The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If the question of truth and error is a deeply significant one in every area of human life, it may be said that in the field of spiritual research this question takes on a very special significance. This is probably because what spiritual research wants to give people and be is connected with those vital questions that not only approach the soul in the same way as the questions of one or other science, but approach the soul, one might say daily, and ultimately make up the interest of this human soul, make up everything that can give the soul consolation and hope on the one hand, and security and strength in life on the other.

The field of spiritual research is wide. It extends, so to speak, to the entire field of development of every entity with which man can be thought to be connected in any way, for everything that comes to man in these fields of spiritual research, one might say, is condensed into significant life riddles and life questions. A question that really confronts us every hour is contained in the momentous words of human destinies. On the one hand, we see the human being entering into existence, already surrounded by hardship and misery from the cradle, and we can predict that hardship and misery will perhaps accompany him throughout his life. If we find him endowed with few abilities in childhood, so that we can know in a certain way that he will initially be only a little useful member of the human community, so that is perhaps mysterious on the one hand; on the other hand, we need only compare how many others enter life blessed with goods of fortune or endowed with significant abilities, so that one can know he will become a useful member of humanity. Outer science is not at all in a position to raise such questions, for outer science with its presuppositions proves itself from the outset incapable of answering such questions. Finally, there approaches man the other, which so to speak spiritual research combines: the question [of immortality], which finally approaches the incomprehensibilities of the human being.

Perhaps it may be said, especially in our time, that this question does not approach man at all in the manner of scientific questions. How many desires, hopes and feelings, which must not intrude into a scientific question at all, are mixed up in this question. There have been and still are enough people in our time who do not believe in the survival of the human soul when the gate of life has closed, and who deny such a survival of the human soul after death, and it may be said that a materialistic way of thinking must come to this view. Noble natures in particular may say that it is selfish to want to live only on condition that this entity passes through the gate of death and then has another form of existence, while it is selfless to give up what one has gained to the general public. From this point of view, many truly noble natures have found the necessity that materialism presents here to be more unselfish than an egoistic need for survival after death.

If only human desires and longings, fear and the dread of life after 'death were decisive, then one could easily assume that one would have to come to more materialistic views precisely out of noble sentiments. But if one approaches the question more deeply, it develops as an eminently scientific question, even if science does not have the means to provide an answer. One need only be a connoisseur of the human soul to say that the most significant thing a person can achieve for his soul is a very individual life. The subtlety, the uniqueness that serves our powers best, that furthers most what we can achieve for ourselves, cannot be given away to anything; and if the soul had to give it away with death, it would have to be lost. From this would follow that significant riddle: it would be against the world order for such a loss to happen, that the best that the soul can achieve should disappear into nothing. Not that this is an answer to the question that has been raised. But it is necessary to raise this question. These are questions that cannot be called scientific in the usual sense, questions that may also be of little concern to some souls who live their lives indifferently.

But apart from whether we can answer these questions or not, the question of where the sources of truth and error can be found in this area is closely related to our inner soul life and destiny. I have often had the opportunity to speak here about the subject of what spiritual research has to offer. Of course, it is not possible to talk about any of them, not even in an introductory way, and it is not my job here to talk about what can be heard in other lectures or is available in the literature. I want to talk about how man comes to such questions, what the insights are, then what the sources are and how man can come to errors.

Because there is a certain necessity to spread the knowledge of spiritual science, it should not only be spoken of truth and error in the field of spiritual science, insofar as these lie on the path of the spiritual researcher himself, but also in relation to the dissemination of the knowledge of spiritual science. The fate of the human being cannot be known if we only look at what the world of the senses reveals, and anyone who is not very familiar with our science also knows that the intellect cannot explain the reasons why a soul is destined for this or that fate. He also knows that the intellect can tell us nothing about the soul's fate after death, because the soul dwells in the supersensible, invisible realm, if it still exists at all as such. The ordinary powers that man has at his disposal to know the world, these powers are not sufficient to answer these deepest questions.

This is where the question arises: Are there forces in the human soul that can penetrate beyond the ordinary senses, that are not dependent on the mind alone, which is bound to the human brain? If we come to the conclusion that the soul not only goes through one life on earth, but that this life repeats itself between birth and death, and that what the soul meets as fate is what it has earned in past lives, and that what we do now creates causes for a future life . It must be said: What enters through birth into physical existence carries with it the forces that it brings in through birth into the external worlds, and knowledge of these supersensible worlds can answer questions about why a soul comes into very specific life situations. Everywhere we are pointed to the necessity of such questions, to the necessity of investigating everything with the powers of the soul that our science cannot investigate.

But do such powers exist in the human soul? It will be easiest to understand how such powers can prevail in the soul if we start from everyday phenomena, which admittedly do not approach man in the same way as the dismaying, surprising event of death, for example, but which approach without man thinking much about them. It is well known that man only reflects on what surprises him; he reflects less on what falls within his daily habits, and yet it is precisely these that can point to the deepest depths of human life. One such phenomenon that occurs daily is the state of waking and sleeping. The state of sleep is mysterious. Every day we are forced to pass into unconsciousness, into a state that spreads darkness around us. This is a significant mystery.

Let us first consider this state purely externally. We see when we fall asleep how our physical body, so to speak, falls away from us, how we gradually become unable to direct our limbs as we do during the day. Finally, we see how our senses cease to be awake to us, how our minds become paralyzed, as it were, and then we pass into an unconscious state. It would be impossible for everything that takes place in the soul from morning to evening in the form of affects, suffering, drives and desires, to disappear when we fall asleep and then arise anew every morning. It must be there, even if the person is not aware of it.

Let us first hypothetically assume what spiritual research shows. It can only be pointed out now; it cannot be shown in detail. So let us hypothetically assume that in what we see with our physical eyes, in what we can grasp with our hands, there is a supersensible spiritual element, a spiritual-secluded supersensible element. This is the source of difficulties, of incipient passion and so on, and this spiritual-supernatural goes out of the dormant state into a spiritual world, so it is present. It should be explicitly stated that this is initially a hypothesis. We will see through our considerations that it has a certain justification. If this is the case, then we have to say that the soul and spirit are also present in sleep, but are unaware of themselves when they enter that world; after all, they use the brain to perceive and appropriate the external world.

We can therefore assume that the soul and spiritual aspects are not strong enough to lead a conscious life when separated from the physical body, that they are too weak for this. If this is the case, then there must be a way to strengthen these powers. It would have to be possible for a person to artificially induce a kind of sleep, so that a state of mind would arise that, on the one hand, resembles ordinary sleep but, on the other hand, is essentially different. The induction of such a state is indeed necessary, and only in such a state can real spiritual research take place. The question is therefore whether the soul and spirit in man can be made so strong that man can, as it were, put himself into a kind of artificial sleep that is not sleep. Then the human being should be able to bring about what is brought about in sleep, that his spiritual-soul life has nothing to do with the body, that the intellect is silent, that the human being is also outwardly physical as in sleep. During sleep, the human being is in a state in which his inner being is silent, subdued, and shrouded in darkness. If, however, a person can voluntarily free himself from his own soul forces, so that he can have experiences free of the body, as if disembodied, then he experiences in the spirit, but initially he can only remember himself as a spiritual being through inner experiences.

What today appears to the broadest sections of humanity as foolishness should be feasible. There can be no proof against its feasibility. People believe they have proof against it, but such people can only claim that with their present powers they cannot know about such things. However, one can only claim that something is known, but not that something is not known. Otherwise, such a worldview makes a logical mistake. But first of all, the strong development of will must be learned, to free oneself artificially from all sense impressions, to effect silence, to dampen all color and light impressions, to want to know nothing of all this, and likewise nothing of hearing impressions and all other impressions; thus to bring to a standstill the ordinary thinking and so on. All this must be brought to a standstill by exercise of the will, just as it is in sleep. Man must now make strong what is otherwise so weak in sleep. This is done through meditation and the like.

What kind of purely mental activities are these? For they are purely mental activities. A meditation is a kind of mental-spiritual experience; but it differs from everything else that a person is used to. Let us consider how this mental activity is perceived. It differs from all other human activities in that these are there to form concepts, ideas and feelings in order to inwardly perceive something external, to depict something external. Man seeks images and expressions in ordinary life. Only in this way can ordinary life be sustained. But the whole purpose of such institutions, which exist for ordinary life, cannot be decisive for the development of the soul, which has been spiritually demanded. For this development of the soul, everything that can be spiritually thought, imagined, felt, desired, is only there for inner self-education, to help the soul to progress, to equip the soul inwardly with forces, so to speak. not what one feels, what one recognizes as outer truth through one's thinking and feeling, that is what matters, but what this thinking, feeling and sensing brings forth in the soul, what it makes of the soul.

This brings us to a completely different level than that of ordinary life, of science. In a sense, the human being must become free of the meaning of his concepts, of the content of his feelings, and must devote himself entirely to some practice with his soul. It is best if the person does not take for meditation ideas that represent something external, because in doing so one feels dependent on the external world. Best for meditation are ideas that can live entirely in the soul alone.

An idea that will seem foolish to the external, material thinker: Imagine that someone has two glasses in front of them, one with water and the other empty. Now imagine that they pour water from the first glass into the second, and the partially filled glass does not become emptier, but rather fuller and fuller, and the more they pour, the fuller the glass becomes.

This is not an actual external process. Nor is that what is important here, but rather what it can evoke in the soul. It can be a symbol for the following: It points us to an area of life that, on the one hand, leads us again and again into its depths, and on the other hand, repeatedly presents us with life's riddles, that which we summarize as “love,” starting with passionate love and rising to the soul form of love. Enormous human suffering can be summarized in this idea, and love has one property: the property that when a loving person does something for another out of love, gives up his spiritual wealth, he does not become poorer and emptier, but fuller and fuller.

It is not so foolish to form such images and symbols. In other areas, people are accustomed to forming such symbols [like a] medal. The medal is circular. We need not worry about it, but draw a circle. All the properties of the circle apply to the medal.

It is not important to recognize an object in order to perhaps fathom the essence of love, but rather to have an idea that is emancipated from external reality. Consider what happens when you manage to empty the soul of all mental judgments, of all external impressions, and to concentrate the full extent of the soul's power only on such an idea, which you have brought into focus. Otherwise in life, we distribute the most diverse powers of the soul that we have within us among the most diverse ideas arising from the behavior of human beings. We often have the soul occupied with many things at the same time. We now empty the soul completely of them and concentrate completely on one such idea, for example, of goodwill, of kindness. We must concentrate exclusively on it, live in it, and if we have enough patience and persistence to do such exercises over and over again, then we will actually bring it about that dormant forces in our soul are awakened. We learn to transform ourselves from a usually suffering, passive being into an active being, and thus we first take hold of ourselves. It is not enough to do just a few such soul exercises, but it all depends on having the patience to prepare the soul so that it always feels active.

Then there comes a time when the soul feels as if it has been reborn, because it no longer needs to form such images, to present such ideas to itself, but these then arise as if from the depths of the soul itself, and the person then indeed lives as if in a new world emerging from the hidden depths. When man has reached this stage, then the actual schooling of the spirit begins, for then a new world appears before him. But what is this world? In order to understand what this world is, we want to point out that today's materialistic man, when it comes to the imaginative world, believes that these are illusions, fantasies, and that they are the same as what emerges in a sick, pathological soul.

When we realize that we are only at the beginning of spiritual research with this imaginative world, then we compare what the spiritual researcher has attained through meditation with what can be experienced in an unhealthy soul. We encounter a trait in sick people that you are well aware of: the trait that such people have the unshakable belief that they are facing an objective world, and it is in vain to try to talk them out of it. They put forward everything with the greatest ingenuity, things that have not even been thought of, and thus they master the thinking mind. If the spiritual researcher were never able to distinguish truth from error here, he would not differ from such a sick soul. The question is how to deal with this.

From this alone you can see that initially we are dealing with nothing more than images that arise from within, which therefore need not be anything other than reflections of what the person has within himself. The person has activated forces, awakened inner life that was not there before, but he has not lived in anything other than himself. What stands before him is initially nothing more than a reflection of his own inner being. Because this reflection is experienced by the human being in this way, it is extremely difficult to make the decision that the true spiritual researcher must now make. It is necessary to realize that one is dealing with nothing but the reflections of one's own inner being, of what one carries in one's soul. But it is not enough for the spiritual researcher to know that everything is only a reflection of one's own inner self; it is also necessary that he actually has the strength to suppress the whole imaginative world so that it is no longer there.

There is also the possibility that people come to such experiences without training. Such people are then usually in love with such experiences. A person is usually extremely happy when such a world arises in him. It is therefore only through strong will training that a person, if he wants to become a spiritual researcher, suppresses the whole imaginative world so that it is no longer there. He actually suppresses his own being, for which he has trained himself. Only then do you realize how much you are in love with yourself.

It takes one of the strongest volitional efforts to suppress these reflections. Man already lives in self-love in the outer life, and this intensifies when this inner life begins. Now one should suppress what one has striven for. But it must be done. Then, however, when you have completely suppressed these reflections by developing the strong will to extinguish them, you have replaced the imaginations and must wait until they come back. Then they will come back in a new form, so that it is then impossible to mistake them for anything other than the objective world. Anyone familiar with such things finds it understandable that many people simply deny this process, for the reason that it is not easy to carry out. But then, when a new world has emerged after the person has suppressed the first imaginative world, then one knows how to distinguish between fantasy and reality in this new world as well. For many, the world is our imagination. And if such a philosophy claims that one cannot get beyond imagination, then it would be all the easier to say: How can one then distinguish between imagination and reality? This sentence is easily refutable. It is a banality that I will say, but that does not matter. The taste of lemonade on the tongue with mere imagination - but that does not quench thirst.

There is no logical proof as to whether a thing really exists or is only an idea. Proof can only be provided by life. But experience also makes a precise distinction between idea, mere fantasy and what is real; or should a person be able to distinguish between a hot iron that is imagined and a real hot iron? The same applies to Kant's sentence that three real thalers contain no more or less than three possible thalers. You can pay a debt with real thalers, but not with possible ones.

You may say that it is different with spiritual things, that what you see could really be self-suggestion. Real life makes the difference. But one must first be in real life. Life alone decides on reality, and so it is also in the spiritual realm. The practice of the soul, the evocation of the power of knowledge in the soul, teaches us to distinguish between imagination and reality. In this way, man is able to evoke the state that is indeed similar to the state of sleep in that man does not use his body. Then, when man has reached this imaginative knowledge, it goes up to higher levels, where man actually begins to have what is called a spiritual world around him, and not only in the way between death and a new birth, but in such a way that it enters into his thoughts, which he remembers. Man comes to know truths about the world beyond. How the characterized questions are to be solved through meditation can be read in the literature. The point is that when man tries to gain knowledge in this way, error does not occur as it does in relation to external knowledge, but error then springs up everywhere. In the outer world we are corrected by many things to which we are accustomed. In this area, correction does not come so easily. The human being is dependent on himself.

There are two things that must be considered. Today they can only be presented as an empirical rule. These are two things that the human being carries into the spiritual world, because he carries his entire soul condition into it, the nature of his power of judgment, his moral condition. What does the human being bring into these spiritual worlds? What the human being develops as good or bad judgment contributes to whether the human being receives stimulation in the right way. A healthy power of judgment will stir his soul in the right way. What must live in his soul will be developed regularly, like our normal eyes and ears. Just as badly constituted senses relate to the world, so does what is cultivated in the soul when a person does not endeavor to maintain sound judgment. Those who want to enter the spiritual world must start from sound human understanding.

The second thing we have to bring with us is a healthy moral state of mind and soul, a soul mood and soul disposition that has, in a sense, managed to be free of soul moods. If a person brings immoral moods into it, then the effect is not one of unhealthy judgment, but rather the immoral mood has a numbing effect, not obliterating, but evoking bad images, untrue images. Mere deception of the soul world would be merely corrected by the power of judgment; what is evoked as a work of deception by an immoral state of mind is there and one believes in it if moral drive is not set in at the same time as spiritual training.

For in the training of the spirit, it must be taken into account that man must free himself from many things, which he can only free himself from with difficulty if he wants to search objectively. We want to start from ordinary life. There we find a phenomenon that can actually be studied everywhere. We find people who are materialists and believe only in nature and law. Such people think that anyone who believes in something other than nature is a fool, and that anything that cannot be explained in materialistic terms is nonsense. On the other hand, there are idealists who are less accustomed to dealing with matter. They are more accustomed to and respect more people with a pronounced soul life. They are therefore better suited to recognize the world and its immaterial conditions. There is realism and spiritualism, and the biggest mistake in ordinary life is that everyone swears by their “ism”. What is this “ism” other than what they have imagined: the expression of their own self. They therefore love it. The idealist loves his ideas, and so on. More far-seeing minds than Goethe's are not really in the mood to say, “I am an idealist, from my point of view things are like this.” Rather, we can see in Goethe's case how he is convinced of something that is actually considered foolish by the true materialist.

The world of material phenomena lives out itself before us, and one must study matter and the law – and one will realize that what matter grants has its justification. Thus, one must also explain that which belongs to the world and its material phenomena through these material phenomena. One can very well engage with the explanations that the materialist gives for matter. Goethe says: “Between the various one-sided directions, the path into truth opens up.” One must recognize that the world is an extremely diverse one and that one must grasp the various fields through the most diverse forms of thought and imagination. So one will always find that matter must be explained in a materialistic way. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that you already find your way in ordinary life. You get beyond that by practicing self-knowledge, which is often quite difficult. If you try to practice self-knowledge objectively, you soon realize what point of view you are taking. This has no further significance except in our soul life. One is then more inclined to also allow others such a point of view. Such ideas are necessary.

The spiritual researcher must recognize that points of view are there for areas of the world, and that one must, as it were, have the opportunity to grasp the world as a whole, to approach it from different sides with different points of view, just as one recognizes the shape of a tree by photographing it from different sides. A materialistic and an idealistic world view can both be correct. This insight must be gained through self-knowledge. Through self-knowledge, one seeks to overcome one-sidedness.

In practice, many things turn out differently than in theory, if one takes the trouble to carry them out seriously. You have conquered a point of view, and when you realize the limitations of it, you feel the ground shaking beneath you. The point of view we have conquered is our own self. And that is why you have to go through such feelings, otherwise you will not get away from your own self, otherwise everything remains subjectively formed. It is this “getting away from oneself” that is important. When we talk about misconceptions, we cannot say: these are truths and those are misconceptions. We become free of misconceptions through self-education, when we can let go of ourselves, when we can give up our point of view. There is nothing that people are more infatuated with than their point of view.

But he must go further. He must not only get away from what we call point of view, but get away from the subjective of his thinking and feeling. One must practice self-knowledge, but that comes naturally if the spiritual training is done in the right way.

When we are confronted with the spiritual world, we are outside of our ordinary life, in which we otherwise stand. We stand before ourselves, have become a thing ourselves. Otherwise we live ourselves, now we stand before ourselves as before an external thing. The spiritual researcher joins the spiritual things when he strives into the spiritual world. We compare ourselves with the spiritual world. This comparison is usually not favorable. This is easy to understand, because when a person begins to know himself, he then knows everything that is missing in him. Man shrinks back from self-knowledge. It is indeed true: self-knowledge is what we snatch from what we have loved. We are in the air. We have felt in a certain way so far; we have to see that as a narrowly limited personality. We have thought in a certain way – narrowly limited personality. Only now does a person realize how in love he is with himself. Self-knowledge is not only difficult because it is so hard to achieve, but also because it requires moral courage, because you put yourself out of yourself, put what you were aside; because you enter into a new state of mind that you are quite unaccustomed to.

To have experienced this mood is what is necessary to avoid error in the field of spiritual research. The errors come from within us. We must always be able to renew this impression, to place ourselves beside ourselves, then we know what to eliminate; then we know how to eliminate the errors. In the field of spiritual research, repeating an error is not the same as in the ordinary world. We have to fight errors at every turn; they are realities. In the spiritual realm, truths have to be gathered at every turn, because only when we understand all this can we agree on the value of insights into the spiritual world. After all, the objection can be raised that the spiritual world is only relevant for those who can see into it. This is not the case: only those who want to explore the spiritual world must be able to see into it. Any unbiased person can understand it.

How does the spiritual researcher relate to the ordinary state of mind? A painter must learn much before he can create a picture. When contemplating the painting, one person may see only the color combinations, while another looks for what the painter has put into it, and the person who experiences most deeply would be disturbed if a theorist came along and explained how colors are mixed, or if someone were to discuss art history and so on. You stand before the picture: if you can grasp what has been put into it, then you grasp it, and you need not be a painter. It is the same with what the spiritual researcher brings to light.

Then the spiritual researcher must express what he has researched in terms that are familiar to people of his time, that can be penetrated by a healthy mind; and then the other person, as listener or reader, receives it, only the person must not approach what the spiritual researcher has to say with prejudices. Then he will understand through a sound mind what the spiritual researcher has brought down. It is not the case that only what the spiritual researcher brings can be understood when one applies this power of judgment; what moves the soul is given in a sufficient way, even if she is not a spiritual researcher herself.

The spiritual researcher himself gains nothing from his research if he only stays there and looks at things, if he does not bring down what he sees so that he can communicate it to other people. In what can be given through spiritual research, the spiritual researcher and the person who only takes in things through a healthy sense of truth are exactly the same. Because this is so, a fruitful dissemination of the knowledge of spiritual research can only take place if this peculiarity of truth and error is taken into account. It must be emphasized here that the truth of what spiritual research has to say can be proclaimed by the spiritual researcher, and that everything can be understood by the ordinary mind if one is unbiased enough. The whole scope of science can be used to verify what is said through spiritual research, but not half-baked science. If it is true on the one hand that the natural sense of truth can always be convinced by what the spiritual researcher brings forth, it must also be said that this sense of truth must also be applied to the spiritual researcher, and here we are faced with the error in the dissemination.

One can understand those who reject spiritual research. These are not even the people who worry the spiritual researcher. They sometimes feel the obligation to test and the time will come when they will see from their feeling of having to test what many have already seen. The spiritual researcher is not worried about his opponents of this kind. He is much more concerned about some of his supporters.

As true as it is that some people reject without reason, it is also true that many people make themselves followers without reason, simply because of what is called belief in authority. That is why many do not apply common sense at all. For such people, there is no way to distinguish between a charlatan who talks about all kinds of things he doesn't really know much about, and someone who knows how to research conscientiously. For people of sound mind, these two phenomena are always known. It is known that the two have always gone hand in hand and that people have been little inclined to distinguish between them. People who are not morally stable are therefore exposed to a certain danger, because they are subject to temptation. This is because the spiritual researcher and anyone who can see into the spiritual world is seen as something very special. This is an unhealthy judgment in the dissemination of spiritual research, because by looking into it, he is nothing more than a researcher in this field, only what can be learned here is much more important than what can be researched in other fields. But a person is no different or higher or better because of this, and if you consider that the fool carries his follies and the clever man his cleverness, you will not consider someone who has something to share from spiritual research to be a higher being. You can judge him by what he has in common with others. The value of a person lies in his moral state of mind.

Those who recognize the life of the soul in a spiritual sense will know how the human soul's longing, human nature's urge, is directed towards the solutions that can actually only be provided by spiritual science. It is all the more necessary that this knowledge be spread in a healthy way, because it is intended to give people the opportunity to understand their destiny, but also the opportunity to experience their destiny in an appropriate way, so that they do not stand in life without a foundation.

What spiritual research has to offer is wisdom that strengthens and fortifies us for our existence. Those who lack the strengthening and fortifying effects of spiritual science will gradually find that they lack strength and power to live in general. Spiritual research is increasingly becoming a necessity in our time. It is all the more necessary to recognize its sources, truths and fallacies. When man opens himself to such directions and thoughts, as they could only be outlined today, then he arrives at that which will more and more be able to be this spiritual research for spiritual culture, and that will strengthen him inwardly in the acknowledgment of this research, in being penetrated by the truth of this research, and he will remain calm in the face of those who do not want to engage in this research. He remains calm so that this calmness of his appears to us as a sign of the evenly attained conviction through spiritual science. Then, when he has looked into and thought about the things himself, he understands the words with which we want to conclude today's reflection as a conclusion in line with our feelings, because the best with which spiritual science can conclude is what can be combined into a feeling; truth and error are rarely viewed in this way, as opposed to everything that can shake spiritual science and its power. We must face it as Goethe, for example, faced a matter that can be compared with the way the spiritual researcher relates to spiritual research. He once had to deal with a great philosophical school that denied movement, so that people said there was actually no movement.

Goethe, who was imbued with the insubstantiality of such views, found words that aptly expressed the refutation from a healthy sense of truth. He said:

Enemy powers may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

Those who understand spiritual research in the right way can behave in a similar way to Goethe here in the face of the refutations of spiritual research.

Those of you who have been attending my lecture cycles or single lectures on spiritual-scientific subjects have had various phenomena of the higher worlds presented from many different aspects, and various beings as well have appeared to us from one realm or another and were shown in different lights. In order to anticipate any possible misconceptions that might arise I should like to point out today that when these beings and phenomena are illuminated, now from one angle, now from another, a superficial view might see contradictions. But if you look more closely you will see that these complicated facts of the spiritual world can be clarified only by throwing light on them from many sides. It is necessary to say this because certain facts with which most of you are already familiar from one aspect must in part be illuminated today from another, a new angle. We need only turn to that most profound document of the New Testament, familiar as the Gospel according to St. John, and read the pregnant words with which we brought yesterday's discussion to a close, in order to sense the literally endless enigmas of cosmic and human evolution hidden in the opening words of this Gospel. In the course of our observations the opportunity may present itself to show why the great narrators of spiritual events often expressed precisely the mighty, comprehensive truths in such a concise, paradigmatical form as we find in the opening verses of the John Gospel. Today we will return to certain well-known facts of spiritual science, treating them from an aspect differing from yesterday's, and see in what form we meet them again in the Gospel of St. John. Let us take our point of departure from the most elementary facts of spiritual science, comparatively speaking.

As we know, man in his ordinary state consists of four principles: physical body, etheric or life body, astral body, and ego, and we know that his daily life alternates in such a way that during his waking hours these four members of his being are organically interconnected and interpenetrative in him, whereas during sleep, while the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, the astral body and the ego bearer—we may call it simply the ego—are removed. Now, there is one point we must thoroughly understand today. In a man of our present stage of evolution we have before us this fourfold state as an inherent demand. As he lies in bed at night with only his physical and etheric bodies present he has, in a sense, the status of a plant; for the plant, as it appears in the outer world, consists only of physical body and etheric or life body; it bears no astral body or ego, and is thus differentiated from the animal and from man. The animal is the first in the scale to have an astral body, and man, an ego. Hence it can be said that during sleep, when his physical and etheric bodies alone remain in bed, man is in a sense a plantlike being. But again, he is not like a plant, and this must be rightly understood. In the present age a free and independent being having neither astral body nor ego, but consisting solely of etheric body and physical body, must have the appearance of a plant—must, in fact, be a plant. On the other hand man, as he lies asleep in bed, has grown beyond the status of a plant, because during the course of evolution he has added an astral body—vehicle of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, impulses, desires, and passions—and also the vehicle of the ego. But the acquisition of a higher principle always involves a corresponding alteration in all that pertains to the lower principles. If an astral body were added to the plant we see today as a being of outer nature, if this astral body were not only to hover over the plant but to permeate it, then what we see penetrating the plant in its substance would have to become animal flesh. That is because upon entering, the astral body would transform the plant in such a way as to convert the substance into animal flesh. And the addition of an ego in the physical world would entail an analogous transformation.

We may therefore say that in a being like man, whose nature embraces not only a physical body but invisible, higher, super-sensible principles as well, the super-sensible members find expression in the lowest ones. Just as the inner qualities of your soul are superficially expressed in your features, in your physiognomy, so your physical body is an expression of the work performed by your astral body and ego; and the physical body does not represent merely itself: it stands as the physical expression of the human principles that are physically invisible. Thus the glandular system and all that pertains to it is an expression of the etheric body, everything connected with the nervous system is an expression of the astral body, and all that is comprised in the circulation is an expression of the ego bearer. So in the physical body itself we again have to take into account a fourfold organization; and only one who worships a crass materialistic world conception could classify the various substances in the human body as equivalent. The blood pulsating in our veins became the substance it is as a result of the fact that an ego dwells in us; the form and substance of the nervous system are due to the presence of an astral body; and the glandular system is the outcome of the etheric body.

If you will take all this into consideration you will readily see that between falling asleep at night and waking up in the morning the human being is really a contradiction in terms. One is inclined to call him a plant, yet he is not a plant because the physical substance of a plant lacks the expression of the astral body—the nervous system—as well as the expression of the ego—the circulatory system. A physical being such as man, equipped with a glandular, a nervous, and a circulatory system, can exist only by means of an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego; but in the night you forsake your physical and etheric bodies—that is, in as far as your astral body and ego constitute you a human being. You basely abandon them, as it were, making them into a self-contradictory being. Were nothing of a spiritual nature to intervene at this time, while you simply withdraw your astral body and ego from your physical and etheric bodies, you would find your nervous and circulatory systems destroyed when you woke up in the morning; for these cannot exist without your having an astral body and an ego within you. Therefore the following takes place, perceptible to clairvoyant consciousness:

In proportion to the withdrawal of the ego and astral body the clairvoyant sees a divine ego and a divine astral body enter into man. Actually there is during sleep, too, an astral body and an ego—or at least a substitute for these—in the physical and etheric bodies. When man's astral principle passes out, a higher one moves in—as does similarly a substitute for the ego. From this it is evident that within the realm of our lives, within their sphere, beings are at work that have no immediate expression in the physical world. What comes to expression in the physical world are minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. The last are for the moment the highest of the beings within our physical sphere, for they alone have physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The fact that in sleep the astral body and ego withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies shows us that even today the former retain a certain independence; that they detach themselves, so to speak, and can live for a certain length of time every day thus sundered from the physical and etheric vehicles.
At night, then, we have the following condition: Just as the human physical body and the human etheric body are by day the bearers of the human ego and the human astral body—in other words, of the innermost principles—so by night they become the bearers, or the temple, of higher astral and ego beings. Now we look with different eyes at the sleeper, for the astral principle within him is a divine-spiritual principle, and there is also an ego, but a divine-spiritual ego. In a sense it can be said that while we are asleep in respect of our astral body and ego, we are watched over and the structure of our organization is maintained by these beings that thus become a part of our life, beings that enter our physical and etheric bodies when we ourselves abandon these. A great deal can be learned from a fact of this sort; and especially if taken in conjunction with certain clairvoyant observations it can elucidate much concerning the evolution of man. What we shall now do is to correlate this difference between waking and sleeping with the great spiritual facts of evolution.

The astral body and the ego appear, to be sure, as the highest and most intimate principles of man's nature, but by no means do they prove to be the most perfect. Even to superficial observation the physical body is more perfect than the astral body. Two years ago I pointed out here¹ that the more closely we examine man's physical body, the more admirable it appears in its entire structure. Not only does the marvel of the human heart or the human brain when examined anatomically satisfy the mind's acute, intellectual thirst for knowledge, but whoever approaches these with his soul feels an aesthetic and moral uplift when he realizes how sublime and wise are the provisions made in this physical body. The astral body is as yet less advanced. It is the bearer of joy and sorrow, of impulses, desires, indulgence, and so forth; and we must admit that in order to satisfy his desires man turns to all sorts of things hardly calculated to further the wise and ingenious workings of the heart or the brain. His craving for enjoyment leads him to seek satisfaction in things like coffee, that are poison for the heart, thereby proving the astral body's craving for pleasures that harm the wisely contrived human heart; yet for decades the heart withstands such poisons consumed by man as a result of his astral body's craving for enjoyment.

This proves that the physical body is more nearly perfect than the astral body. At some time in the future the astral body will be incomparably the more perfect of the two, but at present the development of the physical body is the most advanced. That is because it is actually the oldest principle of man's nature. The physical body itself furnishes the evidence that it was worked upon long before our earth came into being.

The modern doctrine of the origin of the world grew out of purely materialistic conceptions, and what it teaches is nothing but a materialistic fantasy; nor does it matter whether it is called the Kant-Laplace theory or, in the case of a later one, something else. For comprehending the outer structure of our world system these materialistic flights are undoubtedly useful, but they are of no avail in helping us understand anything higher than what the outer eye sees. Spiritual research shows that just as the human being passes from incarnation to incarnation, so a cosmic body like our earth has experienced other formations, other planetary conditions, in the remote past. Before our earth came into being it was in a different planetary state, the spiritual state science calls the “old Moon”.² This does not refer to our present moon but to an ancestor of our earth as a planetary being; and just as the human being has developed from an earlier form of embodiment into what he is today, so our earth has developed from old Moon to Earth: the old Moon is a sort of previous incarnation of the Earth. Going still farther back: a previous incorporation of the old Moon was the Sun—again not the present sun but an ancestor of our present earth; and finally, the precursor of this old Sun was the old Saturn. Those are the states our Earth passed through: a Saturn state, a Sun state, and a Moon state, and now it has reached its earth state.

The first germ of our physical body appeared on the old Saturn. In other words, while nothing of all that surrounds us today existed on that primeval cosmic body we designate the old Saturn (not the present planet)—nothing of our animal or plant life, or even of our mineral kingdom—yet there were the first rudiments of the present-day human physical body. This physical human body was constituted very differently from what it is today: it was present in its earliest germinal state, then developed during the Saturn evolution; and when the latter was completed the old Saturn passed through a sort of cosmic night in the same manner in which man passes through a devachan in order to reach his next incarnation. Then Saturn became the Sun; and as the plant arises out of the seed, so the human physical body reappeared on the old Sun. Gradually this physical body became permeated by an etheric or life body, so that on the old Sun the germinal physical body was joined by the etheric or life body. Man was then not a plant, but he had the status of a plant. He consisted of physical body and etheric body, and his consciousness resembled that of sleep, the consciousness of the carpet of plants that is spread out around us in the physical world today.

The Sun existence came to an end, and again there intervened a cosmic night, or world devachan, as we can call it. When the Sun had passed through this cosmic devachan it was transformed into the old Moon state. Again we find the human physical and etheric bodies that had entered on Saturn and the Sun respectively, but during the Moon evolution the astral body was added. Now the human being possessed a physical, an etheric, and an astral body. Thus you see that the physical body, having come into being on Saturn, was already passing through its third state on the Moon; and the etheric body that had been added on the Sun now rose to its second stage of perfection. The astral body, just engendered, was in its first stage in the Moon period.

Something now happened on the Moon that would not have been possible during the Saturn and Sun stages. While the latter had kept man a comparatively homogeneous being, the following event occurred when the old Moon was at a certain stage of development: The whole heavenly body split into two members, a sun and its satellite, the Moon; so that while in the case of Saturn and the Sun we have the evolution of a single planet, only the first part of the Lunar evolution can be thus characterized. That is because in the beginning everything that constitutes our present earth, sun, and moon was united in one primordial cosmic body in a single state, and then two bodies came into being. The sun that had its genesis at that time was not our sun, nor was it the old Sun, mentioned above: it was a special state that detached itself from the old Moon as a sun state; and along with it there came into being a planet, outside of the sun and circling it, which in turn we call the old Moon minus the sun; that is, the Moon.

Now, what is the significance of this division that took place in our earth's predecessor during the evolution of the old Moon? It lies in the fact that along with the sun the higher beings and the finer substances withdrew from the whole stellar mass as sun, while the coarser substances and the lower beings remained with the Moon. So during the evolution of the old Moon we have two heavenly bodies instead of one: a sun body, harboring the higher beings, and a Moon body, the dwelling place of the lower beings. Had the whole remained united, with no separation occurring, certain beings who developed on the sundered Moon could not have kept pace with the sun beings: they were not sufficiently mature, and therefore had to segregate, cast out, the coarser substances and build for themselves a sphere of action apart. Nor could the higher beings have remained united with these coarser substances, for it would have obstructed their more rapid progress. They, too, required a special field for their development, and that was the Sun.

Now let us turn to the beings dwelling on the old Sun and those on the old Moon, after the separation. We have learned that the potential human physical body had its inception during the Saturn state, that on the Sun the etheric body was added, and on the Moon, the astral body. Now, these human beings—or primeval men, if we may so call them—on the Moon had, in fact, remained with the Moon when it split off; and these were the ones who could not keep pace with the rapid development of the sun beings—those who had gone with the sun and now dwelt within the finer substances and matter on the sun. This also accounts for their becoming coarser during the Moon evolution. During this period, then, we have man in a state consisting of physical body, etheric body, and astral body; in other words, he had attained to the evolutionary stage of a present-day animal, for an animal has the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But you must not imagine man on the old Moon as having been really an animal: his form was very different in appearance from anything in the present animal world, and it would strike you as utterly fantastic if I were to describe it.

Summing up, then: On the old Moon we find what may be called the ancestors of present-day man, equipped with physical, etheric, and astral bodies, in whom these principles tended to become rigid after the division—to become coarser than they would have become had they remained with the sun. But all that had split off with the sun had also passed through this threefold development, the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. This, however, proceeded in the direction taken by the sun, whereas the ancestors of men followed the Moon. These beings that went with the sun show a threefold organism closely paralleling that of man. On the sun, too, were beings who had acquired three principles, so to speak; but these had become finer instead of coarser after the separation. Think of the process as follows: After the split the human forebears became denser beings than they were before, they tended to solidify; while corresponding beings on the sun became more rarefied. Through having acquired an astral body during the Moon evolution, man in a sense descended to the level of an animal; but the beings that did not take part in this development—those that carried the finer substances with them to the sun—became finer.

So while man was hardening on the Moon, being of lofty spirituality arose on the sun. In spiritual science this spirituality is designated the counterpart of what evolved on the Moon. On the Moon men developed up to the rank of the animal, so to speak, although they were not animals. Now, in dealing with the animal kingdom people have always quite justifiably distinguished between different grades of animals, and the animal men on the Moon appeared in three grades differing essentially from one another. In spiritual science these are termed the grades of the “Bull”, the “Lion”, and the “Eagle”. Those are typical configurations, as it were, of the animal world. The old Moon was inhabited by the three groups: Bull men, Lion men, and Eagle men.—Although these connotations apply in no way to our present bulls, lions, and eagles, the deteriorated character of those primordial Moon men which we call Lion-men is nevertheless expressed, to a certain extent, in the feline species; in the character of the hoofed animals there comes to expression the degenerated nature of the so-called Bull men, and so forth.—That describes the densified nature of man after a three-stage development.

But on the sun dwelt the spiritual counterparts of these, also consisting of three groups. While the development of the astral principle on the Moon was shaping these three different animal men, the corresponding spiritual men arose on the sun as Angelical beings, spirit beings. These, too, are known as Lion, Eagle, and Bull, but as the spiritual counterparts of the others. So when you contemplate the sun you see spiritual beings whom you envision as the beautiful prototypes conceived in wisdom, while on the Moon you find something like hardened replicas of what dwells on the sun.

But something in the nature of a mystery underlies all this. These images down on the Moon are not without connection with their spiritual counterparts on the sun. On the Moon we have a group of primordial men, the Bull men, and on the sun a group of spirit beings connoted “Bull spirits”; and there is a spiritual connection between prototype and image. That is because the group soul is the prototype and acts as such upon the images. The forces proceed from the group soul and direct the image down below: the Lion spirit directs the beings who, as Lion men, are its image; the Eagle spirit guides the Eagle men, and so on. If these spirits up above had remained united with the Moon, bound to their replicas and inhabiting them, their activity would have been paralyzed; they could not have exercised the forces needed for the salvation and development of the images. They understood that they had to foster on a higher level what was destined to evolve on the Moon. The Bull spirit felt, I must care for the Bull men; but on the Moon I cannot find the conditions for my own progress, hence I must dwell on the sun and from there send down my forces to the Bull men.—And the same applies to the Lion spirit, and the Eagle spirit.

That is the way evolution proceeded. Certain beings needed a sphere of action above those that were their physical images, so to speak. The latter required a lower, lesser field. In order to function effectually the spiritual beings had to sunder the sun from the Moon and then send down their forces from without. Thus we see on the one hand a development downward, so to say, and on the other, an upward trend.

The evolution of the old Moon (as a cosmic period) proceeds. By acting upon their images from without, the spiritual beings spiritualize the Moon, with the result that the latter can in time reunite with the sun. The prototypes take their images back into themselves, absorb them, as it were. Another world devachan comes about, a cosmic night. (This is also known as a pralaya, whereas stages like Saturn, Sun, and Moon are called manvantaras.) Following this cosmic night there issues out of the obscurity of the cosmic womb our Earth stage, whose mission it is to advance man to the stage at which he can add the ego, or ego bearer, to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. In the meantime, however, all previous evolution must be repeated; for whenever a higher stage is to be reached a cosmic law demands the repetition of all that had already taken place. The Earth had thus to pass once more through the old Saturn stage: again the first potential beginnings of the physical body evolved as out of the cosmic germ; and then followed a repetition of the Sun and Moon stages.

At this time sun, earth, and moon still formed a single body; but now a repetition of previous events takes place: the sun again splits off, and again those loftier beings that need this higher sphere for their development depart with the sun, carrying with them the finer substances they need for creating their cosmic sphere of action. Thus the sun left the Earth, which at that time still bore the moon within its body, and took with it those beings who were sufficiently advanced to find their further development on the sun. You will readily imagine that among these beings were to be found primarily those that had previously functioned as prototypes. All these beings, who during the old Moon period had attained to adequate maturity, progressed rapidly, with the result that they could no longer live in the denser substances and among the earth-plus-moon beings: they had to detach themselves and establish a new existence on the sun—our present sun.

Who were these beings? They were the descendants of those who, back in the old Moon state, had developed on the sun as the Bull, Lion, and Eagle spirits; and the loftiest of these, the most advanced, were those who had merged within themselves the natures of Eagle, Lion, and Bull in a harmonious unity. They are the beings that can be connoted human prototypes—spirit men in the true sense of the term. Keep in mind that among the spiritual beings, who during the old Moon period were to be found on the sun as Bull, Eagle, and Lion spirits, some had attained to a higher plane of development, and these are the Spirit Men proper whose dwelling place is now principally the sun. They are spiritual counterparts, so to speak, of what is in the process of evolution down below on the severed earth-plus-moon; but those that are developing down there are the descendants of the beings that had lived on the old Moon. Now, you can imagine that since a certain condensation, a solidification of these beings had already set in on the old Moon, a tendency to condense, to solidify, to dry out would be all the more pronounced in their descendants. Indeed, a sad and dreary period commenced for this sundered portion which then comprised earth-plusmoon. Above, on the sun, an ever fresher and livelier development, ever fuller life; below, on the Earth, misery and barrenness, steadily increasing rigidity.

Something now occurred without which evolution would have been brought to a standstill: the moon as we know it today separated from the earth-plus-moon body, and what remained is our present earth. In this way the coarsest substances withdrew before rendering the earth completely hard, and the latter was saved from total desolation.

To summarize all this: At the beginning of our Earth evolution the Earth formed one body with our present sun and moon. Had the Earth (earth plus moon) remained with the sun, man would never have been able to reach his present stage of development: he could not have kept pace with a development such as the beings on the sun needed. What developed up there was not man as he is on earth, but his spiritual prototype of which, as he appears in his physical body, he is really but an image. And on the other hand, had the moon remained within the earth, man would have gradually dried out and mummified, and have found no possibility of further development on Earth. The Earth would have become a barren, arid cosmic body; and in place of human bodies as we know them today, something like lifeless statutes would have developed, growing up out of the ground like desiccated men. This was prevented by the secession of the moon, which withdrew into cosmic space and took with it the coarsest substances. That made it possible for an ego to be added to the physical, etheric, and astral bodies already present in the descendants of the old Moon beings; and because the forces of sun and moon acted from without and there held each other in balance, man could experience fructification by the ego.

The earth was now the scene of further human evolution. All that had come over from the old Moon represented in a certain respect a devolution, a development into a lower stage; but now there appeared a new impetus, an impulse upward.—And in the meantime the progress of those corresponding spiritual beings who had remained with the sun steadily continued.

Let us suppose we have a block of hard iron before us and that our muscles are of average strength. We pound and hammer the iron, trying to beat it flat, but we cannot manage to give it any form until we have softened the substance by heat. Something of this sort happened to the earth after the densest substances had withdrawn with the moon. Now the earth beings could be formed, and now the sun beings again took a hand—those beings who as early as the old Moon state had intervened there from the sun as the group souls. Before the moon split off, substances were too dense; but now these beings asserted themselves as forces that gradually shaped and developed man to his present form.

Let us examine this more closely. Imagine you could have stood on this ancient heavenly body that consisted of earth-plus-moon. You would have beheld the sun out in space; and if you had been clairvoyant you would also have seen the spiritual beings described above. On the Earth you would have perceived a sort of solidification, of desolation, and it would have struck you that all about was nothing but aridity and death on the Earth; for the forces of the sun could gain no influence over all this that was on its way to becoming a great cosmic graveyard.—And then you would have seen the body of the moon detach itself from the Earth. You would have seen the substances of the earth becoming malleable and plastic, with the result that the forces descending from the sun were once more able to act. And you would have seen the Bull, Lion, and Eagle spirits regaining their influence over the human beings that were their images. You would have understood that the moon, isolated, had lost some of its harmful influence through its withdrawal, for thenceforth it could act only from a distance; and that in this way the earth was rendered capable of receiving what the spiritual beings had to give. Tomorrow we shall see what sort of a picture presents itself to the clairvoyant when he traces the more remote phases of evolution in the akashic record.

We know that during the old Saturn stage the first beginning of the human physical body was formed. What today we see as the physical human form first took shape on Saturn as though emerging from cosmic chaos. Then came the Sun stage during which the etheric body was added to the physical; and on the old Moon these were joined by the astral element in the case of those beings who continued their development on the sundered Moon, as well as of the spirits who had remained with the sun. On the sun dwelt the spiritual prototypes, on the Moon, their counterparts on the animal level; and finally, upon the Earth there had gradually evolved a condition under which man was once more able to receive into himself the astral element developed on the sun during the Moon evolution, an element that now acted in him as a force.

Let us now trace these four states. The exalted power which during the Saturn stage provided the spiritual germ of the physical human form is called by the author of the John Gospel the Logos. The element that was added on the Sun and merged with what had arisen on Saturn he designates Life, known to us accordingly as the etheric or life body. And what was subjoined on the Moon he terms the Light, for it is the spiritual light, the astral light. On the severed Moon this astral light effected a hardening, but on the sun itself, a spiritualization. What was thus engendered as spirit could and did continue to develop; and when the sun again split off, the principle that had evolved during the third stage shone into men, but man was as yet unable to see what thus shone in from the sun. It took part in the shaping of man, acted as a force; but man could not see it.

What we have in this way come to recognize as the essence of the Saturn evolution we can now express in the words of the Gospel of St. John:

In the beginning was the Logos.

Now we pass to the Sun. To denote what came into being on Saturn and was further developed on the Sun, we say, the etheric body was added:

And the Logos was Life.

On the Moon the astral element entered into both the physical and the spiritual aspects of men:

Within the animated Logos Light arose.

When the separation occurred the light developed in two directions: on the sun into a clairvoyant light, among men into darkness. For when man was to receive the light he, who was the darkness, comprehended it not.

So if we illuminate the John Gospel by means of the akashic record, what we read concerning cosmic evolution is a follows: In the beginning, during the Saturn evolution, everything had come into being out of the Logos; during the Sun evolution, Life was in the Logos; and out of this living Logos there arose Light during the Moon evolution. Finally, out of the living, light-filled Logos there appeared on the sun, during the Earth evolution, the Light in heightened luster—but men walked in darkness. And the beings who had become the advanced spirits of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, shone down as light from the sun to the earth and into the forms of men that were taking shape. But these were the darkness, and they could not comprehend the light that shone down upon them.—Naturally we must not think of this as the physical light, but rather, as the Light that was the sum of the radiations from the spiritual beings, the spirits of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, who constituted the continuation of the spiritual evolution of the Moon. It was the spiritual Light that streamed down. Men could not receive it, could not comprehend it. Their whole development was advanced by it, but without their consciousness taking part. The light shone in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Thus paradigmatically does the writer of the John Gospel present these great verities; and those versed in such matters have ever been called the “servants or ministers of the Logos as it was from the beginning.” He who speaks thus was such a minister or servant of the Logos as it was from the beginning; and in the Luke Gospel we find what is basically the identical disposition. Just read understandingly what the writer of the Luke Gospel says: his purpose is to report events as they occurred from the beginning, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the Word.

And we believe that these documents were written by servants of the Word, or the Logos. We learn to believe this when by means of our own spiritual research we see what took place, when we see how our Earth evolution came about by way of Saturn, Sun, and Moon. And when we then find that we can rediscover, independent of all documents, what is presented in the comprehensive words of the John Gospel and in the words of the Luke Gospel, we learn anew to appreciate these documents and to find in them their own evidence that they were written by those who could read in the spiritual world. They provide a means of communication with men of remote times whom we can face, in a sense, and say, We recognize and know you—because what they knew we have found again in Spiritual Science.

• 1. Cf. Lectures delivered in Whilhelmshöhe near Kasel, June 16-19, 1907.
• 2. In his translation of Occult Science, an Outline, by Rudolf Steiner, Mr. Henry B. Monges provided an ingenious device for eliminating the confusion that arises so easily in connection with the study of planetary evolution. The following footnote, quoted from Occult Science, explains it.
  
  In order to make clear the difference between the designations for the Planetary Evolutions and our present planetary bodies, which bear the same names, the following device has been determined on: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan printed in italics with initial capitals designate the great cosmic planetary cycles of evolution. In the Sun evolution, after the separation of the main cosmic body into two parts, the designation is Sun and Saturn, spelt with capitals, but not with italics. In the Moon evolution, when a separation takes place, the remaining body is spelt Moon, with an initial capital, the separating planetary sun is spelt with small letters. In the Earth evolution, the separated planetary bodies are spelt as is customary: The planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury with initial capitals; sun, moon, earth with small letters.”
  
  The device is gratefully adopted in this translation

We have often studied the period of evolution following the Atlantean catastrophe and the epochs of post-Atlantean civilisation: the Old Indian, Old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Roman, and now the fifth, in which we ourselves are living. There will be two more epochs, making seven in all, before there is another great catastrophe.

The accounts given have naturally been of different aspects of these culture-epochs, for an idea of the future can be formed only by knowing how we are related to each of them. I have often said that there is a correspondence between the individual human being as a ‘Microcosm’, a ‘little world’, and the ‘Macrocosm’, the ‘great world’. Man, the ‘little world’, is in every respect a replica, a copy, of the ‘great world’. This is literally true, but stated in this form it is a very abstract truth and does not lead us very far. It becomes significant only if we can go on and show in detail how the individual human being is to be conceived as a Microcosm compared with the Macrocosm.

The man of to-day belongs to all the seven post-Atlantean epochs for he has been, or will be, incarnated in each of them. In every incarnation we receive what that particular epoch can give us. Thus we bear within ourselves the fruits of past phases of evolution. Our intrinsic qualities and talents are those we have acquired during the several post-Atlantean epochs and they lie more or less within the range of human consciousness as it is to-day. On the other hand, during our Atlantean incarnations there were very different states of consciousness and what we then acquired has, generally speaking, been pressed down into the subconscious. It does not therefore reverberate within us as strongly as what was acquired in later incarnations during the post-Atlantean epoch. In the much earlier Atlantean epoch human consciousness was by no means as wideawake as it became later on and men were not then able to the same extent to injure their own development. Consequently the fruits of Atlantean evolution within us are more in harmony with the World-Order than has been the case since we have been able ourselves to create disorder in our own being. Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences were active during the Atlantean epoch too, but the effect of them upon man was altogether different. Nor was man then in a position to protect himself against them.

The ever-increasing development of human consciousness is the essential feature of post-Atlantean civilisation. The evolution of mankind in the period between the catastrophe which overwhelmed Atlantis and the one that will bring the post-Atlantean epoch to an end may be thought of as a macrocosmic process; humanity as a whole evolves as one great being through the seven post-Atlantean epochs. And the most important phases in the evolution of consciousness during these seven epochs resemble what the individual himself undergoes in the seven ‘ages’ or periods of his own life.

In my book Occult Science, and elsewhere, these different life-periods have often been described. The first period covers the seven years from birth to the change of teeth. During this period the physical body of the human being acquires its basic forms and with the coming of the second teeth these forms are to all intents and purposes established. Naturally, the child continues to grow; but speaking generally, the lines of the bodily structures have already been established. What is accomplished in the first seven years is the construction of the bodily form. We must be prepared to find these rhythms manifesting in us in a wide variety of ways. For instance, there is a difference between the first teeth, which appear during the earliest years of life and then fall out, to be replaced by the second teeth. The two sets of teeth are the result of essentially different conditions. The first teeth are the inherited product of the organisms of the child's forefathers. The second teeth are the product of the child's own physical constitution. This must be kept firmly in mind. Only by being attentive to such details can the distinction be fully understood. Our first teeth, together with our whole organism, are passed on to us by our forefathers; our second teeth are the product of our own physical organism. In the first case the teeth are a direct inheritance: in the second it is the physical organism that is inherited and this in its turn produces the second teeth.

The second life-period is from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The important process now is the development of the etheric body. The third period, to about the twenty-first year, covers the development of the astral body. Then follows the development of the Ego, with the progressive development of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and the Spiritual Soul (Consciousness-Soul).

These are the different periods in man's life: but as you certainly know, the first period of seven years alone follows a completely regular pattern, and this is as it should be for man of the present age. The regularity apparent in the first three life-periods is not found in the later ones, nor can their length be defined with exactitude. If we ask why this is so, the answer is that in world-evolution which proceeds in rhythms of seven periods, the fourth plays a middle part. Thus in the post-Atlantean era we already have within us the fruits of the first four epochs; we are now living in the fifth and moving towards the sixth.

There is undoubtedly a certain correspondence between the evolution of the post-Atlantean epochs and that of the individual human being. Here again there is evidence of correspondence between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.

Let us consider what was particularly characteristic of the first post-Atlantean epoch. We call it the Old Indian epoch because the character of post-Atlantean evolution in general was especially marked in the people of India. In this epoch there existed a sublime, all-embracing wisdom, with wide ramifications. In principle, the teachings given by the seven holy Rishis were identical with what was actually seen in the spiritual world by natural clairvoyants and also by very many of the people of that time. This ancient knowledge was present in the Old Indian epoch as a heritage from still earlier times. In the Atlantean epoch it had been experienced clairvoyantly, but it had now become more of an inherited, primal wisdom, preserved and made known by those who, like the Rishis, had risen through Initiation to the spiritual worlds. Basically, all the wisdom that penetrated into human consciousness was inherited and therefore essentially different from our modern knowledge.

It would be quite wrong to attempt to express the sublime truths proclaimed by the holy Rishis in the first post-Atlantean epoch in terms such as those used in modern scholarship; moreover it would hardly be possible to do so, because the forms assumed by scholarship as it is to-day appeared only in the course of post-Atlantean culture. The knowledge possessed by the ancient Rishis was of a very different character. Anyone capable of proclaiming it felt it working and seething within him, rising up spontaneously. To understand what knowledge was in those days we must realise above all that it did not in any way rely upon memory. Please keep this very specially in mind. Memory is the most important factor when knowledge is being transmitted to-day. A professor or a public speaker must take care that he knows beforehand what he is going to say from the rostrum, and then draw it out of his memory. True, there are people who deny that they do any such thing, insisting that they simply follow their own genius. But they don't affect the argument. The communication of knowledge to-day depends almost entirely upon memory.

Things were very different in the Old Indian epoch. It would be true to say that knowledge arose at the actual moment of speaking. In those early times knowledge was not prepared beforehand as it so often is to-day. The ancient Rishi did not prepare what he had to say and then memorise it. The preparation he made was to induce in himself a mood of piety, of reverence. It was his mood and his feelings that he prepared, not the content of what he was about to communicate. And then, while it was being communicated it was as if he were reading from an invisible script. It would have been unthinkable in those days for listeners to take down in writing what was being said; anything recorded in this way would have been considered quite worthless. Value was attached only to what a man preserved in his soul and might later reproduce for others. It would have been regarded as desecration to write anything down. The view rightly held at that time was that what is transcribed is not, and cannot be, the same as the oral communication.

This way of thinking persisted for a very long time. Such matters are retained in the feelings much longer than in the intellect and when, in the Middle Ages, the art of printing was added to that of writing, it was at first regarded as black magic. Old feelings were still astir in men and they felt that what is meant to pass directly from soul to soul should not be preserved in the grotesque form of letters and words printed on sheets of white paper. People were convinced that this transformed the knowledge to be communicated into something lifeless which might, moreover, subsequently be revived with anything but beneficial results. The direct streaming of knowledge from soul to soul was characteristic of the times we are considering. It was a prominent feature in the cultural life of the first post-Atlantean epoch and must be recognised if we are to understand, for instance, how it came about that Greek and even old Germanic rhapsodists could go from place to place reciting their very lengthy poems. This would never have been possible if they had been obliged to rely upon memory. It was a power and a quality of soul much more alive than memory that lay behind their recitations. Nowadays if we are to recite a poem we must have learnt it beforehand; but what those men were reciting was an actual experience in them, a kind of new creation. Moreover a direct expression of the life of soul was then more clearly in evidence than it is now, when—with some justification in view of prevailing conditions—it is apt to be suppressed. What is considered of main importance nowadays in recitation is the actual meaning of the words. It was not so, even in the Middle Ages, when a minstrel was reciting the Niebelungenlied, for instance. He still had a feeling for the inner rhythm and would stamp his feet to mark the rise and fall of the verse as he strode forward and back. But this was only an aftermath of what had been customary in more ancient times. You would have an erroneous idea of the Rishis and their pupils if you were to think that they had not faithfully communicated the old Atlantean knowledge. Even if the pupils in our schools were to fill their exercise books from cover to cover, they would not have reproduced what had been said as faithfully as the Indian Rishis reproduced the ancient wisdom.

The characteristic feature of the epochs which followed was that the flow of Atlantean knowledge came to a standstill. Until the decline of the Old Indian culture-epoch, knowledge received by men in the form of an inheritance continually increased. In essentials, however, the increase ceased with the close of this epoch: thereafter, hardly anything new could be produced from existing knowledge. An increase of knowledge was therefore possible only in the first epoch; thereafter it ceased. In the Old Persian epoch, among men influenced by Zoroastrianism, something began in connection with knowledge of the external world which can be compared with the second period in human life and is, in fact, best understood through such a comparison. In a spiritual respect the Old Indian culture-epoch is comparable with the first period in human life, from birth to the seventh year. During this period the basic forms are developed; whatever comes later is merely expansion within these established forms. What followed in the Old Persian epoch can similarly be compared with a kind of school-learning, the kind of learning connected with the second life-period. Only we must be clear who were the pupils and who were the teachers. At this point there is something I want to interpolate.

You must have been struck by the difference between the figure of Zarathustra, the Leader of the second post-Atlantean epoch, and the Indian Rishis. Whereas the Rishis seem to be consecrated individuals stemming from a primordial past, to be vessels into whom old Atlantean wisdom has poured, Zarathustra appears as the first historical personality to be initiated into a genuinely post-Atlantean Mystery-knowledge, that is to say, knowledge presented in such a way that it could be understood only by the intelligence of post-Atlantean humanity. Something new has therefore made its appearance. True, during the early period it was preeminently supersensible knowledge that was acquired in the Zoroastrian schools. Nevertheless it was there that knowledge began for the first time to take the form of concepts. The ancient knowledge possessed by the Rishis cannot be reproduced in the forms of modern scholarship but to some extent this is possible with the Zoroastrian knowledge. This is knowledge of an altogether supersensible character and concerned entirely with the supersensible world but it is clothed in concepts comparable with those current during the post-Atlantean epoch in general. Among the followers of Zarathustra a systematic development of concepts took place. To sum up: The treasure-store of ancient wisdom which had evolved until the end of the Old Indian epoch and continued from generation to generation, was accepted. Nothing new was added but the old was elaborated. A comparison, for example, with the production nowadays of a book on occultism will help us to picture the task of the Mysteries of the second post-Atlantean epoch. The contents of any book resulting from genuine investigations into the higher worlds could of course be presented as an entirely logical exposition in the physical world. This might be done. But in that case my book Occult Science, for example, would have to consist of fifty volumes at least, each of them as bulky as the present one. There is, however, another way of doing things, namely to leave something to the reader, to induce the reader to think things out for himself. That is what must be attempted nowadays, for otherwise no progress in occultism could be made. To-day, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, with the intellectual concepts developed by humanity, it is possible to approach and also to assimilate occult knowledge. But in Zarathustra's time the concepts in which to clothe occult facts had first to be discovered and gradually elaborated. There were then no branches of knowledge such as exist to-day. Something capable of being clothed in human concepts had survived from the time of the ancient Rishis, but the concepts as such had to be formulated before the supersensible facts could be clothed in them. It was then, for the first time, that man-made concepts were used to grasp supersensible realities. The Rishis had spoken in the only way in which, in their day, supersensible knowledge could be communicated. They poured their knowledge from soul to soul in an unceasing flow of pictures. They were unconcerned with cause and effect, with concepts and categories such as are familiar to us to-day. This was a much later development. In the field of supersensible knowledge a beginning was made in the second post-Atlantean epoch. It was then that man first became aware of the opposition offered by material existence and therewith the need to express supersensible facts in forms of thought employed on the physical plane. This was the basic task of the second post-Atlantean epoch.

By the third epoch, that of Egypto-Chaldean culture, concepts of supersensible realities were actually in existence. This again is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. There was no physical science but there were concepts of supersensible facts and happenings which had been acquired in a supersensible way, and these concepts could be expressed in forms of thought applicable to the physical plane. In the third post-Atlantean epoch men began to apply to the physical world itself what they had learnt from the supersensible world. This again can be compared with the third period in the life of a human being. In the second period he learns without proceeding to apply what he has learnt. In the third life-period most human beings have to apply their knowledge to the physical plane. The pupils of Zarathustra in the second culture-epoch were pupils of heavenly knowledge; now men began to apply to the physical plane what they had learnt. It may help us to picture this if we say that through their visions men learnt that the supersensible can be expressed by a triangle—a triangle taken as an image of the supersensible; that the supersensible nature of man, permeating the physical, can be conceived as threefold. Other concepts too were mastered, enabling physical things to be related to supersensible facts. Geometry, for instance, was first mastered in the form of symbolic concepts. In short, concepts were now available and were applied by the Egyptians to the art of land-surveying, also to agriculture, and by the Chaldeans in their study of the stars and in the founding of Astrology and Astronomy. What had previously been regarded as purely supersensible was now applied to things physically seen. In the third culture-epoch, then, men began for the first time to apply supersensible knowledge to the phenomena of the world of sense.

In the fourth epoch, the Graeco-Latin, it was especially important that men should come to see that what they were doing was to apply to the physical plane knowledge derived from supersensible sources. Hitherto they had acted without questioning whether this was actually the case. The ancient Rishis had no need for such questioning because the knowledge streamed into them directly from the spiritual world. In the epoch of Zarathustra men assimilated the supersensible knowledge and were fully aware how it originated. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men invested the concepts derived from the supersensible world with knowledge they had acquired in the physical world. And in the fourth epoch (the Graeco-Latin) they began to ask whether it is right to apply to the physical world what has come from the spiritual world. Is what has been spiritually acquired in fact applicable to physical things?—Men could not put this to themselves as a definite question until the fourth culture-epoch, after they had for some time been applying supersensible knowledge in all naivety to physical experiences and observations. Now they became conscientious in regard to their own doings and began to ask whether it is justifiable to apply supersensible concepts to physical facts.

Now when any epoch has an important task to perform, it always happens that some individual is particularly alive to its nature and responsible for fulfilling it. In this case, such an individual would have been struck by the thought as to whether one has the right to apply supersensible concepts to physical facts. Can anyone really predict how things will develop? It is obvious that Plato, for example, had a living connection with the ancient world and still applied concepts in their old form to the physical world. It was his pupil Aristotle who asked whether it is right to do this.—And so Aristotle became the founder of Logic.

People who reject Spiritual Science should just ask themselves why man had managed to get on without any system of Logic. Had they never before the fourth epoch felt any need for it?—To a clear-sighted view of evolution, important periods occur at definite points of time. One such period lies between Plato and Aristotle. Here we have before us a situation that is related in a certain way to the connection with the spiritual world existing in the Atlantean epoch. True, the living spiritual knowledge died out with the Old Indian culture-epoch, but something new had nevertheless been brought down to the physical plane. Now, in this later age, man had begun to develop a critical faculty, and to ask how ideas about supersensible reality may be applied to physical things. This is a sign that man only now became conscious that he himself achieves something when he is observing the external world, that he is actually bringing something down into the sense-world. This was a significant state of things.

We can still feel that concepts and ideas are in essence supersensible when we regard their very character as being a guarantee for the existence of the supersensible world. But only few feel this. What concepts and ideas contain is for most people extremely tenuous. And although there is something in them which can provide complete proof of man's immortality, it would be impossible to convince him, because compared with the solid, material reality for which he longs, concepts and ideas are as unsubstantial as a cobweb. They are, in fact, the last and slenderest thread spun by man out of the spiritual world since his descent into the physical world. And at the very time when he had left the spiritual world altogether and remained linked to it by this last, slender thread only—a thread in which he no longer had any faith—there came the mightiest incision from the supersensible world: the Christ Impulse. The greatest of all spiritual realities appeared in our post-Atlantean epoch at a time when man was least able to recognise the supersensible, because the only spiritual quality remaining to him was his feeling for concepts and ideas.

For anyone studying the evolution of humanity as a whole it would be interesting in a strictly scientific sense—apart from the tornado-like effect it may have on the soul—to set side by side the infinite spirituality of the Christ Being who entered into humanity and the fact that shortly before His coming man had been wondering how far the last thread of spirituality within him was connected with the supersensible world—in other words, to contrast the Christ Principle with Aristotelian Logic, that web of wholly abstract concepts and ideas. No greater disparity can be imagined than that between the spirituality which came down to the physical plane in the Being of Christ and the spirituality which man had preserved for himself. You will therefore understand that with the web of concepts available in Aristotelianism it was simply not possible in the first centuries of Christendom to comprehend the spiritual nature of Christ. And then, gradually, efforts were made to grasp the facts of world-history and the evolution of humanity in such a way that Aristotelian Logic could be applied. This was the task facing medieval philosophy.

It is significant that the fourth post-Atlantean epoch may be compared with the period of Ego-development in man's life. It was in this epoch that the ‘I’ of humanity itself streamed into evolution, at the time when man was further removed from the spiritual world than he had ever been and was therefore at first quite incapable of accepting Christ except through faith. Christianity was bound at first to be a matter of faith and is only now beginning, very gradually, to be a matter of knowledge. We have only just begun to bring the light of spiritual knowledge to bear upon the Gospels. For hundreds upon hundreds of years Christianity could only be a matter of faith, because man had reached the lowest point of his descent from the spiritual worlds.

This was the situation in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. But after the lowest point the re-ascent must begin. Although in a certain respect this epoch brought man to the lowest point of descent, it also gave him the strongest spiritual impulse upwards. Naturally, this was beyond his comprehension then and will be understood only in the epochs still to come. We can, however, recognise the task before us: it is to permeate our concepts and ideas with spirituality.

World-evolution is not a simple, straightforward process. When a ball begins to roll in a certain direction, inertia will keep it rolling unless its course is changed by some other impact. Similarly, pre-Christian culture tended to preserve and maintain the downward plunge into the physical world until our own time. The upward urge is only just beginning and periodically needs a new impetus.

The downward tendency is particularly evident in the way men think, even in a great deal of what is called Philosophy to-day. Aristotle still recognised that spiritual reality is within the grasp of human concepts. But a few centuries after him men were no longer able to understand how the activity of the human mind can make contact with reality. The most arid, most barren element in the development of the old mode of thinking is represented by Kantianism and everything related to it. For Kant's philosophy severs all connection between the concepts a man evolves, between ideas as inner experiences, and what concepts and ideas are in reality. Kantianism is in the process of withering away and has no living impulse to give to the future. It will now no longer surprise you that the conclusion of my lectures on Psychosophy had a theosophical background. I have made it clear that in all our activities, and especially in connection with knowledge of the soul, our task is to take the knowledge bestowed by the gods on men in earlier days and brought down as a stimulus to our thought, and offer it up again at the altars of the gods. But the ideas and concepts we make our own must have their origin in spirituality.

Psychology as a science must be cultivated in such a way that it can emerge from the decadence into which it has fallen. This is not said out of arrogance but because it is what the times demand. There have been and there still are many psychologists: but they all work with concepts totally devoid of spirituality. It is significant that in 1874 a man like Franz Brentano published only the first volume of his Psychology, which in spite of certain distortions, is generally sound. He had announced the second volume for publication in the same year; but he came to a standstill and could not finish it. He was able to give an outline of what the content was to have been but to get beyond that a spiritual impulse would have been needed.

Modern psychologies, for example those written by Wundt and Lipps, do not really deserve the name because they work only with ideas previously evolved and it was obvious from the outset that nothing would come of them. Brentano's Psychology might have led to something but he came to a standstill—which is the fate of all dying sciences. It will not happen so quickly in the case of the natural sciences, where cut-and-dried concepts can be applied because facts are being collected and may be allowed to speak for themselves. With Psychology—the science of the soul—this is much less practicable, for the whole foundation disappears if any attempt is made to work with the ordinary, rigid concepts. You don't immediately lose touch with a heart-muscle even if you analyse it as if it were a mineral product and have no knowledge of its real nature. But you cannot analyse the soul in the same way.

The sciences are as it were dying from above downwards. And it will gradually dawn on men that while they are certainly able to turn the laws of nature to account, this is something quite independent of science itself. To construct machines and instruments, telephones and the like, is a very different matter from a basic understanding of the sciences, let alone the ability to further their progress. A man may have no fundamental understanding of electricity and yet be able to construct electrical apparatus. Science in the real sense is, however, gradually declining and we have now reached a point where in its present form it must be given new life through spiritual science. In our fifth culture-epoch science is rolling downwards by its own momentum: when the ball can roll no further it will come to a standstill, as Brentano did. At this time, therefore, it is imperative that the ascent of humanity should be given a stronger and stronger stimulus. This will indeed take place, but only if efforts continue to be made to fertilise knowledge acquired from outside with what spiritual investigation has to offer.

As I have said before, a kind of repetition of the old Egypto-Chaldean epoch will become apparent during our own fifth epoch. This repetition is at present only just beginning. Indications of this might have become clear to you during this General Meeting. Think, for instance, of Herr Seiler's lecture on Astrology. You will have felt that as students of Spiritual Science you are able to apply to astrological concepts ideas which would be quite impossible for a conventional astronomer, who will inevitably treat anything connected with Astrology as nonsense. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic character of Astronomy. As a matter of fact, Astronomy is the science par excellence which lends itself readily to being led back again to spirituality; from what Astronomy has at present to offer it would be easy to pass to the basic truths of Astrology which is so often derided. What stands in the way is that the general attitude of mind is so far removed from any return to spirituality. It will take time to build the bridge between Astronomy and Astrology and meanwhile all sorts of theories will be devised in an attempt to give a purely materialistic explanation of the planetary movements, and so on. In the case of the chemical and biological sciences the bridge will be even more difficult to build.

The building of a bridge can be easiest of all in the domain of Psychology—the science of the soul. The first requisite will be to understand the conclusion of my lectures on ‘Psychosophy’ where I showed that the stream of soul-life flows not only from the past into the future but also from the future into the past. There are two streams of time: the etheric stream, flowing into the future, and the astral stream, moving from the future back into the past. It is unlikely that anyone in the world today will discover anything of this character without a spiritual impulse, but there can be no real grasp of the life of soul until we recognise that something is perpetually coming towards us from the future. This concept is essential. We shall have to rid ourselves of the mode of thought which looks only to the past when cause and effect are being considered. We shall have to learn to speak of the future as something real, something moving towards us, just as we trail the past behind us. It will be a long time before such concepts are accepted; but until they are there will be no real Psychology.

The nineteenth century produced a really bright idea: Psychology without Soul! People were very proud of it. Roughly, what it meant was that psychological study should be confined to the external manifestations of the human soul and should take no account of the soul itself from which they originated. A science of the soul without soul! As a method this might be possible; but the outcome, to use a rough analogy, is a meal without food. That is modern Psychology. People are anything but satisfied if you give them a meal with nothing on their plates, but nineteenth century science was wonderfully content with a Psychology without soul. Such a trend began at a comparatively early stage and spiritual life must flow as a strong impulse into this whole domain.

The old life has come to an end and a new life must begin. We must feel that there was given to us from the ancient Atlantean epoch a primeval wisdom which has gradually withered away and that in our present incarnation we are faced with the task of gathering a new wisdom for the men of a later time. To make this possible was the purpose of the Christ Impulse, and the activity and power of that Impulse will continually increase. It may be that the Christ Impulse will work most strongly when all tradition—in history too—has died away and men find their way to Christ Himself as the true reality.

You can see, then, that the course of post-Atlantean evolution and the life of an individual human being are comparable as Macrocosm with Microcosm. But the individual is in a strange situation. What is there left to him in the second part of his life but to absorb and assimilate what he acquired for himself in the first half? And when that is all used up, death follows. The spirit alone can be victorious over death and carry forward into a new incarnation what begins to decay after the half-way point of life has been passed. Development is on the ascent until the thirty-fifth year. After that there is decline. But it is precisely then that the spirit takes a hand. What it cannot incorporate into the bodily nature of man during the second half of life it brings to blossom in a later incarnation. As the body withers the spirit gradually comes to fruition.

The macrocosm of humanity as a whole reveals a similar picture. Until the fourth post-Atlantean epoch there is a youthful, thriving development of culture. From then onwards there is a decline—symptoms of death everywhere in the evolution of human consciousness, but at the same time the inflow of new spiritual life which will incarnate again as the spiritual life of humanity in the culture-epoch following our own. But man must work with full consciousness on what is subsequently to incarnate again. The rest will die away. We can look prophetically into the future and see the birth of many sciences seeming to benefit post-Atlantean civilisation although they belong to what is dying. But the life that is poured into humanity under the direct influence of the Christ Impulse will come to manifestation in the future just as the Atlantean knowledge came again to manifestation in the holy Rishis.

Ordinary science knows of the Copernican system only that part which is in process of dying. The part that will live on and bear fruit—and that is not the part that has been influential for four centuries—must now be mastered by men through their own efforts. Copernicanism as presented to-day is not strictly true. Spiritual investigation alone can reveal its real truth. The same holds good for Astronomy, and for everything else that is regarded as knowledge to-day. Science can of course be of practical use and as technology completely justified. But in so far as it pretends to contribute to human knowledge in its real form, it is a dead product. It is useful for the immediate handiwork of men and for that no spiritual content is necessary. But as far as it purports to have anything vital to say about the mysteries of the Universe it belongs to the culture that is dying. If knowledge of the mysteries of the Universe is to be enriched, the orthodox science of to-day must be imbued with life through the findings of Spiritual Science.

The foregoing lectures were intended as an introduction to the study of St. Mark's Gospel which we shall now begin. I had first to show how essential this greatest of all spiritual impulses was for human evolution just at the time when only the last, most tenuous threads of spirituality remained to mankind.

There are certain deeper questions of karmic connection concerning more especially our human influence upon karma, particularly upon that of other people, and concerning also the changing of the direction of karma, be it to a greater or less extent. Such questions as these one can neither answer nor even give an idea of how they ought to be answered, without touching, as we shall today, upon certain important secrets of our world existence. They may perhaps arise out of what has been said, if we follow up what has been broached and had light thrown upon it from one side or another.

We may ask what happens in a person's karma when by reason of his previous acts or experiences there has arisen a necessity for illness to compensate for these acts and experiences, and this person is really healed through human assistance by means of remedies or other intervention. What does this signify and in what way is such a fact related to a deeper conception of karmic law?

Now I will begin by saying that in order to throw any important light at all upon this question, things must be touched upon which are far removed from the science and the present thought of today and which may, so to say, only be spoken of amongst Anthroposophists who, having absorbed some of the truths relating to the deeper foundations of existence, have already prepared themselves for such things, and have acquired a perception of how things which today can only be indicated, may nevertheless be fully proved. I should like, however, to take this opportunity of asking one thing of you. I am today compelled to talk about the deeper foundations of the earth's existence which I shall endeavour to express as precisely as possible. But this would be wrong if it were used in another connection or spoken of without any connection at all, and would lead to one misunderstanding after another. I ask you for the present just to accept it only, and make no other use of it. I must also make a point, regarding these things, that they should not be handed on; that no one should consider them as a teaching which may in any way spread further; for only the connection justifies such a statement, and such a statement is justifiable only when it is backed by the consciousness that can coin suitable words to express thoughts of this kind.

We are now speaking, on the one hand, of the deeper nature of material existence, and on the other, of the nature of soul existence. We must today acquire a deeper comprehension of what pertains to the soul and to the material world. This is, indeed, necessary for a quite definite reason—for the reason given in the previous lectures when we said that the soul of man can penetrate more or less deeply into matter. We described yesterday the nature of the male by saying that in a man the soul penetrates deeper into matter, while in the female the soul holds back in a certain way and is more independent of matter. We saw that much of karmic experience depends upon how the penetration of the soul into matter takes place. We saw also how certain illnesses in one incarnation appear as the karmic consequences of errors made by the soul in former incarnations when it worked at its deeds, experiences and impulses. Then on the way between death and a new birth the soul acquired the tendency to transform into matter that which was formerly only a characteristic, a mere influence in the soul; so it now permeates the body. Because the human being is then permeated by a soul which has also absorbed either the luciferic or ahrimanic influence, the human substance will in consequence be damaged. Here is to be found the cause of illness, and we may therefore say: In a sick body there dwells a damaged soul which has come under a wrong influence—a luciferic or ahrimanic influence; and the moment we are able to remove these influences from the soul, the normal relationship of soul and the body should come about, and health should be re-established. What then is the relation between these two members of the earthly human existence of which we are now speaking, matter and soul? What are they in their deeper nature?

The man of the present day is generally of the opinion that the answer to the question, ‘Of what does matter consist? What is the soul?’—if it could be given at all—must prove to be the same all over the world. I do not think it would be easy for him to understand that for the beings who lived upon the old Moon, the answer to these questions must be quite different from those of beings who live upon the Earth. For existence is so much in the throes of evolution, that even the ideas may alter which a being may have about the deeper foundations of his own nature; so that the answer to this question, ‘What is matter, what is the soul?’ must also vary. It must at once be emphasised that the answers which will be given are only those which the earth-man can make, and are of significance only to the earth-man.

A person will at first judge ‘matter’ according to what confronts him in the external world in the shape of different beings and things, and everything which makes an impression upon him in any way. Then he discovers that there are different sorts of matter. But I need not go very far into that, for you may find in all the ordinary books those expositions which could be given here if we had time enough. These differences in matter present themselves to man when he sees the different metals, gold, copper, lead, and so on, or when he sees anything that does not belong to this category. You know, too, that chemistry traces these different materials back to certain fundamental substances of matter, called ‘elements.’ These elements, even in the nineteenth century, were still considered to be substances possessing certain properties which did not admit of being further divided. But in the case of a substance such as water, we are able to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, yet in hydrogen and oxygen themselves we have substances which, according to the chemistry of the nineteenth century, were incapable of being further divided. One could distinguish about seventy such elements. You will doubtless also know that owing to phenomena which have been produced in connection with a few special elements—radium, for instance—and also owing to various phenomena produced in the study of electricity, the idea of the elements has been shaken in many ways. One has come to the conclusion that the seventy elements were only temporary limitations of matter, and that one could trace back the possibility of subdivision to a fundamental substance, which then through inner combinations, through the nature of its inner elementary being, manifests at one time as gold, at another time as potash, lime, and so on.

These scientific theories vary; and just as the scientific theories changed in ‘each fifty years’ of the nineteenth century, so it came about that certain physicists saw in matter certain entities which are charged with electricity; just as the ionic theory is now in fashion—for there are fashions in science—in the same way at no distant future other scientific methods will exist, and our idea of the constitution of matter will be quite different. These are facts. Scientific opinions are changeable, and must be changeable, for they depend altogether upon those facts which are of significance for one particular epoch. The teachings of Spiritual Science on the other hand continue through all ages—as long as there are civilisations on the earth—and will continue as long as these civilisations exist. It has always had the same comprehensive view regarding the nature of material existence and matter; and in order to lead you on to what Spiritual Science looks upon as the essential part of matter and of substance, I should like to say the following:

You all know that ice is a solid body—not through its own nature, but through external circumstances. It at once ceases to be a solid if we raise the temperature sufficiently; it then becomes a fluid substance. Therefore it does not depend upon what is in a substance itself as to what form it takes in the external world, but upon the entire conditions of the universe surrounding it. We can then further bring heat to this substance, and out of the water we can, after a certain point, produce steam. We have ice, water, steam, and through the raising of the temperature we have caused what we may describe as ‘the appearance of matter in manifold forms.’ Thus we have to distinguish in matter that the appearance it presents to us does not come out of an inner constitution, but that the manner in which it confronts us depends upon the general constitution of the universe, and that one must not isolate any part of the whole universe into individual substances. Now the methods of modern science cannot reach where Spiritual Science is able to reach. The science of today can never, by means of the methods at its disposal, bring the substance of ice—which, when the temperature is increased, is first made fluidic and then turned into steam—into the final condition attainable on earth, into which every substance can be transmuted. It is not possible today, by scientific means, to bring about conditions which show that ‘if you take gold and rarefy it as far as it can be rarefied upon the earth, you will bring it at last to a state which could equally be reached by silver or by copper.’ Spiritual Science can do this because it is based upon the methods of spiritual research; is thus able to observe how, in the spaces between substances, there is always a uniform substance everywhere which represents the extreme limit to which all matter is reducible. Spiritual research discovers a condition of dissolution in which all materials are reduced to a common basis, but what then appears there is no longer matter, but something which lies beyond all the specialised forms of matter around us. Every single substance, be it gold, silver, or any other substance, is there seen to be a condensation of this fundamental substance, which is really no longer matter. There is a fundamental essence of our material earth existence out of which all matter only comes into being by a condensing process, and to the question: What is this fundamental substance of our earth existence, Spiritual Science gives the answer: ‘Every substance upon the earth is condensed light.’ There is nothing in material existence in any form whatever which is anything but condensed light. Hence you see that to those who know the facts, there can be no necessity for such a theory as that of the ‘vibration hypothesis’ of the nineteenth century. Therein one sought to find light by methods which themselves are coarser than the light itself. Light cannot be traced back to anything else in our material existence. Wherever you reach out and touch a substance, there you have condensed, compressed light. All matter is, in its essence, light.

We have thus indicated one side of the question from the point of view of Spiritual Science. We have seen that light is the foundation of all material existence. If we look at the material human body, that also, inasmuch as it consists of matter, is nothing but a substance woven out of light. Inasmuch as man is a material being, he is composed of light.

Let us now consider the other question: ‘Of what does the soul consist?’ If we were to make research in the same way, by means of the methods of Spiritual Science, into the substance, into the really fundamental essence of the soul, then it would appear that just as all matter is compressed light, so all the different phenomena of the soul upon earth are modifications, are manifold transformations of that which must be called, if we truly realise the fundamental meaning of the word: love. Every stirring of the soul, wherever it appears, is in some way a modification of love, and if the inner and the outer are, as it were, intermingled, impressed into one another in man, we find also that his outer bodily part is woven out of light, and his inner soul is woven spiritually out of love. Love and light are, indeed, in some way interwoven in all the phenomena of our earth existence, and anyone who wishes to understand things as explained by Spiritual Science, will first of all ask: To what extent are love and light interwoven?

Love and light are the two elements, the two component parts of all earthly existence: love as the soul part, and light as the outer material part.

Now, however, another fact comes in. For both these elements, light and love, which would otherwise be side by side throughout the great course of the world existence, there must be found an intermediary, weaving the one element into the other—light into love. This must needs be a power which has no particular interest in love, which thus weaves light into the element of love—a power which is interested only in causing the light to be spread abroad to as great an extent as possible, and therefore causes light to stream into the element of love. Such a power cannot be terrestrial for the earth is the Cosmos of Love; and its mission is to weave love in everywhere. Anything, therefore, which is bound up with the earth existence can have no interest which is not to some degree influenced by love.

It is the luciferic beings which act here—for they remained behind upon the Moon upon the Cosmos of Wisdom. They are particularly interested in weaving light into love. The luciferic beings are everywhere at work when our inner part which is actually woven out of love comes into any sort of connection with light, in whatsoever form it may be found; and we are confronted with light in all material existence. Wheresoever we come into connection with light, the luciferic beings enter, and the luciferic influence becomes woven into love. In that way man first, in the course of his incarnations, entered the luciferic element. Lucifer has woven himself into the element of love; and all that is formed from love has the impress of Lucifer, which alone can bring us what causes love to be not merely a self-abandonment, but permeates it in its innermost being with wisdom. Otherwise, without this wisdom, love would be an impersonal force in man for which he could not be responsible. But in this way love becomes the essential force of the Ego where that luciferic element is woven, which otherwise is only to be found outside in matter. Thus it becomes possible for our inner being which, during earth existence, should receive the attribute of love in its fullness, to be permeated besides by everything that may be described as an activity of Lucifer, and from this side leads to a penetration of external matter; so that which is woven out of light is not interwoven with love alone, but with love that is permeated by Lucifer. When man takes up the luciferic—element, he interweaves into the material part of his own body a soul which is, it is true, woven out of love, but into which the luciferic element is interwoven. It is that love which is permeated with the luciferic element, which impregnates matter and is the cause of illness working out from within. In connection with what we have already mentioned as being a necessary consequence of an illness proceeding from a luciferic element, we may say that the ensuing pain, which we have seen is a consequence of the Luciferic element, shows us the effect of the working of the karmic law. So the consequences of an act or a temptation coming from Lucifer are experienced karmically and the pain itself indicates what should lead to the overcoming of the consequences in question.

Now ought we to help in such a case or not? Ought we in any way to cancel what has pressed in from the luciferic element with all its consequences working out in pain?

Remembering the answer to our question as to the nature of the soul, it follows of necessity that we have the right to do this only if we find the means, in the case of a man who has the luciferic element in him which caused his illness, to expel that luciferic element in the right way. What is the remedy which exerts a stronger action, so that the luciferic element is driven out. What is it which has been defiled by the luciferic element on our earth? It is love! Hence only by means of love can we give real help for karma to work out in the right way. Finally we must see in that element of love which has been psychically influenced by Lucifer resulting in illness, a force which must be affected by another force. We must pour in love. All those acts of healing dependent upon what we may call a ‘psychic healing process’ must have the characteristic that love is part of the process. In some form or other all psychic healing depends on a stream of love, which we pour into another person as a balsam. All that is done in this domain must finally be traced back to love; and this can be done. Even if we set simple psychic factors in action; if we assist another, perhaps, only to overcome depression, this can be traced back to love. All arises from the impulse of love, from simpler processes of healing, to that which is often, in amateur fashion called ‘magnetic healing.’ What does the healer communicate to the one to be healed? It is, to use an expression of physics, an ‘interchange of tensions.’ Certain processes in the etheric body of the healer create with the person to be healed a sort of polarity. Polarity arises just as it would arise in an abstract sense, when one kind of electricity, say positive, is produced and then the corresponding electricity—the negative—appears. Thus polarities are created, and this act must be conceived as emanating from sacrifice. One evokes in oneself a process which is not intended to be significant to oneself only, for then one would call forth one process only; in this case, however, the process is intended in addition to induce a polarity in another person, and this polarity, which naturally depends upon a contact between the healer and the person to be healed, is, in the fullest sense of the word, the sacrifice of a force which is no other than the transmuted action of love. That is what is really active in these psychic healings—a transmuted power of love. We must clearly understand that without this fundamental love-force the healing will not lead to the right goal. But these processes of love need not always run their course [so] that the person is fully aware of them with his ordinary day-consciousness; they run their course also in the region of the subconscious. In that which is considered as the technique of the healing process, even to the way in which the movements of the hands are made, and technically reduced to a system, we have the reflection of a sacrificial act. Therefore even where we do not see the direct connection in a process of healing, when we do not see what is being done, we have, nevertheless, before us an act of love, although the action may be completely transformed to a mere technique.

Since the soul consists fundamentally of love, we can assist with psychic factors. And these processes apparently lie very near the periphery of human nature, and by such factors of healing that which in its essence consists of love is enriched by what it requires in the way of love. Thus on the one side we see how we can help, so that, after being caught in the toils of Lucifer, the sufferer is able to free himself again. Because love is the fundamental essence of the soul, we may, indeed, influence the direction of karma.

On the other hand, we may ask, what has become of the substance woven from light in which the soul dwells?

Take the body—the outer man in his material part. If through a karmic process there had not been imprinted from out of the soul into matter a love substance such as is permeated by Lucifer or Ahriman; if a pure love substance only had poured in, it would not have been impurifying, or damaging to the substance woven out of light. If love alone were to flow into matter, it would then so flow into the human body that the latter could not be damaged. It is only because a love which has absorbed luciferic or ahrimanic forces can penetrate that the substance woven out of light becomes less perfect than it was originally intended to be. Therefore it is only through pouring into man of the luciferic or ahrimanic influences during his consecutive incarnations, that the human organisation is not what it might be. If it were as it ought to be, it would manifest healthy human substance; but because it has absorbed the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman, sickness and disease result.

How can we draw from outside those influences which have flowed in from an imperfect soul, that is, from a wrong love substance? What happens to the body by this influx of something which is faulty? According to Spiritual Science something happens which turns light in some way into its opposite. Light has its opposite in darkness or obscurity. Everything really presenting itself—strange as it may sound—as the defilement of that which is woven out of light, is a darkness woven out of a luciferic or ahrimanic influence. Thus we see darkness woven into the human substance. But this darkness was only thus interwoven because the human body has become the bearer of the Ego that lives on through the incarnations. This was formerly not there. Only a human body can be subject to this corruption, for such a corruption was formerly not contained in that which was woven out of light.

Man today draws the base of his material life out of what he has gradually rejected in the course of evolution—that is, the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. These also contain the different substances woven out of light for earth existence. But in none of these substances are there any of the influences which, in the course of human karma have acted on the organism through the soul. In the three kingdoms around us, therefore, man cannot through his luciferic or ahrimanic influence, as emanating from his love forces, have a defiling effect. Nothing of him is here. And what in man has been defiled is spread around him in all its purity. Let us consider a mineral substance, a salt or any other substance which man has also within him, or might have within him. But in him it is interwoven with the love substance defiled by Lucifer or Ahriman. Outside, however, it is pure. Thus every substance outside is distinguished from that which man bears within him. Externally it is always different from what it is in man, because in him it is interwoven with the ahrimanic or luciferic influence. That is the reason why, for everything of external substance which can be more or less defiled by man, there must be something which can be found externally representing the same thing in its pure condition. That which exists in the world in its purity, is the external cure for the corresponding substance in its damaged state. If you apply this in the right way to the human being, you then have the specific for the corresponding injury.

Thus we find in quite an objective way, what may be applied to the human body as a remedy. Here is the injury characterised as a form of darkness—and that which is not yet dark as the outer woven pure light; and we see why we are able to remove the darkness to be found in man if we bring pure substance woven from light to bear upon him. Thus we have a specific remedy for the injury. Now attention has often been drawn to the fact that Anthroposophists in particular should not fall into the narrow-minded error of denying that in such cases there really is a specific remedy against this or that injury, or which beneficially affects this or the other organ. It has often been said that the organism has within it the forces with which to help itself. Even although the Vienna School of Nihilistic Therapeutics may be right in its assertion that by calling up the opposing forces we can bring about a cure, we may nevertheless help on the cure by specific remedies. Here we see a parallel which one may describe from Spiritual Science.

From what I have said about diphtheria, for instance, you may gather that the karmic causes have in this case particularly affected the astral body. Now closely related to the astral body is the animal kingdom You will always find in those forms of illness closer connected with the astral body, that medical science, unconsciously driven by a dim impulse, seeks for remedies from the animal kingdom. For such illnesses whose causes lie in the etheric body, science seeks for remedies out of the vegetable kingdom. An interesting lecture might be given about the relation of the purple foxglove to certain illnesses of the heart. These are things which, inasmuch as they are based on truth, are not right for five years only—as one doctor states—and then begin to be wrong—as in the case when only external symptoms are taken into consideration. But there is a certain treasure of remedies which can always in some way be traced back to some connection with Spiritual Science, which have been inherited without any knowledge whence they came. Just as today the astronomers do not know that the theory of Kant and Laplace came from the mystery schools of the Middle Ages, so people do not know whence came these real valuable remedies. Causes of illness, which are connected with the nature of the physical body, lead to the use of remedies from the mineral kingdom.

A simple consideration of these analogous views will provide a fingerpost for these matters. Through his connection with the surrounding world, man can be helped from two different sides: on the one hand bringing him transmuted love from the psychic method of healing and on the other hand by bringing him transmuted light in various ways by those processes which are connected with external methods of healing. Everything which can be done is brought about either by inner psychic means—by love—or by the external means of densified light. When one day science has advanced so far as to learn to believe in the super-sensible and in the saying: ‘Matter is a form of condensed light,’ then a spiritual light will be thrown by these words upon the systematic research on external remedies. Hence we see that what during long ages, from the mystery schools of old Egypt and old Greece, was gradually added to the treasure of healing is not mere nonsense, but that in all these things there is a sound kernel. Anthroposophy does not exist in order to attack a certain school of medicine, and to say, ‘There they give people poisons!’ The word poison today works as a suggestion, and people do not reflect how relative this word is. For what is ‘poison’? Every substance may be a poison. It is only a question of the methods of healing and of how much is taken at a time. Water is a strong poison, if one takes ten bucketfuls at one time. The results of this, considered chemically, are not very different from what they would be if one gave a person any other substance. It depends always upon the quantity, for all these ideas are relative.

From what we have gone into today, we can be glad that for every injury we can do to injure our body, there is to be found in surrounding nature, which now appears to us as the world, that which will make it whole again. It is also a beautiful relationship that we have for the external world, and we may rejoice not only because we see the beautiful flowers and the mountains glowing in the sunlight, but also because our surroundings are so intimately connected with what is in man himself, good or bad. We can rejoice in nature, not only for what appeals at first sight, but the deeper we go into what has condensed into external material existence, the more we shall find that this nature which causes us to rejoice has within it at the same time the mighty healer for all the damage man can cause himself. Somewhere in nature the remedy is concealed. It is a question, not only of understanding the language of the healer, but also of obeying it and really carrying it out. Today it is in most cases impossible for us to hear the voice of healing nature because our misunderstanding of light, and the darkness which has penetrated into knowledge has in many respects brought about conditions preventing us from hearing. Therefore we must clearly understand that where in one case no help can properly be given, where, on account of karmic connections, some suffering may not properly be lessened, this does not mean that it absolutely could not be done.

Here again we see a remarkable connection which allows us to perceive the whole great world, inclusive of mankind, as One Being. In the sayings: ‘Matter is woven light,’ and ‘the soul is in some way or other diluted love,’ are to be found the keys of innumerable secrets of earth existence. But these hold good only for the earth existence, and would not concern any other domain of the world existence. Thus we have shown nothing less than that we, if in any way we alter the direction of karma, unite ourselves in one or the other case with the elements composing our earth existence: on the one side with light which has become matter—and on the other side with love which has become soul. We either draw the remedies out of our surroundings, out of the condensed light, or out of our own soul by the healing loving act, the sacrificial act, and we then heal with the soul-forces obtained from love. We unite ourselves with what is most deeply justified upon the earth, when, on the one hand, we unite ourselves with light and on the other with love. All earth conditions are in some way conditions of balance between light and love and everything unhealthy is a disturbance of that balance. If the disturbance is in love, we can then help by unfolding the forces of love; and if the disturbance is in light, we can then help by somehow providing for ourselves, out of the universe, that light which is able to dissolve the darkness within us.

These are the fundamental ways of help, and we see again how everything depends upon the balance of opposites. Light and love are polar opposites and on their being interwoven depend ultimately all the psychic and material processes of our life. Therefore in all the spheres of human life, evolution continues from epoch to epoch with the balance inclining first to one side and then swinging back to the other, so that evolution resembles the surging of waves. This motion of an unstable equilibrium throws light even on the most complex processes of civilisation. Take a period when certain injuries entered into the evolution of mankind because man contemplated only [the] inner and neglected the outer, for example, in the Middle Ages. It was then that through the blossoming of the mystical side, the external remained unheeded and errors occurred not only in knowledge but in action. Then followed the age that was repelled by mysticism, and was attracted by the outer world so as to make the pendulum swing to the opposite side.

Here is the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times and many such disturbances of the balance, manifest in different ways.

In this connection I should like to note that just in such times as our own, a characteristic in many people is that they completely forget, and pay no attention to, that which one may call ‘the consciousness of a super-sensible world.’ They pay no attention whatever to the fact that there is a spiritual world, and they therefore turn away their thoughts from it. In such an age—or in all such ages—there is always in certain respects a counterpart to be found. I should like to show you this in a very simple manner.

When there are people upon the physical plane who are so absorbed in the physical that they completely forget the spiritual, then a contrary tendency appears among those souls who are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth—a tendency which works over from the physical into the spiritual plane—impelling them to occupy themselves with the influences which act out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is this which brings about in the physical world the intervention by souls who are still in that state before birth. These souls work down into the physical world according to the means which offer and they are able to work indirectly through persons who are more sensitive to such influence from the spiritual world. In order to make this clearer, one must not accept everything that purports to be a revelation from a Spiritual world. We must distinguish the real characteristic cases in which the dead are anxious show in a palpable manner that there is indeed a spiritual world. Because there are so many people completely in the dark, who have woven so much darkness into themselves that they wish to know nothing about the spiritual world, there are, on the other hand, among the dead many who have the impulse to work into the physical world. Such things generally occur when nothing is done deliberately to bring them about on the physical plane and they occur without special preparation.

You will find much proof of these things collected in the book by our friend, Ludwig Deinhard, Das Mysterium des Menschen (The Mystery of Man). Here much has been collected and systematised which is just what one needs, and which in the scientific literature of to-day is so scattered that it is impossible for everyone to gather it together. Therefore it is a good thing to have in this book a collection of these spiritual facts, which, as you now see, are eminently characteristic of one aspect of our age. You will find very aptly described in this book the characteristic fact of an investigator, who by materialistic methods had in his earth life endeavoured to give every possible proof of the spiritual world—I mean the late Frederick Myers—and who after his death was strongly impelled to show to mankind by means of radiations from the spiritual world and by the help of the spiritual world, what he had endeavoured to do when here.

This is intended to illustrate how in the world and in world affairs we see continual disturbances of the balance, and then again the efforts for the restoring of the balance.

This continual disturbance and restoration of the balance between the two elements of light and love is fundamental for us; and in human karma, from incarnation to incarnation, both work to restore the disturbed condition. Karma, working its serpentine way through incarnations is just such a disturbed balance, until man, after all his incarnations, shall at last create the final balance which can be reached upon earth. Having fulfilled his mission on earth, he evolves then into a new planetary form.

I have endeavoured to set forth a few facts, without which a deeper establishment of karmic connections and laws would be impossible. I have not shrunk from touching to-day upon those mysteries for which our modern science will not for a long time be ripe: Matter is in reality woven light, and that which belongs to the soul is in some way or other refined love. These are ancient occult sayings, but they are sayings which will for all time remain true and will prove fruitful for human evolution, not only for knowledge, but also for human work and action.

Before we can develop all that can be extracted from the significant picture of the ‘Twilight of the Gods’, it will be well to form a foundation, a basis, to work from. For we shall deal with the nature of the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-soul, and from the results of our investigation describe it more minutely. We must see how in Europe the whole collective spiritual life worked in co-operation, how through the activity of the various Folkspirits progress was brought about in mankind, beginning from the earliest ages and proceeding through our present age on into the future.

Each individual people, yea, even all the smaller subdivisions of peoples have their special task in this great collective picture; and you will perceive from what has been said, that in a certain respect it was just to the pre-Christian and post-Christian cultures of Europe that the task, the mission was given to educate the ‘I’ through the different stages of the human being, to form it and gradually to develop it. As we have shown to be the case in the Germanic Scandinavian people, the ‘I’ was in primal ages still clairvoyantly shown to man from the spiritual world. It was shown that this ‘I’ was bestowed upon man by an Angelic Being, who stands between man and the Folk-soul, by Donar or Thor. We have seen that each single individual felt himself to be ‘I’-less, impersonal; to him the ‘I’ was a gift, presented to him from the spiritual world. Naturally in the East, when the ‘I’ actually awoke, they did not find it in that way. There man had already evolved subjectively to such a high stage of human perfection, that he did not feel the ‘I’ as something foreign to him, but as his own. When in the East man awoke to the ‘I’, Eastern culture had already proceeded so far, that it was capable of gradually developing that delicately spun speculation, logic and wisdom, which we have before us in the Eastern Wisdom.

Therefore the East did not experience the whole process of receiving the ‘I’ as though coming from a higher spiritual world, with the assistance of a divine spiritual individuality such as Thor. This was experienced in Europe, and hence the European felt this gradual ascent to the individual ‘I’ as the emerging from a kind of group-soul. The Germanic Scandinavian still felt himself attached to a group-soul, belonging to a whole community, as if he were a part in the great body of his people. Thus only could it come about that nearly 100 years after the Christ-impulse had been given to the earth, Tacitus could describe the Germans of Central Europe as appearing to belong to separate tribes, and yet as members of one organism and belonging to the unity of the organism. At that time each individual still felt himself to be a member of the tribal ‘I’. He felt his individual ‘I’ being gradually born out of the tribal ‘I’, and in the God Thor he recognized the giver, the bestower of the ‘I’, the God who really presented him with the individual ‘I’. But he felt this God to be still united with the collective spirit of the tribe, with that which dwelt in the group-soul. To this group-soul was given the name Sif. That is the name of the spouse of Thor. Sif must linguistically be connected with the word Sippe-tribal relationship,—and this connection really exists, although veiled and hidden. Occultly, however, Sif signifies the group-soul of the individual community from which the single individual grows forth. Sif is the being who unites herself with the God of the individual ‘I’, with the giver of the individual ‘I’, with Thor. The individual man recognized Sif and Thor as the Beings who gave him his ‘I’. The Northman still felt thus about them, at a time when to the peoples in other parts of Europe other tasks had already been given in the educating of man up to the ‘I’.

Every single people has its particular task. There above all we find that people, that collection of peoples, that community of peoples whom we know by the name of Celts. The Folk-spirit of the Celts—of whom from former lectures we know that later he received quite different tasks—then had the task of educating the still youthful ‘I’ of the peoples of Europe. For this it was necessary that the Celts should receive an education and instruction which was communicated directly from the higher world. Hence it is perfectly true that through their Initiates, the Druid Priests, the Celts did receive instruction from the higher worlds which they could not have acquired by their own strength, and which they then had to hand on further to the other nations.

The collective culture of Europe is a gift of the European Mysteries. The progressive Folk-souls are, as they progress, always the leaders of the collective culture of humanity. But at the time when these Folk-spirits of Europe had to direct men to work from out of themselves, it became necessary that the Mysteries should begin to withdraw. Hence with the withdrawal of the Celtic element there took place a kind of withdrawal of the Mysteries into much more secret depths. At the time of the old Celts there was, through the Mysteries, a much more direct intercourse between the spiritual Beings and the people, because the ‘I’ was still united to the group-soul nature, and yet the Celtic element was to be the donor of the ‘I’ to the other part of the population. We might therefore say, that before the actual Germanic Scandinavian evolution began, the mystery-education could only be given to European civilization by the old Celtic Mysteries. This mystery-education allowed just so much to come to the surface as was necessary to form a foundation for the whole culture of Europe. Now out of this old culture, through intermingling with the many different races, peoples and subdivisions of peoples, the most varied Folk-souls and Folkspirits were able to fertilize themselves, and they brought the ‘I’ into ever different conditions in order to educate it, the ‘I’ which has worked its way up out of the foundations of all that lies below the ‘I’ of man.

After the old Greek culture had to a certain extent reached a culminating point in the fulfillment of its special mission, we see quite a different aspect of this same mission in the Roman Empire and its various stages of culture. We have already mentioned that the several post-Atlantean civilizations follow one another in certain order. If we wish to obtain a survey over these successive stages of post-Atlantean civilization, we may say that the old Indian culture worked upon the human etheric body. Hence the wonderfully wise, clairvoyant character of the old Indian culture, because—after the development of the special human capacities—it was a culture that was in the human etheric body; so that we may say, the ancient Indian culture is to be understood somewhat as follows (see diagram).

From the Atlantean down to the later post-Atlantean epoch the Indian Folk-spirit went through the whole of the development of the inner soul forces, without his ‘I’ being wakened. He then returned to his work in the human etheric body. The essential thing in the old Indian culture is that the Indian, with completely developed soul-forces, with soul-forces refined to the highest point, goes back again into the etheric body, and within that he perfects those wonderfully delicate powers, the later reflection of which we see in the Vedas and in a still more refined condition in the Vedantic philosophy. All this was only possible because the Indian Folk-soul had evolved to high degree before the ‘I’ was seen and realized, and this again occurred at a time when man could perceive by means of the forces of the etheric body itself.

The Persian Folk-soul had not progressed so far as this, only so far as to perception in the sentient body or astral body. It was again different at the time of the Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldæan culture. That part of man which we describe as the Sentient Soul was then able to perceive, and we must therefore describe this Egyptian-Chaldæan culture as working in the Sentient Soul. The Græco-Latin Folk-spirit was directed to the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, and worked in that. He himself was only able to work upon this Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings because it had a sort of expression of its nature in the etheric body. But this form of world-conception which now appeared in Greece was less real, as it were, less objective, it bore less of the stamp of reality. Whereas in the old Indian culture there was a more direct activity in the etheric body, there was a more blurred, a fainter image of the reality, which, as I have said, was like a memory of what these peoples had once experienced, a memory reflected in their etheric body.

In the other peoples which then follow upon the Greek people we have to deal principally with the use of the physical body for the development, stage by stage, of the Spiritual Soul. Hence the Greek culture was one which we can only understand if we try to do so from within, if we realize that in this culture what is important in external experience is that which pours forth from the inner nature of the Greeks. On the other hand the peoples lying more towards the West and the North have the task, under the guidance of their Folk-souls, of directing their gaze out into the world, and of seeing what is there to be seen on the physical plane, and of perfecting that which has to play a part on that plane. The Germanic Scandinavian peoples had also the special task of perfecting this as they alone could, because they still enjoyed the blessing of being able to see into the spiritual world with the old clairvoyance, and to carry the primeval experiences which they perceived so vividly, into that which had to be arranged on the physical plane.

One people there was, which, at its later stage no longer possessed this blessing; which in the first place had not gone through such a previous evolution, but had been placed on the physical plane at one bound, as it were, before the birth of the human ‘I’ and therefore was only able under the guidance of its Folk-soul, of its Archangel, to look after that which helped this human ‘I’ on the physical plane, that which was necessary for its well-being there. This was the Roman people. Everything that the Roman people had, under the guidance of its Folk-spirit, to accomplish for the collective mission of Europe, was for the purpose of giving importance to the ‘I’ of man as such. Hence the Roman people was able to develop that which places the ego among other egos. It was able to found the whole system of the rights of the individual. Hence it was the creator of jurisprudence, which is built up purely on the ‘I’. The relation of one ‘I’ to another was the great question in the mission of the Roman people. The other peoples, which grew out of the Roman civilization, already possessed more of what—coming so to say from the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings and from the Spiritual Soul itself—in some way or other fertilizes the ‘I’ and drives it out into the world. Therefore all the mixtures of races of which external history relates, which occurred on the Italian and Pyrenean Peninsula, in present-day France and in present-day Great Britain, were necessary in order to develop the ‘I’ in the different shades of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, and the Spiritual Soul on the physical plane. That was the great mission of those peoples which gradually developed in various ways in Western Europe.

All the several shades of culture and the missions of the peoples of Western Europe can finally be explained by the fact that there had to be developed in the direction of the Italian and Pyrenean peninsulas that which could be formed in the ‘I’ through the impulse of the Sentient Soul. If you study the several folk-characters in their light and shadow sides, you will find that in the peoples of the Italian and Pyrenean peninsulas there is a peculiar mingling of the ‘I’ with the Sentient Soul.

Then you will be able to understand the peculiar nature of those peoples who till now have lived in the land of France, if you consider the growth and mingling of the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, with the ‘I’.

The great world-historical effects, however, which we may consider as represented by Great Britain, are to be traced back to the impulse of the Spiritual Soul penetrating into the human ‘I’. With the world-historical mission that proceeded from Great Britain is also connected that which proceeded from the founding of the external constitutional form. The union of the Spiritual Soul with the ‘I’ did not exist as yet inwardly. If, however, you recognize how this union came about between the Spiritual Soul and the ‘I’ that had been driven outwards, you will find that the great historical conquests made by the inhabitants of that island proceed from that impulse. You will also find that what took place there in the founding of the parliamentary forms of government at once becomes comprehensible, if you know that an impulse of the Spiritual Soul was to be placed on the plane of the world's history.

Thus many shades were necessary, for the several peoples had to be guided through many stages of the ‘I’. If we had sufficient time to follow these things on further we should find pictures in history which would show us how the basic forces branch and work out in the most various ways. Thus did the peculiar constitution of the soul work among the western peoples, who had not preserved in themselves the direct elementary remembrance of the clairvoyantly experienced things of the spiritual world of former times.

In later times, in the Germanic Scandinavian domains, that which proceeded directly from a gradual, successive evolution of primeval clairvoyance and which had already been poured into the Sentient Soul, had to develop in quite a different way. Hence that current of inwardness, which indeed is only the after-effect of a more inward clairvoyant experience gone through in a former age. The Southern Germanic peoples had in the first place their task in the domain of the Spiritual Soul.

The Græco-Latin age had to develop the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings. But it had not merely to give the impulse with this soul, it had to work also with a wonderful premature development that was endowed with clairvoyant experience. All this was poured into the Spiritual Souls of the Central European and Northern Germanic peoples. It worked among these souls as an inner capacity, and the Germanic peoples living more to the South had first of all to develop what pertains to the inward preparation of the Spiritual Soul, to fill it inwardly with the consciousness resulting from the old clairvoyance, but transposed on to the physical plane.

The philosophies of Central Europe, those philosophies which were represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel as late as in the nineteenth century, are apparently far removed from the sphere of mythology, but they are nevertheless nothing but the result of the most penetrating old clairvoyance, acquired by man when he worked in co-operation with the divine spiritual Beings. It would otherwise have been impossible for a Hegel to have looked upon his ideas as realities, it would have been impossible for him to make the strange statement so characteristic of him, when, in answer to the question, ‘what is the abstract?’, he replied, ‘The abstract is for instance an individual man who performs his daily duties, let us say a carpenter.’ That, therefore, which to the abstract scientist is concrete, was abstract to Hegel. That which to the abstract scientist are mere thoughts, to him were the great, mighty architects of the world. Hegel's world of ideas is the final, the most highly sublimated expression of the Spiritual Soul, and contains in pure concepts that which the Northman still saw as sensible-super-sensible, divine spiritual powers in connection with the ‘I’. And when the ‘I’ was expressed in Fichte, it was nothing but a precipitation of what the God Thor had given to the human soul, now viewed from the Spiritual Soul in what seems to be the simplest of thoughts, the thought ‘I am,’ which is the starting-point of Fichte's philosophy. A straight line of evolution goes from the presentation of the ‘I’ by the God Thor or Donar to the old Northern peoples from the spiritual world, down to this philosophy. This God had to prepare all this for the Spiritual Soul in order that the latter might receive its fitting contents, for its task is to look out into the outer world and to work within that world. But this philosophy does not discover merely the external, crude, materialistic experience, it discovers in the external world the contents of the Spiritual Soul itself, and looks upon Nature merely as the other side of idea. Take this on-working impulse, and in it you have the mission of the Northern Germanic peoples in Central Europe.

Now, as all evolution has to progress, we must inquire: How does this evolution advance? When we look back into the ancient times we can see something remarkable. As we have said, in old India the first culture took place in the etheric body, after the necessary perfecting of the spiritual forces had been accomplished. But there are other civilizations besides, which have preserved the old Atlantean culture and carried it over into the people of the post-Atlantean epoch. Whereas on the one hand we have the Indian, coming thus to his etheric body, and from this and its forces creating his mighty civilization and his magnificent spiritual life, we have coming from the other side a culture which originated in Atlantis and continued to work on in the post-Atlantean epoch; a culture which for its foundation and development works out the other side, as it were, of the consciousness of the etheric body. That is the Chinese culture. If you bear this connection in mind, and remember that the Atlantean culture was directly related to what in our earlier lectures we called ‘The Great Spirit,’ you will understand the details of the Chinese culture. This culture was directly connected with the highest stages of the evolution of the world. But it still works into modern human bodies, and from a completely different side. It will therefore seem quite comprehensible that the two great opposites of the post-Atlantean epoch will one day clash in these two civilizations: the Indian, which, within certain limits, is capable of development; and the Chinese, that shuts itself off and remains rigid, repeating what existed in the old Atlantean epoch.

You really obtain an occult, scientific, poetic impression of this Chinese Empire if you observe it in its evolution, and think of the Great Wall of China, which was intended to enclose on all sides that which came from the primal ages and developed in the post-Atlantean epoch. I say that something like an occult poetic feeling steals over one, if one compares the Wall of China with something which existed in former times. I can only indicate these things. If you compare this with the results that have been obtained by science, you will find how extraordinarily illuminating these things are.

Let us clairvoyantly observe the old continent of Atlantis, which must be sought where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, between Africa and Europe on the one side, and America on the other. This continent was encircled by a sort of warm stream, a stream about which clairvoyant consciousness reveals that, strange as it may sound, it flowed upwards from the South, through Baffins Bay, towards the north of Greenland, encircling it and then, flowing over to the East, gradually cooled down; then, at a time when Siberia and Russia had not yet risen to the surface, it flowed down near the Ural mountains, turned, touched the Eastern Carpathians, flowed into the region occupied by the present Sahara, and finally streamed towards the Atlantic Ocean near the Bay of Biscay; so that it flowed in a perfectly unbroken stream. You will understand that only the remnants of this stream still remain. This is the Gulf Stream, which at that time encircled the Atlantean Continent. You will now also understand that, with the Greeks, the life of the soul is remembrance. The picture of Oceanos arose in them, which is a memory of that Atlantean epoch. Their picture of the world is not so very incorrect, because it was drawn from the old Atlantean epoch. The stream that came down by Spitzbergen as a warm current, and gradually cooled and so on,—the region encircled by this stream the Chinese have literally reproduced by enclosing within their Great Wall the culture which they rescued from the Atlantean epoch. There was as yet no history in the Atlantean civilization, hence the Chinese civilization is also in some ways lacking in history. Thus we have there something pre-Indian, something coming from Atlantis.

Let us now turn, in the further progress of the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-spirit, to the description of what follows it. What happens first of all, when a Folk-spirit so leads his people that the Spirit-Self can specially develop? Let us recollect that the Etheric Body was evolved during the Indian civilization, the Sentient Body in the Persian, the Sentient Soul in the Egyptian-Chaldæan, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings in the Græco-Latin, the Spiritual Soul in our own, which is not yet completed. Then comes the laying hold of the Spirit-Self by the Spiritual Soul, so that the Spirit-Self shines into the Spiritual Soul, which, as that is the task of the sixth stage of civilization, must be prepared for gradually. That civilization, which must be pre-eminently a receptive one, for it must reverently await the penetrating of the Spirit-Self into the Spiritual Soul, is being prepared by the peoples of Western Asia and the Slav peoples of Eastern Europe. These latter were pushed forward with their Folk-souls, for the very good reason that everything which is to happen in the future, must in a certain way be prepared beforehand, must already push itself in, in order to provide the elements for what is to follow.

It is extremely interesting to study these advance guards of a Folk-soul who is preparing himself for later epochs. This accounts for the peculiar nature of the Slav peoples at present living to the East of us. Their whole culture gives the Western European the impression of being in a preparatory stage, and they put forward in quite a curious way, through the medium of their advance guards, that which in spirit is quite different from any mythology.

It would be misunderstanding what is being pushed forward from the East as a civilization of the future, it would be misunderstanding this culture if we were to compare it with that which the Western European peoples possess, viz., an impulse that continues in a straight line, which is still rooted in and has its source in the old clairvoyance. The peculiarity attaching to the souls of these Eastern European peoples is expressed in the whole attitude they have always shown when their relations to the higher worlds have come into question. This relation, if we compare it with what appears in our mythology in Western Europe and the strange divine figures worked out even down to the individual character, is quite different. That which it offers appears to us in such a way that we may compare what it gives us as a direct out-pouring of the Folk-spirit, with our various planes or worlds, through which we prepare ourselves to understand a spiritual, a higher culture. For instance, we find there in the East the following conception: The West has received a series of successive worlds, lying side by side. In the East we find in the first place a distinct consciousness of a world of the Cosmic Father. Everything that is creatively active in air and fire, in all the elements in and above the earth, meets us as one great, all-embracing idea, which is at the same time an all-embracing feeling, the concept of the Heavenly Father. In somewhat the same way as we think of the Devachanic world as fertilizing our earth, so do we find this heavenly world, the world of the Father, coming towards us from the East, and it fertilizes that which is felt to be the Mother, the Spirit of the Earth. We have no other expression and can think of no other way of picturing the whole Spirit of the Earth than in the picture of the fertilization of Mother Earth.

Two worlds, then, confront one another there, instead of single individual Divine Figures. And what is felt to be the Blessed Child of these two worlds, stands in front of them as a third world. That is not an individual being, not a feeling in the soul, but something which is the product of the Heavenly Father and the Earth-Mother. In this way the relation of Devachan to the Earth is felt from the spiritual world. There, that which blossoms in the material body is felt as something altogether spiritual; and that which grows and blossoms in the soul, is perceived as the world which is at the same time felt to be the Blessed Child of the Heavenly Father and the Earth-Mother. Universal as these conceptions are we find them among the Slav peoples which have been pushed forward towards the West. In no Western European mythology do we find this conception so universal. We find in them clearly defined Divine Figures, but not that which we present in our Anthroposophy as the different worlds; these we find more in the Heavenly Father, the Earth-Mother, and the Blessed Child of the East.

In the Blessed Child there is again a world which permeates another one. It is a world which is, however, conceived of as being individual, because it is connected with the physical sun and its light. The Slav element also has this Being,—although in a differently developed form of conception and feeling,—which we have so often found in the Persian mythology; it has the Sun-being who so pours his blessings into the other three worlds that the destiny of man is woven into the creation, into the Earth, through the fertilization of the Earth-Mother by the Heavenly Father, and through that which the Sun-spirit weaves into both these worlds.

A fifth world is that which comprises everything spiritual. The Eastern European element feels the spiritual world as underlying all the forces of Nature and their creations. But this we must think of in quite a different shade of feeling, connected more with the facts, creations and beings of Nature. We must conceive of this Eastern soul as being in a position to see an entity in an occurrence of Nature, of seeing not only the physically-sensible, but the astrally-spiritual. Hence the ideas of an immense number of beings in this unique spiritual world, which we may at the most compare with the world of the Elves of Light. It is that spiritual world, which is looked upon in Anthroposophy as the fifth world, which dawns more or less in the feelings of the peoples of the East. Whether they call it by this name or that, does not signify; what does signify is that the feelings are colored and shaded, that the concepts which characterize this fifth plane or spiritual world are to be found in the world of the East. By means of these feelings this world of the East is preparing for that Spirit which is to bring the Spirit-Self into man, in readiness for that epoch when the Spiritual-Soul shall ascend to Spirit-Self, in the sixth age of post-Atlantean civilization, which is to succeed our own. We meet with this in a very unique manner not only in the creations of the Folk-Souls, which are as I have just described, but also in a wonderful preparatory fashion, in the various externalities of Eastern Europe and its culture.

It is very remarkable and extremely interesting to see how the Eastern European expresses his tendency of receptivity towards the pure Spirit by receiving with great devotion Western European culture, thus indicating prophetically that he will be able to unite something still greater with his being. Hence also the little interest he has in the details of this Western European culture. He receives what is presented to him more in broad outlines and less in details, because he is preparing himself to take up that which as Spirit-Self is to enter into mankind. It is particularly interesting to see how, under this influence, a much more advanced conception of Christ has been able to come in the East than in Western Europe, excepting where it has come about through Anthroposophy. Of all non-Anthroposophists the most advanced conception of Christ is that held by the Russian philosopher, Solovioff. It is so advanced that it can only be understood by Anthroposophists, because he develops it higher and higher and gives it an endless perspective, showing that what man is able to recognize in Christ to-day is only the beginning, because the Christ-impulse has as yet only been able to reveal to man a small degree of what it contains within it. But as regards the conception of Christ, if we look for instance at the way in which Hegel understood Him, we shall find that one may say: Hegel understood Him as only the most refined, most sublimated Spiritual Soul could.

But in Solovioff the concept of Christ is a very different one. He fully recognizes the two parts in this conception, and everything which has been expressed in the many theological disputes, and which in reality rest upon great misunderstandings, is put aside, because the ordinary conceptions do not suffice to make the idea of Christ in His twofold nature comprehensible; they do not suffice to make one understand that therein the human and the spiritual must be clearly distinguished. The concept of Christ rests upon clearly grasping what took place when the Christ entered into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, who had developed all the necessary qualities. There were, then, two natures which must first of all be comprehended as such, although at a higher stage they again form unity. As long as one has not grasped this duality, one has not realized Christ in His complete form. This can, however, only be done by the philosophical comprehension which has a premonition that man himself will reach a culture in which his Spiritual Soul will attain to a state into which the Spirit-Self can come; so that man will in the sixth age of civilization feel himself to be a duality in whom the higher nature will hold the lower nature under complete control.

Solovioff carries this duality into his conception of Christ and brings emphatically into notice that there can be no meaning in it unless one accepts the facts of a divine and a human nature, both really working together, so that they do not merely form an abstract but an organic unity, that thus only can this be understood. Solovioff recognizes that two Will-centers must be thought of in this Being. If you take the teachings of Spiritual Science as to the true significance of the Christ-Being, which proceed from the existence of, not an imaginary, but a spiritually real Indian influence, you then have to think of Christ as having developed within His three bodies the capacities of feeling, thought and will. There you have a human feeling, thinking and willing into which the divine Feeling, Thinking and Willing has immersed itself. The European will only thoroughly assimilate this when he has risen to the sixth stage of culture. This has been prophetically expressed in a wonderful way in Solovioff's conception of Christ, which like a rosy dawn announces a later civilization. Hence this philosophy of Eastern Europe strides with giant steps beyond that of Hegel and Kant, and when one enters the atmosphere of this philosophy, one suddenly feels as it were the germ for a future unfolding. It goes so much further because this conception of Christ is felt to be a fore-shining, the morning dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization. By means of this the whole Christ-Being and the whole significance of Christ becomes the central point of philosophy, and it thus becomes a very different thing from what the Western European conceptions are able to offer concerning it. The conception of Christ,—so far as it has been worked out in non-Anthroposophical circles, in which it is comprehended as living substance which, as a spiritual personality, is to work into the social life and the life of the States, which is felt as a Personality in Whose service man finds himself as ‘man with the Spirit-Self,’—this Christ-Personality is worked out in a wonderful, plastic manner in the various expositions Solovioff gives of St. John's Gospel and its opening words. Again it is only on the ground of Spiritual Science that a comprehension can be found of what is so profoundly understood by Solovioff in the sentence, ‘In the beginning was the Word, or the Logos,’ and so on, of how differently St. John's Gospel is understood by a philosophy, which can be felt as a germinating philosophy which points in a remarkable manner to the future. Although on the one hand it must be admitted that in the domain of philosophy Hegel's work represents a most mature fruit, something that is born from the Spiritual Soul as a very ripe philosophical fruit, on the other hand this philosophy of Solovioff is the germ in the Spiritual Soul for the philosophy of the Spirit-Self, which will be added in the sixth age of culture.

There is perhaps no greater contrast than that eminently Christian conception of the State which hovers as a great ideal before Solovioff as a dream of the future, that Christian idea of the State and the people, which takes everything it finds in order to offer it to the down-streaming Spirit-Self to hold it towards the future so that it may be Christianized by the powers of the future:—there is really no greater contrast than this conception by Solovioff of a Christian community in which the Christ-idea is still a future one,—and the conception of the divine State held by St. Augustine, who accepted, it is true, the Christ-idea, but constructed the State in such a way that it was still the Roman State; he took up Christ into the idea of the State given him by the Roman State. The essential point is, that which provides the knowledge for the Christianity which is growing on into the future. In Solovioff's State Christ is the blood which runs through all social life, and the essential point is that the State is thought of in all the concreteness of personality, so that it acts indeed as a spiritual being, but it will fulfill its mission with all the characteristic peculiarities of a personality. No other philosophy is so permeated by the Christ-idea,—the Christ-idea which shines forth to us from still greater heights in Anthroposophy,—and yet remaining only at the germinal stage.

Everything that we find in the East, from the general feeling of the people up to its philosophy, comes to us as something that bears only the germ of a future evolution within it, and that therefore had to submit to the special education of that Spirit of the Age whom we already know; for we have said that the Spirit of the Age of the ancient Greeks was given as an impulse to Christianity, and was entrusted with the mission of becoming later on the active Spirit of the Age for Europe. The national temperament which will have to develop the germs for the sixth age of civilization had not only to be educated but to be taken care of, from the first stages of its existence, by that Spirit of the Age. So that we may literally say,—whereby the ideas of Father and Mother lose their separate sense,—that the Russian temperament, which is gradually to evolve into the Folk-soul, was not only brought up, but was suckled and fed by that which, as we have seen, was formed out of the old Greek Spirit of the Age and then acquired another rank, outwardly.

Thus are the missions divided between Western, Central, Northern and Eastern Europe. I wished to give you an indication of these things. We shall work further on the foundations of these indications, and show what will distinguish the future of Europe, and also show that we must form our ideals from such knowledge. We shall show how through this influence the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-spirit gradually transforms himself into a Spirit of the Age.

During the second half of last year, it became my duty to carry on some occult research into life between death and a new birth. We have, it is true, already described what has to be considered there, but a complete knowledge of this part of human life, a real penetration therein, is only possible if one carries on research into it from the most diverse points of view. Though everything found in the writings and cycles about this theme is correct, still to all this may be added that which must be said tonight and perhaps also the day after tomorrow about the subject.

When the human being has stepped through the portals of death—that is, when he has laid aside his physical and his ether body—the soul during the first interval of time is particularly taken up with memories of the span of life it spent on earth. We know, of course, that the soul requires a certain amount of time to free itself from all that connects it with the last earthly life. Now, let us present this process of growing out of the preceding life on earth as it relates to the whole of the universe, to the world.

When the human being leaves his physical body and his ether body, and thus lives only in his astral body, which we may also call the soul body, a complete spatial expansion takes place, one might say: a dilatation of his being into the far reaches of space; this takes place not merely after death, but also in sleep. Every night we really expand over the stellar spaces. After death, we expand slowly and gradually in such a way that we must seek the substance of our soul—for we cannot now say: the substance of our body—in the circumference of the earth, at first far beyond the atmosphere. Farther and farther it expands, until we (though it may sound paradoxical, it comes to that) have expanded the life of our soul over the whole expanse of the sphere which in the end corresponds to the moon's orbit around the earth. We grow so large that the boundary of our being is the orbit of the moon. As long as we thus grow larger, that which we may call the Kamaloka-time prevails. That is the time of inner connection with the preceding life on earth.

Then, however, the expansion goes on. The human being expands in fact out into the world of the stars, and then the time begins when he expands so far that the outer boundary of his being; may be designated as the orbit which, in astronomical terms, is described by Venus, in occult terms by Mercury. Now, the condition of life for man, after he has left the sphere of the moon, depends on the kind of life he led here between birth and death. When he carries his life into the universe to the sphere of Mercury, then he may live there in Such a way that he can easily find contact with people with whom he lived on earth, with whom his soul was united on earth; or, on the other hand, it may be man's fate to have difficulties in finding such contacts—that is to: say, to be condemned to loneliness in expanding his life thus into the sphere of Mercury. And it depends on the way in which he has led his life on earth whether he feels that he is destined to loneliness, or, if one may use the term, to sociability. A person who in life has not cared to awaken in his soul moral feelings a moral way of thinking, a moral mood, benevolence, sympathy—a person who has developed this only to a small extent—feels doomed to loneliness after death when he expands to the sphere of Mercury. And it is difficult for him to find other souls with whom he is united. A person who has developed much sympathy, a moral way of thinking, will live companionably with other souls as he expands to the sphere of Mercury. Thus it is given into our hands to arrange our life between death and a new birth. The sphere of Mercury—in occult terms—is therefore the sphere in which our moral qualities are expressed. It also is the sphere in which what we have developed in the way of moral qualities becomes effective in still another manner.

Another aspect to be considered is the fact that precisely during this passage through the sphere of Mercury (in occult parlance) we have the after-effect of having been in the life between birth and death a conscientious human being, or one lacking conscientiousness. You see, everything that happens in the world here in physical life receives its direction or its causation from the spiritual world. We have several times considered the natural death from old age, which has to occur for man because it is what really must happen to him in order that life may take its right course from incarnation to incarnation. But as we know, there is not merely this death from old age, well founded in evolution; there is also a death which befalls the human being in the flower of youth, even in childhood. There are in the world manifold illnesses, epidemics, and so forth playing a part in human life. And they are not merely the effect of physical causes, but they are ordained, directed from the spiritual world. And this actually comes from the region of Venus, that belt around the earth which, however, in occult parlance we call the sphere of Mercury. That is, if we take the radius from earth to Venus and draw a circle—quite without considering astronomical relations—that, then, is the sphere of Mercury (we mean a circle, not around the sun, but, around the earth); and in this belt, in the space occupied by this plane, there lie the forces by which illnesses and death are directed on earth: death in so far as it does not occur as natural death from old age, but in an irregular manner. Certain spiritual beings are operative there, those beings whom occultism designates as the spirits of illness and death. An individual who (in occult parlance) enters the realm of Mercury after having spent his life on earth as a person without a conscience, condemns himself to become a servant of these—as we may well call them—evil spirits of illness and death, while he is going through this realm. Indeed, we do not have a conception, an impression, of what is meant by a “lack of conscience” until we know this fact. Lack of conscience sentences a human being to bear the yoke of these evil spirits in the realm of Mercury for a time between death and a new birth. And when those forces are developed which are sent from the surrounding realm to the earth so that epidemics, illnesses, take place, so that death at the wrong time takes place, then these souls “without conscience” must cooperate as servants of the spirits of illness and death who send these forces into our physical world.

Something else happens when a trait which is very widespread on earth has its after-effect all the way up to this sphere: laziness. Our life is really conditioned by laziness. Innumerable things would be done differently by men if they were not lazy. Also by laziness, the human being sentences himself to become for a time in the sphere which has just been discussed the servant of those powers which are subordinate to Ahriman, and which we may designate as the powers of hindrance—that is to say, of those spirits who hinder work on earth. Servants of the spirits of hindrance we become for a definite period of time, more or less prolonged, through everything we have poured into our soul by laziness. In this way, we get a conception as to how those forces which we have developed in our soul during our physical life have their effect in that life between death and a new birth.

The next sphere to which the soul expands is designated in occultism as the sphere of Venus. [astronomically: sphere of Mercury.] We prepare ourselves for it by religious qualities, a religious attitude. A human being who has developed in the time between birth and death an attitude which causes his soul to look toward the spiritual primordial powers and primordial forces of the world—such a person is able to be a social being in the sphere of Venus, so that he lives together with other human beings with whom his soul has established relationship on earth. But also other spirits of the Higher Hierarchies enter from then on into the human sphere, and man lives there with spirits of the Higher Hierarchies if he has developed a religious attitude, religious sentiments, religious feelings. On the other hand, if here on earth he has not brought his soul into contact with religious impulses, he sentences himself to loneliness, to seclusion, to tormenting loneliness. If he has been an atheist here on earth, then he will be a completely isolated individual after reaching the sphere with which we are concerned here. And it must be said that those people who today foster an irreligious attitude condemn themselves to complete loneliness. Those, for instance, who unite in the Monist Society, inhibit their inner freedom of movement, and because they have found themselves united here under that “flag,” they sentence themselves to sit each in his own cage, each separate from the other.

The next sphere into which we enter is the sphere of the Sun. Again circumstances are different from those known to physical astronomy. We obtain this sphere if we draw a line between the earth and the sun—that is, if we use this line as the radius and draw a circle around the earth. In the spiritual world, conditions do differ from those in the physical world. We expand to the extent of this sphere after having gone through the sphere of Venus. For this sphere, the preparation valid for the sphere of Venus no longer holds good. For the Venus sphere, we may be prepared in such a way that we find contact with all those souls with whom we have established religious fellowship in the life between birth and death. In the sphere of Venus, human beings are so to speak confined in regions like the regions in which on earth peoples, races, live together. Thus there are in the Venus-sphere regions in which those persons find each other who are related through their religious feelings. This is not sufficient for the sphere of the Sun. In the sphere of the Sun the feeling of loneliness prevails if the human being was prepared on earth only for a certain kind of religious feeling in his soul. In the sphere of the Sun, a person is a social being only when he has developed, in the best sense of the word, an understanding of every religious feeling; when, so to speak, he has developed a deeper tolerance for all religious Systems on earth. Up to our time, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the exoteric Christian faith has been more or less sufficient, for this Christian faith contains in a certain way, though in quite a different way, an understanding of other systems of religion which far transcends that involved in a limited religious system. We can easily convince ourselves of this. Many other religious systems are still confined to certain regions of the earth, and if we wish to see, we can very easily note how the adherent of Hinduism, of Buddhism; and of other faiths; will indeed speak of the equal validity of all religions and of a wisdom common to all religions ... but if we consider more deeply what he means, we find that he means his own religion exclusively. In the last analysis, he demands of other people that they should acknowledge his own religion. That is what he then calls the equal validity of all religions. Read theosophical periodicals originating in India. There, the East Indian religion is considered the one religion, valid for the world, and those who do not accept this are said not to be honest theosophists. Primitive Christianity from the beginning has not been attuned to this idea, especially where it has become occidental religion. If things were in the Occident as, they are in India, we would have today a religion of Wotan; that would be then, what Hinduism is for the orient. The Occident, however, has not taken up the religion, which has evolved from it, but from the beginning the religion of a founder who has lived outside of the Occident, of the Christ Jesus. Unegotistically, the Occident has received a religion into its very being. That is a difference in principle, and in the very essence of Christianity there lies a true tolerance for every religious system, even though this essence may have been little understood by occidental Christians.

In fact, for the Christian, everyone is a Christian, no matter what he may call himself. And it is nothing but narrow-mindedness, if one wants to spread Christian dogma everywhere. Broad-mindedness is something quite different. If one considers the Hindu, the Chinese, the Buddhist, if one enters into the deeper elements of their being, one will find everywhere the beginnings of Christianity and will stress in everything they themselves think the beginnings of Christianity, without having to mention the name of the Christ. But this more narrow Christianity, as it is given today to man between birth and death, is only one preparation for the sphere of the Sun: another thing is necessary—that which we designate in the right, the true sense, as Theosophy. [Rudolf Steiner was talking to members of the Theosophical Society.—Ed.] It gives us an inner comprehension of all religious systems on earth, of their very essence. If we acquire this understanding here on earth, then we prepare ourselves in the right way for the sphere of the Sun. This understanding of the different religions and of the Mystery of Golgotha, of the Christ impulse, is necessary for us if we are not to become hermits in relation to other human souls and in relation to the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies in the sphere of the Sun, between death and a new birth.

When we come into the sphere of the Sun between death and a new birth, we find there two things. The first thing we find is something we can express only in an image: we find an empty throne, an empty World-Throne. And that which we may seek on this empty World Throne we can find only in the pictures of the Akashic Record. On this throne, which we find empty during the time we pass between death and a new birth, the Christ once sat within the Sun sphere. He expanded into the earth sphere through the Mystery of Golgotha, and since that time the inhabitants of the earth must gain here on earth an understanding of the Christ impulse, and must keep this impulse in their memory. Then they will be able to recognize the image which appears in the Akashic Record while gaining a living experience of the Sun sphere. He who has not attained this understanding here on earth will not recognize who at one time was sitting on the throne, and what is preserved as an image only. And he cannot find his way within the Sun-sphere between death and a new birth. There we see why it is the mission of the souls of men on earth to seek here for themselves the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha as we seek it in our spiritual movement. Through this, we keep between death and a new birth the memory of the Christ Impulse, and do not become hermits in the sphere of the Sun, but social beings, by reason of the forces which we have taken with us; so that in a way, by our own strength which we brought with us, we bring to life the image—which is now merely an image in the Sun-sphere—of the Christ. And we must take so much strength with us from the time on earth that this strength remains with us also for the subsequent time, and cannot be lost.

We find a second thing in this sphere of the Sun, a second throne: and it is now occupied by a real being, by Lucifer. And so, between death and a new birth, when we have reached the sphere of the Sun as it has been described, we feel ourselves on the one hand in the presence of Christ, on the other in the presence of Lucifer. If we had not received the Christ impulse, Lucifer alone would have to become our leader. But if we have received the Christ impulse, then we are, on the far voyage through the universe, under the leadership on the one hand of the Christ impulse, on the other of Lucifer; for we also need him for the ensuing times. We also need Lucifer, for he leads us in the right way through the lower spheres of the universe, at first as far as the Mars-sphere.

That is the next sphere to which we expand between death and new birth. In order that Lucifer may lead us in such a way as is fitting for us men, we must have the Christ impulse as a counterbalance; then the Lucifer impulse is salutory for us; otherwise it is evil for us. Another thing has become necessary: in the sphere of Mars, we must have the possibility of taking into account, with our whole being, certain changes which have occurred on Mars in the course of recent centuries. These changes may be described in about the following way. Every heavenly body is related to every other heavenly body through the agency of certain forces; all heavenly bodies stand in a certain relation to the earth. From them the forces radiate. In fact, from Mars and its sphere not only does the light effect radiate, which comes to the earth, but from it also spiritual forces radiate. If we go back to earlier centuries, we find that the forces radiated from Mars which inspired men to that which human beings needed in earlier times: physical forces, to further the evolution of mankind. It is not merely a myth but an occult truth that what has developed as warlike force and warlike complication in the world, what has made man energetic, courageous through centuries and millennia, stems from an influx of the forces of Mars. But such is the life of a planet that its forces go through an ascending and a descending development. And Mars has changed in a certain way its mission during the last centuries. The warlike forces that are developed now are the ebbing warlike life of the previous centuries; new life from inciting forces of Mars does not flow in any longer. For at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mars had reached a decisive point, a point which, in the life of Mars, may only be compared to the time when the earth had come to a decisive point, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact of immense importance upon which we touch here. Mars went through a decisive period. That fact was known within the earth-mysteries, in which the decision is made for the great spiritual concerns of earth-existence. That is to say, since the twelfth century, the decisive preparations have been made within the mystery development of the earth in order to take into account the change in the Mars-sphere. The forces which Mars was to send out to bring courage and energy to earth, were past for Mars: they were no longer destined to penetrate to the earth. But by the fact that Mars has gone through such a crisis, there came a change for the souls who live between death and a new birth, in the experiences they would have to go through in the Mars-sphere after death. That is to say: When man goes beyond the sphere of the Sun, forces radiate into the essence of his soul, forces which already have a significance for the next incarnation. The soul who passed through the sphere of Mars in the early times, before the seventeenth century, came into contact with those forces which permeated it with courage and energy. Lucifer was the leader to the sources of courage and energy. But the souls who came in later times could no longer find the characteristic forces: Mars was then going through its crisis. Where, within the Mysteries, the great spiritual decisions are made, there one does not take into consideration merely human life between birth and death, but also its salvation or perdition between death and a new birth; that is, in the Mysteries one sees to it that those things are infused into the spiritual culture of mankind which cause the souls after death to go through the different spheres in the right way.

If we wish to comprehend the meaning of the happenings in the Mars-sphere, we must consider the following. A great decisive matter confronts the Rosicrucian Mysteries because one had to consider that for the development of the earth, very special times were ahead: the times of external material culture, of external material triumphs. We cannot oppose these: though they bring nothing spiritual, we must of necessity experience this time of machines, airplanes, and other inventions. But these times bring a kind of death of the soul. We cannot oppose them, we must gain a living experience of them.—The materialistic era had to come, but it always was the endeavour of higher spiritual beings to create a counter-balance against this materialistic era. When we consider all that has come to light in the development of the earth as a counter-balance against materialism, we have as the last and most significant phenomenon Francis of Assisi; that Francis of Assisi who, in his entity as Francis of Assisi, turned away from all external life, who led in Assisi that life which is known to you and which has been painted so wonderfully by Giotto on the walls of the church of Assisi ... so that even today when these pictures have been painted over so often, life yet radiates movingly from the walls. And even though that place also has gone through a development tending toward materialism, we will have to say: the region around the town of Assisi still is pervaded by the spiritual atmosphere of Francis, that atmosphere which has assimilated the elements of a life alien to the world, but on intimate terms with the soul, not merely with the human soul, but with the soul of Nature. In the cycle Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy you may read that wonderful poem into which Francis of Assisi poured what he felt toward the soul of Nature and of Nature's beings. One may say that no poet has found more beautiful accents, and perhaps only Goethe has found again accents as beautiful about the life of Nature. What is the cause of all this? The cause of all this is the fact that Francis of Assisi in his previous incarnation, in the seventh, eighth century, in a Mystery School near the Black Sea, was the pupil of an individuality who was no longer incarnated in a physical body.

This is a noteworthy matter. Francis of Assisi, in his immediately preceding incarnation, had lived in this School of Mysteries, and with other disciples he was a disciple of a being who then worked only in the spiritual body among the pupils including Francis of Assisi. And this was none other than the Buddha, who we know was incarnated for the last time as Gautama Buddha. Nevertheless, he continued to be active in the spiritual body. We know that as a spiritual being he was present at the birth of the child Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel. He has continued to be active in the School in which Francis of Assisi lived in his previous incarnation. There the latter assimilated the impulses of his life so intimately associated with the soul, of that life which was to lead men away from everything that was to spread out on earth, which was to lead away from the purely materialistic life. And all this remained in Francis of Assisi. We see the after-effects of this in the Francis of Assisi incarnation. But it could not come about that on earth, in the era which had the materialistic mission, many souls should join a Francis of Assisi community. Those could not do this who had to progress with the time. So, in a way, a conflict was created. It could not come about that on one side there was only exterior, material culture, on the other disciples of Francis of Assisi. Although Francis of Assisi is great and powerful, on the one side, yet on the other the rules he gave could not be of use for ensuing times. How only could it come about? What had to happen on earth?

This has been established in significant perspectives in the Rosicrucian Mysteries since the twelfth century. There it was said; The human being will have to work with the earthly body, will have to gain a living experience in an external way of the material existence between birth and death, and he will have to go along with the triumphs of this material existence. But for every soul who becomes inured, intimate with material existence, a possibility must be created to have, with part of its nature, an understanding for the inner experience of that which lies in the teachings of Francis of Assisi. It is precisely this which constitutes the essence of progress of souls on earth: that these souls must increasingly develop so to speak two natures, the farther they go into the future; that we with the organs of our soul shall be able to take hold of the impulses of existence on earth, so that we may become familiar with them; but that we should be able to develop within ourselves moments and hours in which we can be given over in solitude to the life of the soul itself. While we become more open to the world and more familiar with it, we must at the same time have hours when we can become familiar with our soul. While on the one hand we follow Edison, we must be able to become quietly, in our hearts, disciples of Francis of Assisi or of his great teacher, the Buddha. Thus every human being must be able to feel even if he is being pushed into material life. And for this development the preparation had to be given in the Rosicrucian Mysteries. Christian Rosenkreuz had the mission to care for it.

How can all this be brought about? Only through the fact that a certain period of the life between death and a new birth may be used for the soul in a very definite way. They said to themselves in the Rosicrucian Mysteries: Mars, so to speak, loses his old task; let us give him a new one.—With the beginning of the seventeenth century, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Buddha who had apart from this completed his last incarnation on earth, was sent to Mars, to the sphere of Mars, and one may say, speaking quite correctly: At that precise time the Buddha accomplished for Mars something similar to what the Christ accomplished on earth—only in a larger measure—in the Mystery of Golgotha. That which had always emanated from Mars, and was part of its essence, that very thing the Buddha transformed by his sacrifice. He transformed the whole nature and essence of Mars. For Mars, the Buddha has become the great Redeemer. It was a sacrifice for him. You only have to remember how the Buddha arose to the point of expounding the doctrine of giving the message of universal peace, of harmonious existence. He was then transferred into that planetary sphere from which the force of aggressiveness originated. He, the Prince of Peace, crucified himself, so to speak, though not through the Mystery of Golgotha. In this way, something else is brought into the Mars-sphere: Mars is permeated by the essence of the Buddha. As on earth the substance of the Christ has flowed out from the Mystery of Golgotha, so the peace substance of the Buddha flows into the Mars-sphere, and since then is in the Mars-sphere.

It was thus that they spoke within the Rosicrucian Mystery. In consequence of the sending of the Buddha, human souls could live for some time between death and a new birth in the sphere of Mars, after they had found themselves in the Sun-sphere and had borne the Christ Impulse up to that sphere. After the soul has entered there through the right permeation with the Christ Impulse, and through the guidance of Lucifer, the soul comes out farther into the sphere of Mars; and precisely in our time, an event occurs in the Mars-sphere, which previously could not take place: the souls are permeated by that which no longer can occur on earth,—they are permeated by the Buddha—Francis of Assisi—element. Between death and a new birth each soul—if it is prepared in the right way—can go through that which has become living experience on earth, as in a last blossoming, in the soul-life of Francis of Assisi, but which since that time cannot have a proper home on earth. The human soul by experiencing the sphere of Buddha in the life between death and a new birth can acquire there the strength that will enable it to do what has just been said: it may enter by a new birth into a purely material existence, may be thrown into a terrestrial existence which will be more and more materialistic, and yet will be able to develop forces in another part of the entity of the soul so that it may be given up to the world of the spirit and of the soul. This is the truth about the secrets which are hidden between death and a new birth.

Then, we expand farther and farther into the reaches of the stars, to Jupiter, Saturn, and farther. What has been described now, occurs only, in fact, with the most advanced souls. Those souls which have not fulfilled the conditions and will not fulfil them until later—such souls, in the life between death and a new birth, come into contact only with the spheres nearest the earth. They also go through the other spheres, but in a certain unconscious state akin to sleep. In the outer spheres, in the spheres beyond the sun, the forces are gathered which man must acquire in order to be able to work, to collaborate, in building up a new body as he approaches a new birth. What man consists of has not merely been acquired on earth. It is the greatest short-sightedness of materialists to believe now that man is a creature of the earth. If man builds himself up in this way with the forces which are given to him, if he builds himself up in the most comprehensive meaning of the word, these constructive forces are cosmic forces which man first had to acquire for himself. While expanding, between death and a new birth, to the Sun-sphere, he still has contact with the forces which are after-effects from his previous life. The forces he needs in order to work into the sphere of the earth whatever can construct his physical body out of the surrounding spheres, those forces he must extract from the forces which meet him outside of the Sun-sphere. The human being really must expand into the cosmos between death and a new birth; he then must live with the cosmos, for on earth alone the forces are lacking which really can bring forth the human being. No new human being ever could result from the human germ which originates from the combination of the two sexes, if the following were not to take place.

There is in existence this small human germ. With this human germ unites something immeasurably great and significant, something which had first expanded in a mysterious way into infinite reaches of the world, and then contracted again. After man expands to the spheres of the stars, he begins to contract again. He goes through the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon, becoming ever smaller and smaller. And as he grows smaller, he takes into himself the spiritual forces of the cosmos. And he grows ever smaller and smaller. And that which is finally compressed, compacted into a small spiritual globe, that has been actually condensed from an immense dilution. And this now unites with the physical globe which is the germ cell, and fertilizes it by forces from the spiritual realms. Thus we see how man enters existence by birth.

After having gone through his previous death, he expanded into the distant spaces of the universe, became so to speak a giant globe. In spirit, he was together with spiritual beings and facts; then he compresses himself again, becomes ever smaller and smaller, until the time has come when, by the forces inherent in him, lie unites with physical matter. That which forms, together with the human germ cell, the human body, has been brought in from the cosmos. From this human germ cell, even if it were fertilized, nothing could result that might live on earth, if the compressed spirit-globe could not unite with it; this can be ascertained by occult investigation. And what only could result from this human germ-cell? From it only the foundation for the senses and the nervous system could result, but nothing that is capable of living, such as the body of man which must build itself up around the senses and the nervous system; the former does not originate with father and mother. Earth can give the forces for the senses, the nervous system. What grows organically around them, must be brought in from the cosmos. And when finally the time comes when a new science will grasp the processes in the human germ-cell according to the application of occult knowledge, then human beings who think clearly will be able to understand what they now cannot grasp in any scientific presentation. Whether you read Haeckel's sparkling discussions of this matter, or others, you will find everywhere that things are not understandable by themselves. What one does not know is the fact that a third force unites with that which comes from father and mother. The third force comes in from the cosmos. Only one certain group of people know—or today we may say, knew—of this secret, but this state of affairs is coming to an end now. Children and their nurses and educators mention it—or, at least it was mentioned, when they related that the stork or some other sort of being brings in an element by which human beings can enter the world. That is only a metaphoric expression for a spiritual occurrence, but it is more intelligent than what intelligent people maintain today. For our time, however, it is regarded as enlightened to explain human conditions in a materialistic way. This metaphoric presentation really still should have an effect on the children's souls, on their imagination! People do say: The children no longer believe in the stork—because those who tell this fairy-tale no longer believe it themselves. But those who today become anthroposophists believe in the stork, and they will soon find that in this metaphoric presentation a good interpretation is given of spiritual happenings.

Thus we have contemplated the cosmic aspect of life between death and a new birth; the day after tomorrow we will more particularly touch upon the human aspect of practical life.

But now we will consider one more thing. Kant once, following truly, one might say, an inspiration, made this significant statement:

“Two things have made a great impression on me: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

This statement may seem significant to the occultist. For what is the strange relation that exists between the starry sky and that which is best in the life of our soul? Both are one and the same. We expand between death and a new birth as far as the starry sky, and we bring its forces into life and feel them as the most significant forces of our soul. No wonder! We are, indeed, the external images of the heavens. We look up to the starry sky where we were between death and a new birth, and we see that which we have taken into ourselves. No wonder that we feel at one with that which lives in us as guidance for the life of our soul and that which radiates into us from the starry sky, and which we feel effective in us when we appeal to the deepest life of our soul. The starry sky is one and the same with us, and we with it, when we contemplate our existence as a whole.

Thus we must tell ourselves that such an anthroposophical contemplation does not merely give us that which we may call understanding, knowledge, in the usual every-day meaning. It really gives us moral strength and support in the feeling that the whole universe lives in us. And gradually we see ourselves permeated by the universe when we go through life between death and a new birth. Truly, it is hidden to the external eye, this life between death and a new birth; but that also is hidden which in the depth of our soul's existence drives us, impels us. And yet it is in us, it is effective in us and gives us our strength, this our best being. We carry the heavens within us because we experience them before we enter into our physical existence. We then feel the obligation to make ourselves worthy of these heavens which have done so much for us that we owe to them our entire inner being.

More of this the day after tomorrow, when we shall contemplate life more under the aspect of man, and from a point of view which affects rather the practical activity of life.

At the time when materialism—mainly theoretical materialism—was in its prime, in the middle and still to some extent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the writings of Buchner and Vogt (‘bulky Vogt’ as he used to be called) had made a deep impression upon people who considered themselves enlightened, one could often hear a way of speaking that is occasionally also heard today, because stragglers from that epoch of theoretical materialism are still to be found in certain circles. When people do not flatly deny the possibility of a life after death, or even here and there admit it, they are wont to say: Well, there may be a life after death but why should we trouble about it during life on Earth? When death has taken place we shall discover whether there is indeed a future life, and meanwhile if here on Earth we concern ourselves only with the affairs of earthly existence and take no account of what is alleged to come afterwards, we cannot miss anything of importance. For if the life after death has anything to offer we shall then discover what it is!

As I said, this way of speaking could be heard time and time again and this is still the case in wide circles today; in the way the subject is expressed it may often, in a certain respect, almost seem acceptable. And yet it is utterly at variance with what is disclosed to spiritual investigation when the facts connected with the life between death and rebirth are considered in their spiritual aspect. When a man has passed through the gate of death he comes into contact with many and infinitely varied forces and beings. He does not only find himself living amid a multitude of super-sensible facts but he comes into contact with definite forces and Beings—namely, the Beings of the several higher Hierarchies. Let us ask ourselves what this contact signifies for one who is passing through the period of existence between death and the new birth.

We know that when an individual has spent this period of life in the super-sensible world and passes into physical existence again through birth, he becomes in a certain way the moulder of his own bodily constitution, indeed of his whole destiny in the life on Earth. Within certain limits the human being builds and fashions his body, even the very convolutions of his brain, by means of the forces brought with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters again into physical existence through birth. Our whole earthly existence depends upon our physical body possessing organs which enable us to come in touch with the outer physical world, to act and moreover to think in that world.

If, here in the physical world, we do not possess the appropriately formed brain which, on passing through birth we formed for ourselves out of the forces of the super-sensible world, we remain unable to cope with life in this physical world. In the real sense we are fitted for life in the physical world only when we bring with us from the spiritual world forces by means of which we have been able to build a body able to cope with this world and all its demands. The super-sensible forces which man needs in order to fashion his body and also his destiny are received by him from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies with whom he has made contact between death and the new birth. What we need for the shaping of our life must be acquired during the time that has preceded our birth since the last death. Between death and the next birth we must approach, stage by stage, the Beings who can endow us with the forces we need for our physical existence.

In the life between death and rebirth we can pass before the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in two ways. We may recognise them, understand their nature and essential characteristics, be able to receive what they can give us and what we shall need in the following life. We must be able to understand or at least to perceive what is being offered us and what we shall subsequently need. But we might also pass before these Beings in such a way that, figuratively speaking, their hands are offering gifts which we do not receive because it is dark in the higher world in which we then live. Thus we may pass through that world with understanding, with awareness of what these Beings are offering us, or we may pass through it without understanding, unaware of what they wish to bestow. Now the way in which we pass through this spiritual world, which of the two ways we necessarily choose in our life between death and the new birth, is predetermined by the after-effects of the previous life and of earlier lives on Earth. A person whose attitude in his last life on Earth was unresponsive and antagonistic to all thoughts and ideas that may enlighten him about the super-sensible world—such a person passes through the life between death and rebirth as if through a world of darkness. For the light, the spiritual light we need in order to realise how these different Beings approach us and what gifts we may receive from them for our next life on Earth—the light of understanding for what is here coming to pass cannot be acquired in the super-sensible world itself; it must be acquired here, during physical incarnation on Earth. If, at death, we bear with us into the spiritual life no relevant ideas and concepts, we shall pass unknowingly through our super-sensible existence until the next birth, receiving none of the forces needed for the next life. From this we realise how impossible it is to say that we can wait until death itself occurs because we shall then discover what the facts are—whether indeed we shall encounter any reality at all after death. Our relationship to that reality depends upon whether in earthly life we have been receptive or antagonistic in our souls to concepts or ideas of the super-sensible world that have been accessible to us and will be the light through which we must ourselves illumine the path between death and rebirth.

Something further can be gathered from what has been said. The belief that we have, so to say, only to die in order to receive everything that the super-sensible world can give us, even if we have made no preparation for it—this belief is utterly false. Every world has its own special mission. And what a man can acquire during an incarnation on Earth he can acquire in no single one of the other worlds. Between death and the new birth he is able, in all circumstances, to enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But in order to receive their gifts, to avoid having to grope in darkness through life there or in fearful loneliness, in order to establish contact with those Beings and receive their forces, the ideas and concepts which are the light enabling the higher Hierarchies to be visible to the soul must be acquired in earthly life. And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be an inadequate human being in his next life.

We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in dream—as is so frequently the case today. On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull, unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands, in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others—and there are many such people nowadays—in these cases the seer will very often find that their previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how we have prepared ourselves for it here.

Another possibility may occur. I am saying these things in order that by understanding the life between death and rebirth, life between birth and death may become more and more intelligible.

When we study life on Earth with discernment, we see many human beings—and in our time they are very numerous—who can, as it were, only ‘half think’, whose logic invariably breaks down when faced with reality. Here is an example: A certain free-thinking cleric, an honourable man in all his endeavours, wrote in the first Freethinkers' Calendar as follows: Children ought not to be taught any ideas about religion for that would be against nature. If children are allowed to grow up without having any ideas about religion pumped into them, we find that they do not of themselves arrive at ideas of God, immortality, and so forth. The inference to be drawn from this is that such ideas are unnatural to the human being and should not be drummed into him; he should work only with what can be drawn from his own soul. As in many other cases, there are thousands and thousands of people nowadays to whom an utterance such as this seems very clever, very subtle. But if only genuine logic were applied the following would be obvious: If we were to take a human being before he has learnt to speak, put him on a lonely island and take care that he can hear no single word of speech, he would never learn to speak. And so anyone who argues against children being taught any ideas about religion would logically have to say that human beings should not have to learn to speak, for speech does not come of itself. So our free-thinking cleric cannot propagate his ideas by means of his logic, for both he and his logic come to a halt when confronted by the facts. His logic can be applied to a small area only, and he does not notice that his idea, assuming one can get hold of it, cancels itself out.

Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large proportion of those human beings—and their number is legion—who are incapable of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life—that is to say, in the incarnation preceding the present one.

And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations? We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all, mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired is an egotistic attitude of soul.

When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.

Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are also connected in a certain way as causes and effects. This can be seen from the following.

When the seer directs his gaze into the super-sensible world where souls are sojourning after death, he will find among them those who during part of this life between death and rebirth are servants of those Powers whom we may call the Lords of all healthy, budding and burgeoning life on the Earth. (In the very lengthy period between death and rebirth, innumerable experiences are undergone and in accounts of the present kind, parts only can be described.) Among the dead we find souls who for a certain length of time in the super-sensible world co-operate in the wonderful task—for wonderful it is—of pouring, infusing into the physical world everything that can further the health of beings on the Earth, can help them to thrive and blossom. Just as in certain circumstances we can become servants of the evil spirits of illness and misfortune, so too we can become the servants of those spiritual beings who promote health and growth, who send down from the spiritual world into our physical world forces that help life to flourish. It is nothing but a materialistic superstition to believe that physical hygiene and external regulations are the sole means of promoting health. Everything that happens in physical life is directed by the beings and powers of higher worlds who are all the time pouring into the physical world forces which in a certain way work freely, upon human or other beings, either promoting or harming health and growth. Certain specific spiritual powers and beings are responsible for these processes in health and illness. In the life between death and rebirth man co-operates with these powers; and if we have prepared ourselves in the right way we can experience the bliss of co-operating in the task of sending the forces which promote health and growth, from the higher worlds into this physical world. And when the seer enquires into why such souls have deserved this destiny, he becomes aware that in physical life on Earth there are two ways in which human beings can execute and think about what they want to achieve.

Let us take a general look at life. We see numbers of human beings who carry out the work prescribed for them by their profession or office. Even if there is no radical case of any one of these people regarding their work as if they were animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it is at least true to say that they work because they are obliged to. Of course they would never neglect their duty—although of course anything may happen! In a certain sense it cannot be otherwise in the present phase of man's evolution; the only urge such people feel towards their work is that of duty. This does not by any means suggest that such work should be criticised root and branch. It should not be understood in this sense. Earth-evolution is such that this aspect of life will become more and more widespread; nor will things improve in the future. The tasks that men will have to carry out will become increasingly complicated in so far as they are connected with outer life and men will be condemned more and more to think and do only that to which duty drives them. Already there are hosts of human beings who do their work only because duty forces them to it, but on the other hand there will be people who look for a Society such as ours in which they can also achieve something, not simply from a sense of duty as in everyday life but for which they feel enthusiasm and devotion. Thus there are two aspects of a man's work: has it been thought out or done as an outer achievement merely from a sense of duty, or has it been done with enthusiasm and inner devotion, solely out of an inner urge of his own soul? This attitude—to think and act not merely out of a sense of duty, but out of love, inclination and devotion—this prepared the soul to become a server of the beneficent Powers of health and salutary forces sent down from the super-sensible world into our physical world, to become a servant of everything that brings health and to experience the bliss that can accompany these circumstances.

To know this is extremely important for the general well-being of man, for only by acquiring during life the forces that will enable him to co-operate with the Powers in question will he be able to work spiritually for an ever intensifying process of healing and betterment of conditions on the Earth.

We will now consider still another case, of one who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment and its demands. This by no means applies to everybody. There are some people who take no trouble to adjust themselves to the world and are never at home with the conditions either of spiritual or outer physical life. For example, there are individuals who notice an announcement that here or there an anthroposophical lecture will be given; they go to the place but almost as soon as they get seated, they are already asleep! In such cases the soul cannot adapt itself to the environment is not attuned to it. I have known men who cannot even sew on a button to replace one that has been torn off; that again means that they cannot adapt themselves to physical conditions. Countless cases could be quoted of people who cannot or will not adapt themselves to life. These symptoms are very significant, as I have said. At the moment, however, we will think only of the effects upon the life between death and rebirth.

Everything becomes cause and everything produces effects. A man who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment, someone, that is to say, who can actually sew on a button or can listen to something with which he is unfamiliar without immediately falling asleep, is preparing himself to become, after death, a helper of those Spirits who further the progress of humanity and send down to the Earth the spiritual forces which promote life as it advances from epoch to epoch. After death we can experience the bliss of looking down upon earthly life and co-operating with the forces that are perpetually being sent to the Earth to further its progress, but this is possible only if we endeavour to adapt ourselves to our environment and its conditions. To be rightly and thoroughly understood Karma must be studied in details, in details which reveal the manifold ways in which causes and effects are connected here in the physical world, in the spiritual world and in existence as a whole.

Here again light is thrown upon the fact that our life in the spiritual worlds depends upon the mode of our life in the physical body. Each world has its own specific mission; no two worlds have an identical mission. The characteristic phenomena and experiences in one world are not the same in another. And if, for example, a being is meant to assimilate certain things on Earth, it is on Earth that he must do so; if he misses this opportunity he cannot acquire them in some other world. This is particularly the case in a matter which we have already considered but of which it will be well to be thoroughly aware. The matter in question concerns the acceptance of certain concepts and ideas needed by man for his life as a whole. Let us take an example that is near at hand. Anthroposophy is a timely and active force in our epoch. People approach and accept Anthroposophy during their life on Earth in the way known to you, but again the belief might arise that it is not necessary to cultivate Anthroposophy on Earth, for one will be in a position after death to know how things are in the spiritual worlds; that moreover the higher Hierarchies will also be there and able to impart to the soul what is necessary.

Now it is a fact that having passed through the phase of development leading to the present cycle of evolution, the human being, with his whole soul, has been prepared to contact on Earth the kind of anthroposophical life that is possible only while he is incarnated in a physical body. Men are predestined for this and if they fail they will be unable to establish relationship with any of the spiritual Beings who might have been their teachers. One cannot simply die and then, after death, find a teacher who might take the place of what here, during physical life on Earth, can come to souls in the form of Anthroposophy. We need not, however, be dejected by the fact that many individuals reject Anthroposophy and it is therefore to be assumed that they will not be able to acquire it between death and the new birth. We need not despair about them for they will be born in a new earthly life and by that time there will be a strong enough stimulus towards Anthroposophy and enough Anthroposophy on the Earth for them to acquire it. In the present age despondency is still out of place, but that should not lead anyone to say: I can acquire Anthroposophy in my next life and so can do without it now. No, what has been neglected here cannot be retrieved later on.

When our German Theosophical Movement was still very young I was once giving a lecture about Nietzsche, during which I said certain things about the spiritual worlds. At that time it was customary to have discussions and on this occasion someone got up and said that such matters must always be put to the test of Kant's philosophy, from which it would be evident that we can have no knowledge of these things here on Earth and can begin to know them only after death. That, quite literally, was what the man said. As I have repeatedly emphasised, it is not the case that one has only to die in order to acquire certain knowledge. When we pass through the gate of death we do not experience anything for which we have not prepared ourselves. Life between death and rebirth is throughout a continuation of the life here, as the examples already given have shown. Therefore as individuals we can acquire from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies only that for which we have prepared ourselves on Earth—perhaps by having become anthroposophists. Our connection with the Earth and our passage through the life on Earth have a significance which nothing else can replace.

A certain form of mediation is, however, possible in this connection and I have already spoken of it. A person may die and during his lifetime have had no knowledge at all of Spiritual Science; but his brother or his wife or a close friend were anthroposophists. The man who has died may have refused to have anything to do with Anthroposophy during his life; perhaps he consistently abused it. Now he has passed through the gate of death and Anthroposophy can be conveyed to him in some way by other personalities on Earth. But there must be someone on Earth who passes on the knowledge to him out of love. Connection with the Earth must be maintained. This is the basis of what I have called ‘reading to the dead’. We can render them great benefit even if previously they would listen to nothing about the spiritual world. We can help them either by putting what we have to say into the form of thoughts, conveying knowledge in this way, or we may take an anthroposophical book, visualise the personality concerned, and read to him from it; then he will learn. We have had a number of striking and beautiful examples in our Movement of how it has been possible in this way to benefit the dead. Many of our friends read to those who have died. I recently had an experience that others too may have had. Someone asked me about a friend who had died very recently and it seemed that he was trying to make himself noticed by means of all kinds of signs, especially at night, creating disturbance in the room, rapping and so on. Such happenings are often indications that the dead person wants something; and in this case it was quite evident. In his lifetime the man had been very erudite but had always rejected any knowledge of the spiritual world that might come his way. It became obvious that he would greatly benefit if a particular Lecture Course containing the subject-matter for which he was craving, were read to him. In this way very effective help can be given beyond death for something left undone on Earth.

The fact that can convince us of the great and significant mission of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy can bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, that when human beings die they have not really gone away from us but we remain connected with them and can be active on their behalf. If it is asked whether one can always know whether the dead soul also hears us, it must be said that those who do what has been described with genuine devotion will eventually become aware from the way in which the thoughts which they are sending to the dead live in their own souls that the dead person is hovering around them. But this is an experience, a feeling, of which sensitive souls alone are capable. The most distressing aspect is when something that might be a great service of love is not heeded; in that case it has been done unnecessarily for the person concerned, but it may still have some effect in the general pattern of worlds. In any case one should not grieve excessively about such lack of success. After all, it happens even here that something is read to people who do not listen!

These things may well give a true conception of the seriousness and worth of Anthroposophy. But it must constantly be emphasised that the conditions of our life in the spiritual world after death will depend entirely upon the manner of our life here on Earth. Even our community with others in the spiritual world depends upon the nature of the relationship we sought to establish with them here. If there has been no relationship with a human being here on Earth it cannot be taken for granted that any connection can be established in the other world between death and rebirth. The possibility of being led to him in the spiritual world is as a rule dependent upon the contact established here on Earth—not necessarily in the last incarnation only but in earlier lives as well.

In short, both objective and personal relationships established here on Earth are the decisive factor for the life between death and the new birth. Exceptions do occur but must be recognised as such. What I said here at Christmastime (in Lecture Five) about the Buddha and his present mission on Mars is one such exception. There are numbers of human souls on the Earth who were able to contact the Buddha—even in his previous existence as Bodhisattva—as a result of inspirations received from the Mysteries. But because the Buddha was incarnated for the last time as the son of Suddodana, then worked in his etheric body as I have described¹ and has now transferred his sphere of activity to Mars, at the present time the possibility exists that even if we never previously came in contact with the Buddha, we can establish a relationship with him in the life between death and rebirth; and we can then bring the results of that contact with us into the next incarnation on Earth. But that remains an exceptional case. The general rule is that after death we find those individuals with whom we had actual contacts here on Earth and continue these relationships in that other state of existence.

What has now been said is closely related to the information given during this Winter about the life between death and the new birth, and the aim has been to show that if Anthroposophy remains simply a matter of theory and external science, it is only half of what it ought to be; it fulfils its true function only when it streams through souls as a veritable elixir of life and enables these souls to experience in depth the feelings that arise in a human being when he acquires some knowledge of the higher worlds. Death then ceases to appear as a destroyer of human and personal relationships. The gulf between life here on Earth and the life after death is bridged and many activities carried out with this in mind will develop. The dead will send their influences into life, the living their influences into the realm of the dead.

My wish is that your souls will feel more deeply that life is enriched, becomes fuller and more spiritual when everything is influenced by Anthroposophy. Only those who feel this have the right attitude to Anthroposophy. What is of prime importance is not the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that the Earth too has passed through the several incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, and so forth. The most important and essential need is to allow Anthroposophy to transform our lives in a way commensurate with the Earth's future. This feeling can never be experienced too deeply, nor can we bestir ourselves too often in this connection. The feelings we bear with us from these meetings and then move through life under the stimulus of the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds acquired here—these feelings are the really important element in anthroposophical life. Merely to have knowledge of Anthroposophy is not enough; knowledge and feeling must be combined. We must realise, however, how false it is to believe that without any understanding of the world we can do it justice. Leonardo da Vinci's saying is true: “Great love is the daughter of great understanding.” He who is not prepared to understand will not learn how to love.

It is in this sense that Anthroposophy should find entry into our souls, in order that from this influence which proceeds from our own being a stream of spirituality may find its way into Earth-evolution, creating harmony between spirit and matter. Life on the Earth will, it is true, continue to be materialistic—indeed outer life will become increasingly so—but as man moves over the Earth he will bear within his soul the realisation of his connection with the higher worlds. Outwardly, earthly life will become more and more materialistic—that is the Earth's karma—but in the same measure, if Earth-evolution is to reach its goal, souls must become inwardly more and more spiritual. My purpose today was to make a small contribution towards understanding this task.

• 1. See Lectures Three, Five and Six of the course, The Gospel of St. Luke

Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ]

At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not.

This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change?

We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science.

Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole.

I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind.

So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist.

Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking?

Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic.

Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine.

Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context.

Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history.

After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.

I Logic: Idea in itself
II Nature: Idea in its external being
III Spirit: Idea in its separateness

Soul—State—World-history
Art—Religion—Philosophy

When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction.

Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself.

Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea.

In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical.

I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything.

Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man).

Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite.

Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being.

Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back.

In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this.

Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea!

Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme!

In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality.

Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit.

Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution.

Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand.

You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question.

Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history.

Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

Notes:

1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German.

I want to speak today OF something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to humankind by anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces of the human being: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of the human being we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

The human is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when people reach what is called the threshold of the spiritual world.

Our study today will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which humanity stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In the life between birth and death, human beings unfold the force of will as the impulse of their actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, the force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of human will bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while people are awake, they are in a condition resembling sleep wherever their will is involved. True, we have in our consciousness the ideas lying behind what we will, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that we know nothing. We do not know how the idea, “I move my arm,” is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconscious and it may truly be said that people are no more conscious of the real process of will than they are of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of human will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if scientists do not expressly say so, they have in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science today? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. People think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way people think and you will find evidence of it in any text book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that humanity inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were humans not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, humankind has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, humanity itself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution. I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa, and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then-Civilized world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of human beings were among the contributory causes. Yet so it is. In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of people on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses: Humanity itself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth existence. Nor does this apply only to an event of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within human beings and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms alone.

Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side. Here (X) is the center of the earth. When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following. In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapor if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapors begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapors lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapors inside the earth press upward. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapors arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapor do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram a, b, c, d, e, f—do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole. Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say, 1,500 million points¹ all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the center of gravity of your own physical structure. When people are awake, this center of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when they are asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centers of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within the human beings.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling today. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms lie within the human organism. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within humankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of the human being. Science tells us of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in our center of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologist in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that areconcentrated in our center of gravity, and the external, physical, and chemical forces? We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity. In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When people take into themselves the substances of the outer world, it is their will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between the human being and the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms of nature today is such that our will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings we had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through humankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space. So much for the one pole in the human constitution.

But the human is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in waking life, human intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while we are awake, although we are not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of the human being. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of human nature were not there—the pole of the up-building forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in our center of gravity, so the up-building forces lie in the sphere into which we pass during sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, we are in a condition figuratively described by saying that with our “I” and astral body we are outside the physical body. But then we are entirely beings of soul and spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time we are connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, up-building forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually up-built would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, up-building forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself. I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The up-building forces lie in humankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in our being but not in our waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously, during our sleep—that is what builds up the earth planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by human sense organs here on earth. But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inner activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If inhabitants of the moon—supposing in this sense there were such beings—were to look at the earth, they would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—they would detect what takes place around the centers of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which human beings live between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centers of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds us in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant, and mineral worlds are maya means nothing: What is of value is the realization that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of human evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain. Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, the human being too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in people is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in people. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of the human being to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth, if I may speak figuratively, hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as we believe that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as we cling to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed today lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking people cannot use the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as a human being I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all humankind—of every physical happening. The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text books of geology, botany, and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of Martian premises. I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology, and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth. This being would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink. That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by human beings themselves of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside the human being; they lie within humankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realize that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling people to sleep than to impress upon them that they have no share in the course taken by earth existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel themselves to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

Someone may say: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body. With equal conviction such a person should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure. The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of human beings. The range of our vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilized world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world consciousness, human responsibility widens into world responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions today. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis, do not imagine that what you read there today can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. People think today that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya. But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realized: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in humankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya,” becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in the human being a reality far greater than is usually perceived. And then the feeling of responsibility for earth existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realization that humankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As people of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of human beings.—What human beings? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the ones who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining today.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective inter-working of human beings on the earth. None of us should, for that reason, exclude ourselves as individuals, for each of us has a share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its on-flowing life.

I have been endeavoring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books. Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in our world were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge, were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second, and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second circle. This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quaternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when human beings are outside their physical bodies.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from our powers of cognition. The part played by humankind in shaping earth existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment speaks of the human being's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will Human beings know nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. We do not know what is really going on when by lifting our hand we set in operation a process of will; nor do we know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my mystery play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not fantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose fantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern people who like to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. They feel relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than fantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if poets are not themselves conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if their soul is linked with the cosmos, if they have not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, they give utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes.² The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying. Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the human world that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth existence the human world is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the human world. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from humanity. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning. Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavors never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meager sense of reality prevailing in our present civilization expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without human beings, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose tree. These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thoughts: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, the human being has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without humankind. It is an unreal concept when modern scientific investigators think, according to their premises, that earth evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture today I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in human beings and their cosmic environment.

• 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.
• 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethe's Faust.

I want to speak to-day of something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to mankind by Anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces in man: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of man we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

Man is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when man reaches what is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World.

Our study to-day will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which man stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In his life between birth and death, man unfolds the force of will as the impulse of his actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, this force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of will in man bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of man's will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if he does not expressly say so, he has in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science to-day? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9th, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. Men think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way men think and you will find evidence of it in any text-book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch—but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that man inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were man not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, man has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution.—I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then civilised world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of men were among the contributory causes.—Yet so it is.—In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of men on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth-existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses. Man himself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth-existence. Nor does this apply only to events of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within man and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events, remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms alone.

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Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side.—Here (X) is the centre of the earth.—When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following.—In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapour if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapours begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapours lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapours inside the earth press upwards. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapours arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapour do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram—a, b, c, d, e, f do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole.—Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say 1,500 million points [Note 1] all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centres of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within man.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling to-day. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms lie within the organism of man. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within mankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of man. Science tells us of physical, chemical and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologists in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the Threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the Threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that are concentrated in man's centre of gravity, and the external, physical and chemical forces?—We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity.—In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When man takes into himself the substances of the outer world, it is his will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between man and the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature to-day is such that his will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through mankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space.—So much for the one pole in man's constitution.

But man is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in his waking life, man's intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth-existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while man is awake, although he is not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of man himself. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of man's nature were not there—the pole of the upbuilding forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity, so the upbuilding forces lie in the sphere into which men pass during their sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, man is in a condition figuratively described by saying that with his “I” and astral body he is outside the physical body. But then he is entirely a being of soul-and-spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time he is connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth-planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, upbuilding forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually upbuilt would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, upbuilding forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself: I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The upbuilding forces lie in mankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in man's being but not in his waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth-evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously to man, during his sleep—that is what builds up the earth-planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by man's sense-organs here on earth.—But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inter activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If an inhabitant of the Moon—supposing in this sense there were such a being—were to look at the earth, he would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—he would detect what takes place around the centres of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which man lives between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centres of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds man in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant and mineral worlds are maya means nothing. What is of value is the realisation that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of mankind's evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain.—Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, physical man too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in man is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in man. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of man to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth—if I may speak figuratively—hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as man believes that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as he clings to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed to-day lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking men cannot fuse the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as man I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all mankind—of every physical happening.—The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth-existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text-books of geology, botany and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of his premises.—I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean.—Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth.—He would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth-existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink.—... That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside man; they lie within mankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realise that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the course taken by earth-existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth-existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

An individual may say to himself: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body.—With equal conviction he should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure.—The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of man. The range of man's vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilised world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth-planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world-consciousness, human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions to-day. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis,do not imagine that what you read there to-day can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. Men think to-day that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya.—But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realised: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in mankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya”, becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than is usually perceived.—And then the feeling of responsibility for earth-existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realisation that mankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As men of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of men.—What men? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the men who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining to-day.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking of men on the earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its onflowing life.

I have been endeavouring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books.—Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in the world of men were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second—a circle.—This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quarternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when man is outside his physical body.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from man's powers of cognition. The part played by mankind in shaping earth-existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment speaks of man's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will. Man knows nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. He does not know what is really going on when by lifting his hand he sets in operation a process of will; nor does he know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth-existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not phantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose phantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern man who likes to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. He feels relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than phantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if the poet is not himself conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if his soul is linked with the cosmos, if he has not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, he gives utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes. [Note 2] The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying.—Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the world of man that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth-existence the world of man is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the world of man. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from man. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”, but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning.—Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there, cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose-tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavours never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meagre sense of reality prevailing in our present civilisation expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without man, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose-tree.—These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality.—Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth-evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture to-day I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in man and his cosmic environment.

Notes:

Note 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.

Note 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's Faust. [This is a reference to GA#'s 272 and 273: Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust, Volumes I (15 lectures) and II (13 lectures), most of which are yet untranslated. – e.Ed.]