost importance, though the present age has little external knowledge of it. This conflict will be between those who want what is a necessity to take place, and secrets of this kind to be imparted, and those who wish to keep mankind in immaturity. So far the latter have had the upper hand. It is most important that these things should be known. You can see from this, my dear friends, what mischief will be set on foot if the truths of Spiritual Science are withheld. For man will be exposed to the forces of evil, and he will only be protected from it by giving himself up to the spiritual life of the good. To withhold the spiritual life of goodness from men is to be no friend to humanity. Whoever does this, be he Freemason or Jesuit, is no friend to humanity. For it means handing men over to the forces of evil. And there may be a purpose in doing so. This purpose may be to confine goodness to a small circle, in order by the help of this goodness to dominate the helpless humanity who are thus led by evil into the follies of life.

You can imagine, my dear friends, that anyone like Goethe, who has a presentiment of all these things, will have some hesitation in approaching them. From many things I have said in your presence about Goethe's particular kind of spirituality, you will be able to form a concept of how he would approach these subtle, but world-shattering matters with only really relevant ideas. Hence, in conceiving his Faust, he did not wish to be thought that man, wanting to make progress in culture, must fearlessly expose himself to the forces of evil; instead, he clothes this too, in Greek ideas, by confronting Mephistopheles with primeval ugliness, with the trinity of Phorkyads, the three prototypes of ugliness. Instead of pointing men unreservedly to the reality of evil, as Spiritual Science must do, Goethe points to the reality of ugliness as contrasted with beauty. Hence the characteristic behaviour of Mephistopheles towards the Phorkyads. Had Mephistopheles remained in his northern home, that is to say in a world that has certainly advanced beyond that of the Greeks in the world-order, he would have been obliged to meet with the bitter, but essential world, from which future evil flows. Instead of this, Goethe makes him meet in the world of antiquity the prototypes of ugliness, the Phorkyads. So that he places him, as it were, in prehistoric times before the history of evil. By employing Greek concepts, he places most solemn truth before men in a way that could still arouse their sympathy. And here too Goethe shows his deep knowledge of the matter. We know—you may read this in my Occult Science—that the future is in a sense the reproduction of the past on a higher level. Jupiter is a kind of repetition of the Moon; Venus of the Sun; and Vulcan of Saturn. On a higher level, the earlier appears in the later. It is the same as regards evil. Evil appears in order that man may develop goodness out of his own nature with all possible strength. But this evil will show distorted pictures, caricatures, of the forms of the primeval age.

You see, what we now are is largely because we are constructed symmetrically, the left-man and the right-man working together. Physicists and physiologists wonder why it is we have two eyes, what use we have for two eyes. If they knew why we have two hands, and of what use they are to us, they would also know why we have two eyes and of what use these are. If, for instance, we could not touch the left hand with the right, we could never arrive at ego-consciousness. By being able to grasp the right-man with the left, by gaining knowledge of the right-man by means of the left, we arrive at consciousness of ourselves, at consciousness of the presence of the ego. To look at an object a man must have more than one eye. If, by birth or accident, he has only one eye, that does not matter: it is not the external apparatus but the faculty, the forces, that are of importance. When we look at a man the axes of the eyes are crossed. In this way the ego is associated with sight; through the crossing the left direction is associated with the right. And the farther we go back the closer is the relation, in common with the consciousness. This is why Goethe gives the three Phorkyads one eye and one tooth between them, a representation that shows his deep knowledge. Thus the three have but one eye and one tooth. This implies that the senses are not meant to be working together, they are still isolated from one another. On the one hand relationship is expressed, on the other we are told that the elements are not yet working in collaboration, that what arises through the right-man and the left-man cannot yet appear. Thus accurately does Goethe express what he wishes to say, and he suggests infinitely much.

Now, if you think over what you know from Occult Science namely, that the present bi-sexual-sexual human being has sprung from the uni-sexual being, and that male and female have only been developed in the course of evolution, you will see that a retrograde evolution takes place when Mephistopheles meets with evil in the form of ugliness, joins with it in going with the Phorkyads: “Done! here stand I” (after he has thrown in his lot with the Phorkyads) ...

“Here stand I, Chaos' well-beloved son!”
Phorkyads: “And Chaos' true-born daughters, we, undoubted.”

To which Mephistopheles replies:

“O fie! Hermaphrodite must I be flouted?”

He becomes ‘hermaphrodite’ when it is intended to show the condition preceding the bi-sexual, the condition to which I have just referred. Truly Goethe gives his descriptions from inside knowledge! In this scene we may recognise how deeply he had divined and entered into the truths of Spiritual Science.

Now, remember now not long ago I said that no one can ever arrive at a satisfying conception of the world who, misled by what man is now, what he has of necessity to be, comes on the one hand to abstract ideals, ideals having no forces. (Forces such as those in nature that cannot fit into the physical world-order, but have to disperse like mist when the earth reaches her goal, that is, her grave). No one can find a satisfying world-outlook who is either an abstract idealist of this kind, or a materialist. As I said, man must be both. He must be able to rise to ideas in conformity with the age in which he lives, and also look at material things in a material way and form materialistic ideas about them. Thus, he must be able to form both a materialistic and an idealistic conception of the world, and not set up a unity with abstract concepts. Having on the one hand scientific concepts, on the other idealistic concepts, we must then let them interpenetrate each other just as spirit and matter do. As I have told you, in processes of cognition the ideal must permeate and illumine the material, the material must permeate and illumine the ideal.

And Goethe found this out. It occurred to him how one-sided it is when, in abstract concepts, men seek a world-outlook inclining more to matter or more to spirit. Hence he was drawn to seek his world-conception not in abstract ideas but in a different way. And this he describes as follows:

“Since so much of our experience does not admit of being openly expressed and directly imparted, long ago I chose this method, namely, to reveal the hidden meaning to the observant by dint of contrasted images playing into one another.”

Now, can anyone express more clearly that he is neither idealist nor realist, but both idealist and realist, letting the two world-outlooks play into one another. Goethe seeks to approach the world from the most diverse directions, and to come to truth by means of mutually reflected concepts. Thus, in Goethe's impulses there is already concealed the way that must be taken by Spiritual Science in order to lead mankind towards the future—the health-giving future.

One would like, my dear friends, what Goethe began to be continued; but then it would be essential for such works as Faust to be really read. Man has, however, more or less lost the habit of reading. At best, men would say when they read:

“Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom widener, profoundly pensive one!”

Oh! poetry. Then there is no need to go deeper into it, no need to meditate over every word! Thus men console themselves today when offered anything they are not actually bound to believe; for they like to take things superficially. But the universe does not permit that. When you consider the deep truth I have just shown in connection with the meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads—a truth that has been preserved in many occult schools of the present day—then you have the opportunity of understanding, together with much else that enables you to realise it, the intense seriousness of our striving after Spiritual Science, the seriousness that must underlie our endeavours. It may be said that there sometimes escapes, half consciously, from those who have come into contact with what is essential for man in the future, an pious ejaculation, like Nietzsche's, in his Midnight Song: “The world is deep, Yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”.

We must indeed say that the day gives man day-consciousness; but, so long as he clings only to what the day brings, man of himself becomes simply Homunculus, not Homo. For “the world is deep, yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”. And since Goethe does not wish to lead Faust into merely what the day brings, but into all that conceals the eternal, he has to let him take his way in the company of Homunculus, and of Mephistopheles who confronts the supersensible. Goethe thought he could do this by steeping himself in Greek ideas, and by bringing them to life within himself.

When I wrote my Occult Science, I was compelled to bring the evolution of the earth somewhat into line with present-day ideas. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one could have put it differently. For instance, in a certain chapter of this Occult Science the following might then have been found. One would have spoken otherwise of those beings whom one can describe as the beings of the first hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. One would have called the Seraphim those beings who make no differentiation between subject and object, who would not say: there are objects outside myself, but: the world is, and I am the world and the world is I—who know of their own existence only by means of an experience, of which man has a weak idea when some experience carries him away in glowing rapture.

It is in fact sometimes difficult to explain to modern people what a glowing rapture is, for it was even understood better at the beginning of the nineteenth century than it is now. It still happened then that some poem or other, by this or that poet, was read, and the people acted through rapture—forgive my saying so, but it was so—as if they were mad! So much were they moved, so much were they suffused with warmth.

Nowadays people are frozen just when one thinks they should be enraptured. And this rapture of the soul—which was experienced particularly in Central and Eastern Europe,—if raised as a unifying element into the consciousness gives one an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim.

And we have to imagine the consciousness-element of the Cherubim as a completely purified element in the consciousness, full of light, so that thought becomes directly light, and illumines everything; and the element of the Thrones as bearing up the world in grace.

One would then have said: the choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones act together, in such a way that the thrones constitute a nucleus, and the Cherubim radiate their own luminous nature from it. The Seraphim cover the whole in a mantle of rapture, which streams out into all space.

But these are all beings: in the midst of the Thrones, round them the Cherubim, and in the periphery, the Seraphim. They are beings which mutually interplay and act and think and will and feel. And if a being possessing the necessary susceptibility had traveled through space where the thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim had thus formed a center, he would have felt warmth in different degrees and in different places; now higher, now lower warmth, but yet in a spiritual and psychic way; in such a way, however, that the psychic experience is at the same time a physical experience in our senses. Thus, when the being feels the warmth psychically, there really is present what you feel when you are in a heated room.

Such a union of the begins of the First Hierarchy did exist once upon a time in the universe. And this formed the system and existence of the “Saturnian Age.” Warmth is just the expression of these beings. The warmth is nothing in itself, it is only the evidence that these beings exist.

I should like to use a simile here which may perhaps help as an explanation. Suppose you are fond of somebody, you find his presence warms you. Suppose further there comes another man who has no heart at all and says: that person doesn't interest me in the least; I am interested only in the warmth which he spreads around. He does not say he is interested in the warmth the other sheds, but that nothing but the warmth interests him. He is talking nonsense, of course, for when the person who radiates warmth has gone, the warmth has gone also. It is there only when the person is there. In itself it is nothing. The person must be there for the warmth to be there.

Thus Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones must be there; otherwise warmth is not there either. It is merely the revelation of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now at the time of which I speak, what I have just described to you did in actual fact exist. When one spoke of the element of warmth one was understood to mean really Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones. That was the Saturnian Age.

Then one went further and said that only this highest hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, has the might and the power to produce something of this kind in the Cosmos. And only by reason of the fact that this was done at the beginning of a terrestrial creation could evolution proceed. The Sun, as it were, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones was able to a certain extent to direct the course of it. And this happened in such a way that the Beings produced by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Exusiai and Dynamis—now surged into this space created and warmed in this Saturnian life by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Thus the younger—of course, the cosmically younger—Beings entered in; and theirs was the next influence. Whereas the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones revealed themselves in the element of warmth, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy were seen in the element of light. The Saturnian element is dark, but warm, and within the dark and gloomy world of the Saturnian existence arises light, precisely the thing that can appear through the sons of the Second Hierarchy , through the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

This is the case because the entry of the Second Hierarchy represents an inward illumination, which is connected with a densification of warmth. Air comes forth from the pure warmth-element, and in the revelation of the light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

But you must get this clear: Actually Beings press in. Light is present for a Being with the necessary powers of perception. Light is what distinguishes the paths of these Beings. Under certain circumstances when light appears somewhere, there also appears shadow, darkness, dark shadow. So shadow also arose through the entry of the Second Hierarchy in the form of light. What was this shadow? The air. And actually till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was known what the air is. Today one knows only that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen, etc. which means no more than if one says, for instance, that a watch is made of glass and silver—whereby nothing whatever is said about the watch. Similarly nothing whatever is said about the air as a cosmic phenomenon when you say it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. But a great deal is said if one knows that from the cosmic point of view air is the shadow of the light. So that with the entry of the Second Hierarchy into the Saturnian warmth, one actually has in fact the entry of light, and its shadow, air. And where that happens is Sun. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would really have had to talk in this manner.

The further stages of development are now conducted by the sons of the Third Hierarchy, the Archai, Archangels and Angels. These Beings bring into the luminous element with its shadow of air, introduced by the Second Hierarchy, another element resembling our desire, our urge to acquire something, our longing to have something.

Hence it came about that, let us say, an Archai or Archangel-Being entered and found an element of light, or rather, a place of light. In this place it felt, by reason of its sensitiveness to light, the urge towards and desire for darkness. The Angel-Being carried the light into the darkness, or an Angel-Being carried the darkness into the light. These Beings became the intermediaries, the messengers between light and darkness.

The result was that what formerly shone only in light, an trailed behind it, its shadow, the somber, airy darkness, now began to gleam in all colours, that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light. It was the Third Hierarchy which conjured forth colour from out of light and darkness.

Observe, you have here something as it were historically documented to put before your souls. In the time of Aristotle one still knew—supposing one had pondered within the Mysteries on the origin of colours—that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy had to do with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in his Colour-Harmony that colour was a combined effect of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element was lost—that the First Hierarchy was responsible for warmth, the Second for light and its shadow, the air, and the Third or the shining forth of colour in a world continuity. And there remained nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory of Colour, over which the initiated have smiled up to the eighteenth century, and which then became an article of faith with those who were just expert physicists.

In order to speak in the sense of this Newtonian theory, it is really necessary for one to have no knowledge at all of the spiritual world. And if one is still inwardly spurred by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, one is utterly opposed to it. One states what is correct as Goethe did, then one storms dreadfully. Goethe was never so furious as on the occasion when he castigated Newton; he was simply furious about the wretched nonsense.

We cannot understand such things today, simply because anyone who does not recognize the Newtonian teaching concerning colour is looked upon by the physicists as a fool. But it was not really the case that Goethe stood quite alone in his own time. He alone uttered these things, but even at the end of the eighteenth century the learned knew perfectly well that the origin of colour lay in the spiritual world.

Air is the shadow of light. Just as when light radiates and, under certain circumstances, gives rise to deep shadow, so, if colour is present, and this colour works as a reality in the airy element, not merely as a reflection, not merely as a reflex-colour, but as a Reality; then the fluid, watery element arises from out of the real colour element. As air is the shadow of light, in cosmic thought, so water is the reflection, the creation of the element of colour in the Cosmos.

You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real meaning of colour. Red—well—do you believe that red in its real nature is only the neutral surface on generally regards it? Surely Red is something which attacks one. I have often discussed it. Red makes one want to run away; it pushes one back. Violet-blue one wants to pursue; it continually evades one, and gets ever darker and darker. Everything lives in colours. They are a world of their own, and the psychic element feels in the colour-world the necessity for movement, if it follows colours with psychic experience.

Today man stares at the rainbow. If one looks at it with the slightest imagination, one sees elemental beings active in it. They are revealed in remarkable phenomena. In the yellow certain of them are seen continually emerging from the rainbow, and moving across to the green. The moment they reach the underneath of the green, they are attracted to and disappear in it, to emerge on the other side. The whole rainbow reveals to an imaginative observer an outpouring and a disappearance of the spiritual. It reveals in fact something like a spiritual waltz. At the same time one notices that as these spiritual beings emerge in red-yellow, they do it with an extraordinary apprehension; and as they enter into the blue-violet, they do it with an unconquerable courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see streams of fear, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling that there is the seat of all courage and valor.

Now imagine we have the rainbow in section. Then these being emerge in the red-yellow and disappear in the blue-violet; here apprehension, here courage, which disappears again. There the rainbow becomes dense and you can imagine the watery element arises from it. Spiritual beings exist in this watery element which are really a kind of copy of the beings of the Third Hierarchy.

One can say that in approaching the learned men of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must understand such things in this way. You cannot understand Albertus Magnus if you read him with modern knowledge, you must read him with the knowledge that such spiritual things were a reality to him and then only will you understand the meaning of his words and expressions.

In this way therefore air and water appear as a reflection of the Hierarchies. The Second Hierarchy enters in the form of light, the Third in the form of colour. But in order to enable this to be established, the lunar existence is created.

And now comes the Fourth Hierarchy. I am speaking now with the thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Now the Fourth Hierarchy. We never speak of it; but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one spoke freely of it. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is man himself. But formerly one did not understand by it the remarkably odd being with two legs and the tendency to decay that wanders about the world now; for then the human being of the present day appeared to the scholar as an unusual kind of being. They spoke of primeval man before the Fall, who existed in such a form as to have as much power over the earth as Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, had over the lunar existence; the Second Hierarchy over the solar existence; the First Hierarchy over the Saturnian existence. They spoke of man in his original terrestrial existence, and as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift form the higher Hierarchies of something they first possessed, and preserved, and did not themselves require—Life. And life came into the colourful world which I have been sketchily describing to you.

You will ask—But didn't things live before this? The answer you can learn from man himself. Your ego and your astral body have not life, but they exist all the same. The spiritual, the soul, does not require life. Life begins only with your etheric body; and this is something in the nature of an outer wrapping. It is thus that life appears only after the lunar existence, with the terrestrial existence, in that stage of evolution which belongs to our earth. The iridescent world became alive. It is not only then that Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., felt a desire to bring light into darkness and darkness into light and so called forth the play of colours in the planets, but also they desired to experience this play of colour inwardly, and make it inward; to feel weakness and lassitude when darkness inwardly dominates over light, and activity when light dominates over darkness. For what happens when you r un? When you run it means that light dominates over the darkness in you; when you sit and are idle, the reverse happens. It is the effect of colour in the soul, the effect of colour iridescence. The iridescence of colour, permeated and shot with life, appeared with the coming of man, the Fourth Hierarchy. And at this moment of cosmic growth the forces which became active in the iridescence of colour began to form outlines. Life, which rounded off, smoothed and shaped the colours, called forth the hard crystal form; and we are in the terrestrial epoch.

Such things as I have now explained to you were really the axioms of those medieval alchemists, occultists, Rosicrucians, etc., who, though scarcely mentioned today in history, flourished from the ninth and tenth up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and whose stragglers, always regarded as oddities, existed into the eighteenth century and even into the beginning of the nineteenth. Only then were these things entirely covered up. The philosophical attitude to life of the time led to the following phenomenon:

Suppose I have here a human being. I cease to have any interest in him, merely take off his clothes and hang them on a clothes-dummy with a knob at the top like a head, and thereafter take no more interest in the human being. I say to myself further: That is the human being, what does it matter to me that anything can be put into these clothes; the dummy is, as far as I am concerned, the human being. So it was with the elements of Nature. People are no longer interested that behind warmth of fire is the First Hierarchy, behind light and air is the Second, behind the so-called chemical ether, colour-ether, etc. and water is the Third, behind life and the earth is the Fourth, or Man. Out with the clothes-horse and hang the clothes on it! That is the first Act. The second begins then with the school of Kant!~ Here begins Kantianism, here one begins, having the clothes-horse with the clothes on it, to philosophize concerning what “the thing in itself” of these clothes might be. And the conclusion is that one cannot recognize “the thing in itself” of the clothes. Very perspicacious! Naturally, if you have removed the man first, you can philosophize about the clothes, and this leads to a very pretty speculation: the clothes-horse is there all right, and the clothes hanging on it, so one speculates either in the Kantian fashion—one cannot recognize “the thing in itself”—or in the manner of Helmholtz, saying: these clothes cannot surely have form. There must be crowds of tiny whirling specks of dust, or atoms, in them, which by their movement preserve the clothes in their form.

Yes, this is the turn that later thought has taken. But it is abstract, and shadowy. All the same it is the kind of thought in which we live today; out of it we fashion the whole of our Natural Scientific principles. And when we deny that we think in terms of atoms, we are doing it all the more. For it will be a long time before it is admitted that it is unnecessary to weave a Dance of the Atoms into it, rather than simply to replace man into his clothes. But that is just what the resuscitation of Spiritual Science must attempt.