The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The previous lecture, which is followed by today's lecture, was about the hidden depths of the soul's life and explained that the soul's life is not absolutely bound to matter, that it is not only separable from the physical, but also from the ideas that are gained from it through the senses and the mind. The possibility of the separation of soul experiences from physical ideas was demonstrated by the difference between memories and dreams. Those [memories] arise without the original power of the soul's compassion, these [dreams] with the original accompanying phenomena of the emotional life of joy, suffering and the like. There - in memory - the soul life detaches itself from the life of imagination, which is gained in the outside world, and withdraws into the hidden depths of the soul, where it works and works, where it exercises its power by working on the entire human organism.

While the life of imagination often proves powerless – for we know not what goes on in the depths of the sea when the surface ripples – the hidden life of the soul proves itself to be a power. We see this in dreams, in the trance of mediums, in the work of art and in the knowledge of the spiritual researcher. For man can penetrate into it by training his mind, so that he learns to consciously draw from the sources of truly real life, into which he not only gazes without control like the dreamer and fantasist and thereby becomes a dreamer, hallucinist or even a liar, not like the one with atavistic gifted with atavistic clairvoyance, becomes the plaything of the spirits of such a soul or astral world in his dreams, nor alone, as the true artist draws from the spirit and shapes it in beauty, but as a knower, consciously seeing, can distinguish what is vision from what is true and self-willed. [...]

This knowledge of the hidden can only lead to the right spiritual research if it is gained, firstly, through self-knowledge, through descending into one's own inner being. With this self-knowledge, secondly, knowledge of the spiritual environment arises and grows. The greater the self-knowledge, the broader the spiritual horizon, the power to penetrate into the realities of the environment, into the hidden world spirit. l..]

Dear attendees! When approaching the subject of today's consideration, then one comes, starting from the points of view that are represented here, in a basically quite strange situation compared to everything that has been thought and researched in our age for decades about the important question of the origin of man. The reason why one finds oneself in a strange position is that, over the past few decades, the origin of man has been presented primarily in the form in which one believes one should think about the origin of man in the present day: in terms of the results of modern science. And who could deny that the great and tremendous advances in natural science in recent times have every right to have a say at the moment when this important question is put to man.

Most of the people present who are dealing with the question from the point of view of natural science must understandably have the impression that anything that can be said here from the point of view of spiritual science about this question is basically directly opposed to what natural science has to say about the point – understandably, dear attendees, and I ask you to bear in mind that this is being said. For it is precisely with such questions that what should emerge on the occasion of the two lectures of my last visit, which dealt with how to refute theosophy on the one hand and how to defend it on the other, always hovers in the background. Especially with questions like today's, the spiritual scientist must be completely clear that much, much can be brought forward from the ideas of the present, seemingly with good reason, against his assertions. Therefore, it must be understood that a lecture such as this evening's can provide some suggestions, but is far from quickly convincing someone who is still unfamiliar with the theosophical views. This is said as an introduction to characterize the attitude from which such a lecture is given. What have we experienced in recent decades [in relation to our topic today]? More and more, those [scientists] who believe they have a judgment in this area have come to the conclusion that man in the totality of his being has its origin from creatures that, in the sense of a systematic arrangement of living beings, actually belong to the sphere of what today's man calls his education, his culture, in fact, the sphere of his human activities. The extraordinarily fruitful principle of development has led to the belief that in the past, development would have progressed in such a way that from simple, primitive life forms, to which today's primitive life forms still resemble, through slow development - as a result of the “struggle for existence,” through adaptation - gradually more and more complicated forms of life have formed, up to the higher animals, and that in such a progressive development, man has risen, as it were, from the lower realms. So man's ancestors are sought in animal life, and there is such a conviction in [wide] circles on this point that anyone who wants to put forward something that does not agree with it is actually thought of as a retarded mind. Now, first of all, the natural scientists – not so much the natural scientists who remain in the realm of facts, but rather the natural scientists who have felt called upon to link worldviews, world mysteries to their research – they have felt compelled to present, so to speak, the outer form and the outer physical conditions of human life as a first as complications that arose from the forces that come from the realms that stand below the human, so that one would only have more complicated living conditions than in the case of animals, especially those that stand one step lower than humans, but that one must still derive the forces from what is already found in the lower living beings.

Those natural scientists who wanted to tie an outlook on life to the facts of natural science have strengthened this belief. But not only has this belief become established, but it has also become established that the higher intellectual powers, what we call man's aesthetic perception, his moral impulses, are also only higher forms of the spiritual, of the soul, that one finds in the animal kingdom, that one can also look for the more primitive forms more primitive forms of moral behavior in animals that can be grasped in terms of moral concepts in relation to humans, so that one is often convinced that man has emerged as an intellectual, moral, and aesthetic being only through complication from the living beings below him.

It must be conceded that in the face of the magnificent results of modern natural science, it is extremely difficult to come up with any other attitude, any other view. And it must be readily admitted that as a spiritual scientist one often finds oneself in a strange position when, on the one hand, one allows the achievements of natural science to take effect and, on the other hand, one has to deal with what certain more or less amateurish spiritual scientists believe they have to extract from the scientific results. When one compares the conscientiousness of the two presentations, it is the case that, in terms of conscientiousness, one would actually prefer to side with the natural scientist than with some amateur spiritual researchers.

Now the point is that spiritual research in this field is also in a very special position because, basically, it only comes into disharmony with the thoughts, ideas and hypotheses that have emerged from the results of natural science , while it becomes ever clearer to the spiritual researcher that the actual results of natural science virtually force human thinking to gradually take a perspective as it is given by spiritual science. Actually, the dichotomy between spiritual science and natural science is not that great, because the facts of natural science correspond more to spiritual science than to the monistic and materialistic [interpretations]. So, as a spiritual researcher, one feels in harmony with the facts as one progresses, and only comes into conflict with the hypotheses that are drawn from the facts from some quarters.

If one observes man in his development and wants to trace him back to his origin, it seems only natural that the views about him must be in line with the views one has about the course of the earth's development, [this going back] was indeed [previously] held entirely in the materialistic sense in which the biological theory of evolution, the theory of the development of living beings, is [carried out]. When one reflects on the course of the Earth's development, then as a rule one only considers what the external, inanimate forces, the forces of physics, chemistry, geology, can achieve, and one follows the Earth in a state in which it looked different from what it looks like today, in which it was perhaps in a state that, compared to our present-day Earth formation, resembles a gaseous ball. We know that this is a widespread hypothesis, that it is assumed that the Earth condensed from a gaseous state. It is known that if you trace this back even further into the distant past, you come to see the whole solar system in a gaseous state. The spiritual researcher recognizes that objections have recently been raised against this so-called Kant-Laplace theory, but in the broadest circles it still prevails. It is believed that the whole solar system itself emanated from a kind of primeval nebula that was in rotation, and it is also imagined that the planets, including our Earth, were separated by the forces that were at work in this rotation.

I have often pointed out how the so-called [Plateau's] experiment is carried out in schools to illustrate this Kant-Laplacean theory. You take a large drop of a substance that can float on water, let a sheet of card penetrate at the point of the equator, pierce it at the point of the axis with a needle and make the drop rotate, thus showing that small drops do indeed come off and move around the center. What could be simpler than to prove in this way how a planetary system could have formed in such a way? But in an experiment, it is important to take into account everything that needs to be logically included, and it turns out that something is forgotten in this experiment: one forgets oneself, forgets that one is standing there and turning, and that you only have the logical right to put forward the hypothesis [and to transfer the experiment to the solar system] if you assume that there is a giant teacher out there in the universe who has caused all this movement with a giant needle. If you do not make this addition in this experiment, then you are on completely unjustified ground.

Of course, spiritual science does not place a professor out in space, but it does say that nowhere is there a formless matter like this cosmic fog; that matter is permeated or at least directed by spiritual powers and forces everywhere, [without us falling into anthropomorphism in the process]. Therefore, for spiritual science it is clear: Even if it is justified in terms of material formation that such a primeval nebula is there, then a spiritual event underlies this outer event, just as the activity of the spiritual soul underlies the events in the human body. Spiritual science does not start from an analogy, but from spiritual research. In the specifically concrete, spiritual science seeks the spiritual events, the spiritual forces and the spiritual entities that underlie them, so that instead of external, materialistic hypotheses, it sees the spirit in them.

Now, if one were to undertake the usual presentations of the Kant-Laplacean theory and the associated operations, one could say that it is possible to derive what our body is and the shaping of physical and mental structures from the rotation in the primeval nebula. If we want to make the assumption that some kind of giant teacher is out there and sets the whole thing in motion, then we can speak, if need be, of the formation of the earth having emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. But then we come to a critical point again, and this has been seen not only by spiritual researchers, but also by thoughtful natural scientists. This point concerns the origin of life in general on our earth body. One can, of course, if one does not take certain conditions into account, perhaps indulge in the belief that living things could once have come into being through the spontaneous generation of certain substances. It would be a very long way indeed if one wanted to explain all the philosophical and other reasons that demonstrate the impossibility of deriving life from conditions that are purely physical. It is much more important that this impossibility has become clear to deep-thinking natures such as Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Preyer, the brilliant biographer of Darwin, that they found no way to come to terms with it in their thoughts, to see life emerging from a spiritless, [inanimate] earth. So these researchers have resorted to the assumption that our Earth, at the beginning of its formation, was by no means just any physical or physical-chemical body, but they assumed that, even if it is true for the present that the Earth body that we have under our feet, presents itself as a lifeless one to mineralogists, and that the living beings on it reproduce in their own realms through inheritance, this does not apply to ancient times, but Preyer and Fechner were forced to think of the earth in the distant past as a living being, as a large organism, so that in the sense of these naturalists the earth was originally a large living organism in the universe. Then the time would have come when certain substances and components of this earth crystallized out of this so-called living substance, and what crystallized out is our present body, containing chemical and physical forces. While originally the earth had a life of its own, it now gives its life, in its own way, to individual earth creatures, so that the origin of living beings could be thought of as the emergence of a living being from a living earth body.

It makes a strange impression when Darwin's biographer directs his thoughts to this primeval form of the earth and creates an image out of his thinking. When we read in Preyer that the earth organism was originally to be imagined as being alive, that its bloodstreams were glowing iron vapors, that the breath of this earth body was incoming world vapors from the environment and the nutrition of the earth body was matter that flowed to it from the universe - a strange mixture of natural physical ideas [with life processes]! He cannot completely free himself from his physical conceptions, but he must admit that something like nutrition, breathing and blood circulation can be assumed in the incoming vapors. We do not think of glowing iron as performing these functions when it comes to nutrition. But Preyer shows us one thing: that even natural scientists can feel compelled to recognize the earth as an organism. They meet spiritual science halfway; they admit that if you go backwards, you come to a starting point where the earth [was a large living organism], that the earth, as something dead, in the further course [of development], has set the living [...] aside, [specialized] into [the most diverse] beings, into [plants], animals, humans. They think of remote pasts imbued with full life. But there is still something missing, which spiritual science must ascribe from these prerequisites to this earth body: [The thought is missing] that the earthly body must in truth not only have a living starting point, but that it must be thought of as having a soul and a spirit, so that when we look at the origin of the earth, we are not only dealing with a living organism, but we have to imagine the earth as a soul-inspired, spirit-inspired organism.

Yes, now one could say: What is being done here, other than what is to be explained first, is being placed into what was originally assumed? Instead of developing the spirit, one assumes the spirit as originally existing. But that is what one must do, ladies and gentlemen, according to all the possible prerequisites of a science of knowledge, because it is nowhere possible, even conceivable, that the higher natural kingdoms develop from subordinate natural kingdoms; nowhere in the course of experience are we given a stepping out of the spiritual-soul from a merely physical, of a living being from a merely [physical-] chemical. What we encounter, especially in ourselves, is that we see the spiritual-soul working on the material; and anyone who has followed the lectures given here and has heard what has been said about this spiritual-soul will know how right it is to say that, especially in the case of human beings, the spiritual-soul works on the external physical-material.

We follow the person in us, let us say, in the time from that moment until we remember back in normal [human life], and see our experiences emerging from the depths of our consciousness in our memory. We see at the center of these events of consciousness becoming more and more alive that to which we apply the word “I”. It would be absurd to assume that this 'I' only began at the moment up to which we can remember. It must also have been there in the dream-like, dusky consciousness, when the child does not yet say 'I' to itself. The 'I' must have been there. How was it present in connection with the other soul forces? If we consider the ordinary life of the human soul, we can say that what emerges as consciousness in this stage is something special, something personal. We see how we work the special life energies, which are individual to us, into it. Therefore, we are compelled to think of what we see working within our consciousness later in life as the actual agent of our whole organism. We have to think that we inherit the general structure of this organism from our ancestors, but that the energies that make up our organism have to be worked into it, [right down to the finest plastic formations of the brain].

When we recognize this, then we are no longer far from being able to trace this individuality back to a previous life on earth. There we see the spiritual and soul forces at work on our inner physical and material being, and we can then say to ourselves that, as today, as in our earthly present, our ego with its soul forces is still working on our body in early childhood. This work is not inherited from our ancestors; rather, there is still a certain scope left in what we have become through the forces of heredity, in which we can work our spiritual and soul nature. We see this, for example, in the fact that we develop from a crawling creature into a walking one. We see how the spiritual-soul element lifts us up, we see the spiritual-soul element working on the physical.

Only when we progress to what was mentioned in the last lecture - about the hidden depths of the soul life - to the spiritual training through which one gains insight into the spiritual world behind the physical, then we can consider what has already been described here. If you apply the methods that you will find in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” to yourself, you will gradually come to a point where you, as a human being, are no longer dependent on living in the soul in such a way that you have to use physical tools. Spiritual science shows that man can apply methods of meditation and concentration to himself, through which he can acquire a spiritual essence, independent of the physical, so that he has experiences and knows that he did not have them with the help of the senses; but knows: Now you are experiencing something in your original spiritual-soul nature, you become aware of what you are beyond this physical being.

And it is particularly interesting that when you ascend to such a training, you have the feeling from the very beginning: Yes, you are now experiencing something supernatural. But at the same time, at the beginning you are not able to express what you experience in the same way in concepts and ideas and words. Why not? Because when you express ideas and concepts in words, you need the instrument of the brain. The ideas and concepts that people form are taken from the world, so that a gap opens up between what one experiences and what one can express. Only when one practices patience and perseverance and continues the exercises does the time come when one is able to truly express the experiences one brings down from the spiritual world in terms of concepts and ideas taken from the outer life. Before this possibility arises, one knows that one feels the brain as something that offers a great deal of resistance. One feels that in the further course of training, one must do the work of shaping the brain plastically, in a way similar to the way the child must shape the still clumsy brain plastically for life. The aim is to work such fine shapes into the brain that they cannot be recognized by natural scientists with external instruments. The work of the soul-spiritual being on the material substance of the body can, however, only be followed inwardly. Thus, we see again in the spiritual-soul realm the actual origin of what is becoming.

It is no longer an unjustified claim to say that, as things currently stand on our earth, the spiritual and soul life of man, as it was before the first material atom of our body came into being, is only able to use the scope that is limited in the general structure of our physical body. While this scope, over which the conditions of heredity have no power, shapes the soul and spirit, we see that the physical, the general human form, can only be preserved by human beings of a similar nature. Thus, under today's living conditions, the soul and spirit are only able to shape certain things within a body received through heredity.

If this is the case today – and if we assume that the earth has undergone an evolution, which even natural science admits – it is not to be said that in the distant past the spiritual-mental was only able to work within a certain scope. Take it for the moment as a hypothesis; it need not be dismissed out of hand as absurd, when spiritual science says: The further we go back into primeval conditions, the more powerfully the spiritual-soul [of man] is effective. In the remote past, this spiritual-soul was so significant, so powerful that it could also shape that which today can only be shaped within heredity. Just as we see today that the spiritual soul forms only a small part of the material human being, so we see that in ancient times it formed the entire organism, so that the human soul was present in the ensouled earth organism, and the earthly body was once able to yield such a substance that could be formed directly from the soul into a full human being by the spiritual-soul worlds.

Thus we look back into the ancient past, where conditions were not yet as they are today, where within the total soul of the earth organism the human souls were contained, that is, the earth organism also had organic substance that was different from the present one, which can only be classified according to the forces of inheritance in the human body. So we come back to an earth configuration - in contrast to the earth formation in which we stand - in which there was no such reproduction as in our time; we do not find such a connection between generations, between male and female. In the place of the interaction between male and female, we find the interaction between the spiritual soul and the living substance of the earth body. The spiritual-soul aspect had a fertilizing effect on the earthly substance and allowed that to emerge which the human being was at the origin of his earthly existence: a creature formed and developed purely out of the spiritual-soul core of his being.

If we look at present-day conditions with an open mind, this may seem like a daring hypothesis, but it is certainly not something absurd.

So we see that our earthly body is formed, as it were, out of living substance.

Something else must be said, which is also true. When the spiritual researcher refers back to epochs of the earth when it made no sense to speak of male and female, but when the heavenly and earthly fertilized each other, the views of the natural scientists get in the way, but not the facts of natural science that have emerged in recent decades. These facts have led natural scientists to particular assumptions. We see how, in recent times, which began with Ernst Haeckel's belief that he had to give a materialistic interpretation of human origin in his conception of the Darwinian theory at the [Stettin] Natural History Society [in 1863]; we see how the naturalists who hold this older point of view felt compelled to draw a straight line of development [from the monera] to man, and how they are always obliged to say that, before man came upon the earth, there lived a creature similar to the present-day ape. [But more recent research has] corrected this view. Everywhere we see that attempts have been made to bring man's ancestor closer to a physical, animal-like being, which, through the perfection of its physical organization, also produced the height of the spiritual organization.

We can no longer accept such things, that man had an ancestor who was somehow similar to a present-day animal form. We see the necessity for this. Naturalists say that there were once human ancestors that resembled today's apes. That which now lives as the animal world has arisen from decadence, so that what we have as apes is a being that has arisen from a declining formation of a higher form on the one hand, and on the other hand we have man. We see monkeys and humans as two branches leading back to a being that no longer exists, that was only in very distant geological times. This common ancestor of animal-kind and humanity, to which the facts lead the natural science worldview people, is [hypothetical], a being that is purely imagined.

Now, certain naturalists have been forced by careful results to move this being further and further up, so that many are already forced to say that even higher mammals do not resemble this hypothetical being, we would have to go back even further to a being from which the very first mammalian forms descended, and this being would have developed a branch at the same time that was always superior to animality and that finally developed into man. When one sees a monkey, one must always trace it back to an earlier stage of animal existence and then assume a purely hypothetical, purely imagined entity that developed a branch that became reptiles, while another branch was formed that became human. So we see the naturalist going to something that formed humans and animals from the same being.

How far removed are such scholars from what we have expounded from spiritual science? No further than that their habits of thought compel them to shape the conditions of the earth's development in such a way that they can only conceive of the origin of present-day life forms in a physical way, whereas the spiritual researchers put something in this place that emerged under completely different earthly conditions and from completely different conditions: the fertilization of the earthly substance by the spiritual soul.

We also find the possibility of thinking of the further progress of development up to the human being as an entity worked out of the spiritual-soul. Just as today's human being is the product of a father and a mother, so too was such a primeval human being, as I have now described him in the sense of spiritual science, joined together from two sides, from the substance of the earth and the spiritual-soul of the earth's surroundings. Thus we can say that the human being belonged to the spiritual environment. Through this primal element, the human being has lived more in the whole of the heavenly environment and felt his connection with cosmic conditions.

But we could only receive our spiritual and soul germ at a certain point on the earth. Through this, the human being is individualized, through the fact that he came [to a certain place], through this he has become a special being, a being that has become native, that has become firmly bound to the locality of the earth.

Thus in this primeval man we have at the same time: a general human and an individual, an earth-bound and a more heavenly, macrocosmic element. Strangely, we see the after-effects of what we have just characterized in today's man.

If we carefully examine everything that comes to man through heredity, it shows that, despite all the other circumstances that have been specialized through heredity, we find a general human element at the basis of man, and that every human nature is individualized into a second. We still find both today: something universally human and something specialized. If we examine present-day humanity, we find that the universal human element is inherited from the female side, while the specific, individual character is essentially inherited from the male ancestors, regardless of whether the individual as an individuality is male or female. This means that we can still see the after-effects of what manifested itself in primeval man as a general heavenly element – if the expression is not taken pedantically – and what came from the general life substance of the earth. Therefore, we need only assume that in the primeval men, who were formed out of the spirit, in the one case the macrocosmic element predominated, which had a fertilizing effect from the surrounding area, while the element that came from the earth itself receded more. As a result, some of the primeval men specialized. Where the heavenly element was more active, specialization led to the female principle, while where the earthly element predominated, where the specific earthly destiny gained the upper hand, the more individual was formed, the tendency towards the male. Thus we see how, out of these general conditions, the tendencies were formed in the original human being, consisting of soul and spirit, and how these tendencies became more and more concentrated and took shape as man and woman.

And this whole process, my esteemed audience, must be imagined in such a way that the conditions were always changing, that is to say, nothing else but that the conditions that had made it possible for the cosmic elements to fertilize from the spiritual environment were disappearing. The living earth substance released the purely mineral and chemical from itself and was therefore no longer able to release living substance. What had been brought into being through spiritual fertilization by the lower and the higher, and which could no longer shape the human being in this way, was replaced by something that emerged in a different way and became formative by being incorporated into the human being itself, so that reproduction occurred from generation to generation. We see that the forces that shape the human being lead back to each other in such a way that the female contribution leads back to a cosmic, heavenly element, and that which is given in reproduction by the male leads back to the original, organically living earth substance. We still see the general in the female and the individual in the male. No one will be able to shed light on the relationship of heredity and the contribution of male and female who does not take these things into account, even if only hypothetically. The forces that worked between the earth's environment and the earth itself had to be passed on to heredity.

We must now consider how the development of animals relates to this development of man, to this view of the origin of man. For in a certain way, the origin of man is not properly understood without considering the development of animals. It shows that man, as he stands before us today in his duality - so that on the one hand there is still a certain scope for the spiritual and soul to work, and on the other hand he receives what he has inherited - could only develop as he is today , if he retained this spiritual-soul education until a certain point in time, until the conditions on earth were such that they could no longer provide the possibility for the human being to arise from the spiritual-soul. Only then did today's form of reproduction develop. As a being formed from the spiritual-soul, the human being had to wait.

What would have happened if he had abandoned the origin of the spiritual and soul earlier and merely submitted to earthly conditions? Simple considerations can show us this. If the spiritual and soul had not remained in its original nature until the extreme moment of time, but had allowed earthly conditions to prevail, then the spiritual and soul would have become weak in the face of earthly conditions. If man had earlier adopted the mode of reproduction that is now his, his spiritual and soul forces would be weaker and that which comes from the earth would have gained the upper hand – because it was even more powerful when the earth still had organizing forces within it – and he would have descended to a lower level under the influence of the organizing forces of the earth.

This is the case with animality. The spiritual soul of the animals united with the earth at different times, descending into the spheres of the earth before man. The animal preceded man. But man does not descend from the animal, but from its spiritual archetype. Those spiritual archetypes that have become animals descended earlier than man, who remained longest at the top in the spiritual regions. Thus the lines of development do not lead to the archetype of the animal kingdom and of man. We must think of the archetype of the animal kingdom as separate from the soul-spiritual of man.

Thus we see how, in the sense of a logically developed theory of evolution, spiritual science places the human being in the context of the earth's overall development, and how this coincides with a properly considered scientific view. Spiritual science places man in such a line of development, in which the metamorphoses of the earth itself are taken into account, how then the animal forms arise and finally man arises, having waited so long in the spiritual surroundings of the earth, so that he could adapt to the conditions of the earth in such a way that the greatest scope was given for the spiritual and soul life.

Dear attendees, I have already indicated that what has been said today, especially by people who have equipped themselves with all the knowledge of today, must often be regarded as unthinkable, as absurd. And if only a few people have the inclination and the will to recognize that these things [of spiritual science] that play into cultural life should be pursued with the same seriousness as [those of] natural science, then that will be enough to show how this influence on cultural life occurs. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view, and admittedly arrives at something to which the natural scientist must still relate negatively, but those who want to can see that true natural science, based on facts, comes straight to meet what spiritual science has to give. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view from natural science, but it does arrive at something to which the natural scientist must still be hostile. If we disregard the fantasies of natural science and consider only the facts, we shall see that these everywhere substantiate and prove what has been characterized today.

But for man it is important to be aware that there is an independent spiritual element within him that is not the result of a material body, but that the physical is the result of a spiritual element that has its origin in the spiritual environment and has sunk its seeds into the now inanimate substance of the earth.

The study of the external facts in the development of the earth [does not contradict the independent significance of the spiritual and soul in human nature, but rather, through every deeper reflection, every living in its essence – like a soliloquy, like a conversation that the soul has with itself, must form itself, which, from the depths of human nature, must repeatedly shape itself in such a way that we can summarize the relationship of the human being to himself and to life in the words:

From the spirit man has sprung,

In the spirit man's whole life works and moves,

To the spirit man's whole being strives.

Translated by Antje Heymanns and Norbert Mulholland

For many years I have attempted to give lectures here during the winter months on a subject I call Spiritual Science. This winter again, as part of the announced lectures, we will focus on the facts of the spiritual world from the perspective of Spiritual Science. We will look at what belongs to the fundamental questions of existence: The relationship between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, human souls and animal souls, the spirit of man and of animals and the spirit in the plant realm. Then we will look at the nature of human development throughout the various stages of life; through childhood, youth and the later life years, and the part that education plays in forming a person’s main character. The life of the spirit will be illuminated by looking at great individualities of human evolution—at Zarathustra, Moses, Galilei, Goethe. An attempt will be made to show the relationship of what we call Spiritual Science to natural science, using examples from astronomy and geology. Subsequently, from the sources of Spiritual Science itself, we will try to tell what it has to say about the riddle of life.

Each year these contemplations were preceded by a kind of general orientation. We want to follow this custom again today by speaking about the significance of Spiritual Science; its nature and relationship, or its task in regard to the various spiritual needs of the present.

In the sense we speak about Spiritual Science here, one might say that it is still quite an unpopular topic today in wide circles of humanity. Indeed, one speaks about Geisteswissenschaft,¹ or ‘humanities’ from standpoints different to those that we must take. So, for example, one understands ‘history’ to be a subject that belongs to the field of humanities—but one also finds history in other scientific fields of the present. Here we want to speak in a different sense than usual about Spiritual Science. Today, when one talks about Spiritual Science’ and applies this to history, then one has to at least acknowledge that, apart from what is accessible to human observation through sensory and intellectual experiences, there are yet other major trends of history which can be considered. These trends show themselves as forces working in the stream of world happenings, and affect, as it were, the fates of individual peoples and individual states. Of course, one speaks about general ideas in history and in human life. One who thinks about what this means will soon realise that abstract ideas are being referred to; to which one appeals when talking about the nature and the strength of what guides human destiny. In a certain respect these are general ideas with which human cognitive faculty can gain an insightful relationship.

Spiritual Science is spoken of here in a different sense, in that the spiritual world is assumed to be a world that is essential, just as the human world is essential within physical existence. It will be shown that if one surmounts with the human faculty of knowledge beyond outer sense observations and intellectual experience, and goes to the guiding forces of human and cosmic existence, then one may not only arrive at abstractions, at sapless and feeble ideas; instead at something essential; at something that is alive, meaningful, spiritually imbued by existence as is the essence of man itself. So, we speak about a spiritual world with real existence here. This is exactly what makes Spiritual Science unpopular from the standpoint of the widest circles of our present-day spiritual movement. And still, the least of what one calls those who pursue such spiritual research is blabberer, dreamer or fantasist. And even today it is quite common to say that everything which presents itself as strictly methodical, or appears or wants to appear to be truly scientific on this basis, is quite dubious.

Great, tremendous progress has always had a strong suggestive effect on humanity: on all thinking, feeling and emotion. And if we look at the great advances that have been made recently in human life—we could almost say in the last centuries—, these were not in the area of Spiritual Science about which we want to talk here, but rather in the area which humanity is so proud of today—and to emphasise, rightfully so—and where there is still great hope for the future development of humanity. The progress of the last centuries up to the present time, lies in a field that grows out of the natural sciences. When we think about how enormous all of this is that today has been won not only theoretically for human knowledge in the field of natural sciences, but which promises to still be gained on the basis of natural sciences—in addition, when one weighs up the great significance of natural science achievements for external life—then one must say the blessing, the meaningfulness of natural science progress could and must have exerted a suggestive power on the human mind in our time. Even so, this suggestive effect also expressed itself in another direction. If it had solely expressed itself so that the human mind, faced with immense progress, would foremost have felt something like a kind of worldly veneration, who could even say a word against it?

However, this suggestive power has also expressed itself in another direction; namely, not only acknowledging what natural science research, and progress derived from it, signifies for our time; but it also led in a direction where, in the widest circles, the belief arose that all knowledge, all insights of humanity, can only be won on the basis of what is acknowledged today as natural science.

Based on this belief people feel entitled to conclude that Spiritual Science methods are contradictory to natural science methods. And thus, for someone standing on natural scientific ground, it would be impossible to even talk about ‘research’ in relation to the spiritual world. Therefore, a prejudice spread in the widest circles that Spiritual Science must be rejected, as it stands in opposition to the legitimate claims of the natural sciences.

It is noticeable that by raising this objection something extraordinarily difficult to weigh-up has been dropped into the equation. The natural scientific method, it is stated, is one whose research results and findings, can be verified by anyone at any time. Also, that in the process of gaining these insights, nothing of what prevails in the subjective human being as feeling; sympathy or antipathy, longing or desires, can play a role.

The prerequisite that nothing is allowed to interfere includes ‘wanting to achieve a particular result’. The human element must be excluded from research when it comes to the results of natural scientific research and only the pure objectivity of things is allowed to speak.

Spiritual Science cannot make this demand so easily. For someone who is quick to make a judgment about the general validity of this demand, the mere fact that Spiritual Science cannot comply with it will suffice as a reason to reject it. Why is this the case? The objects of natural science which it researches can be found around everyone. It begins with something that can be placed in front of anyone and about which anyone, once confronted by an object, can think about it by applying natural scientific methods. Moreover, the qualifications with which a person approaches something presented to him in the field of vision in his surroundings, do not seem to matter. This is exactly what is expressed by the general demand: Natural scientific knowledge needs to be verifiable by any human being at any given point in time.

True Spiritual Science is not able to proceed in the same way as natural science to obtain its results. First, it is not able to say that its results could be reproduced by any human being at any moment in time. This is because Spiritual Science has to presuppose that its research results will be gained by someone who does not see his inner being as something static, as something complete, who doesn’t see his subjective nature as finished but who says to himself: My subjective nature, the whole sum of my soul existence with which I am able to face this world, is not closed-off, is not finished, it can be developed, the soul-life can be deepened. The soul-life can proceed so that whatever one finds—when focussing the senses on the external world and the intellect on what the senses say—is only, as it were, a foundation for further experiences of the soul. Further soul-experiences come about when a soul immerses itself in itself, works on itself, considers the immediate comprehension of life the starting point, and then, through forces that initially slumber within it but which can be brought out, wrestles through levels of existence. These forces cannot be looked at in such a way that they can be checked by a physical eye.

Thus, what a spiritual researcher has to go through in preparation for his studies is an inner wrestling of the soul, that is completely independent from anything one has within oneself. So, if one demands of science that a human being should not contribute anything to the results that are externally presented to him, then there can be no question of Spiritual Science. But if someone reflects a little and asks himself: which part of the demands made by Spiritual Science is the most important? Then one could say to oneself, that its results should be applicable to all human beings, they should not be subject to personal arbitrariness or to someone’s individuality; and should not only be significant for the inner life of this or that person, but should be significant for all human beings.

This is the importance of all that is scientific: that it is not only valid for someone who studies the scientific topic, but also, once a topic has been researched, this may lead to insights that could be valid for all people.

Now, if it were true that what has been characterised as human development is only subjective and only valid for one or another human being, and is thus only a personal belief, then one could not really speak of Spiritual Science. But it will become apparent to us this winter that this inner life of man—the wrestling of the soul with forces that are at first dormant but are able to awaken—unfolds and develops and then leads him from experience to experience; that this soul-life can rise up to a level where its experiences will have a very specific characteristic.

If we contemplate human life, as it takes place inside the human soul, it is at first a completely personal one—this way for one, that for another. Anyone possessing healthy self-reflection will be clear about this or that arising in his soul as sympathy or antipathy, that it is, as it were, only a personal touch, and that this is the case and how it is so. But the inner experience leads to a certain point, where especially a methodically driven self-realisation, a pure self-knowledge uninfluenced by anything personal, will have to acknowledge to oneself: the ‘personal’ has just been cast off, forms a special area. But then one will reach a certain point where for the inner experience, for the super-sensible experience arbitrariness also stops, exactly the same way it stops if one faces this or that sense perceptible phenomena and one cannot think as one likes but must think according to the object. Thus the human being also comes in his inner soul to a certain sphere, to a certain area, where he becomes clearly aware that his own personal subjectivity no longer speaks. But that now super-sensible beings and forces, who are not perceptible to the physical senses, speak and for whom his individuality has as little importance as for what the external sensory objects say.

This insight must indeed be gained if we want to talk about the right to call what must be said about the spiritual world ‘science’ at all.

Again, these winter lectures are meant to prove that the research of the spiritual world can be called science.

Therefore, one must say Spiritual Science is essentially founded on what can be researched through the human soul, when it has reached a point in its inner struggles and experiences where the personal no longer has a say in the contemplations of the spiritual world, but where the soul allows the spiritual world itself to tell of its own peculiarities.

If one then wants to compare Spiritual Science with natural science, some might say: there is still an important criterion missing from Spiritual Science, namely, the ability to make a convincing impression on all people which natural science can, because one is aware that wherever natural scientific results appear, even if you have not done this research or seen it yourself, one could, if one went to an observatory or into a laboratory and used a telescope or a microscope, recognise things in the same way as the person who has informed you about it.

Furthermore, it could be said: If, on the path of Spiritual Science, a proof is a purely inner matter, and the soul is wrestling with itself until it says, ‘now you will contribute nothing from your personality to what the objects tell you’—it still remains an individual wrestling. And to one who gains certain insights in this way, or with whom the spiritual researcher shares his results, it should be said: ‘For me these results remain an unknown territory, until I myself ascend to the same point!’

As will be shown, this also is an incorrect objection. Certainly, this lonely wrestling of the human soul, this uncovering of dormant soul forces is part of ascending to the spiritual world, where it objectively speaks to us. But the spiritual world is like this: when Spiritual Scientific results are shared, they do not remain ineffective. Communications by a human soul, which are tested through Spiritual Science research, and exchanged with other souls, can, in a certain sense, be verified by every soul—not like in a laboratory where one can see what the other has found—but in such a way that one can gain insight. For in every soul lives an impartial sense of truth, a healthy logic, a healthy rationality. And when the results of Spiritual Science are clothed in healthy logic that appeals to our healthy sense of truth, then in every soul, or at least in every unbiased human soul, a chord can resonate with the communicating soul.

It can be said that every soul is pre-disposed within itself, even if it has not yet devoted itself to the markedly, lonely wrestling, to take into itself the communication from Spiritual Science by way of an unbiased logic and a healthy sense of truth. Quite certainly it has to be admitted that in the widest circles, where this or that of Spiritual Science is carried on today, that the same healthy sense of truth and healthy logic does not prevail everywhere where communications of spiritual research are received—but then, this is an inadequacy of every spiritual movement. In principle, however, what has been said is correct. Yes, in principle one should even pay attention to the fact that it must lead to error upon error when someone accepts light-heartedly and with blind faith what nowadays is often brought to humanity as Spiritual Science. Whoever stands truly grounded in Spiritual Science feels strictly obliged to share logically and rationally what he has to say, so that it actually can be verified by a healthy sense of truth and by applying logic. We have now characterised the nature of Spiritual Science from one side, by showing how its results need to be obtained.

That spirit exists as an objective fact can only be proven by Spiritual Science itself. But it should be pointed out now that this Science will lead to what we call the real, the true content of the spiritual world, a content that is filled in a living way with something essential, just as a human being himself is filled with an inner essence.

Spiritual Science is, from this point of view, clear about the fact that all external, physical-sensory existence, all existence about which the senses and rational experiences speak to us, are ultimately born out of the spiritual world. And human beings, like all other things, are born out of this spiritual world, have developed out of it, so that behind the manifest world, behind what we ordinarily call the physical external existence, the region of the spiritual world extends. Now, when Spiritual Science gradually begins to demonstrate through its observations what it is like in this spiritual world, how the spiritual world is the foundation of our manifest world, then in many circles of our time, an aversion, an antipathy appears, which at the beginning of today’s considerations was characterised as follows: at the present time, in wide circles, Spiritual Science is a rather unpopular matter. And it is not at all difficult to understand, that Spiritual Science still faces enormous resistance today. This is in fact quite obvious and not only because something that is in a certain respect newly assimilated in cultural life—like Spiritual Science and like all small and great achievements of humanity—has always been treated with a certain amount of rejection. It is so because, indeed, there is much in the area of concepts, which man today obtains as a result of natural scientific observations, that necessarily cause someone who beliefs himself to be firmly grounded in natural science, to get entangled in contradictions when he hears what Spiritual Science says. One who is grounded in Spiritual Science has no doubt at all that, with some justification, hundreds upon hundreds of so-called rebuttals of Spiritual Science could be put forward. Only in parentheses, I would like to add that I myself will soon give two lectures at different places (and here also) so that the question raised can be clarified. One of these will be titled, ‘How do you refute Theosophy?’ and the other one ‘How do you justify Theosophy?’² This is an experiment to show how someone who is grounded in Spiritual Science is able to collate absolutely everything that can be brought up against it. Yes, I will go further and say even more than has already been stated against it. The refutations of Spiritual Science, as one usually speaks of refutations today, are not particularly difficult in regard to their conclusions. It is easy to disprove spiritual scientific research.

I do not wish to compare these refutations directly, but, in order to elucidate what I wish to say, I want to take up something that one often notices when reading works by certain philosophers about the philosophy of Hegel. I do not want to speak here about the significance of Hegel’s philosophy, what is true and what is error; we want to leave that aside. Yet among the Hegel experts there will be few who would not admit that with Hegel they have to do with an eminent spirit. Now there is a strange sentence in Hegel’s writings which makes a deep impression, so to speak, on those who light-heartedly want to refute Hegel. This sentence reads; ‘All that is real is rational!’ Now imagine, as it were, the inner laughter such a sentence will trigger in one who likes to refute! A philosopher, who is supposed to be great, talks such nonsense; ‘What is real is rational!’ One only needs to cast a glance at the world to see how irrational such a sentence is! There is a simple method to disprove the truth of this sentence, and that consists in oneself committing an utterly foolish act. Because then one can state concerning this act that it is quite certainly not rational.

Should the fact that refutation is easy also lead to one taking it lightly and easily take it as meaningful? This is a completely different question, which might be answered by considering the following: Would Hegel really have been so stupid—regardless of how one stands in regards to Hegel—that he would not have realised what could be said against this sentence? Would he really have believed that no man would be able to commit an absolutely stupid act? Should one not rather feel compelled to explore what Hegel meant to say with this sentence, and realise that with such a refutation one is unable to undermine what he meant.

This could also be the case with many things regarding Spiritual Science. To take something concrete: Spiritual Science must presuppose—this can only be mentioned today—that what is recognised in the human being as the tools of thinking, of imagination, of feeling and of willing, namely the nervous system with the brain, has been produced out of something spiritual. The brain and the nervous system are instruments of something essential that cannot be demonstrated in the sensory world, but must be investigated using the characteristic methods of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science must therefore step back from what external science, relying on sensory phenomena, says about the brain and the nervous system, to something that works in the human being as soul-spiritual itself, and which can no longer be researched by means of the senses—it can only be explored on the inner paths of the soul. Now it really is child’s play to refute what spiritual research tells about the supersensible which underlies the human brain. One could say; everything you say is itself only a product of the brain. If you do not recognise this, then observe how abilities increase according to the development phase. In lower animals the mental abilities are quite imperfect. In higher animals, and particularly in higher mammals, they are already more significant and more perfected. In man they appear most perfect, because his brain has reached the greatest perfection. This shows that what appears as spiritual life grows out of the brain. And if you still do not believe this, then approach someone who is able to show you how during certain cases of illness certain parts of the brain become ineffective, and certain abilities, as it were, can no longer be exercised by a person—so that certain parts of the brain are eroded and the spiritual life gets switched off. This shows you, how bit by bit your spiritual life can be eroded through what is evidently an organ!

Why then, do you continue to talk about spiritual beings, that are behind the manifested things? It really is child’s play to make this objection. However, it must seem obvious today that the objection is not based on natural scientific results, but has been derived from a suggestion, which for many people has been constructed out of certain natural scientific theories. This is all related to the fact that our time is under the suggestive power of the idea that truth and knowledge can only be gained by directing the senses outward, and the rational mind lit up by what has been gained. In relation to Spiritual Science, it must be said, that even if these results of natural science must cause refutations of the results of Spiritual Science to just spring forth from everywhere, one can stress that on the other hand, there is a deep need, a deep longing in our present time, to hear something from those lands about which Spiritual Science knows how to report. Simultaneously, a deep longing to hear of these has emerged and is alive and consciously present in a group of people. In a large part of humanity it lies dormant, as it were, beneath the surface of consciousness, but it will become more and more apparent. The need for the results of Spiritual Science will steadily increase. This longing, this need for spiritual scientific results will appear, as it were, as a side-effect of the admiration, of the devotion to natural scientific achievements. Precisely because the achievements of the natural sciences must necessarily turn man's gaze outwards, the longing for the results of the Spiritual Science arises within him as a counterbalance. As it developed in this regard in the nineteenth and in our [20th] century, we have arrived within evolution at a completely different viewpoint from the one which humanity had even a century ago. If one wants to speak about the value of spiritual scientific research for the present, then it is significant to recall before our souls, that even a century ago, great spirits did not feel the need to speak about spiritual scientific results in the same way as is planned to happen in this lecture series. Great individualities only set the tone for humanity. In a certain sense they only express the needs of the entire age, including the needs of lesser individualities. Such a thing can be clearly illustrated to us, if we take a look at these eminent individualities. It can be said rightly that a century ago a person like Goethe did not at all feel the need to speak about spiritual scientific results, as it is done today on the basis of Spiritual Science. When the question arose to talk about something that is beyond the external manifestations, Goethe, like so many other people, has often pleaded that this is a matter of belief and could not be a strict science. And Goethe also often expressed that essentially the communication of generally valid results on this basis could hardly be very fruitful if they were communicated by one person to another.

In the course of one century we have progressed the overall development of humanity, not only in such a way that Goethe lived in a century which neither had telegraphs, telephones, railways, and no such prospects as those offered by aeronautics; but also in relation to spiritual development, we are facing results that are different from those of Goethe’s time. You can see this in a specific example. There is a beautiful talk Goethe had with a certain person, Falk , at the occasion of Wieland’s death. There he spoke about those regions from which a certain insight must be derived of that which transcends birth and death in the human being, which does not decay with the sensory shell, which is immortal as opposed to the mortal part of the human being. The immediate occasion of Wieland’s death, who was so highly regarded by Goethe, urged him to express himself in a popular way to a person like Falk, who showed him understanding for this. What he said there is highly significant when we address the question about the significance of Spiritual Science for the present; “...You have long known that ideas that lack a firm foundation in the sensory world, for all their other value, carry no conviction for me, because I want to know about nature, not merely assume and believe. As far as the personal continuance of our souls after death is concerned, on my path this is my position: it is in no way in contradiction with the observations I have made over many years about the condition of our, and of all beings in nature; on the contrary, it even emerges from them with new conclusiveness. How much or how little this personality deserves a continued existence is a different question and a matter that we have to surrender to God. Preliminarily, I will first remark this: I assume different classes and hierarchical orders of the primordial constituents of all beings, as it were the starting points of all phenomena in nature, that I wish to call souls, because with these an ensouling of everything starts, or, even better call them ‘monads’—let us retain this Leibnizian expression for ever! There is hardly a better term for expressing the simplicity of the simplest being. Now some of these monads or starting points are, as experience shows, so small, so insignificant, that they are at most suitable for some subordinate service and existence; in contrast others are really strong and powerful. The latter therefore tend to pull everything that approaches them into their circle and transform it into something belonging to them, that is, into a body, a plant, an animal, or even higher, into a star. They continue to do this until the small or large world, whose intention lies spiritually within them, also becomes physically visible externally. Actually, only the latter I want to call souls. It follows from this, that there are world-monads, world-souls, like ant-monads, ant-souls, and that both are related in their origin, if not completely one, in their original being. Every sun, every planet carries within itself a higher intention, a higher mission, by virtue of which its developments must come about just as regularly and according to the same law that governs the development of a rosebush through leaf, stem and crown. You might want to call this an idea or a monad, as you like, I have nothing against it: suffice that this intention exists in nature invisibly and prior to the visible development out of it...”³

In a certain sense, Goethe is speaking then about what we will also speak about more often in these lectures: the reincarnation of the human soul. And he remarks, that after everything what he himself formed as conviction about the human world, the animal realm, and so on, this does not contradict what he has established as science. Now it is easy to imagine what such a statement in the mouth of Goethe says, when one remembers that Goethe, in the year 1784 made a discovery that on its own would have been sufficient to make his name famous until the furthest times, even if he would not have done anything else: The discovery of the so-called inter-maxillary bone in the human upper jaw. Man has in the upper jaw, just as animals do, an inter-maxillary bone. Just at the time when Goethe began to undertake natural scientific studies, this was generally denied. To distinguish between humans and animals one searched for differences in the external features only, and thought animals had in their upper jaw an inter-maxillary bone whilst human beings didn’t have one. This would distinguish the human structure from animal structures. Goethe didn’t want to concede, could not believe, that the difference between humans and animals would lie in this subordinate feature. And so he began to use all known means to show that the so-called inter-maxillary bone⁴ is not missing in a human being; although it fuses already shortly after birth, it exists as part of the initial structure. He succeeded to show clearly that the distinction between humans and animals does not lie in such an external criterion. From this starting point Goethe explored all areas of natural science, and was well acquainted with the scientific thinking of his time. Indeed, he was so far ahead of his time, that Darwinians, who wanted to reinterpret Goethe in Darwinian terms, can claim today: Goethe was a precursor of Darwin. Although Goethe was rooted in the science of his time and went beyond it, he could still maintain his views about the immortal part of the human being, which were reminiscent of reincarnation and actually quite compatible with his scientific ideas. What Goethe was then able to say, could basically be said by anyone. Other researchers who sought to acquire the knowledge they needed for life in a scientific manner were also in the same position. Characteristic of this is that, based on Haeckel, people invoked a great deed of Kant, namely his founding of the mechanical world-view, by referring to the “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or an attempt to account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the entire Universe,” written by Kant in 1775. You only need to take the ‘Reclam’⁵ booklet, look at the ending and then ask: How do those who stand on the mere ground of Haeckelianism relate to Kant, when he speaks about the immortality of the human soul; about the great secrets of the human soul; about the prospect of habitability of other celestial bodies; and the continued life of the human soul on other planets? How do such followers of Haeckel relate to the possibility of reincarnation of the human being as it appears in this script by Kant that was published in 1775? Today one quotes things in such a way, that one would have to be astonished if the same people, who refer to Kant, would have really read those things. Things are different today from how they were a century or a century and a half ago.

It was a need of that time that one spoke about the spiritual things of life in a certain way, that did not want to have anything to do with science, because it was felt that this speaking did not contradict what can be claimed by science. Anyone who allows science from the time of the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century to affect them, feels that if they only absorb science through popular descriptions, then they could speak like Goethe: “The convictions I myself have formed about a spiritual life, even if they are only a personal belief, contradict in no way what is offered as science today”.

But things have changed, and today things are getting very complicated in relation to science. It must be remembered that, after Goethe's death, the great discoveries of Schleiden⁶ and Schwann⁷ concerning the human and animal cell were made and that it was only then that an elementary organism presented itself to the senses. What is the need to talk about ‘life on different celestial bodies’ and so on, when in an animal or a plant one can see how bodies are built up through the interaction of purely material visible cells!

Then came other enormous achievements. We only need to ponder the impact on human thinking that was made by the introduction of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff⁸ and Bunsen,⁹ which extended man’s view over distant worlds, and which allowed one to conclude that material existence as we find it here on Earth, is the same as that on the furthest celestial bodies—so that one can talk about a unity of substance within the entire cosmic existence. And each day adds to what we can encounter in this area. I could point to hundreds and hundreds of things that have had a revolutionary effect, not on the world of reality, but on people’s imagination. In this way the conviction had to arise that no one has the right to talk about what natural scientific methods offer in any way other than this: Wait for what natural scientific research can tell you about the foundations of life, about the origin of the spiritual life from the activity of the brain, and do not fantasize by talking about a spiritual world that supposedly underlies everything! All of this is only too easily understood. Thus has changed the persuasiveness of natural sciences in people’s view. In this regard Goethe really is a forerunner of Darwin. But despite of this he rose, in accordance with the spirit of his time, through his natural scientific research from the development of living beings, from imperfection, to perfection; to a purely spiritual worldview that definitely searches for the supersensory, for the spirit behind all sense perception. People who proceed in the same way in our time believe, that the results of natural science urge them to stop short of what these results should be; and that everything that belongs to the realm of the spirit seemingly bursts forth from the manifest background.

Today, a person cannot speak anymore in the same way as he could have spoken a century ago, about what he, through his personal conviction knows or believes to know, or what he has learned about the super-sensory world—that this does not contradict natural scientific research results. Instead, it seems that it must quite strongly contradict them—and not only for the isolated, serious, dignified truth-seeker, and striving human being does it seem so. If this is the case then we have to say: For our present time, the power of conviction, the reasons for conviction which could be brought forward only a century ago, or even later, without contradicting external scientific results—are no longer directly decisive. Today, more weightier impulses are needed to uphold what is said about the super-sensible world against the strictly scientific results of science. What we consider ourselves authorised to believe about the spiritual world, we have to be able to present in the same way, to obtain in the same objective manner as the natural scientific results are obtained—yet on a different foundation. Only a Spiritual Science that works with the same logic, with the same healthy sense of truth as natural science does, will be felt as capable of standing its ground next to a natural science that has progressed enormously. When considering this, one understands in what sense Spiritual Science has become a necessity for the present time. One also understands that this Spiritual Science alone can meet the longings, about which we have talked. These longings are present because what we have just characterised affects many human souls unconsciously—especially among the best truth-seekers, and in a field where one would not have expected it, considering how the human urge for knowledge strives beyond what has previously always been said in the field of science.

Certainly the mathematical field, the field of geometry seems to be one, where what is gained appears to be secure in its application to the sensory world. Who would believe with a light heart, so to speak, that anyone could claim that what the world has to say about mathematics, about geometry, could in any way be questioned. And yet it is characteristic that in the course of the nineteenth century there were minds who brought themselves to invent geometries and mathematics through strictly mathematical research, that were not valid within our sensory world, but would apply to quite different worlds. Thus we know that there were spirits thinking in strictly mathematical terms, who felt they could go beyond what so far existed as mathematics and geometry in the area of our sensory world, and that they could invent a geometry for a completely different sensory world. And there is not one but several such geometries. People who are mathematically trained know something about the names of Riemann,¹⁰ Lobatschewski,¹¹ Bolyai.¹² We do not want to go deeper into it here, because the only point is that something like this was able to be developed out of human knowledge. There are, for example, geometries which do not acknowledge the sentence; ‘The three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.’ For them the triangles have a very different property, namely, for example, the three angles of a triangle are always less than 180 degree. Or another case; for Euclidean geometry one is able to draw only one parallel line through one point to a given line. Geometries have been devised where one can draw an endless amount of parallels through one point to another existing line. This means there were spirits who felt compelled to not only be smitten by other worlds, but to make up geometries for these! This illustrates mightily that even in mathematical heads there is a longing to go beyond what is in the world immediately surrounding us. Only one thing needs to be added to the fact that our time needs something that can be derived from Spiritual Science. It will be shown to us that indeed the human being, in relation to his actual spiritual-soul nature, reappears again and again in renewed lives on our Earth. What is called reincarnation is a similar fact in the spiritual-soul realm as development theory or evolutionary theory is on a subordinate level for the animal kingdom. That the human soul evolves through incarnations that it experienced during the ancient past, and through those that it will live through in the distant future. Certainly, at the present time, the art of refutation will soon be strongly directed against such things.

But one can already state that the present time has a deep longing for such results, which are connected with that by which the human being can orientate himself as to his destiny, and his whole situation in regard to the outer world.

Only recently man began to place himself appropriately as a historical being into world evolution. This has come about through external means of education. Think of mankind’s limited horizon in the 14th or 15th century before the art of printing spread educational materials. Thus, questions like the following would not yet have touched human hearts; ‘How can our soul be satisfied in the face of what we recognise as historical progress?’ Here lies the origin of a question which for many today has become a question of the heart. Historical progress shows us, that ever new achievements are made, which also have value for the inner development of the soul itself, that new and ever new facts enter into the stream of the progressing humanity. So man must ask himself; ‘What is the state of the human being himself in his innermost nature? Have the people of the past been condemned to live their lives in a dull existence, unable to participate in the evolutionary products of later progress? What then is the share of the human being in the successive developments of the human race?’

This may be a question to which many objections could be raised—we only want to say that indeed the question, the riddle, arises out of a deep feeling in the human soul: ‘Is it possible that a human soul living today, whose life is enclosed between birth and death, cannot take part in achievements that will only be imprinted into the stream of human evolution in the future?’

For the confessors of Christianity this question takes on a fundamental importance. One whose faith is based on Reformed Christianity distinguishes between the evolution of humanity in the pre-Christian epoch and the evolution in the post-Christian epoch, and states that from the Christ-event a stream of new spiritual life has emerged which earlier was not available for mankind on Earth. Thus, particularly for such a person the question arises: ‘How is it for the souls who lived prior to the Christ-event, prior to the revelation of what radiated from the Christ-Event?’

Such a question can be asked by man. Spiritual Science answers this for him not only theoretically, but also in a way that is satisfactory for him, by showing that the same people, who took in achievements of the pre-Christian era in the time before the Christ-event will be reincarnated after the stream of Christian development has begun. Therefore whatever happens in civilisation, nobody will need to miss out on. Thus, for Spiritual Science something grows out of history that is not just general abstract ideas that are cold and abstract, that must energise like rigid forces the stream of humanity, but Spiritual Science refers to history as something in which man with his innermost being participates everywhere. And since the human horizon has been broadened by modern means of education, this question is now posed in a completely different sense than about a century ago, when peoples’ horizons were more limited.

A yearning for an answer exists, that can only be quenched through Spiritual Science. If we consider all of this—and we could continue to talk in the same vein and refer to much that confirms that Spiritual Science is important for the present time because it yearns so much for its results—then we gain an idea about the significance of Spiritual Science for the present.

All the lectures, which will be held here in the course of this winter, must serve only one purpose, namely to gather material from the most diverse sides in order to show the results and the significance of Spiritual Science for human life and for the satisfaction of the highest needs of humans in general. Only this needs to be added in conclusion; one of the most common objections against Spiritual Science today, albeit one taken from a catchphrase, is that natural science has happily advanced to be able to explain the world monistically, through a uniform principle given by natural scientific methods. It has almost become a slogan, arousing antipathy in many, that states; ‘Now Spiritual Science is coming back and setting up a dualism opposed to such epistemologically beneficial monism!’ With such slogans many sins are committed.

Has the principle of a unified explanation of the universe been broken simply by the fact that two streams work together in the cosmos, one of which works from the outside and the other from the inside and they meet within the soul? May it not be assumed that what approaches the soul from two sides—namely, from sense perception on the one hand, and from spiritual scientific research on the other—is nevertheless founded in a unified existence and only initially appears for human perception in two currents? Does Monism really have to be taken superficially? If it were the case that the monistic principle were thereby broken, then someone might immediately allege that the monistic principle would also be broken apart if one concedes that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen and oxygen can nevertheless have a uniform origin, even if they unite in what we call water.

In the same way the sensory and the supersensible worlds can have a unified origin, even if one is forced by facts of natural science and Spiritual Science to say that two streams unite in the human soul, one entering from the side of the senses and the other from the side of the spirit. One cannot immediately show the unity, the ‘monon’, but it does not therefore contradict a monistic worldview. What shows itself in this way from two sides, gains the strength of full reality only when we recognise how it constitutes itself out of these two currents. If we turn our gaze to the external world, we see, through the arrangement of our senses and our intellect, a world view that does not show us what it grows out of: the spirit. But when we follow the paths of spiritual scientific research and experience the uplift in the soul, then we find the spirit. It is within our soul that spirit and matter meet. Only in the fusion of spirit and matter within our soul lies the true spirit- and matter-filled spiritual reality!

Thus, perhaps what has just been said might be summarised in words that express the same but in a poetic form, what all those who tried to gain an unbiased view of spirit and matter have felt at all times. Spiritual Science in its relationship to natural science teaches us to recognise that this is true:

The rich abundance of matter
Presses upon human sense
From World-depths mysteriously.

The clarifying Spirit-Word
Streams into depths of soul
From content filled World-heights.

They meet in the human inner being
To wisdom-filled reality.

• 1. Translator’s comment: Literal translation of Geisteswissenschaft from German is ‘Spiritual Science’, in English called ‘humanities’.
• 2. ‘How do you refute Theosophy? How do you justify Theosophy?’ Rudolf Steiner talked about this topic for the first time on 19 and 25 March 1911 in Prague, and later at various locations in Germany. The Berlin lectures were later published in the series of Architect-House-Lectures.
• 3. Goethe’s conversation with Falk on 25 January 1813: Flodard Freiherr von Biedermann: Goethe’s conversations—except those with Eckermann. Collected works, Leipzig Edition 1909, Volume 2, page 169 ff.
• 4. Translator’s comment: Today called the premaxillary bone.
• 5. Translator’s comment: Reclam is a German publishing house, established in 1828, well-known for its small sized, mainly classic books, and for its favourable prices.
• 6. Matthias Jacob Schleiden, 1805-1881, Botanist, Professor in Jena and Dorpat. ‘The Plant and its Life’, 1848.
• 7. Theodor Schwann, 1810-1882, Anatomist and Physiologist, Professor in Loewen and Luettich; ‘Microscopical researches into the accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants’, 1839.
• 8. Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, 1824–1887, Physicist, Professor in Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1860 he discovered, together with Bunsen, spectral analysis. Researches on the Solar Spectrum and the Spectra of Chemical Elements.,1861-1863.
• 9. Robert Bunsen, 1811–1899, Chemist, he was, inter alia, Professor in Marburg and Heidelberg, ‘Collected Treatises, 3 Volumes, 1904.
• 10. Bernhard Riemann, 1826-1866, Professor in Goettingen, ‘On the Hypotheses which lie at the foundation of Geometry’, 1854.
• 11. Nikolaus Lobatschewski, 1793-1856, Russia, ‘On the Origin of Geometry’, 1829.
• 12. Johan Bolyai, 1802-1860, Ungarn, Engineering Officer and Mathematician.

Before I change over to the single results of spiritual science in this series of talks, I want to contemplate on one of many misunderstandings that this spiritual science experiences.

You can repeatedly hear that objection among others that spiritual science allures the human being from his denomination, from his religious life. Why one should not fear that in the present, just if spiritual science wants in the real sense to be the continuator of natural sciences as they have developed for three to four centuries in our intellectual life. How should one not fear this, because wide circles of our present educated people just hold the view that a worldview that is built on the firm ground of natural sciences cannot be concerned with those requirements of the religious life? Many people hold the view that someone who works his way up in the present to that height which gives the human beings the “true science,” must free himself from that what one has called religious confession for long times. In many circles, one thinks that religious mental pictures, religious feeling, and religious thinking correspond to a level of childish development of humanity, whereas we have now entered into the mature age of human intellectual development that is called to remove the old religious preconceptions and to change over to purely scientific ideas and a worldview based on them.

Considering the present human beings, one finds such a mood, as I have just characterised, with many people. A historical overview of the latest phase of the cultural life, of the last times of the nineteenth century can also cause the impression that I would like to characterise in the following way. The religious human beings who worried about the religious sense felt constrained from a certain viewpoint to save the field of religious life from the attack of the modern scientific life. This continues until our days. Numerous writings set themselves the task to explain the necessity of the religious life for the human soul from philosophical or other points of view with respect to the scientific way of thinking and worldviews. However, I would have to explain a lot if I should point to the bases that entitle to such statements as they have been made. For example, I could point to the attempts of the theological school of Ritschl (Albrecht R., 1822-1889) and Herrmann (Wilhelm H., 1846-1922) showing that with single thinkers something lived that slumbered in the hearts of many people. I point to this school not to characterise it or that at which Ritschl and his followers aimed. To a lesser extent, I would like to give the contents of the view of Ritschl and Hermann but rather the mood from which it developed.

One recognises Ritschl as a deeply religious thinker who felt called to protect the religion against the attack of scientific knowledge. How did he try to accomplish this? He tried to accomplish it, saying that science as it has developed during the last three to four centuries shows how the human intellect has penetrated into the mysteries of the material outside world. Looking at this, Ritschl said to himself, one can squeeze nothing out of all that what the human soul should squeeze out as religious truth and religious confession. Hence, Ritschl and his followers look for another source of the religious confession. They say to themselves, religion is always endangered if one wants to support it with that knowledge, as it is standard in natural sciences, and always one faces the impossibility to squeeze out anything from the scientific way of thinking that could inspire and penetrate the human soul. Hence, one must refuse finally to add something to the religion that is an object of science. But for it there is an original religious life in the human soul which has to keep itself completely separate from any invasion of science and that it may come—if it develops and revives internally—to autonomic experiences, to internal facts which connect the human soul with the contents of the religious confession.

Thus, this school tries to save the religious confession, purifying it from any invasion of the scientific. If the soul renounces to have something in the religious life that could look similar even at a distance to that what is achieved scientifically and unfolds this self-purified life in itself, then that appears internally what signifies its connection with the divine primal ground of existence. Then it feels that it carries internally, as a mental fact, its connection with the divine in itself.

However, if one goes deeper into such attempts that control many, in particular theological thinkers even today, one sees immediately: concerning the human soul life one can get a somewhat often-distilled mysticism out of his soul in a way. But if it concerns of getting really religious truth, then such a school of thought feels constrained to fill the soul from anywhere with contents because the soul must be, otherwise, completely doomed to a narrow mystic life. Therefore, this Ritschl school takes up the Gospel again on the other side, takes up the truth which is provided by the Gospel and leaves a deep abyss between its demand to develop the religious truth only from the soul and that what the soul takes from the outside by the revelations of the Gospels. Yes, an even deeper abyss can arise, and the followers of this school themselves noted this saying: every human being is able to come in a certain connection with the divine if he abandons himself impartially to that what lives in his soul, and speaks to his soul. Your soul is connected with something divine-spiritual. However, the single souls cannot come to such internal experiences as Paul or Augustine had them. Hence, one has to receive such experiences also from the outside. Briefly, at the moment when such a direction which wants to attain the religious confession only by the religious feeling intends to pronounce as thought how the soul is connected with the divine, then it is forced to annihilate its own principle! We would be led to the same inconsistent views if we let the religious-philosophical views of the nineteenth century pass by, as they have developed until our time.

However, it is typical that many serious thinkers in the fields of religious research struggled only for a concept, for an idea, for a definition of religion, and that one cannot even find an adequate concept from what a religion emerges as religion in the human soul, from which impulses of the human soul it originates. This is something that is enmeshed in a wide net of polemic with the serious religious researches of the nineteenth century, and until our time. There some people speak of the fact that the human beings advanced from a certain kind of revering nature to suppose something divine behind the natural phenomena and then to revere this divine in nature. Other researchers think that the religious need originated from that what one may call soul cult. The human being saw, for example, the human beings dying who were dear to him, and he could not imagine that their innermost essence had passed; thus, he transported them into a world in which he revered them. Such researchers mean that ancestor worship, soul cult is the origin of the religious feeling.

Then the human beings advanced further, transferred what they felt and revered also to nature, so that the apotheosis of the natural forces originated from the fact that one assumed the souls of ancestors only as living on, but one raised such revered ancestor souls to the divine and made them rulers of natural forces and worlds.—The third current whose opinion in particular the religious researcher Leopold von Schroeder (1851-1920, German Indologist) pronounced clearly that an impulse manifests in the human nature. Just the investigation of the most primitive peoples confirm to assume that behind all phenomena a good being lives who watches over the good in the world: One sees the development of this impulse in the different religions and religious confessions.

One can argue against any such view that it does not go well with anything that one—if one simply has an understanding of the religious life and the religious confession—has to call religion according to this understanding, because spiritual science wants to introduce itself as something new in the human development. It would be less useful if I discussed all these views of the bases, of the origin and being of the religious confession. For I have to say if one looks at all these discussions one question is not satisfactorily answered: what about the religious confession within the entirety of the human nature, the human personality? Hence, I will also proceed this time in similar way as I have proceeded last time with the consideration of “antisophy.” I tried just from the spiritual-scientific point of view to show first how antisophy is founded in the human nature, and that one has not to be surprised, if it appears there or there. I try also to describe the reason of religion in the human nature in order to show how spiritual science that goes into the entirety of the human nature or at least wants to go, places itself in life that wants to be carried by a religious confession.

Spiritual science is less destined because of its whole predisposition and nature to get itself into controversial discussions; it is destined above all to describe how the matters are and to leave everybody free which relation this spiritual science can have to the single branches and currents of the human soul life. Hence, it should also not be my task today to discuss the religious confession as such spiritual-scientifically, but to show what spiritual science wants to be, and what a religious confession can be and then to leave it to everybody to draw conclusions concerning the relation of both.

Spiritual science is based on the fact that the human soul is able to transform itself and outgrow the usual looking of the everyday life and also the usual views of the outer science and to soar a particular kind of knowledge. Spiritual science requires that investigations form the basis that come from a soul that has become independent concerning its experiences of the physical body. If such a soul experiences itself and the world, it gets observations that do not concern the sensory world but the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher transports himself by the specified exercises, which I discuss in the following talks, with his soul into the spiritual world. Then he is in the spiritual world and talks about the beings and processes of the spiritual world. One attains this projection into the spiritual world in different stages, as I have described them in my bookHow Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. We have to characterise these stages somewhat just for this consideration.

If by such an increase of attention, as I have suggested it in both previous talks, the human soul becomes able to experience independently from the physical-bodily, it experiences first that one can call the whole soul contents which the soul attains an Imaginative world. It is an Imaginative world not because this world is mere imagination, but because that what the soul experiences in itself appears like from the sea of the inside being and is at first a completely saturated spiritual imagery. It would be wrong if anybody regarded this imagery as a manifestation of the spiritual world; for this imagery, this Imaginative world testifies at first nothing else than that the inner mental has increased so that it can experience ideas, sensations, inner impulses not only referring to external sense impressions but that an imagery comes forth from its own laps. This imagery that one experiences in particular by an increase of attention is, so to speak, at first only a means to penetrate into the real spiritual world. Since as this imagery appears one can never say whether a picture corresponds to a spiritual reality or not; but there something else must be added that is attained again by an increase of devotion, so that now from another side, namely from the spiritual world, contents flow in these pictures.

Because of his further development, the spiritual researcher can say about such a picture: spiritual contents flow in; by this picture, which has arisen in your soul, a being or a process of the spiritual world reveals itself. As you look at the outer colours as expression of the outer sensory processes and beings, you can look at this world because the spiritual world soaks up in it as a picture of the spiritual world. You must reject other things.—One learns to experience this imagery with reference to the spiritual world as the letters in the usual life. As the letters express something only if one joins them to words that are meaningful, the pictures of the spiritual world are manifestations of a spiritual world when they become means of expression for a world in which the soul of the spiritual researcher is able to transport itself. Indeed, a complete erasing of the Imaginative world takes place. Since the pictures transform themselves, combine themselves in various way. As the compositor takes the letters from the letter case and forms words, the imaginations are confused as it were in the spiritual percipience and become means of expression of a spiritual world if the spiritual researcher rises to the second stage of higher knowledge that one can call the inspired knowledge, the knowledge by Inspiration. Within this inspired knowledge, the objective spiritual world fits into these pictures. Nevertheless, in this Inspiration you attain the outside of the spiritual processes and beings only. You have to submerge in the things, so to speak, to come really into the spiritual world, must become one with the things of the spiritual world. This happens in the stage of Intuition, the third stage of spiritual knowledge.

Thus, the spiritual researcher rises by Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition in the spiritual world. With Intuition, he stands in the spiritual world in such a way that his own spiritual self has become independent of all bodily and is immersed in the spiritual beings of the world, as far as he is able of it. With it, I have characterised the relation of spiritual research to the spiritual, a life in the spiritual world, feeling one with the beings and processes of the spiritual world and an experience of the spiritual. One has to understand this as the characteristic feature of spiritual science.

Now it concerns the following: if such spiritual science originates, how can one imagine its relation to the religious confession?

This will arise as a result if we consider the human soul and the human personality in its entirety. There something appears to us that one could call the climax of soul development, I would like to speak of this climax of soul development today.

Indeed, the human soul develops in the real life inside; one would like to say, in four stages. So that no misunderstanding emerges, so that the belief could not originate, as if the word climax means that the one or other stage is nobler or higher, I want only to say that one can distinguish four different stages of the soul about the value of which I state nothing. There we have the stage of the sensory experience of the outside world at first. Indeed, in the sensory experience of the outside world, the human being is in the whole world process, and one cannot consider the human being different from being in the middle of the material world.

Concerning this view one experiences quite odd things today. When those who are now beyond their first half of life were young and perhaps pursued philosophical studies, the proposition by Kant and Schopenhauer was a given that “the world is my representation.” I have already drawn your attention to the fact that the quite usual experience, as trivial as it sounds, must upset this sentence. Since one has to say, if you want to place yourself into reality, in spite of all explanations that one has done in this field and which are based on nothing but on misunderstanding: the healthily experiencing human being must make a distinction between his idea and his perception. If there is no difference between idea and perception, if the whole tableau of the outside world is my idea or representation, the human being must feel a piece of hot iron of 500° C which he only imagines also if he puts it on his face as a real piece of iron of 500° C. The human being must stand while he perceives with his senses, within the current of the outside world. Now one can experience that philosophers try to restore—as for example Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1941)—what one called naivety in our youth. One called it “naive realism” if one saw the human being immediately standing in the stream of the material world. Bergson tries to show again, exactly the same way, as if philosophy begins with him that this view is the right one that one must imagine the human being as a sensorily perceiving being in the world of sensory laws.

There one stands sensorily perceiving in the world, and the typical is that the single senses perceive separate worlds, a world of colours and light, a world of tones, a world of the differentiations of heat, a world of hardness and softness and so on. The single senses are on this first stage of the human world experience in the stream of the world process. There we get a worldview on the way of perception. This worldview accompanies us through life; with this worldview, we are active, we act under its impression, it controls us, and we control again a piece of the world from this worldview. Thus the human being himself is as it were a piece of this world process, feels, experiences himself, and gets his worldview this way.

One can call the second stage of this world experience the stage of aesthetic experience, no matter whether it appears in the artistic creating or in the artistic feeling and looking. If one wants to realise only cursorily what aesthetic experience is, one must say that primarily the aesthetic feeling is an inner experience compared with the mere sensory one.

If one perceives light and colours, one is given away by the eye to light and colours; if one perceives tones, one is given away by the ear to the world of tones; you are given away as it were partially to the outside world and stand with a piece of your being in the world. However, everybody who has reflected about the artistic creating or about the enjoyment of art, about the aesthetic feeling knows that the aesthetic feeling is substantially more internal than the mere sense-perception; and secondly it is more extensive, while it originates from the uniform of the human nature. Hence, it is not sufficient for the aesthetic feeling that we see a sum of colours or hear a sum of tones; enthusiasm, the inner joy of the aesthetic experience must be added. If I only perceive, I perceive colours and I try to get a picture of the sensorily given things; if I look aesthetically, my whole personality lives with it. What goes over into me from a picture that has artistic contents seizes me completely. Joy, sympathy or antipathy, desire, exaltation flow through me; however, these seize the whole person. We hear in the course of the talk that to such an experience that is internalised even if it is attached to things of the outside world, to pieces of art or the nice nature the second member of the human nature is necessary. Even if one regards such an assumption as unacceptable in our present cultural life, the assumption justifies itself. If the human being faces the outside world with his senses, if he lets the stream of the outer events approach him, then he witnesses as an aesthetic looking person something that is internally connected much more with him, with his being. He experiences with that what we call the aesthetic human body or the aesthetic human being that is not bound to a single organ, but penetrates the whole human being as a unity.

The human being frees himself in the aesthetic enjoyment from this sensory world. The epoch of Goethe had more an idea of this relief than our time has. Our time is the time of materialism, of naturalism. It feels it already as something wrongful if the human being looking at pieces of art wants to separate himself from the outer sense-perception; hence, one forbids as it were such artistic creating in the modern naturalism that gets free from the outer sensory looking.

However, the Goethean epoch, in particular Goethe and Schiller themselves, did not accept as real art what is only an imitation of nature what puts something before us that is already in nature, but it demanded that that what art should be the human being has to seize deeply and to transform internally. However, it still has another idea. Goethe pronounces it especially nicely when he walks through Italy where his ideal to study the old art came true. After he had studied Spinoza's God at home with Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803, theologian, philosopher) and others, he wrote home: “The lofty pieces of art were produced at the same time as the highest natural works by human beings according to the true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary collapses: there is necessity, there is God.” It is the same attitude when Goethe says once, art is a manifestation of secret physical laws that could not become obvious without it.

He says elsewhere that the artist does not deal with speculative fiction, but he comes almost by looking at the outer bodily into the artistic field. Hence, Goethe and Schiller talk of truth in art and connect the experience of the artist with the experience of the recognising human being. They feel that the artist separates himself from the outer nature that he is closer, however, in his experiences to that what works spiritually behind all natural phenomena. Hence, such human beings speak about something true in this aesthetic experience. Goethe says once very nicely when he discusses an aesthete, whom he admired, Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768) that art is a continuation and human conclusion of nature, “because—while the human being is put on the summit of nature—he regards himself as a complete nature again which has to produce a summit once more in itself. Therefore he increases penetrating himself with all perfection and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning and he finally ascends to the production of a piece of art.”

  It would lead too far if I wanted to show now again how the human being, separating himself from the outer view of nature in the aesthetic view, internally squeezes something true, how, indeed, for someone who can experience aesthetically it has a deep meaning once to say facing a picture, a drama, a sculpture or a piece of music: this has inner truth—or the other time: it is untruthful without meaning that it imitates nature. It is something that is deeply founded in the human nature to speak about artistic truth in aesthetics. There is truth and fallacy in this field that only does not consist in the fact that one imitates the outer nature badly.

Nevertheless, one comes—if one advances to the aesthetic looking—from the field of that view which is called real in the usual sense to the field of fantasy, to an imagery. The imaginative world of art compared to the Imaginative world of the spiritual researcher presents itself in such a way that the world of fantasy looks like a real silhouette, indeed, but like a silhouette. However, the Imaginative world of the spiritual researcher is saturated with new reality. The imaginative world of art is that what withdraws from the immediate sensory view and keeps a connection with the human soul, a connection that is not identical to that with the sensory world. Hence, art is that what lifts the human being in free way out of servile absorbing the views of the sensory world.

Art is that what detaches the human being from the sensory world and gives him the consciousness for the first time: you experience, even if you do not let flow the sensory world into yourself; you stand in the world, even if you detach yourself from the world in which your body is put sensorily.—This attitude gives the human being a feeling of his determination that he is not bound only to the physical world in his development. However, it is really in such a way, as if in art the imaginative life appears like in a silhouette. The imaginative life is much more saturated with life than the life of mere fantasy. This would be the second stage in the climax of the human soul development.

Now the third stage of this climax can be characterised by the fact that the human being internalises himself even more. In art he has moved from the outside inwards, has gone adrift from the outward appearance. Now it is conceivable that the human being refrains of the outer experience completely, lives wholly internally, does not let in what he imagines like in art, impregnates it with that what he has perceived but does not let any perception in himself. There he would be still farther away from the sensory world with his completely isolated, completely emptied inner life. The outer world would be dark and silent round him. There is a longing for anything in his soul, however, nothing is there if not from another side anything could come into this soul. Even as the material world approaches us from the outside if we offer our senses to it, the spiritual world is coming up to meet us internally if we let nothing into our soul in the described way and are there, nevertheless, waiting in the wake condition. What we can experience there can only convince us of our true human being; this shows us only in our true independence, in our true inwardness.

Religious ideas of all times testify that something comes from the outside. If the human being moves from sense perception to the aesthetic view, he moves as it were in the normal life to a stream of oblivion. He swims over this stream into his inwardness. If contents are added to his inwardness by another world, these contents are the religious contents. By these contents, the human being can know that there is a world after the sensory world. It can be reached by no outer senses, also not by such a processing of the sensory impressions, as it happens by fantasy, but lets flow in—excluding the whole life of fantasy—purely inner devotion from the invisible what carries now the soul spiritually from the inside. It goes without saying that the human being feels as a part of the extrasensory, spiritual world, as it is a given to him that the percipience of outer colours require objects if he perceives such colours.

I have now to draw your attention to something very important at this point. There were times in which it would have appeared as absurd to say: I feel something, but this feeling is not stimulated by a divine-spiritual world as it appears to the modern human being absurd that he feels warmth putting out his hand and does not say: there is an object which burns me. For the complete human soul life, it is healthy if one feels such a thing to say that a spiritual world projects in us as it is healthy if anything burns us to point to a burning object.

Here is now something that becomes clear to us if we consider views that have not completely become known but these views live already on the ground of the souls. The view spreads more and more by natural sciences that everything that the human being experiences is only his mental pictures. I have already pointed to that. It is already commonplace among the physical scholars: what I perceive as colours exists only in my eye; what I hear as tones is only in my ear; everywhere outdoors only moved atoms exist.

How often one can read that—if I perceive a colour—ether waves vibrate outdoors with that and that velocity; there is outdoors moved matter only! It is of course an inconsistency if one denies colours and yet to assume matter! Today, hence, there are already the so-called immanence philosophers who say that everything that we perceive is only a subjective world. It would be conceivable, but this still lies in the future that one says: the fact that I perceive light and colours with my eyes, is certain. However, it is impossible to know about something that induces light and colours. The fact that I perceive tones with my ears is certain; but it is impossible to know something about that what produces the tones. What those say in this field who want to be the scholars, many people advancing to the materialistic view already say since centuries about the inner experiences. As today the biased philosopher says, I have the colour which I perceive only in my eye; I do not know what induces it, humanity says to itself in general, I have my feeling in myself; in which way it is caused, however, by the spiritual world, about that one can know nothing.

Since centuries, since millennia one no longer refers the inner experiences because of a prejudice to something objective that would be something spiritual in this case as certain philosophers do not want to refer the impressions of the outside world to real processes of the outer life. However, a healthy human soul life feels with its feelings in the world of the spiritual as it feels its colour sensations in the sensory world. As it is absurd for the healthy soul life to believe that the colour speaks only from the eye, it is absurd for a healthy soul life to state that the feeling speaks only from the soul that a divine-spiritual world outside us does not stimulate. This healthy feeling of the soul corresponds to the third member of the human nature that leaves—as we will show—the physical body in sleep and is inside during the waking state: We called this member the astral body of the human being. Our etheric body provides the aesthetic views for us; our astral body experiences itself religiously. This part of our nature must experience itself religiously. It is no miracle that the human organism can deny the religious truth very easily; since the usual human experience is so organised that this astral body if it leaves the physical body in sleep becomes unaware. It has no experiences then for itself, but again when it submerges in the physical body when it perceives with the physical organs. Hence, own experiences of the astral body can only appear in the physical life like from dark, unknown undergrounds.

Thus, the religious experiences appear like from dark, unknown undergrounds in the usual human life that proceeds in the sensory world in the waking state. However, if the spiritual researcher strengthens his soul in such a way that it experiences itself consciously and independently from the physical body with that what remains unaware in the normal life during sleep, then this soul settles in that what lights up as religious contents and experience like from dark, unknown undergrounds of the soul. The religious experiences thereby justify themselves just in the spiritual-scientific view. What remains unknown to the human being if he returns in sleep into the bosom of spiritual life, and what he would experience there if he were conscious during sleep, this appears, stimulated by the outer life, in the religious feeling. In the spiritual-scientific research, however, it appears as an immediate view. Hence, the religious feeling of the everyday life becomes the spiritual view in the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Except in the world of the sensory in which we live with our physical body, we also live in the world of the spiritual. This world of the spiritual remains invisible at first for the outer human organisation. Nevertheless, the human being still lives in this world of the spiritual, and it would be absurd to believe that only that existed what the human being can see in the physical life. If he strengthens his soul life in such a way that he can behold the spiritual round himself, he just beholds the beings and processes of the spiritual world that stimulate, otherwise, only what ascends like from unknown depths as religious life. In his spiritual experience, the spiritual researcher attains the view of those beings and processes of the spiritual which remain usually unknown to the religious life but which have to send their impulses into the religious life and penetrate the human being with the feeling of his connection with the spiritual world. However, there we also realise that we must go into the human nature concerning the religious life. We come, so to speak, into the subjective of the human nature.

If we take this into account we also realise—because this subjective is much more manifold than the outer bodily—how in a higher measure that what comes from the spiritual world is dependent on the subjective nature of the human being as the outer physical reality is dependent on his outer nature. Indeed, we know that our worldview changes if our eyes see better or worse; we also know that there is, for example, colour blindness; but the outer bodily nature is more monotonous with all human beings than the inner individual nature. Hence, that will even more differ what becomes internally discernible, and it cannot appear as religious confession that is spread over the whole world if one only figures the matter out. The spiritual world, which is everywhere the same, appears in such a way that it is coloured according to the predisposition, the particular states of the human organisation. The human beings differ especially in their confessions according to the differences of climate, race, and the like.

Thus, we survey the earth, and in the course of the historical development, the different religions appear gradated according to the different individual of the soul life. If we consider the religious confessions as nuanced by the human nature but being rooted in the same spiritual world in which all human beings are rooted with their astral bodies, we do not have the right to attribute “truth” only to one religion. On the contrary, we have to say that these different religions are that what can ascend like from unknown undergrounds in the human soul. They are due to a particular manifestation of the spiritual world by the human astral bodies.

Now here one finds that the spiritual researcher ascends in the climax of the human soul development to the fourth stage where Intuition takes place. On this stage, the real experience of the full human inwardness appears only, but in such a way, that the human being is with his inwardness now really beyond his physical senses and lives in the spiritual world. He experiences the uniform spiritual world there, no matter how he is organised as a human individual on earth. The fact that we are this or that particular human being with feelings coloured this or that way is due to the fact that the mental-spiritual lives together with the physical. Thereby that individualises itself what we are. As a spiritual researcher, however, we become independent of the physical body. If we completely perceive beyond the physical body, we perceive the uniform spiritual world in which the human being is every night if he sleeps but unconsciously. The spiritual researcher has strengthened his soul life so that the still low forces that let the human beings be unaware in the spiritual world have gained strength with him, so that he is aware in that world in which the human being is unaware during sleep. Then he experiences the spiritual beings and processes, which send their impulses in the human astral body, which one can experience, however, in their true being only if the human ego has become completely independent. Then one experiences what those human beings have indicated as the greatest who tried to penetrate from their point of view into these depths of the human being. Goethe for example tried to show this in the marvellous poem The Mysteries where the different experiences, which the human being can have with the religions spread over the globe, are represented in twelve persons. They have joined in a cloister-like building to experience together what they have brought with them as individual confessions from the most different areas of the earth, from the different climates, races, and epochs, and what they now want to bring into mutual effect.

This happens under the guidance of a thirteenth who shows us that a uniform spiritual forms the basis of the different religious confessions. Goethe explains that a miraculous organism is poured out over the earth in the religious confessions which nuance themselves according to races and epochs, and that with the ascent to the real spiritual world one beholds that what lives in the single religious confessions in a great united whole. Thus, he anticipates as it were what just spiritual science should perform concerning the religious confessions: the fact that they should be recognised in their inner essence. Since spiritual science experiences the spiritual directly in spirit.

If one wanted to speak, for example, about the Christian religion from the viewpoint of spiritual science, one would have to show how the contents of the Christian religion are recognised by spiritual science, could even be recognised, even if there is no tradition nor any document—I state this now hypothetically. We assume for a moment that nothing that is included in the Gospels would exist. The spiritual-scientific researcher positions himself beyond all these documents at first; then he would perceive if he observed the historical course on the spiritual field how humanity experiences a descending development of the inner experiences from the primeval times up to a point which lies in the Greek-Roman epoch, and how for an ascending development an impulse had to come. We call it the Christ impulse, which positioned itself in the human development, which is a unique impulse, as there can only be one centre of mass of a balance. From the spiritual knowledge, the whole position and function of the Christ being in the world would arise. Then one would approach the Gospels with such knowledge, would find these or those sayings in them as Christ appeared like out of uncertain depths, and positioned himself in the human development. However, one can recognise him if one advances to Inspiration and Intuition in the spiritual-scientific research. The religious life becomes visible from a uniform primary source before the spiritual-scientific view where it rises to Intuition.

Thus, in the climax of the human soul development it becomes obvious that Intuition is the life in the ego as the religious life is the life in the astral body as the artistic view is the life in the etheric body, and as the sensory percipience is the life in the physical body. As true in this climax expresses itself how the human nature is, as true it belongs to the whole human life that the human being unfolds a religious life; and as true this climax, this four-membered human soul development exists, as true the spiritual-scientific experience attains that directly what is experienced in the religious life from unknown depths. Hence, for an impartial judgement spiritual science can never be an enemy of a religious confession. Since it shows the primal source, the basic nature of the religious confessions. It shows also how these confessions originate from a uniform spiritual primordial ground,—even if the attention must be drawn repeatedly to the fact that this view is poles apart from those abstractions and dilettantism which speaks of the equality of all religions and the equivalence of all religious confessions. Since these stand on no other point of view concerning their logic, as if one only always wanted to emphasise: the snail is an animal, and the deer is also an animal, and one must always look for the “same” everywhere.

It is only religious-philosophical dilettantism to speak about an abstract equality of all religions; since the world is developing. Someone who surveys the development from the spiritual world also realises that the single religious confessions tend in their different manifestations to subsume all religious confessions in Christianity. Christianity loses—by its unique position arising from the Jewish monotheism—nothing of its cultural task in the world by the fact that these things are considered spiritually.

However, I have still to say one thing if one wants to have some completeness representing the relation of the human being to the religious confessions. If we face the outside world, we face it with our physical body. We as human beings can only take a rather indirect share of the relation of the physical body to the whole physical-material outside world. Without our complete witness, the relation of our body to the whole universe is regulated. How much can the human being do if this relation is confused to recover it by means of a remedy and the like? How much is in the relation of the human being to the cosmic outside world that the senses can provide for us in which he does not share immediately? When, however, the human being begins positioning himself with his inside in the spiritual universe, everything in him witnesses what flows from this spiritual universe into him. Hence, the inner experiences assert themselves immediately if the human being becomes aware of his relation to the spiritual universe. He feels supported by this spiritual universe, and he feels his relation to it in such a way that he says to himself, there I am, I stand in the spiritual universe, and I want to feel the existence in this universe in my consciousness! The religious life becomes with it an inner experience in a sense quite different from the experience of the material universe by the physical body. The religious experience becomes inner experience. It expresses itself as admiration, adoration, feeling that one gets the spiritual as grace. This is the reason why this religious life expresses itself preferably in the feeling of the human being. There we get the reason why one can say: the religious confession is rooted in the feeling first of all. However, one must ascend to the knowledge why it appears in feeling. Spiritual science reveals what is felt what is there as spiritual processes and beings. Hence, we enter, while we penetrate religiously into the spiritual life, the emotional life of the human being, we enter into a region where he searches his hopes for his humanity in order to stand firmly in the world. Hence, the entry into the spiritual world on the detour of the religious is nothing else than that one arrives at it on the way of feeling. This becomes clear in particular to someone who learns to recognise how necessary it is that the human being, although he rises in spiritual science to knowledge that is valid for all, has to go as a preparation for the objective spiritual experience through his subjective emotional life. He has to experience it with all its joys and sufferings, its disappointments and hopes, its fear and anxiety.

I believe that anybody may say that my explanations have lacked what forms just the emotional element in the religious confession that warms up and fulfils the human soul. Nevertheless, someone who considers the whole attitude that is generated by spiritual science inevitably understands that the spiritual researcher simply puts the things, and the things themselves may produce the feeling. He would feel it as something unchaste if he captivated the feeling by his word like suggestively. Every soul should feel in freedom. Spiritual science has to put the things as they arise from the spiritual research.

I wanted today to discuss on basis of the four-membered human nature and of the climax of the soul development to which extent spiritual science can just illuminate and light up the reasons of the religious confession. The religious confession is rooted in the human nature. True spiritual science will never be an enemy of the true religious experience necessary to the human being. The fact that the human being experiences everything that he experiences spiritually in the same way as spiritual research experiences it with its methods will become apparent by various explanations in the following talks; and the fact that the objections against spiritual science, which are done from scientific side or from religious confessions, are unfounded. One will realise this if one considers the single results of spiritual science. Today, however, I wanted to show, notpolemicizing against a single religious confession, how the religious confessions relate to the wealth, to the entirety of the human nature. As spiritual scientist one feels just in harmony with all those who have expressed their conviction in the course of the human development as it is revealed in spiritual science. I want to remind of Goethe once again.

Even if spiritual science did not yet exist as science at Goethe's time, his whole mood was, nevertheless, a spiritual-scientific, theosophical one. He intended and felt what originated from it in the spiritual-scientific sense. Hence, he felt that that science which dives in the things must find the spiritual and, hence, cannot be strange to religion. Therefore, he also felt that the human being if he frees himself in the art from the outer nature does not free himself, nevertheless, from that what forms the spiritual basis of nature. Goethe was convinced that one experiences the phenomena of the world with science and art in such a way as the religious human being must also experience them who feels his inside being rooted in the spiritual world. Hence, Goethe means, nobody can be irreligious who possesses science and art. If one faces the world with true science, one learns to recognise it wholly spiritually and can experience himself as positioned only in the spiritual world. If one finds the truth by art, the soul must experience this truth and become devout gradually, that means it experiences religiously what forms the basis of the world as spirituality. That is why, he also realised that area of the outer life where it cannot be different for someone who understands the things really than that in this area of the outer experience the divine can be felt immediately. Kant (Immanuel K., 1724-1804, German philosopher) still supposed that the so-called “categorical imperative” is necessary for the moral life: if the categorical imperative can speak in the soul, duty can settle in the human life. This is in such a way, as if from a world in which the human being does not live this imperative speaks to the soul. Goethe did not feel this way. However, he realised that someone who experiences his duty, experiences God who settles in his soul in the duty. Goethe's view was that someone experiencing the duty lovingly experiences God immediately in the moral life. Morality is an immediate experience of the divine in the world.

However, if one can feel God pulsating in moral through his soul, one is not far away from the point where he can experience Him in other regions. For Kant it was still a risky “adventure of reason” to experience the divine immediately. However, Goethe answered to him: “If we rise to a higher field of moral by faith in God, virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then it may be the same case in the intellectual that we make ourselves worthy—looking at the perpetually creative nature—of the spiritual participation of her productions. I had striven only unconsciously and out of an inner desire tirelessly for that archetypal, typical, I was even successful in constructing a natural representation, nothing could hinder me to pass the adventure of reason courageously, as the old man from King's Mountain (= Königsberg, place of Kant's birth and death) calls it.” Kant called the immediate experience of a spiritual world an “adventure of reason.” Goethe already stands at the point where he wants to pass the “adventure of reason” courageously. However, he is convinced that one cannot enter the spiritual world different from revering, adoring—that is with religious mood. True religion opens the gates of the spiritual world. Hence, Goethe thinks that someone who already experiences quite scientifically or artistically brings religious mood with him and can experience the spiritual world. Therefore, spiritual science feels in harmony with Goethe. To sum up, we can also apply the confession that he pronounced with few words to the today's consideration what one can call “spiritual-scientific creed:” who possesses real science who has real art stands in life in such a way that he has the best preparation for the experience of a spiritual world. However, someone who has neither science nor art should try to arouse that longing in his soul by which he can attain religious adoration, and then he can enter the spiritual world by the detour via the religious mood. Goethe expressed this exactly with the words:

Our spiritual-scientific world view may not only turn to the development and advance of the individual souls, but above all it has also to help really to gain additional points of view for the observation of life. In our time it has to suggest itself to us in particular to gain such additional points of view for the judgement of life. Indeed, it is a big and also important task for the individual human being to help himself by that which he can gain as the fruit of the spiritual-scientific self-education. Only because the individual human beings really help themselves, can they co-operate in the development of humankind generally. But our attention should be directed not only to that, but we really should be able to feel as supporters of the anthroposophical world view the big events of our time from a high point of view, from a really spiritual point of view. We should be able to transport ourselves to a higher standpoint judging the events. Today some points of view just with reference to the big events of our time may be given, because our present meeting takes place in these destiny-burdened times.

We start from something that is near to us as human beings. Human beings have illnesses at certain times. One considers illnesses normally as that which damages our organism which penetrates our organism like an enemy. Such a general point of view is not always justified. Indeed, there are symptoms which must be judged from this point of view where as it were the illness comes like an enemy into our organism. But that is not always the case. In most cases, the illness is something completely different. The illness is not the enemy in most cases, but just the friend of the organism. That what is the enemy of the organism precedes the illness in most cases, it develops in the human being, before the externally visible illness breaks out. There are forces opposing each other in the organism, and the illness, which breaks out at any time, is the attempt of the organism to save itself from the forces opposing each other which were not noticed before.

Illness is often the beginning work of the organism to induce the healing. The illness is that which the organism undertakes to fight against the hostile influence which precedes the illness. The illness is the last form of the process, but it signifies the battle of the good juices of the organism against that which is lurking there at the bottom. Only if we look at the most illnesses in such a way, do we get the correct understanding of the illness process. Hence, the illness points to the fact that something has taken action, before the illness broke out, that should come out of the organism. If some phenomena of life are seen in the right light, you understand quite easily what I said. The causes may be in the most different areas. What it concerns, this is that which I have just suggested: the fact that we have to look at the illnesses as something that the organism defends itself against things which should be driven out.

I do not believe that there is a comparison which holds really as true as the comparison of such a sum of significant, deeply intervening events, as we experience them now since the beginning of August 1914 over a big part of the earth, with an illness process of the human evolution. Just this must strike us that these military events are actually an illness process. But wrong would it be to believe that we cope with it if we simply understand this illness process in the wrong sense as just many an illness process is understood: as if it is the enemy of the organism. The cause goes ahead of the illness process. It can strike us in our time particularly how little people are inclined in the present to take into consideration such a truth which must prove itself as immediately clear to somebody who takes up the spiritual-scientific world view not only in his reason, but also in his feeling.

We had to experience a lot of infinitely painful things just in the course of the last nine months—painful concerning the human ability of judgement. Is it not that way, actually, if one reads the literature, which is read mostly and is spread by the most different countries of the earth, is it not as if the people who judge about these events suppose that in July 1914, actually, history has begun? This was the saddest experience in which we had to take part beside all the other painful things that the people, setting the tone or rather giving articles, and making the public opinion, know basically nothing about the origin of the events and look only at the nearest. The infinite discussions, these invalid discussions came into being from that. Where is the cause of the present military conflicts? Over and over again one has asked: does this have the guilt? Does that have the guilt?—And so on. Always one hardly went back further than up to July, at most June 1914. I mention that because it is a characteristic feature of our materialistic time. One thinks usually that materialism only manages a materialistic way of thinking, a materialistic world view. This is not the case. Materialism manages not only this, but it also manages shortsightedness; materialism manages mental laziness, manages lack of insight. The materialistic way of thinking leads to the fact that one can prove everything and believe everything. It really belongs to that self-education which anthroposophy must give us to see that somebody who stops in the area of materialism can prove everything and believe everything.

I take a simple example. When one had something to say about the spiritual-scientific world view during the last years, somebody here or there believed to have to assert his view compared to the spiritual-scientific world view. One could often hear: Kant has already proved by his philosophy that the human being has limits of knowledge, and that one cannot get where the spiritual-scientific world view wants to attain knowledge.—Then the very interesting matters were stated by which Kant should have proved that one cannot penetrate to the spiritual world with human cognition. If one still went on representing spiritual science, then the people came and believed: he denies everything that Kant has proved. Of course, such a thing contained a little bit of the assertion: this man must be an especially foolish person, because he strictly denies proven matters.

It is not that way at all. The spiritual scientist does not deny at all that this is absolutely right what Kant has proved, it is clear that this is proved quite well. However, assume once that somebody would have strictly proved in the time in which the microscope was not yet invented, that there would be the smallest cells in the plant, but one could never find these because the human eyes were not able to see them. This could have been strictly proved, and the proof would be absolutely right, because the human eye, as well as it is arranged, could never penetrate to the organism of the plant up to these smallest cells. That is an absolutely right proof which can never be upset. However, life has developed this way that the microscope was invented, and that in spite of the strict proof people got the knowledge of the smallest cells. Only if once anyone understands that proofs are worthless for gaining the truth that proofs can be correct, but mean basically nothing special for the progress of the knowledge of truth, only then will one stand on the right ground. Then one knows: the proofs can be good, of course, but the proofs do not have the task to lead really to truth. Think only once of the comparison I have given, then you see that also, as absolutely strict the proof may be that the human visual ability does not reach to the cell, as strict can be the proof that human knowledge, as Kant says, does not reach to supersensible worlds.

The proofs were absolutely correct, but life goes beyond proofs. This is also something that is given to somebody on the path of spiritual research that he extends his ken and is really able to appeal to something different than to the human reason and its proofs. Who limits himself to materialistic ideas is really led to an uncontrollable confidence in proofs. If he has a proof in the pocket, he is generally convinced of the truth.

Spiritual research will just show us that anyone can prove the one and the other matter rather well that, however, proofs by reason have no significance for gaining real truth. That is why it is a concomitant of our materialistic time that people are enslaved by mental shortsightedness. If this mental shortsightedness is still infiltrated with passions, it comes about that we see today not only the European peoples fighting with arms, but feuding with each other. There anyone has to say all possible matters, and you cannot expect basically that one is able to persuade the other, not only during the war. If anybody believed that one day a neutral state could possibly choose between the allegations of two hostile states, he would have a naive confidence. Of course, one side can have its opinion and substantiates it by all kinds of proofs, but the other side will do the same. One gets insight only if one is involved in the deeper bases of the whole human evolution.

I tried already some years before the outbreak of this war to throw some light on it in the series of talks about the individual folk-souls and their effects on the individual human beings in the different European regions, how the individual nations face each other and that there really different forces hold sway over the different peoples. Today we want to complete that with a few other viewpoints.

Our materialistic time thinks too much in the abstract. Such a thing is not taken into consideration in our materialistic time at all that there is a real development in the life that the human being has to allow to be ripe that what is in him develops gradually to the real judgment. The human being—we know this and it is shown in detail in my essay Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science—experiences such a development that during the first seven years his physical body, from the seventh up to the fourteenth years the etheric body develops in particular et cetera. This advancing development of the individual human being is taken into consideration a little, the parallel phenomenon, the synonymous phenomenon much less. The processes which take place within the individual nation's connections are directed and led—we all know this from spiritual science—by beings of the higher hierarchies. We speak of folk-souls, of folk-spirits in the true sense of the word. We know that, for example, the folk-soul of the Italian people inspires the sentient soul; the French folk-soul inspires the intellectual soul or mind-soul, that the inhabitants of the British islands are inspired by the consciousness-soul; in Central Europe the ego is inspired. I do not pass any value judgment on the individual nations, but I may only say that this is that way. The fact that, for example, an inspiration of the people that inhabit the British islands is based on the fact that it brings as nation everything into the world that is caused by inspiration of the consciousness-soul from the folk-soul. It is strange to which extent people become nervous in this field. When I emphasised here or there during the war what I had expressed in the mentioned series of talks, there were people who almost understood it like a kind of abuse of the British people that I said that it would have the task to inspire the consciousness-soul, while the German folk-soul has to inspire the human ego. As if one understood it as an insult when one says: salt is white, paprika is red.—It is a simple characterisation, the representation of a truth which exists, and one has to accept this as such a truth first of all. One manages that much better which prevails between the individual members of humankind if one looks at the characteristics of the individual peoples, and not, if one confuses everything, as the modern materialistic view does it.

Of course, the individual human being rises up above that which he gets from his folk-soul, and this is just the task of our anthroposophical society that it raises the individual human being out of the group-soul and raises him to the general humankind. But it remains that the individual human being, in so far as he stands in a people, is inspired by his folk-soul, that, for example, the Italian folk-soul speaks to the sentient soul, the French folk-soul to the intellectual soul or mind-soul, the British folk-soul to the consciousness-soul. We have to imagine that as it were the folk-soul is hovering over that which the individual human beings do in the single nations. But as we see that the human being develops already as we can say: the ego experiences a particular development in a certain time of life; we can also speak of a development of the folk-soul in relation to its people. Only this development is somewhat different from that of the individual human being.

We take, for example, the Italian people. There we have this people and the folk-soul belonging to this people. The folk-soul is a being of the supersensible world; it is affiliated to the world of the higher hierarchies. It inspires the sentient soul, and this always happens, as long as the people live, the Italian people, because we speak of this people, but it inspires the sentient soul in the different times in the most different way. There are times in which the folk-souls inspire the members of the single nations, so that this inspiration happens as it were on the level of the soul. The folk-soul floats in higher regions of spirit and its inspiration happens in such a way that it inspires the soul qualities only. Then there are times when the folk-souls float further down and make stronger demands on the single members of the peoples when they inspire them so strongly that not only the human being gets them in his soul qualities, but where they work so effectively that the human being becomes dependent on the folk-soul concerning his bodily qualities. As long as people are influenced by the folk-soul in such a way that it inspires the psycho-spiritual qualities, the type of the people is not coined so deeply. The forces of the folk-soul do not work there, so that the whole human being is seized up to the blood. Then a time comes when one can infer already from the kind how the human being looks out of his eyes, from the facial features how the folk-soul is working. It is revealed that the folk-soul has sunk deeply; it makes forceful demands on the whole human being.

Such a deep impression took place with the Italian people approximately in the middle of the 16th century, about 1550. Then again the folk-soul floated back as it were, and thenceforward that is passed on the descendants. You can say: the most intensive being together of the Italian people with their folk-soul was about 1550. At this time, the Italian folk-soul sank the deepest, this people of the Italian peninsula got their most distinctive character. If we go back to the time before 1550, we see that their character is not as strongly coined as from 1550 on. Then only the typical begins what we know as Italianità. The Italian folk-soul, so to speak, entered into marriage with the sentient soul of the individual human being, who belongs to the Italian people.

For the French people—I do not talk about the single human being who can rise up above the people—the similar point in time entered when the folk-soul sank the deepest and penetrated the people completely, about 1600, in the beginning of the 17th century. At this time, the folk-soul completely seized the intellectual soul or mind-soul.

For the British people the point in time entered in the middle of the 17th century, about 1650. Only then the British people got their exterior British expression.

If you know such matters, something will be explicable to you, because you can now put the question differently: how is it with Shakespeare in England?—Shakespeare worked in England, before the British folk-soul worked most intensively on the English people. That is why he is not understood in England substantially. As everybody knows, there are issues in which everything that does not correspond completely to the taste of the governesses is eradicated. Very often Shakespeare is extremely moralised. We know that the deepest understanding of Shakespeare was caused not in England, but in the Central European spiritual development.

Now you will ask: when did the folk-soul touch the members of the Central European people?—However, the case is somewhat different, because this folk-soul descends and ascends repeatedly. And thus we have in the time, when the boon legend world of Parzival, of the Grail originated, such a descent of the folk-soul which combines with the individual souls, then it ascends again and after that a next descending takes place in the time between 1750 and 1830. The Central European life is then touched by its folk-soul the deepest. Since that time the folk-soul is ascending. Thus you see that it is quite comprehensible that Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) lived in a time in which he could get little from the German folk-soul. There was not the time when the folk-soul combined with the individual souls of the people. Hence, Jacob Böhme is, although he is called the “Teutonic philosopher.” a person who is chronologically independent of his folk-soul; he stands as it were like an uprooted human being there, like an everlasting phenomenon within his time. If we take Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, these are also German philosophers, they are completely rooted in the German folk-soul. This is just the typical feature of these philosophers living in the time between 1750 and 1830 that they are completely rooted in the folk-soul.

You see that it does not depend only on the fact that one knows: with the Italian people the folk-soul works on the sentient soul, with the French people the folk-soul works on the intellectual soul, with the British people the folk-soul works on the consciousness-soul, with the Central European nation the folk-soul works on the ego. One has also to know that this happens at certain points in time. The events which happen become historically explicable only if one knows such matters really. That nonsense which is done as science where one gets the documents and enumerates the events successively and says that one has to derive one matter from the other, however, this nonsense of the historians does not lead to a real history, to an understanding of the human evolution, but just only, so to speak, to a falsification of that which exists and works in human history.

If one sees how differently that works on the individual peoples—I could still characterise other peoples—which forces drive these peoples, then one sees the conflicting matters which are there. And one sees that the events of today really did not happen only during the last years, but were prepared for centuries.

We look at the East, at the area of the Russian culture. The characteristic of the Russian culture is that it can develop when once the point in time can enter when the Russian folk-soul combines with the spirit-self—I already expressed this in the mentioned series of talks. A time has to come in which this characteristic of the European East is only revealed. This will be completely different from the development in the West or in the middle of Europe. Provisionally, however, it is quite explicable that that which is allotted to the Russian culture is not there at all, but that the Russian culture has such a relationship—like the individual human being—to the spirit-self that it turns always upwards. The single member of the Russian people and even profound Russian philosophers do not speak as one speaks of the biggest matters in Central Europe, but they speak quite differently.

We find something tremendously typical. What is the most characteristic of this Central European cultural life? You all know that there was a time of the great mystics in which Master Eckhart, John Tauler and others worked. They all sought for the divine in the human souls. They tried to find the God in their chests, in their souls, “the little spark in the soul,” as Master Eckhart expressed it. They said: therein something must be where the divinity is immediately present. Thus that striving originated through which the ego wanted to be united with its divinity in itself. This divinity wanted to be won by hard efforts; the divinity wanted to be won by the developing human being. This runs as a trait through the whole Central European being. Imagine which infinitely deep emotion it is when Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) who, I may say, stands internationally on the ground of the Central European culture and cultural life, says in one of his nice sayings The Cherubinic Wanderer: if I die, not I die, but God dies in me.—Imagine how infinitely deep this is. For he, who said this, seized the idea of immortality vividly, because he felt: if death happens in the individual human being,—because the human being is filled with God—this phenomenon of death is no phenomenon of the human being, but of God, and because God cannot die, death can be only a delusion. Death cannot mean destruction of life. He knows that an immortal soul exists and says: if I die, not I die, but God dies in me.—It is a tremendously deep sensation which lives in Angelus Silesius. This is a result of the fact that the inspiration takes place in the ego.

If the inspiration takes place in the sentient soul, it can happen what took place by Giordano Bruno. The monk got into the spirit with everything what he found with Copernicus, felt the whole world animated. Read a line of Giordano Bruno, and you find verified that he, in so far as he has grown out of the Italian people, just proves the fact that there the folk-soul inspires the sentient soul.

Cartesius, Descartes (1596–1650), is born almost in the characterised point of the French development, when the French folk-soul combined so surely with the French people. Read a page by Cartesius, the French philosopher, you find that he confirms on each page what spiritual science finds: the fact that there the inspiration of the folk-soul works on the intellectual soul.

Read Locke (1632–1704) or Hume (1711–1776) or another English philosopher, up to Mill (John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873) and Spencer (Herbert Spencer, 1820–1903), everywhere inspiration of the consciousness-soul.

Read Fichte (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814) in his struggle in the ego itself, then you have the inspiration of the ego by the folk-soul. This is just the characteristic that this Central European folk-soul is experienced in the ego, and that, hence, the ego is the actually striving force, this ego with all its power, with all its mistakes, with all its wrong tracks and also with all its conscious efforts. If this Central European human being should find the way to Christ, he wants to bear Him in his own soul.

Try once to look for the idea to experience the Christ or a God internally in the Russian cultural life, if it is not taken over externally by the west-European civilisation. You cannot find it at all. There one expects everywhere that a historical event happens really, so that it takes place, as Solovyov (Vladimir Solovyov, 1853–1900) says, as a “miracle.” The Russian cultural life is very much inclined to behold the resurrection of Christ in the supersensible realm, to revere the working of an inspiring power externally, as if the human being is beneath it, as if the inspiration moves over humankind like a cloud, not as if it enters into the human ego. This intimate being together of the ego with its God, or also, if it concerns Christ, with Christ, this desire that Christ is born in the soul is to be found only in Central Europe. If once the East-European culture develops as it is commensurate, again a kind of group-soul will appear because that culture will be founded which floats above the human beings. This kind of group-soul is only on a higher level than the old group-soul was. At the time being, we must find it quite natural that one speaks everywhere in that way, as the Russian philosopher does, about something that floats like the spiritual world above the human world. However, he can never approach that world as intimately as the Central European human being wants to approach with his ego the divine that flows and weaves through the world.

When I often spoke of the fact that the divinity flows through the world and weaves and surges, then that is out of the sentient world of the Central European human being and would not at all be understood by any other European people in the same way as it can be taken up by the Central European feeling nature. This is the typical, the characteristic of the Central European people.

These are the forces which live there in the individual peoples facing each other, which time and again are in competition, which must discharge by force as clouds discharge and cause flashes and thunderstorms.

Do we not hear, one could say now, a word sounding in the East of Europe which was as it were something like a slogan and should work thus, as if the culture of Eastern Europe should begin now to extend over the little valuable Western Europe, to overflow it? Do we not see that the Pan Slavists, the Pan-Slavism¹ appeared, especially also appeared in spirits like Dostoyevsky (Fyodor Mikailovitch Dostoyevsky, 1821–1881) and similar people, with the particular points of his program as there was said: you West-Europeans altogether, you have a decadent culture that must be replaced by East Europe.—Then a whole theory was built up, a theory which culminated above all in the fact that one said: in the West everything has become decadent; this must be replaced by the fresh forces of the East. We have the really orthodox religion against which we do not fight, but we have just accepted it like the cloud of the folk-soul floating above the human beings et cetera. Then sagacious theories were built up, very sagacious theories, which the principles, which the intentions of the old Slavism could already be, that from the East the truth must now spread out over Central Europe and Western Europe.

I said that the single human being can rise up above his people. Such an individual being was Solovyov in a certain field, the great Russian philosopher. Although one also notices with him in each line that he writes as a Russian, nevertheless, he rises up above his people. In the first time of his life, Solovyov was a Pan-Slavist. But he has more exactly concerned himself with that which the Pan-Slavists and Slavophils² put up as a kind of national philosophy, national world view. What did Solovyov, the Russian, find? He asked himself: is there already the real Russian being in the present? May it be included already in those who represent Pan-Slavism and Slavophilism?—And lo and behold, he did not rest, until he came on the right thing. What did he find? He checked the statements of the Slavophils to whom he had belonged before, he tackled them, and there he found that a big part of the forms of thinking, the statements, the intentions is got from the French philosopher de Maistre³ friendly to the Jesuits, who was the great teacher of the Slavophils concerning their world view. Solovyov himself proved that Slavophilism does not grow on own ground, but originates from de Maistre. He proved even more. He discovered a German book of the 19th century which was forgotten for long time and which nobody knows in Germany. The Slavophils copied whole parts of that book in their literature. What a peculiar phenomenon appeared? One believes that something comes from the East, whereas it is a purely western import. It came over from the West and was then sent back to the western people again. The western people were confronted with their own thought-forms because own thought-forms do not yet exist in the East.

If anyone tackles the matters exactly, it is confirmed everywhere what spiritual science has to say. So that one already deals with something while rolling from the East that is still elementary, with something that will find its development when it takes up that as affectionately which has developed in Central Europe as this Central Europe took up the Greek and Latin cultural achievements from the South. Because development of humankind takes place, so that the following condition takes up the previous one. What I could characterise in the public lecture as the Faustic way of thinking of Central Europe by the words: there was a year 1770—Goethe felt it as a Faustic striving when he said:

I've studied, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and—what is worst—Theology
from end to end with diligence.
Yet here I am, a wretched fool
and still no wiser than before

Faust I, verses 354–359

There a very rich German cultural life came about, a most intensive striving. But if Goethe had written his Faust forty years later, indeed he would not have started: “I've studied now, to my regret, Philosophy ...” et cetera, and I have now become a wise man,—but he would have written exactly his Faust like in 1770. This vivid striving comes from the inspiration of the folk-soul in the ego, from that intimate being together of the ego with the folk-soul. This is a basic characteristic of the Central European spiritual culture. And the East European culture has to combine with it affectionately, it must take up it. What had to flow into Central Europe was received once from the southern culture, was taken up. Now, however, it is not different when from the East the elementary wave of development rolls, as if the pupil is furious with his teacher because he should learn something from him and wants to thrash him, therefore. It is a somewhat trivial comparison, but, nevertheless, it is a comparison which exactly applies to the matter. Human masses of quite different internal forces of development live in Europe together. These different forces of development must compete with each other; they must assert themselves in different way. The reluctant forces developed for a long time. If one looks at the details, one finds that they express everywhere what spiritual science has to say.

Is it not expressed so wonderfully, does not the wave of the European development crowd together in such a way that it is put symbolically before the whole humankind that in Central Europe the intimate living together of the ego with the spiritual world must be felt? That God is to be experienced in the “little spark in the soul,” that Christ is to be experienced in the “little spark in the soul?” Christ Himself must come to life in the human ego efficiently. That is why the whole development in Central Europe tends to the ego as in no other European language. “Ich” (ego) is “I-C-H.” Like a mighty symbol in the intimate interaction of that what can be the holiest to the soul stands there in Central Europe: I = I-CH—Jesus Christ. Christ Jesus and at the same time the human ego! The folk-soul is working that way, inspiring the people to express in typical words what the underlying facts are. I know very well that people laugh at such a thing, when I express that the folk-soul worked for centuries, so that the term “ich” has come about which is so typical, so symbolical. However, we let people laugh. Only few decades, and they will no longer laugh, but then they will regard it as more significant than what people call physical laws today.

What had an effect as a wave of development worked rather typically. Sometimes, the consciousness expresses a very small part of the truth only; but what works in the subconscious depths expresses itself much truer. We speak, for example, of “Germans” (Teutons, Germanic people). Words are formed by the active genius of language. A part of the inhabitants of Central Europe is called “Germans.” If a German speaks of “Germanic people” (Teutons), he counts the inhabitants of Germany, Austria, Holland, Scandinavia, but also the inhabitants of the British islands to them. He expands the word “German” about a wide area. However, the inhabitant of the British islands rejects this. He calls the German “German” only. He does not have the word German for himself. The German language embraces a much bigger circle. It is inclined to put the word into the service of selflessness; he not only is called “German,” he also encloses the others. The other, the Briton, rejects this. If you are once grasped by the creative genius of language, then you see something really wonderful in it. What people have in consciousness becomes maya, the big delusion. What exists in subconscious depths has a much truer effect. Something tremendously significant and deep expresses itself therein.

Compare now the rude way to look at the relations of the European peoples today with the way one has to go to work intimately to understand the European interplay of forces. Then only will you be able to see the devastation that the materialistic age caused in the human power of judgment. The fact that one started to think that matter carries and holds everything is not yet the worst, but that one has become shortsighted that one cannot look at the central issue, even does not do a step behind the veil which is woven as a maya over the truth, this is the actually bad.

Materialism well prepared what it intended. Also there the genius worked, only the genius who caused materialism as the highest leader is Ahriman. He had a powerful influence during the last centuries. I may still point briefly to a chapter to which one does not point with pleasure today. If it happens, one looks at it as a particular madness. One influences the human being the easiest, if one instills to him in his youth in his powers of imagination, in his soul what should grow up then in him. In the later life one cannot teach human beings anything thoroughly. Hence, Ahriman never would have, actually, better prospects to make the souls really materialistic, than when he instills in the youthful childish souls already that which works on in the subconsciousness. If in the time when the human being does not yet think intellectually already the materialistic forms of thinking are taken up, then people will learn to think thoroughly materialistically if materialism is already instilled in the children's souls. Ahriman did this in such a way that he inspired a writer of the materialistic age⁴ with the idea of Robinson Crusoe. Who allows to take in Robinson sees the materialistic ideas of Robinson thoroughly working. It does not seem so, but the whole—as Robinson is constructed as he is driven in this adventurer's life in the external experience to everything, until even the religion grows up finally like cabbages on the fields—all that prepares the child's soul very well to the materialistic thinking. If you imagine that there were in a certain time—in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries—Bohemian, Portuguese, Hungarian versions of Robinson et cetera as imitations of Robinson Crusoe, one must say: the job was performed thoroughly, and the portion that the Robinson reading had in the education of materialism is enormous.

Compared with such a phenomenon one has to point to something different that the children should take up in their understandings for their later lives. These are the fairy tales which live in Central Europe, and particularly the fairy tales which the brothers Grimm⁵ collected. This is a much better literature for the children than Robinson. And if one understands that which now happens between the European peoples in such a frightful, such a grievous and destiny-burdened way as an admonition to look at the way a little more exactly that developed in the subsoil of the events, at that which extends to himself in the present, then one will know above all, that it does not depend really on whether now a few German scholars send back their medals and certificates to England. If the admonition of the time is so strong that one recognises the materialistically inspired consciousness-soul of the British people in its significance, one also understands the significance of the Robinson reading and eradicates the whole Robinson once. Much more thoroughly, much more radically one will have to set to work if one is able to take into consideration the admonitions of our time correctly one day.

Thirty-five years have now passed since I started interpreting Goethe, just in his spiritual-scientific task. I tried to show that in Goethe's theory of evolution a really great, spiritual theory of evolution is given. The time must come when that is seen in wider circles. For Goethe gave a great, tremendous and spiritual theory of evolution. This was hard to understand for the people. Then Darwin could work better in the materialistic age who gave that in a coarsened, materialistic way which Goethe gave in a fine, spiritual way as a theory of evolution. It was a thorough Anglicisation which seized Central Europe. Now imagine the tragedy which lies, actually, in the fact that the most English naturalist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, who swore completely on Darwin, had to appear with his furious hatred about the English. When this war broke out, he was one of the first who sent back the received medals and certificates to England. To send back the English coloured Darwinism, he is probably too old, however, that would be the essential, the more important action.

The concerning matters are tremendously deep and important, and they are connected with the necessary spiritual deepening of our time. If one sees once that the Goethean theory of colours is infinitely deeper than the Newtonian theory of colours that the Goethean theory of evolution is infinitely deeper than Darwin's theory of evolution, then one finally becomes aware of that which the Central European cultural life involves, also with regard to such highest fields.

I will only arouse a sensation in your souls which admonitions the present grievous, destiny-burdened events must be to us. An admonition to work which should induce us to reflect that which is there in the Central European cultural life and which is as it were an obligation to get it out. I also meant this when I spoke yesterday in the public lecture⁶ about the fact that this Central European cultural life contains germs which must produce blossoms and fruits.

When we say time and again: the conscious soul-life takes place on the surface; however, beneath it there is something about which we have spoken during these days. Then we are also allowed to direct our thoughts to the fact that in the impulses of numerous human beings also in the present something lives that is quite different from that they are aware of. Do not believe that the human beings fight in the West and the East who have to defend the big Central European fortress only for that they are aware of in their consciousness. Look at the impulses above all which are unaware to many human beings who go through blood and death today. However, the impulses exist, and we should be able to get the sensation from spiritual science,—looking to the East and to the West—that in the impulses of those, who sacrifice their lives, something lives that the future has to bear only for the external experience, even if the fighters possibly have no premonition in their consciousness. Considering these events that way we can penetrate ourselves with the right feeling.

Take into account that many souls have gone through blood and death during these military events which cannot be compared with that which took place in the conscious history of humankind, and we imagine that these souls will look down on the death which was imposed to them by the big events of time. Imagine that for the purposes of what I said the day before yesterday the youthful etheric bodies permeate the spiritual atmosphere. Imagine that not only the souls, the individualities, are in the spiritual world, but that something useful of their young etheric bodies penetrates the spiritual atmosphere. Let us try to look at the admonitions which people should have, who are left here on the earth. Yes, the individual human being who has gone through the gate of death reminds us of the big tasks which are to be carried out in the European culture.

These admonitions must be heard. And people must be inclined to get recognising sensations of our conditions from the depth of the cultural life. If one feels once that way that everybody who remains today in the blossom of his years on the battlefield stands as an admonisher calling for the spiritualisation of humankind in the European culture, one will have properly understood it. One wants not only that from such sites as ours the abstract knowledge goes out: the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, the human being goes through many incarnations, the human being has a karma and so on,—but one would want that the souls who take part in our spiritual-scientific life are roused in their internal depths to the sentient life which has just been suggested, to experience also that which the admonitions of the early deceased are in the next future. The nicest we can acquire to us as supporters of spiritual science is the vivid life which should go like a breath through those who count themselves to us. Not the knowledge, not the knowledge only, but this life, this life becoming reality.

In the last times, several members left us from the physical plane. Also a young co-worker, our dear Fritz Mitscher, died. I had, arranged by karma, the task to speak at the cremation in Basel. I had to speak certain words to the disappearing soul. Among various matters, I spoke to the soul that we are aware of the fact that he also remains as a co-worker, after he has gone through the gate of death. I had to speak this out of the consciousness that what invigorates us is not only a theory, but that it must fill our souls completely with life. Then, however, we must behave to those who have gone through the gate of death like to those who are here still in life. We must not be waiting to say to ourselves: human beings living in physical bodies are prevented by the most manifold circumstances from fully realising the spiritual life. Which inhibitions can we notice in this physical life on earth with the human beings if the really big tasks of development are involved—and have to be fulfilled then. But we can rely on the dead often better. This feeling that they are among us that a special mission can be transferred to them allowed me to speak the obituary for our friend Fritz Mitscher appropriately who has gone as an early deceased through the gate of death. What was said for him concerns many others who have gone through the gate of death. We regard them as our most important co-workers, and it will not be misunderstood if I say: even more than on the living we can rely on the dead with our spiritual work.

But that we can generally express such a thing, we have to stand quite vividly in that which our spiritual movement can give us. I rely on the fact that just the dead are now the most important co-workers for the spiritualisation of the future human culture on the external field in our destiny-burdened time. For this death is a great master at which those look back who have gone through the gate of death. Some people need a stronger teacher than life can be today. You can see this at various examples.

I would like to give an example—some other could be given. A spectacular article⁷, opposing against spiritual science, represented by me, appeared several years ago in a magazine which is published in South Germany, in the Hochland. This article caused a great sensation. It has made sense to many people because it was written by a quite famous philosopher. The editor of that magazine Hochland accepted this article. He supported, actually, as he thinks, such a view on this tricky spiritual science.

It does not depend really on defending oneself with external means against it. It is absolutely comprehensible that the quite clever people of the present consider spiritual science to be something foolish. But after the war had broken out, something different occurred. The editor of the mentioned magazine is a good German, a man feeling very German. Now the man whose article he accepted in those days has written letters to him, and this editor also has printed them, I may say, in his especially gifted “innocence” in the South German Monthly Magazine. Try once to read them, you will see that same philosopher venting his rage against the Central European spiritual culture so that the editor of the Hochland feels compelled to say: one can only find somebody, who thinks such matters, in madhouses in Central Europe. What an infinitely significant criticism. There is an editor of a South German magazine. This editor accepts an article which he considers to be authoritative to destroy spiritual science of which he says: this is a good article about spiritual science by a famous philosopher.—After some time the editor gets letters from the same man, who should be in a madhouse, as he says. So would one not have to continue, with the logic of life, and say: if the man is now a fool, he once was a fool, too, and the dear editor did only not realise in those days that he deals with a fool when he wrote against spiritual science.—This is logic of life. You cannot sometimes wait, until such logic of life works, but it already exists in our life. Thus you can sometimes experience something according to this prescription. In those days, the article appeared just against my spiritual science. People read him. People said: this is a famous philosopher and Platonist, he is especially clever.—The editor said to himself: if anybody who is so clever writes about spiritual science, this is a significant article.—Some time passes, and the same editor says: the man is a fool.—But he needed the proof in the just cited way. Such matters take place with the living human beings. Such people who have so little steady ground under their feet like that editor of the South German magazine need that they are taught by events which are given in much deeper sense by the life of the last times from the spiritual world than it is convenient.

Thus you understand when I return to that which I said just now: our time had many reluctant forces, and if we call the war an illness—we can do this,—this is an illness which was caused by something that took place long ago, and it is there to the recovery, so that something is eradicated that had to lead to the damage of the life of the whole culture gradually. If we call it illness in this sense, if we look at the illness as a defence, we understand this war and the destiny-burdened events of the present, understand it also in its significant hints and admonitions. We then experience it with all internal forces of our souls, so that we can surely take notice of those who have gone through the gate of death and look at the next future and really have learnt what they can inspire in the souls which they want to hear. That spiritual deepening which is necessary for the human welfare and progress in the next future must come into them.

If your souls can rightly take up that which I would like to say with these words, you are supporters of our spiritual-scientific world view in the right sense only now. If your souls can make the decision to become such souls which turn their attention to that which is murmured down from those who have gone through the gate of death because of the destiny-burdened events.

A connecting bridge between the living and the dead should be built by spiritual science just for the next future, a connecting line by which the inspiring elemental forces of those who have made the big sacrifices in our time are able to find their way to us.

That is why I wanted to stimulate sensations during these days, teaching to your souls. These sensations should be like sensations expecting that which is said to the souls by the effects of our destiny-burdened time. In this sense, I may close today again with the words that I already spoke here the day before yesterday that should have an effect like a mantram in our souls, so that our souls expect the inspiration which will come there from the dead who become particularly living in spirit:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

• 1. was originally a scientific term for the relationship of the Slavic languages. The idea of nationality of the Slavophils led to the demand to unite all the Slavic peoples under Russian dominion.
• 2. several Russian philosophers of the 19th century who stood up for the emancipation of the Russian culture in contrast to the “Westernisers.”
• 3. Joseph-Marie Comte de Maistre (1753–1821) stood up for absolutism and the feudal form of society. He regarded Catholicism and the papal primacy as foundations of the national and social life
• 4. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) wrote The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York (1719)
• 5. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) published their collection of fairy tales in 1810 for the first time.
• 6. The Human Destiny Seen in the Light of Spiritual Knowledge, Vienna, 8th May 1915, not yet published.
• 7. Wincenty Lutoslawski Rudolf Steiner's so-called Occult Science in Hochland October 1910

As you may have realized, a basic feature of the various considerations in which we have been engaged in recent weeks is the effort to gather material that will help us understand the difficult times we live in. Such understanding can only come about through a completely new way of looking at things. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that a healthy development of mankind's future depends upon a new understanding taking hold in a sufficiently large number of human beings.

I should like these discussions to be as concrete as possible, in the sense in which the word, the concept “concrete,” has been used in the lectures of past weeks. Great impulses at work in mankind's evolution at any given time take effect through this or that personality. Thus it becomes evident in certain human beings just how strong such impulses are at a particular time. Or, one could also say that it becomes evident to what extent there is the opportunity for certain impulses to be effective.

In order to describe certain characteristic aspects of our time I have here and elsewhere drawn attention to a man who died recently. Today I would like once more to speak about the philosopher Franz Brentano who died a short time ago in Zürich.¹ He was certainly not a philosopher in a narrow or pedantic sense. Those who knew him, even if only through his work, saw him as representing modern man, struggling with the riddle of the universe. Nor was Brentano a one-sided philosopher; what concerned him were the wider aspects of essential human issues. It could be said that there is hardly a problem, no matter how enigmatic, to which he did not try to find a solution. What interested him was the whole range of man's world views. He was reticent about his work and very little has been published. His literary remains are bound to be considerable and will in due course reveal the results of his inner struggles, though perhaps for someone who understands not only what Franz Brentano expressed in words but also the issues that caused him such inner battles, nothing actually new will emerge.

I would like to bring before you what in our problematic times a great personality like Franz Brentano found particularly problematic. He was not the kind of philosopher one usually meets nowadays; unlike modern philosophers he was first and foremost a thinker, a thinker who did not allow his thinking to wander at random. He sought to establish it on the firm foundation of the evolution of thought itself. This led to his first publication, a book dealing with Aristotle's psychology, the so-called “nus poetikos.”² This book by Brentano, which is long out of print, is a magnificent achievement in detailed inquiry. It reveals him as a man capable of real thinking; that is, he has the ability to formulate and elaborate concepts that have content. We find Franz Brentano, more especially in the second half of his book about Aristotle's psychology, engaged in a process of thinking of a subtlety not encountered nowadays, and indeed seldom at the time the book was written. What is especially significant is the fact that Franz Brentano's ideas still had the strength to capture and leave their mark in human souls. When people nowadays discuss things connected with the inner life, they generally express themselves in empty words, devoid of any real content. The words are used because historically they have become part of the language, and this gives the illusion that they contain thought, but thinking is not in fact involved.

Considering that everywhere in Aristotle one finds a distinct flaring up of the ancient knowledge so often described by us as having its origin in atavistic clairvoyance, it is rather odd that people who profess to read Aristotle today should ignore spiritual science so completely. When we speak today about ether body, sentient body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, these terms are coined to express the life of soul and spirit in its reality, of which man must again become conscious.

Many of the expressions used by Aristotle are no longer understood. However, they are reminders that there was a time when the individual members of man's soul being were known; not until Aristotle did they become abstractions. Franz Brentano made great efforts to understand these members of man's soul precisely through that thinker of antiquity, Aristotle. It must be said, however, that it was just through Aristotle that their meaning began to fade from mankind's historical evolution. Aristotle distinguishes in man the vegetative soul, by which he means approximately what we call ether body, then the aesthetikon or sensitive soul, which we call the sentient or astral body. Next, he speaks of orektikon which corresponds to the sentient soul, then comes kinetikon corresponding to the intellectual soul, and he uses the term dianoetikon for the consciousness soul. Aristotle was fully aware of the meaning of these concepts, but he lacked direct perception of the reality. This caused a certain unclarity and abstraction in his works, and that applies also to the book I mentioned by Franz Brentano. Nevertheless, real thinking holds sway in Brentano's book. And when someone devotes himself to the power of thinking the way he did, it is no longer possible to entertain the foolish notion that man's soul and spirit are mere by-products arising from the physical-bodily nature. The concepts formulated by Brentano on the basis of Aristotle's work were too substantial, so to speak, to allow him to succumb to the mischief of modern materialism.

Franz Brentano's main aim was to attain insight into the general working of the human soul; he wanted to carry out psychological research. But he was also concerned with an all-encompassing view of the world based on psychology. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that Franz Brentano himself estimated that his work on psychology would fill five volumes, but only the first volume was published. It is fully understandable to someone who knew him well why no subsequent volumes appeared. The deeper reason lies in the fact that Brentano would not—indeed according to his whole disposition, he could not—turn to spiritual science. Yet in order to find answers to the questions facing him after the completion of the first volume of his Psychology he needed spiritual knowledge. But spiritual science he could not accept and, as he was above all an honest man, he abandoned writing the subsequent volumes. The venture came to a full stop and thus remains a fragment.

I would like to draw attention to two aspects of the problem in Brentano's mind. It is a problem which today every thinking person must consciously strive to solve. In fact, the whole of mankind, insofar as people do not live in animal-like obtuseness, is striving, albeit unconsciously, to solve this problem. People in general are either laboring in one direction or another for a plausible solution, or else suffering psychologically because of their inability to get anywhere near the root of the problem. Franz Brentano investigated and pondered deeply the human soul. However, when this is done along the lines of modern science one arrives at the point that leads from the human soul to the spirit. And there one may remain at the obvious, and recognize the human soul's activity to be threefold in that it thinks; i.e., forms mental pictures, it feels and it wills. Thinking, feeling and willing are indeed the three members of the human soul. However, no satisfactory insight into them is possible unless through spiritual knowledge a path is found to the spiritual reality with which the human soul is connected. If one does not find that path—and Franz Brentano could not find it—then one feels oneself with one's thinking, feeling and willing completely isolated within the soul. Thinking at best provides images of the external, spatial, purely material reality. Feeling at best takes pleasure or displeasure in what occurs in the spatial physical reality. Through the will, man's physical nature may appease its cravings or aversions. Without spiritual insight man does not experience through his thinking, feeling and willing any relationship with a reality in which he feels secure, to which he feels he belongs. That was why Brentano said: To differentiate thinking, feeling and willing in the human soul does not help one to understand it, as in doing so one remains within the soul itself. He therefore divided the soul in another way, and how he did it is characteristic. He still sees the soul as threefold but not according to forming mental pictures of thinking, feeling and willing. He differentiates instead between forming mental pictures, judging or assessing, and the inner world of fluctuating moods and feelings. Thus, according to Brentano, the life of the soul is divided into forming mental pictures, judgments, and fluctuating moods and feelings.

Mental pictures do not, to begin with, lead us out beyond the soul. When we form mental pictures of something, the images remain within the soul. We believe that they refer to something real, but that is by no means established. As long as we do not go beyond the mental picture, we have to concede that something merely imagined is also a mental picture. Thus, a mental picture as such may refer to something real or to something merely imagined. Even when we relate mental pictures to one another, we still have no guarantee of reality. A tree is a mental picture; green is a mental picture. To say, The tree is green, is to combine two mental pictures, but that in itself is no guarantee of dealing with reality, for my mental picture “green tree” could be a product of my fantasy.

Nevertheless, Brentano says: When I judge or make assessments I stand within reality, and I am already making a judgment, even if a veiled one, when I combine mental pictures as I do when I say, The tree is green. In so doing I indicate not only that I combine the two concepts “tree” and “green,” but that a green tree exists. Thus I am not remaining within the mental pictures, I go across to existence. There is a difference, says Brentano, between being aware of a green tree and being conscious that “this tree is green.” The former is a mere formulation of mental pictures, the latter has a basis within the soul consisting of acceptance or rejection. In the activity of merely forming mental pictures one remains within the soul, whereas passing judgment is an activity of soul which relates one to the environment in that one either accepts or rejects it. In saying, a green tree exists, I acknowledge not merely that I am forming mental pictures, but that the tree exists quite apart from my mental picture. In saying, centaurs do not exist, I also pass judgment by rejecting as unreal the mental picture of half-horse, half-man. Thus according to Brentano, passing judgment is the second activity of the human soul.

Brentano saw the third element within the human soul as that of fluctuating moods and feelings. Just as he regards judgment of reality to consist of acknowledgments or rejections, so he sees moods and feelings as fluctuating between love and hate, likes and dislikes. Man is either attracted or repelled by things. Brentano does not regard the element of will to be a separate function of the soul. He sees it as part of the realm of moods and feelings. The fact that he regards the will in this way is very characteristic of Brentano and points to a deeply rooted aspect of his makeup. It would lead too far to go into that now; all that concerns us at the moment is that Brentano did not differentiate will impulses from mere feelings of like or dislike. He saw all these elements as weaving into one another. When examining a will impulse to action, Brentano would be concerned only with one's love for it. Again, if the will impulse was against an action, he would examine one's dislike for it. Thus for him the life of soul consists of love and hate, acknowledgment and rejection, and forming mental pictures.

Starting from these premises Brentano did his utmost to find solutions to the two greatest riddles of the human soul, the riddle of truth, and the riddle of good. What is true (or real)? What is good? If one is seeking to justify the judgment of thinking about reality or unreality, the question arises, Why do we acknowledge certain things and reject others? Those we acknowledge we regard as truth; those we reject we regard as untruth. And that brings us straight to the heart of the problem: What is truth? The heart of the other problem concerning good and evil, good and bad, we encounter when we turn to the realm of fluctuating moods and feelings. According to Brentano, love is what prompts us to acknowledge an action as good, while hate is the rejection of an action as evil. Thus ethics, morality, and what we understand by rights, all these things are a province of the realm of moods and feelings. The question of good and evil was very much in Brentano's mind as he pondered the nature of man's life of feelings fluctuating between love and hate.

It is indeed extremely interesting to follow the struggle of a man like Brentano, a struggle lasting for decades, to find answers to questions such as What right has man to assess things, judging them true or false, acknowledge or reject them? Even if you examine all Brentano's published writings—and I am convinced that his as yet unpublished work will give the same result—nowhere will you find him giving any other answer to the question What is true? In other words: What justifies man to judge things except what he calls the “evidence,” the “visible proof”? He naturally means an inner visible proof. Thus Brentano's answer amounts to this: I attain truth if I am not inwardly blind, but able to bring my experiences before my inner eye in such a way that I can survey them clearly, and accept them, or by closer scrutiny perhaps reject them. Franz Brentano did not get beyond this view. It is significant indeed that a man who was an eminent thinker—which cannot be said about many—struggled for decades to answer the question What gives me the right to acknowledge or reject something, to regard it as true or false? All he reached was what he termed the evidence, the inner visible proof.

Brentano lectured for many years in Vienna on what in Austrian universities was known as practical philosophy, which really means ethics or moral philosophy. Just as Brentano was obliged to give these lectures, so the law students were obliged to attend them, as they were prescribed, compulsory courses. However, during his courses Brentano did not so much lecture on “practical philosophy,” as he did on the question How does one come to accept something as good or put something down as bad? Due to his original views, Franz Brentano did not by any means have an easy task. As you know, the problem of good is always being debated in philosophy. Attempts are made to answer the question: Have we any right to regard one thing as good and another as bad? Or the question may be formulated differently: Where does the good originate, where is its source, and what is the source of the bad or evil? This question is approached in all manner of ways. But all around Brentano, at the time when he attempted to discover the criterion of good, a peculiar moral philosophy was gaining ground, that of Herbart, one of the successors of Kant's.³ Herbart's view of ethics, which others have advocated too but none more emphatically than he himself, was the view that moral behavior, in the last resort, depends upon the fact that certain relationships in life please us, whereas others displease us. Those that please us are good, those that displease us are bad. Man as it were is supposed to have an inborn natural ability to take pleasure in the good and displeasure in the bad. Herbart says, for example: Inner freedom is something which always, in every instance, pleases us. And what is inner freedom? Well, he says, man is inwardly free when his thinking and actions are in harmony. This would mean, crudely put, that if A thinks B an awful fellow but instead of saying so flatters him, then that is not an expression of inner freedom. Thinking and action are not in the harmony on which the ethical view of inner freedom is based. Another view on ethics is based on perfection. We are displeased when we do something we could have done better, whereas we are pleased when we have done something so well that the result is better, more perfect than it would have been through any other action. Herbart differentiates five such ethical concepts. However, all that interests us at the moment is that he based morality on the soul's immediate pleasure or displeasure.

Yet another principle of ethics is Kant's so-called categorical imperative, according to which an action is good if it is based on principles that could be the basis for a law applying to all.⁴ Nothing could be more contrary to morality! Even the example Kant himself puts forward clearly shows his categorical imperative to be void of moral value. He says: Suppose you were given something for safekeeping, but instead you appropriated it. Such an action, says Kant, cannot be a basic principle for all to follow, for if everybody simply took possession of things entrusted to them, an orderly human society would be an impossibility. It is not difficult to see that in such a case, whether the action is good or bad cannot be judged on whether things entrusted to one are returned or not. Quite different issues come into question.

All the modern views on ethics are contrary to that of Franz Brentano. He sought deeper reasons. Pleasure and displeasure, he said, merely confirm that an ethical judgment has been made. As far as the beautiful is concerned, we are justified in saying that beauty is a source of pleasure, ugliness of displeasure. However, we should be aware that what determines us when it is a question of ethics, of morality, is a much deeper impulse than the one that influences us in assessing the beautiful. That was Brentano's view of ethics, and each year he sought to reaffirm it to the law students. He also spoke of his principle of ethics in his beautiful public lecture entitled “Natural Sanction of Law and Morality.”⁵ The circumstances that led Franz Brentano to give this lecture are interesting. The famous legislator Ihering had spoken at a meeting about legal concepts being fluid, by which he meant that concepts of law and rights cannot be understood in an absolute sense because their meaning continually changes in the course of time.⁶ They can be understood only if viewed historically. In other words, if we look back to the time when cannibalism was customary, we have no right to say that one ought not to eat people. We have no right to say that our concepts of morals should have prevailed, for our concepts would at that time have been wrong. Cannibalism was right then; it is only in the course of time that our view of it has changed. Our sympathy must therefore lie with the cannibals, not with those who refrained from the practice! That is, of course, an extreme example, but it does illustrate the essence of Ihering's view. The important point to him was that concepts of law and morality have changed in the course of human evolution which proves that they are in a state of flux.

This view Brentano could not possibly accept. He wanted to discover a definite, absolute source of morality. In regard to truth he had produced “the evidence” that what lights up in the soul as immediate recognition is true, i.e., what is correctly judged is true. To the other question, what is good, Brentano, again after decades of struggle, found an equally abstract answer. He said: Good and bad have their source in human feelings fluctuating between love and hate. What man genuinely loves is good; i.e., what is worthy of love is good. He attempted to show instances of how human beings can love rightly. Just as man in regard to truth should judge rightly, so in regard to the good he should love rightly.

I shall not go into details; I mainly want to emphasize that Brentano, after decades of struggle, had reached an abstraction, the simple formula that good is that which is worthy of love. Instead, it has to be said that Brentano's greatness does not lie in the results he achieved. You will no doubt agree that it is a somewhat meager conclusion to say, Truth is what follows from the evidence of correct judgment; the good is what is rightly loved. These are indeed meager results, but what is outstanding, what is characteristic of Brentano, is the energy, the earnestness of his striving. In no other philosopher will you find such Aristotelean sagacity and at the same time such deep inner involvement with the argument. The meager results gain their value when one follows the struggle it cost to reach them. It is precisely his inner struggles that make Franz Brentano such an outstanding example of spiritual striving. One could mention many people, including philosophers, who have in our time tried to find answers to the questions, What is truth? What is the good? But you will find their answers, especially those given by the more popular philosophers, far more superficial than those given by Brentano. That does not alter the fact that Brentano's answers must naturally seem meager fare to those who have for years been occupied with spiritual science. However, Brentano had also to suffer the destiny of modern striving man, lack of understanding; his struggles were little understood.

A closer look at Brentano's intensive search for answers to the questions, What is true? What is good? reveals a clarity and comprehensiveness in outlook seldom found in those who refuse spiritual science. What makes him exceptional is that without spiritual science no one has come as far as he did. Nowhere will you find within the whole range of modern philosophical striving any real answers concerning what truth is or what the good is. What you will find is confusion aplenty, albeit at times interesting confusion, for example in Windelband.⁷ Professor Windelband, who taught for years at Heidelberg and Freiburg, could discover nothing in the human soul to cause man to accept certain things as true and reject others as false. So he based truth on assent, that is, to some extent on love. If according to our judgment of something we can love it, then it is true; conversely, if we must hate it, then it is untrue. Truth and untruth contain hidden love and hate. Herbartians, too, judge things to be morally good or morally bad according to whether they please or displease, a judgment which Brentano considered to be applicable only to what is beautiful or ugly.

Thus there is plenty of confusion, and not the slightest possibility of reaching insight into the soul's essential nature. All that is left is despair, which is so often all there is left after one has studied the works of modern philosophers. Naturally they do pose questions and often believe to have come up with answers. Unfortunately that is just when things go wrong; one soon sees that the answers, whether positive or negative, are no answers at all.

What is so interesting about Brentano is that, if only he had continued a little further beyond the point he had reached, he would have entered a region where the solutions are to be found. Whoever cannot get beyond the view ordinarily held of man will not be able to answer the questions What is true? What is false? It is simply not possible, on the one hand to regard man's being as it is regarded today, and on the other to answer such questions as What is the meaning of truth in relation to man? Nor is it possible to answer the question What is the good? You will soon see why this is so. But first I must draw your attention to something in regard to which mistaken views are held both ways, that is the question concerning the beautiful.

According to Herbart and his followers, good is merely a subdivision of beauty, more particularly beauty attributed to human action. Any questions concerning what is beautiful immediately reveal it to be a very subjective issue. Nothing is more disputed than beauty; what one person finds beautiful another does not. In fact, the most curious views are voiced in quarrels over the beautiful and the ugly, over what is artistically justified and what is not. In the last resort the whole argument as to whether something is beautiful or ugly, artistic or not, rests on man's individual nature. No general law concerning beauty will ever be discovered, nor should it be; nothing would be more meaningless. One may not like a certain work of art, but there is always the possibility of entering into what the artist had in mind and thus coming to see aspects not recognized before. In this way, one may come to realize that it was lack of understanding which prevented one from recognizing its beauty. Such aesthetic judgment, such aesthetic acceptance or rejection, is really something which, though subjective, is justified.

To confirm in detail what I have just said would take too long. However, you all know that the saying “taste cannot be disputed” has a certain justification. Taste for certain things one either has or has not; either the taste has been acquired already or not yet. We may ask, why? The answer is that every time we apply an aesthetic evaluation to something we have a twofold perception. That is an important fact discovered through spiritual investigation. Whenever you are inclined to apply the criterion of beauty to something, your perception of the object is twofold. Such an object is perceived in the first place because of its influence on the physical and ether bodies. This is a current that streams, so to speak, from the beautiful object to the onlooker, affecting his physical and ether bodies regardless whether a painting, a sculpture or anything else is observed. What exists out there in the external world is experienced in the physical and ether bodies, but apart from that it is experienced also in the I and astral body. However, the latter experience does not coincide with the former; you have in fact two perceptions. An impression is made on the one hand on the physical and etheric bodies and on the other an impression is also made on the I and astral body. You therefore have a twofold perception.

Whether a person regards an object as beautiful or ugly will depend upon his ability to bring the two impressions into accord or discord. If the two experiences cannot be made to harmonize, it means that the work of art in question is not understood; in consequence, it is regarded as not beautiful. For beauty to be experienced the I and astral body on the one hand, and the physical and ether body on the other must be able to vibrate in unison, must be in agreement. An inner process must take place for beauty to be experienced; if it does not, the possibility for beauty to be experienced is not present. Just think of all the possibilities that exist, in the experience of beauty, for agreement or disagreement. So you see that to experience beauty is a very inward and subjective process.

On the other hand what is truth? Truth is also something that meets us face to face. Truth, to begin with, makes an impression on the physical and ether bodies and you, on your part, must perceive that effect on those bodies. Please note the difference: Faced with an object of beauty your perception is twofold. Beauty affects your physical and ether bodies and also your I and astral body; you must inwardly bring about harmony between the two impressions. Concerning truth the whole effect is on the physical and ether bodies and you must perceive that effect inwardly. In the case of beauty, the effect it has on the physical and ether bodies remains unconscious; you do not perceive it. On the other hand, in the case of truth, you do not bring the effect it has on the I and astral body down into consciousness; it vibrates unconsciously. What must happen in this case is that you devote yourself to the impression made on the physical and ether bodies, and find its reflection in the I and astral body. Thus, in the case of truth or reality you have the same content in the I and astral body as in the physical and ether bodies, whereas in the case of beauty you have two different contents.

Thus the question of truth is connected with man's being insofar as it consists of the lowest members, the physical and ether bodies. Through the physical body we participate only in the external material world, the world of mere appearance. Through the ether body we participate solely in what results from its harmony with the whole cosmos. Truth, reality, is anchored in the ether body, and someone who does not recognize the existence of the ether body cannot answer the question Where is truth established? All he can answer is the question Where is that established which the senses reflect of the external world; where is the world of appearance? What the senses reflect in the physical body only becomes full reality, only becomes truth, when assimilated by the ether body. Thus the question concerning truth can only be answered by someone who recognizes the total effect of external objects on man's physical and ether bodies.

If Franz Brentano wanted to answer the question What is truth? he would have been obliged to investigate the way man's being is related to the whole world through his ether body. That he could not do as he did not acknowledge its existence. All he could find was the meager answer he termed “the evidence.” To explain truth is to explain the human ether body's relation to the cosmos. We are connected with the cosmos when we express truth. That is why we must continue to experience the ether body for several days after death. If we did not we would lose the sense for the truth, for the reality of the time between death and new birth. We live on earth in order to foster our union with truth, with reality. We take our experience of truth with us, as it were, in that we live for several days after death with the great tableau of the ether body. One can arrive at an answer to the question What is truth? only by investigating the human ether body.

The other question which Franz Brentano wanted to answer was What is the good? Just as the external physical object can become truth or reality for man only if it acts on his physical and etheric bodies, so must what becomes an impulse towards good or evil influence man's I and astral body. In the I and astral body it does not as yet become formulated into concept, into mental picture; for that to happen it must be reflected in the physical and etheric bodies. We have mental pictures of good and evil only when what is formless in the I and astral body is mirrored in the physical and ether bodies. However, what expresses itself externally as good or evil stems from what occurs in the I and astral body. Someone who does not recognize the I and astral body can know nothing about where in man the impulse to good or evil is active. All he can say is that good is what is rightly loved; but love occurs in the astral body. Only by investigating what actually happens in the astral body and I is it possible to attain concrete insight into good and evil. At the present stage of evolution the I only brings to expression what lives in the astral body as instincts and emotions. As you know, the human “I” is as yet not very far in its development. The astral body is further, but man is more conscious of what occurs in his I than he is of his astral body. As a consequence man is not very conscious of moral impulses, or, put differently, he does not benefit from them unless the astral impulses enter his consciousness. As far as the man of today is concerned, the original, primordial moral impetus is situated in his astral body, just as the forces of truth are situated in his ether body. Through his astral body man is connected with the spiritual world, and in that world are the impulses of good. In the spiritual world also holds sway what for man is good and evil; but we only know its reflection in the ether and physical bodies.

So you see it is only possible to attain concepts of truth, goodness and beauty when account is taken of all the members of man's being. To attain a concept of truth the ether body must be understood. Unless one knows that in the experience of beauty the ether and astral bodies distinctively vibrate in unison—the I and physical body do too, but to a lesser degree—it cannot be understood. A proper concept of the good cannot be attained without the knowledge that it basically represents active forces in the astral body.

Thus Franz Brentano actually came as far as the portal leading to the knowledge he sought. His answers appear so meager because they can be properly understood only if they are related to insight of a higher order. When he says of truth that it must light up and become directly visible to the eye of the soul, he should have been able to say more; namely, that to perceive truth rightly one must succeed in taking hold of it independently of the physical body. The ether body must be loosened from the physical body. This is because the first clairvoyant experience is that of pure thinking. You will know that I have always upheld the view, which indeed every true scientist of the spirit must uphold, that he who grasps a pure-thought is already clairvoyant. However, man's ordinary thinking is not a pure thinking, it is filled either with mental pictures or with fantasy. Only in the ether body can a pure thought be grasped, consequently whoever does so is clairvoyant. And to understand goodness one must be aware that it is part and parcel of what lives in the human astral body and in the I.

Especially when he spoke about the origin of good, Franz Brentano had an ingenious way of pointing to significant things; for example, that Aristotle had basically said that one can lecture on goodness only to those who are already habitually good. If this were true, it would be dreadful, for whoever is already in the habit of being good does not need lectures on it. There is no need to instruct him in what he already possesses. Moreover, if those words of Aristotle's were true, it follows that the converse is true also, that those not habitually good could not be helped by hearing about it. All talk about goodness would be meaningless; attempts to establish ethics would be futile. This is also a problem to which no satisfactory solution can be found unless sought in the light of spiritual science.

In general it cannot be said that our actions spring from pure concepts and ideas. But, as those who have studied The Philosophy of Freedom will realize, only an action that springs from a pure concept, a pure idea, can be said to be a free action, a truly independent action.⁸ Our actions are usually based on instincts, passions or emotions, only seldom if ever on pure concepts. More is said about these matters in the booklet Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science.⁹ I have also elaborated on it in other lectures.

In the first two seven-year periods of life—the first lasting up to the change of teeth, to about the seventh year, the second lasting till puberty—a human being's actions are predominantly influenced by instincts, emotions and the like. Not till the onset of puberty does he become capable of absorbing thoughts concerning good and evil. So we have to admit that Aristotle was right up to a point. He was right in the sense that the instincts towards good and evil that are in us already during the first two periods of life, up to the age of 14, tend to dominate us throughout life. We may modify them, suppress them, but they are still there for the whole of our life. The question is, Does it help that with puberty we begin to understand moral principles, and become able to rationalize our instincts? It helps in a twofold manner, and if you have a feeling and sense for these things, you will soon see how essential it is that this whole issue is understood in our time.

Consider the following example: Let us say a human being has inherited good tendencies, and up to the age of puberty he develops them into excellent and noble inclinations. He becomes what is called a good person. At the moment I do not want to go into why he becomes a good person, but to examine more external aspects. His parents we must visualize as good, kind people and so, too, his grandparents. All this has the effect that he develops tendencies that are noble and kind, and he instinctively does what is right and good. But let us now assume that he shows no sign, after having reached puberty, of wanting to rationalize his natural good instincts; he has no inclination to think about them. The reason for this we shall leave aside for the moment. So up to the age of 14 he develops good instincts but later shows no inclination to rationalize them. He has a propensity for doing good and hardly any for doing bad. If his attention is drawn to the fact that certain actions can be either good or bad he will say, It does not concern me. He is not interested in any discussions about it; he does not want to lift the issue into the sphere of the intellect. As a grown man he has children—whether the person is man or woman makes of course no difference—and the children will not inherit his good instincts if he has not thought about them. The children will soon show uncertainty in regard to their instinctive life. That is what is so significant.

Thus, such a person may get on well enough with his own instincts, but if he has never consciously concerned himself about good and evil, he will not pass on effective instincts to his children. Furthermore, already in his next life he will not bring with him any decisive instincts concerning good and evil. It is really like a plant which may be an attractive and excellent herb, but if it is prevented from flowering no further plants can arise from it. As single plant it may be useful, but if the future is to benefit from further plants, it must reach the stages of flower and fruit. Similarly a human being's instincts may, unaltered, serve him well enough in his own life, but if he leaves them at the level of mere instincts, he sins against posterity in the physical as well as spiritual sense. You will realize that these are matters of extreme importance. And, as with the other issues, only spiritual science can enlighten us about them.

In certain quarters it may well be maintained that goodness is due solely to instincts; indeed, that can even be proved. But anyone who wants to do away with the necessity for thoughtful understanding of moral issues on this basis is comparable to a farmer who says: I shall certainly cultivate my fields, but I see no point in retaining grains for next year's sowing—why not let the whole harvest be used as foodstuff? No farmer speaks like that because in this realm the link between past and future is too obvious. Unfortunately, in regard to spiritual issues, in regard to man's own evolution, people do speak like that. In this area great misconceptions continuously arise because people are unwilling to consider an issue from many aspects. They arrive at a onesided view and disregard all others. One can naturally prove that good impulses are based on instinct. That is not disputed, but there are other aspects to the matter. Impulses for the good are instincts active in the I and astral body; as such they are forces acting across from the previous life. Consequently one cannot, without spiritual knowledge, come to any insight concerning the way human lives are linked together either now or in the course of man's evolution.

If we now pass from these more elementary aspects to some on a higher level, we may consider the following: On the average, people living today are in their second incarnation since the Christian chronology began. In their first life it was sufficient if they received the Christ impulse from their immediate environment in whatever way possible. In their present, or second incarnation that is no longer enough; that is why people are gradually losing the Christ impulse. Were people now living to return in their next incarnation without having received the Christ impulse anew they would have lost it altogether. That is why it is essential that the impulse of Christ find entry into human souls in the form presented by spiritual science. Spiritual science does not have to resort to historical evidence but is able to relate the Christ impulse directly to the kinds of issues we are continually discussing in our circles. This enables it to be connected with the human soul in ways that ensure it is carried over into future ages when the souls incarnate once more. We are now too far removed from the historical event to absorb the Christ impulse the way we did in our first incarnation after the Christ event. That is why we are going not only through an external crisis, but also an inner crisis in regard to the Christ impulse. Traditions no longer suffice. People are honest who say that there is no proof of historical Christ. But spiritual knowledge enables man to discover the Christ impulse once more as a living reality in human evolution. The course of external events shows the necessity for the Christ impulse to arise anew on the foundation of spiritual science.

We have been witnessing so very many ideals on which people have built their lives for centuries suffering shipwreck in the last three years. We all suffer, especially the more we are aware of all that has been endured these last three years. If the question is asked, What has suffered the greatest shipwreck? there is only one answer: Christianity. Strange as it may seem to many, the greatest loss has been to Christianity. Wherever you look you see a denial of Christianity. Most things that are done are a direct mockery of Christianity, though the courage to admit this fact is lacking. For example, a view widely expressed today is that each nation should manage its own affairs. This is advocated by most people, in fact by the largest and most valuable part of mankind. Can that really be said to be a Christian view? I shall say nothing about its justification or otherwise, but simply whether the idea is Christian or not. And is it Christian? Most emphatically it is not. A view based on Christianity would be that nations should come to agreement through human beings' understanding of one another. Nothing could be more unchristian than what is said about the alleged freedom, the alleged independence—which in any case is unrealizable—of individual nations. Christianity means to understand people all over the earth. It means understanding even human beings who are in realms other than the earth. Yet since the Mystery of Golgotha not even people who call themselves Christian have been able to agree with one another even superficially. And that is a dreadful blow, especially in regard to feeling for and understanding of Christianity. This lack has led to grotesque incidents like the one I mentioned, of someone speaking about German religion, German piety, which has as much sense as speaking about a German sun or a German moon.

These things are in reality connected with far-reaching misconceptions about social affairs. I have spoken about the fact that nowadays no proper concept of a state exists. When people who should know discuss what a state is or should be, they speak about it as if it were an organism in which the human beings are the cells. That such comparisons can be made shows how little real understanding there is. As I have often pointed out, what is lacking, what we need more than anything else, are concepts and views that are real and concrete, concepts that penetrate to the reality of things. The chaos all about us has been caused because we live in abstractions, in concepts and views that are alien to the reality. How can it be otherwise when we are so estranged from the spiritual aspect of reality that we deny it altogether? True concepts of reality will be attained only when the spirit in all its weaving life is acknowledged.

There was something tragic in Franz Brentano's destiny right up to his death—tragic, because he did have a feeling for the direction modern man's spiritual striving should take. Yet, had he been presented with spiritual science he would have rejected it, just as he rejected the works of Plotinus as utter folly, as quite unscientific.¹⁰ There are, of course, many in the same situation; their spirit's flight is inhibited through the fact that they live in physical bodies belonging to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. This provokes the crisis we must overcome. Such things do, of course, have their positive side; to overcome something is to become stronger.

Not till the concrete concepts of spiritual science are understood and applied can things be done that are necessary for a complete revision of our understanding of law and morality, of social and political matters. It is precisely spirits like Brentano that bring home the fact that the whole question of jurisprudence hangs in the air. Without knowing the super-sensible aspect of man's being, such as the nature of the astral body, it is impossible to say what law is or what morality is. That applies also to religion and politics. If wrong, unrealistic ideas are applied to external, material reality, their flaws soon become apparent. No one would tolerate bridges that collapse because the engineer based his constructions on wrong concepts. In the sphere of morality, in social or political issues wrong concepts are not spotted so easily, and when they are discovered, people do not recognize the connection. We are suffering this moment from the aftereffect of wrong ideas, but do people see the connection? They are very far from doing so. And that is the most painful aspect of witnessing these difficult times. Every moment seems wasted unless devoted to the difficulties; at the same time one comes to realize how little people are inclined nowadays to enter into the reality of the situation. However, unless one concerns oneself with the things that really matter, no remedy will be found. It is essential to recognize that there is a connection between the events taking place now and the unreal concepts and views mankind has cultivated for so long. We are living in such chaotic times because for centuries the concepts of spiritual life that were at work in social affairs have been as unrealistic as those of an engineer who builds bridges that collapse. If only people would develop a feeling for how essential it is, when dealing with social or political issues, indeed with all aspects of cultural life, to find true concepts, reality-permeated concepts! If we simply continue with the same jurisprudence, the same social sciences, the same politics, and fill human souls with the same religious views as those customary before the year 1914, then nothing significant or valuable will be achieved. Unless the approach to all these things is completely changed, it will soon be apparent that no progress is being made. What is so necessary, what must come about is the will to learn afresh, to adjust one's ideas, but that is what there is so little inclination to do.

You must regard everything I have said about Franz Brentano as an expression of my genuine admiration for this exceptional personality. Such individuals demonstrate how hard one must struggle especially when it concerns an impulse to be carried over into mankind's future. Franz Brentano is an extremely interesting personality, but he did not achieve the kind of concepts, ideas, feelings or impulses that work across into future ages. Yet it is interesting that only a few weeks before his death he is said to have given assurances that he would succeed in proving that God exists. To do so was the goal of his lifelong scientific striving. Brentano would not have succeeded, for to prove the existence of God he would have needed spiritual science.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, before mankind's age had receded to the age of 33, it was still possible to prove that God exists. Since then mankind's age has dropped to 32, then 31, later 30 and by now to 27. Man can no longer through his ordinary powers of thinking prove that God exists; such proof can be discovered only through spiritual knowledge. Saying that spiritual science is an absolute necessity cannot be compared to a movement advocating its policies. The necessity for spiritual science is an objective fact of human evolution.

Today I wanted to draw your attention once more to the absolute necessity for spiritual science and related philosophical questions. However, it will be fruitful only if you are prepared to enter into such questions. What mankind is strongly in need of at the present time is the ability to enter into exact, clear-cut concepts and ideas. If you want to pursue the science of the spirit, anthroposophy, theosophy—call it what you will—only with the unclear, confused concepts with which so much is pursued nowadays, then you may go a long way in satisfying egoistical longings, gratifying personal wishes. You will not, however, be striving in the way the present difficult times demand. What one should strive for, especially in regard to spiritual science, is to collaborate, particularly in the spiritual sense, to bring about what mankind most sorely needs. Whenever possible turn your thoughts, as strongly as you are able, to the question: What are human beings most in need of, what are the thoughts that ought to hold sway among men to bring about improvement and end the chaos? Do not say that others, better qualified, will do that. The best qualified are those who stand on the firm foundation of the science of the spirit. What must occupy us most of all is how conditions can be brought about so that human beings can live together in a civilized manner.

We shall discuss these things further next time.

• 1 . Franz Brentano, see note 2 to Lecture I.
• 2 . Franz Brentano, Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, in particular his ideas of “nus poetikos.” “The nus poetikos is the light that illuminates phantasms, and makes the spiritual within the empirical visible for our spiritual eyes,” from a supplement on the “Activity of the Aristotelian God”; Mainz, 1867, p. 172.
• 3 . Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841, German philosopher.
• 4 . Immanuel Kant, 1725–1804, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, available in various editions and translations in English.—from Critique of Practical Reason, Part 1, section 7, the Categorical Imperative: “Act so that the principles underlying your will at any time could also be a principle for a universal law.” Compare also his Foundation for a Metaphysics of Morals, second section.
• 5 . Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, a lecture held on January 23, 1889, at the Vienna Law Society; published in Leipzig, 1889.
• 6 . Rudolf von Ihering, 1818–1892, jurist. His views were expressed in a lecture “Über die Entstehung des Rechtsgefuhls,” given several years before Brentano's (see above note) at the Vienna Law Society.
• 7 . Wilhelm Windelband, 1848–1915, German philosopher.
• 8 . Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom (Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1964).
• 9 . Rudolf Steiner, Education of the Child (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965).
• 10. Plotinus, 204-270, neo-Platonic philosopher.

Moritz Benedikt, the criminal anthropologist and well-known physiologist, found that the posterior cerebral lobe of criminals is relatively small, as in higher apes; he established atavism in this case. In this way, crime is attributed entirely to the physical constitution. Even the soul life is controlled quite mechanically by modern school psychology, the speed of absorption of sensory impressions, strength of memory and so on. The human being is treated like a machine. This has been happening increasingly for 50 years. Even social life should be shaped in this way, as it is through the sentence [...]: Act so that your motive can become the norm for all people. It's like saying, “Wear a skirt that fits all people.” It is Kant's categorical imperative. But even if one achieves excellence in the natural sciences, it does not follow that one could (transfer their results) to the moral field. So it is with Oscar Hertwig, who so brilliantly refuted Darwinism; in the social field, he has not only produced inadequate but also harmful results.

Spiritual knowledge is necessary to gain insight into the possibility and essence of human freedom; knowledge of what man's true nature is leads to love of the human being and is the only basis for true morality and social life of the future, based on brotherhood. Generalized morality, as we have it now, leads to the opposite of what is desired, as current events prove; moral preaching is like telling the stove: get warm without heating.

Thinking, feeling and willing find their correlate in the nervous system, in breathing and rhythm, for example in the blood circulation for digestion or metabolism, for reproduction. The nervous system is degenerative, leads to death, just as thinking in waking consciousness always destroys something. It must merge with imagination if it is to become viable. Volition, the metabolism, leads to life, to being born, when it is connected with intuition. The essence of intuition is love. Feeling in the middle then maintains the balance so that the pendulum does not swing in one direction or the other.

New religions no longer arise since the synthesis in the Christianity of all religions. Anthroposophy should not be confused with all kinds of obscurantism, but is common knowledge and should become more and more so, even if it is currently being rejected. From it will be born a realistic, benevolent socialism, in which all is salvation. Because people today are asleep, it has been possible for a few people to bring about these catastrophic events.

Yesterday we were considering the successive moods of soul that have to be attained if human thinking—if what is ordinarily called knowledge—is to enter the realm of reality, and we came to a condition of soul that we named surrender. In other words, a thinking that has risen to the conditions of soul we described before—a thinking, that is, which has become possessed of wonder, and has then learned what we called reverent devotion to the world of reality and finally what we called knowing oneself to be in wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world—if such a thinking be not able then to rise still further and enter the region we have described as a condition of surrender, it cannot come to reality. Now this surrender is only to be attained by making the resolute endeavour again and again to face for ourselves the inadequacy of mere thought. We have to take pains to stimulate and strengthen within us a mood that may be expressed as follows. It must be as though we were constantly saying to ourselves: I ought not to expect that my thinking can give me knowledge of the truth, I ought rather solely to expect of my thinking that it shall educate me. It is of the utmost importance that we should develop in us this idea, namely, that our thinking educates us. If you will really take this point of view as a practical rule of life you will find that there are many occasions when you are led to quite different conclusions from those that seem at first sight to be inevitable.

I daresay there are not many of you who have made a thorough study of the philosopher Kant. It is not necessary. I only want here to refer to the fact that in Kant's most important and revolutionary work, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” you will always find proofs adduced both for and against a proposition in question. Take, for example, a statement such as the following. “The world once had a beginning in time.” You will find that Kant puts, perhaps on the other side of the same page, the statement: “The world has always existed, from all eternity.” And then he proceeds to adduce valid proofs for both statements, notwithstanding that the one obviously expresses the very opposite of the other. That is to say, Kant proves in the same manner that the world has had a beginning and that it has had no beginning. He calls this method of reasoning “Antinomy” and thinks it is itself an evidence that the human faculty of knowledge has boundaries, seeing that man is forced thereby to arrive at contradictory conclusions. And, of course, he is right, so long as one expects by thinking to come to conformity with some objective reality. So long as we give ourselves up to the belief that by thinking or by the elaboration of concepts or, let us say, by the elaboration in thought of experiences we have in the world, we can come to reality, so long are we indeed in desperate case, if someone comes forward and shows us that a particular statement and its exact opposite can equally well be proved. For if this is so, how are we ever to arrive at Truth? If, however, we have learned that where the situation demands a decisive pronouncement, thinking can come to no conclusion about reality, if we have persistently educated ourselves instead to look upon thinking as a means to become wiser, as a means to take in hand our own self-education in wisdom, then it does not disturb us at all that at one time one thing can be proved and at another time its opposite can be proved. For we very soon make the following discovery. The fact that the elaboration of concepts does not, so to say, expose us in the least to the onset of reality, is the very reason why we are able to work with perfect freedom within the sphere of concepts and ideas and to carry on our own self-education by this means. If we were perpetually being corrected by reality, then the elaboration of concepts would not afford us a means of educating ourselves in this manner in perfect freedom. I would like to ask you to give careful consideration to this fact. Let me repeat it. The elaboration of concepts affords us a means of effective and independent self-education, and it can only do so because we are never disturbed in the free elaboration of concepts by the interference of reality.

What do I mean when I say we are not disturbed? What sort of disturbance could reality make in the free elaboration of concepts? We can picture to ourselves a little what such a disturbance would be like if we contrast—purely hypothetically for the moment, though, as we shall see later, it does not need to remain entirely in the realm of hypothesis—our human thinking with divine thinking. For we can say, can we not, that it is impossible to conceive of divine thinking as having nothing to do with reality. When we try to picture the thinking of the Gods, we can only conceive of it—still speaking for the moment purely hypothetically—as intervening in reality, as influencing reality. And this leads inevitably to the following conclusion. When a human being makes a mistake in his thinking, then it is a mere logical mistake, it is nothing worse. And when, later on, he comes to see that he has made a mistake he can correct it; and he will at the same time have accomplished something for his self-education, he will have grown wiser. But now take the case of divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, then something happens; and when it thinks falsely, then something is destroyed, something is annihilated. So that if we had a divine thinking, then with every false concept we should call forth a destructive process, first of all in our astral body, then in our etheric body and thence also in our physical body. If we had active divine thinking, if our thinking had something to do with reality, then a false concept would have the result that we should, as it were, stimulate inside us a drying up process in some part or other of our body, a hardening process. You will agree, it would be important to make as few mistakes as possible; for it might not be long before we had made so many mistakes that our body would have become quite dried up and would fall to pieces. We should, in fact, soon find it crumble away if we transformed into reality the mistakes in our thinking. We actually only maintain ourselves in real existence through the fact that our thinking does not work into reality, but that we are protected from the penetration of our thinking into reality. Thus we can make mistake after mistake in our thinking. If later we correct these mistakes we have thereby educated ourselves, we have grown wiser, and we have not at the same time committed devastation with our mistakes. As we strengthen ourselves more and more with the moral force of such a thought as this we learn to know the nature of the “surrender” of which I spoke and we come at last to a point where we do not at critical moments of life, turn to thinking, in the hope to gain knowledge and understanding of external things.

That sounds strange, I know, and at first sight it seems as though it would be quite impossible. How can we refuse to have recourse to thinking? And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world. We have to judge and form opinions—we shall see in the course of these lectures why that is so—we have to act in life and cannot always wait to penetrate to the depths of reality. We must judge—but we should educate ourselves to exercise caution in accepting as finally true the judgments and opinions we form. We should, as it were, be continually looking over our own shoulder and reminding ourselves that where we are applying our keenest intellect, just there we are treading on very uncertain ground and are perpetually liable to make mistakes. That is a hard saying for cocksure people! They think they will never get anywhere at all if they are to doubt whether the opinion they form on some event is conclusive. Observe a little and you will see that very many people, when some statement is made, think it necessary at once to say: “But what I think is this”—or when they see something, to say: “I don't like that!” or “I like it!” This kind of attitude must be given up by anyone who does not rest content to go through life with easy self-assurance; it must be given up if we want to set the course of our inner life in the direction of reality. What we have to do is to cultivate an attitude of mind which may be characterised in the following words: “Obviously I have, of course, to live my life, and this means I must form judgments and conclusions. I will, therefore, employ my power of judgment in so far as the practice of life makes this necessary, but I will not use it for the recognition of truth. For that I will be for ever looking cautiously over my shoulder, I will always receive with some degree of doubt every judgment that I happen to make.”

But how are we then to arrive at any thought about truth, if not by forming judgments in the ordinary way? We have already indicated yesterday the right attitude of mind, when we said that we ought to let the things speak, let the things themselves tell their secrets. We have to learn to adopt a passive attitude to the things of the world, and let them speak out their own secrets. A great deal of error would be avoided if men would do this. We have a wonderful example in Goethe, who, when he wants to investigate truth, does not allow himself to judge but tries to let the things themselves utter their own secrets. Let us suppose we have two men, one who judges and the other who lets the things tell their own secrets. We will select a very clear and simple example. One man sees a wolf and describes it. He finds that there are other animals besides which look like this wolf, and he arrives in this manner at the general concept “wolf.” And now he can go on to form the following conclusion. He can say to himself: In reality there are many individual wolves; the general concept of “wolf” which I make in my mind, wolf as such, does not exist; only individual wolves exist in the world. Such a man will easily state it as his opinion that we have really only to do with individual wolf beings, and the general concept of wolf which one holds as an idea is not anything real. There you have a striking example of a man who merely judges and forms opinions. This is the kind of conclusion he develops. And how about the man, on the other hand, who lets reality speak for itself? How will he think of that invisible quality of wolf which is to be found in every single wolf and which characterises all wolves alike? He will look at it in this way. He will say to himself: Let me consider a lamb and compare it with a wolf. I am not going to formulate any judgment on the matter, I am simply going to let the facts speak. And now, let us imagine this man has the opportunity to see with his own eyes how the wolf eats up the lamb. He sees the event take place before him. Then he would have to say to himself: “The substance which before was running about as lamb is now inside the wolf, it has been absorbed into the wolf.” It needs no more than the perception of this fact to see how real the wolf nature is! For if we were to rely on what we can follow with our external senses we might easily be led to the conclusion that if a wolf were deprived of all other food and were to eat nothing but lamb he must gradually—for the metabolism that goes on inside him will produce this result—he must gradually come to have in him nothing but lamb substance. As a matter of fact, however, he never becomes a lamb, he remains always a wolf. That shows quite unmistakably, if one judges the matter rightly, that the material part of the wolf has been quite erroneously assumed to constitute “wolf” as such. When we let ourselves be taught by the external world of facts, then it shows us that besides what we have before us as material substance in the wolf there is something else, something we cannot see and that yet is real in the highest degree. And this it is which brings it about that when the wolf eats nothing but lamb he does not become lamb but remains wolf. All of him that is merely perceptible to the senses has come from lambs.

It is difficult sometimes to draw a sharp line of demarcation between judging and letting ourselves be taught by reality. When, however, the difference has once been grasped and when judgment is only employed for the ends of practical life, while for an approach to reality the attitude is taken of allowing ourselves to be taught by the things of the world, then we gradually arrive at a mood of soul which can reveal to us the true meaning of “surrender.” Surrender is a state of mind which does not seek to investigate truth from out of itself, but which looks for truth to come from the revelation that flows out of the things, and can wait until it is ripe to receive the revelation. An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender, on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being. To work with patience, knowing that patience will bring us further and further in wise self-education—that is the mood of surrender.

And now we must go on to consider the fruits of this surrender. What do we attain when we have gone forward with our thinking from wonder to reverence, thence to feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with reality and finally to the attitude of surrender—what do we attain? We come at last to this. As we go about the world and observe the plants in all their greenness and admire the changing colours of their blossoms, or as we contemplate the sky in its blueness and the stars with their golden brilliance—not forming judgments but letting the things themselves reveal to us what they are—then if we have really succeeded in learning this “surrender,” all things in the world of sense become changed for us, and something is revealed to us in the world of the senses, for which we can find no other word than a word taken from our own soul life.

Suppose this line (a—b) represents the world of the senses as it shows itself to our view. Suppose you are standing here (c) and you behold the world of the senses spread out before you like a veil. This line (a—b) is intended to represent the tones that work upon your ear, the colours and forms that work upon your eye, the smells and tastes that work upon your other organs, the hardness and softness, etc., etc.—in short, the whole world of the senses. In ordinary life we stand in the world of the senses and we apply to it our faculty of judgment. How else do all the sciences arise? Men approach the world of the senses and by many kinds of methods they investigate the laws that prevail there. You will, however, have gathered from all that we have been saying that such a procedure can never lead one into the world of reality, because judgment is not a leader at all; it is only by educating one's thinking, it is only by following the path of wonder and of reverence, etc., that one can ever penetrate to the world of reality. Then the world of the senses changes and becomes something entirely new. And it is important that we should make discovery of this if we would gain any knowledge of the real nature of the sense world.

Let us suppose that a man who has developed this feeling, this attitude of surrender, in a rather high degree, looks out over the fresh bright green of a meadow. At first sight he cannot distinguish the colours of any individual plants; the whole presents a general appearance of fresh green. Such a man, if he has really brought the attitude of surrender to a high degree of development, will perforce feel within him at the sight of the meadow an inner sense of balance; he cannot help being moved to feel this mood of balance—a balance that is not dead but quick with life, we might compare it to a gentle and even flow of water. He cannot help but conjure up this picture before his soul. And it is the same with every taste, every smell and every sense-perception; they inevitably call up in his soul a feeling of inner movement and activity. There is no colour and no tone that does not speak to him; everything says something, and says it in such a way that he feels bound to give answer with inner movement and activity—not with judgment or opinion but with movement, active, living movement. In short, a time comes for such a man when the whole world of the senses flings off, as it were, its disguise and reveals itself to him as something he cannot describe with any other word than will. Everything in the world of the senses is will, strong and powerful currents of will. I want you to mark this particularly. The man who has attained in any high degree to surrender, discovers everywhere in the world of the senses ruling will. Hence it is that a man who has developed in himself even a small measure of this quality of surrender, feels pain if he suddenly sees a person coming towards him wearing some startling new fashion of colour. He cannot help experiencing this inner movement and activity in response to what approaches him from outside; he is sensible of will in everything and he feels united with the whole world through this will. The world of the senses thus becomes, as it were, a sea of infinitely differentiated will. And this means that while other-wise we only feel it as spread out around us, this world of the senses begins to have for us a certain thickness or depth. We begin to look behind the surface of things, we begin to hear behind the surface of things—and what we see and hear is will, flowing will. For the interest of those who have read Schopenhauer I will here remark that Schopenhauer divined this ruling will in a one-sided way in the world of sound; he described music as differentiated workings of will. But the truth is that for the man who has learned surrender, everything in the world of the senses is Ruling Will.

And now when a man has learned to detect everywhere in the world of the senses this ruling will he can go further, he can penetrate to secrets that lie hidden behind the world of the senses and that are otherwise inaccessible to him.

If we would understand aright the nature of the next step we must ask ourselves the question: How is it we gain any knowledge at all of the sense world? The answer is simple: By means of our senses. By means of the ear we acquire knowledge of the world of sound, by means of the eye knowledge of the world of colour and form, and so on. We know the sense world through the medium of our sense organs. A man who confronts this world of the senses in an ordinary everyday manner receives impressions of it and then forms his judgments. The man who has learned surrender receives impressions in the first place through his senses; and then he feels how there streams across to him from the objects active, ruling will; he feels as if he were swimming, together with the objects, in a sea of ruling will. And when a man has come to this point and feels the presence and sway of will in the objects before him, then his own evolution drives him on of itself to the next higher stage. For then, having experienced all the previous stages leading up to surrender—the stages we have called feeling oneself in harmony with the wisdom of the world, and before that reverence, and before that wonder—then, through the penetration of these conditions into the last gained condition of surrender, he learns how to grow together with the objects with his etheric body also, which stands behind the physical body. He grows together with the objects with his physical body, that is with his sense organs, in the active ruling will. When we see, hear, smell, etc., then as men of surrender we feel the ruling will streaming into us through our eyes and ears, we feel ourselves in true correspondence with the objects. But behind the physical eye is the etheric body of the eye, and behind the physical ear is the etheric body of the ear. We are filled through and through with our etheric body. And just as the physical body grows together with the objects of the sense world when man penetrates to the ruling active will, so too can the etheric body. And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will. When our etheric body grows together with the objects of the world, then we have the impression that we cannot let these objects remain as they are in our ideas and in our conceptions and thoughts. They change for us as soon as we come into relation with them. Suppose a man who has already experienced the mood of surrender in his soul is looking at a green leaf, full of sap. He turns the eye of his soul upon the object before him, and at once he finds he cannot leave it as it is, this juicy green leaf; the moment he beholds it he feels that it grows out beyond itself, he feels how it has in it the possibility to become something quite different. You know that a green leaf, as it grows gradually higher and higher up in the plant, turns at last into the coloured flower-leaf or petal. The whole plant is really no more than a transformed leaf. You may learn this from Goethe's researches into nature. So when the student beholds the leaf he sees that it is not yet finished, that it is trying to grow out beyond itself; he sees, in short, more than the green leaf gives him. The green leaf stimulates him to feel within him something of a budding and sprouting life. Thus he grows together—quite literally—with the green leaf, feeling in himself, too, a budding and a sprouting of life. But now suppose he is looking at the dry and withered bark of a tree. If he is to grow together with that he cannot do otherwise than be overcome with a feeling of death. In the withered bark he sees—not more, but less than is there in reality. If anyone looks at the bark from the point of view of external appearance alone he can admire it, it can give him pleasure, in any case he does not see in the dead bark something that shrivels him, piercing him, as it were, in the soul and filling it with thoughts of death.

There is nothing in the whole world that does not, when the etheric body grows together with it, give rise to feelings either of growing, sprouting, becoming, or of decaying and passing away. Everything shows itself in one or other aspect. Suppose, for example, a man who has attained to surrender and has then progressed a further step turns his attention to the human larynx. He will have a strange impression. The larynx will appear to him to be an organ that is quite in the beginning of its evolution and has a great future before it. From what the larynx itself tells, he will feel that it is like a seed, not at all like a fruit or like a withered object, but like a seed. He knows quite clearly from what the larynx itself brings to expression that a time must come in human evolution when the larynx will be completely transformed, when it will be of such a nature that whereas now man only utters the word, he will one day give birth to man. The larynx is the future organ of birth, the future organ of procreation. Now man brings forth the word by means of the larynx, but the larynx is the seed that will in future times develop to bring forth the whole human being—that is, when man is spiritualised. The larynx expresses this quite directly when one lets it tell what it is. Other organs of the human body show us that they have long ago passed their zenith, and we see that they will in future times be no longer present in the human organism.

Such a vision is compelled to behold everywhere on the one hand a growing, a coming into being, and on the other hand a dying away. It sees both as processes going on into the future. Budding, sprouting life—death and decay; those are the two things that we find intermingled with one another all around us when we attain to this union of our etheric body with the world of reality. In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death. Everything that we see behind the world of the senses makes itself known to us as proceeding from one or other of these two fundamental forces. In occultism what we behold in this way is called the world of coming into existence and of passing away. And so, when we confront the world of the senses we are looking into the world of arising and passing away, and what lies behind is Ruling Wisdom.

Behind Will is Wisdom! I say expressly ruling wisdom, for the wisdom man brings into his ideas is as a rule not active at all, but a wisdom that is merely thought. The wisdom man acquires when he looks behind the active will is united with the objects; and in the kingdom of objective things, wherever wisdom rules, it does really rule and the effects of its working find actual expression. When it, so to speak, withdraws from reality, then begins the dying process; where it flows into reality, there you find a coming into existence, there you find budding, sprouting life. We can mark off these worlds in the following way (see diagram 1). We look at the sense world and we see it first as A, and then we look at B which is behind the sense world—the world of ruling wisdom. From out of this world is taken the substance of our own etheric body, what we behold outside us as ruling wisdom—that we behold, too, in our etheric body. And in our physical body we behold, not merely what sense appearance shows, but also ruling will, for everywhere in the sense world we see ruling will.

Yes, the strange thing is that if we have attained to surrender, then when we meet another man and look at him, his colour, whether it be inclined to red or yellow or green, does not seem to us merely red or yellow or green, but we grow together for example, with the rosy-cheekedness of his countenance. We feel the ruling will there, and all that lives and weaves in him, as it were, shoots across to us through the medium of the colour in his cheeks. People who are naturally inclined to observe and note rosy cheeks will say that a rosy-cheeked person is alone healthy. We approach our fellow-man in such a way as to see in him the ruling will. And we may now say, turning to our diagram, that our physical body, which we will denote by this circle here, is taken from the world A, the world of ruling will. Our etheric body, on the other hand, which I will denote with this second circle, is taken from the world of ruling wisdom, the world B. Here you have, then, the connection between the world of ruling wisdom that is spread around us, and our own etheric body—and the world of ruling will that is spread around us, and our own physical body. Now in ordinary life man does not know of these connections, the power to do so is taken from him. The connections are there all the time, but they are, as it were, withheld from man, he can have no influence upon them. How is this?

As a matter of fact there are opportunities in life where our thoughts and whatever we develop in the way of judgments and opinions are not so harmless for our own reality as they are in everyday existence. In the ordinary everyday waking condition, good Gods have seen to it that our thoughts have not too bad an influence on our own reality; they have withheld from us the power our thoughts might otherwise exercise upon our physical body and etheric body; and it would really go very hardly with us in the world if it were not so If thoughts—let me emphasise once more—were to signify in the world of man what the thoughts of the Gods do in reality signify, then man would evoke inside him with every error in thought a slight death process, and little by little he would be quite dried up. And as for an untruth! If with every lie he told man had to burn up the corresponding bit of his brain—as would have to happen if man had power to work into the world of reality—then we should soon see how long his brain lasted! Good Gods have withheld from our soul the power over our etheric body and physical body. But that cannot be so all the time. For were we never to exercise any influence from our soul upon our physical and etheric body then we should quickly come to an end of the forces that are in these bodies, we should have a very short life. For in our soul, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, are contained the forces that must flow ever and again into the physical and etheric body, the forces we need in our etheric body. This inflow of forces takes place at night when we are asleep. In the night there flow to us from the universe, coming to us by way of our ego and astral body, the currents that we need to dispel fatigue. There you have in actual fact the living connection between the worlds of will and of wisdom and the physical and etheric bodies of man. For into these worlds vanish during sleep the astral body and ego. They enter into these worlds and build there centres of attraction for substances which have then to flow out of the world of wisdom into the etheric body and out of the world of will into the physical body. This must go on in the night. For if man were present in his consciousness, this instreaming could not happen rightly. If ordinary man were conscious during sleep, if he were present with all his errors and vices, with all the bad things he has done in the world, then this would create a strange apparatus of attraction in those other worlds for the forces that are to stream in. Then tremendous disturbances would be set up in the physical and etheric bodies by the forces man's ego and astral body would send into them out of the world of ruling wisdom and the world of ruling will.

Therefore have good Gods made provision that we cannot be present when the right forces must stream into our physical and etheric body by night. For the good Gods have dulled the consciousness of man during sleep, that he may not be able to spoil what he undoubtedly would spoil by his thoughts were he conscious. It is on this account that we have to undergo great pain when we are on the path of knowledge and are making the ascent into the higher worlds; if we are in real earnest it must necessarily bring us great pain. You will find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, a description of how the life of man by night, the sleeping life, is, so to speak, made use of, to help man to rise from the world of external reality into higher worlds. When man begins from out of the world of Imagination to light up his sleep consciousness, when he begins to lighten it with knowledge and experiences, then it is important for him to make sure that he himself gets out of the way and so shuts out of his consciousness all that might cause disturbance to his physical and etheric bodies. It is an absolute necessity, in making the ascent into higher worlds to get to know oneself thoroughly and exactly. When we really know ourselves we cease as rule to love ourselves. Self-love comes to an end when we begin to have self-knowledge; and this self-love—which is always present in a man who has not attained to self-knowledge, for it is an illusion to imagine we do not love ourselves; we love ourselves more than anything else in the world—this self-love must have been overcome if we are to be able to shut ourselves out of our consciousness. We must, in actual fact, come to the point where we say to ourselves: As I am now, I must eliminate myself. We have already gone a long way in this direction in that we have attained to self-surrender. But we must now not love ourselves at all. We must have the possibility at every moment to feel—I must put myself right on one side; for if I do not shut out completely all those things in me that otherwise I quite like to feel in me, errors, trivialities, prejudices sympathies, antipathies—if I do not put these right away then my ascent into higher worlds cannot be made aright.

Because of these errors, disturbing forces will mix with the inflowing stream from higher worlds that has to enter into me to make clairvoyance possible. And these forces will stream into my physical and etheric bodies, and as many as are the errors, etc., so many will be the disturbing processes set up. As long as we are not conscious in sleep, as long as we are not capable of rising into the world of clairvoyance, so long do good Gods protect us and not let these currents from the world of will and the world of wisdom flow into our physical and etheric bodies. But when we carry up our consciousness into the world of clairvoyance, then no Gods are protecting us—for the protection they give consists in the very fact that they take away our consciousness—then we must ourselves lay aside all prejudice, all sympathy, all antipathy, etc. All these things we must put right away from us; for if we have anything left of self-love, or of desires that cling to the personal in us, or if we are still capable of making any judgment on personal grounds, then all such things can work harm to our health—namely, to our physical body and etheric body—when we follow the path of development into higher worlds.

It is exceedingly important that we should be clear about these things. And it is easy to perceive the significance of the fact that in ordinary day life man is deprived of all influence upon his physical and etheric body, his thoughts, in the manner in which he grasps them when he is within these bodies have nothing whatever to do with reality, they are quite ineffective and consequently unable to form any judgment about what is real. By night they would be able to do so. Every false thought would work destructively on the physical and etheric bodies. If we were conscious in the night we should see before us what I have just been describing to you. The world of the senses would appear to us as a sea of ruling will, and behind it would appear the wisdom—the wisdom that builds the world, beating through this will, as it were lashing it up and down into great waves, and with every beat of the waves evoking continually processes of coming into existence and of passing away, processes of birth and of death. That is the true world, into which we have ultimately to look, the world of ruling will and the world of ruling wisdom, and the latter is also the world of perpetual births and perpetual deaths. That is the world that is our world, and it is of immense importance for us to recognise it. For if we once recognise it we begin to discover in very truth a means for attaining to a greater and greater height of surrender; because we feel ourselves interwoven in perpetual births and perpetual deaths, and we know that with every deed we do we connect ourselves in some way with a coming into existence or with a passing away. And “good” will begin to be for us not merely something of which we say: That is good, I like it, it fills me with sympathy. No, we begin to know that the good is something that is creative in the World-All, something that always and everywhere belongs to the world that is arising and coming into being. And of the “bad” we begin to feel how it shows itself everywhere as an outpouring of a process of death and decay. And here we shall have made an important transition to a new world-conception, where one will not be able to think of evil in any other way than as the destroying angel of death, who goes striding through the world, nor of good in any other way than as the creator of continual cosmic births, in great and small. And it is for Spiritual Science to awaken in man a sense of how through this spiritual world-conception he can deepen his whole outlook on life, as he begins to feel that the world of good and the world of bad are not merely as they appear to us in external maya, where we stand before them with our power of judgment and find only that the one is pleasing to us and the other displeasing; no, the world of good is the creative world and the bad is the destroying angel who goes through the world with his scythe. And with every bad thing we do we become a helper of the destroying angel, we ourselves take his scythe and share in the processes of death and decay. The ideas that we receive from a spiritual foundation have a strengthening influence upon our whole outlook on life. This strength is what men should now be receiving that they may carry it into the evolution of the future; for indeed they will need it. Hitherto good Gods have taken care of man but now the time has come in our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch when destiny, and good and evil will more and more be given over into his own hands. Therefore it is necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognise them in the world—the one as a creative and the other as a death-dealing principle.

[ 1 ] We have had the activity of higher spiritual Beings within our Cosmos, brought before our souls by means of two examples, that on ancient Saturn and that on the ancient Sun, which is the reincarnation, or the production of Saturn. It will now be necessary to explore the spiritual realm itself in which these higher spiritual Beings are, and consider their action and influence from still another point of view. During the first half of these lectures some things will have to be said which many of you have already heard. But even apart from the fact that there are many listeners here who have not yet heard some of the things which may be called introductory, it is necessary to repeat them, because we have to rise in these lectures to very high regions of spiritual life.

[ 2 ] From what has been said you will have seen that spiritual Beings of the most different kinds have to be active within a cosmic system which is in process of development. What in reality, is this ancient Saturn? Let us make a precise image of it. Of course ancient Saturn has nothing to do with the Saturn of the present day. You can easily imagine that in ancient Saturn were already included the germs of all that belongs to-day to the whole of our solar system; our Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, all these bodies were within ancient Saturn and have evolved out of it. Imagine to yourselves a globe, or heavenly body which would have the sun as its central point and would reach so far outwards that the Saturn of to-day was contained in it, this globe, larger than our present solar system, would give you a correct idea of ancient Saturn. Our whole solar system came forth, out of ancient Saturn. One might even compare it — not exactly but approximately — with the general Kant-Laplace universal primeval mist, out of which, according to the opinion of many modern people, our solar system has formed itself. But the comparison is not quite accurate, for the majority imagine that a sort of gas was the starting point of our solar system, whereas we have seen that it was a body of warmth, not of gas. Ancient Saturn was a giant body of warmth.

[ 3 ] And so we heard yesterday, that when that ancient Saturn had transformed itself into the later Sun, the Cherubim began to be active from the surrounding circumference of the Universe. You have now to realise that those Cherubim, who were active, in the periphery of the Sun, were also already present in the periphery of ancient Saturn. Only they were not as yet called on to play their part — to put it trivially, they had not yet reached the stage when they could undertake something important, but they were present in the environment of Saturn. Still other Beings were around ancient Saturn, Beings of a degree still higher and still more sublime than the Cherubim, namely, the Seraphim, (Spirits of Love). The Thrones also came from the same region. But the Thrones, who are one grade lower than the Cherubim, let their substance flow downwards to form the warmth-substance of Saturn, as we have already shown. Thus we can imagine Saturn as a giant globe of warmth, surrounded by circles of spiritual Beings who are of a supremely high, sublime nature. Christian Esotericism calls them Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. They are the Dhyanic Beings of the Eastern Teaching.

[ 4 ] Whence do these circles of sublime Beings come? Everything in the world, everything in the Universe has evolved. And if we want to form an idea of the place whence come the Cherubim, the Seraphim and the Thrones, we shall do well to turn our thought into our own solar system and to ask ourselves: What will some day become of our solar system? We wish now to give you a short sketch of the development of our solar system.

We know that it has come forth out of ancient Saturn, Saturn transformed itself into the ancient Sun, which again changed into the ancient Moon. In the time when the ancient Sun was Moon, a particular development began. This Moon for the time went forth out of the Sun. In the ancient Moon we have the first heavenly body, which is outside and separate from the Sun. The Sun was able to evolve higher, because it cast from it the coarser substances. The whole system then developed towards our present earth. Our earth came into being because, along with all the remaining Moon and Earth, it divided from the Sun the coarser substances and beings belonging to it. But evolution goes further. The beings who have now to dwell upon the Earth, separated from the Sun, and who have been thrown out of the Sun, although excluded from it are developing ever higher and higher. They have to pass through yet another condition, that of Jupiter. But through all this, they are gradually maturing towards re-union with the Sun. And when the condition of the Venus-development will have come, all the beings who now live and move upon our earth will be re-absorbed into the Sun, and the Sun itself will have reached a higher stage of development, just because it will have again redeemed all the beings it had formerly excluded. Then will come the Vulcan development, the highest state in the development of our system. These are the seven stages of evolution of our system: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. In the Vulcan development, all those Beings who have evolved out of the small beginnings of the Saturn existence, will be spiritualised in the highest degree, they will have grown not only as far as the Sun, but even higher than the Sun. Vulcan is more than Sun, and with this it has reached the maturity of sacrifice, the maturity necessary to self disintegration.

[ 5 ] The course of evolution is this: a Sun, which from the beginning is included in such a system, has at first to throw off its planets, being too weak to develop further without excluding them. It grows strong, absorbs its planets again, and grows into a Vulcan. Then the whole is dissolved, and from the Vulcan globe is formed a hollow globe which is something like the circles of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. The Sun will thus dissolve in space, sacrifice itself, send forth its Being into the Universe, and through this will itself become a circle of Beings like the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, which will then advance towards new creation.

[ 6 ] Why are the Thrones enabled. to give out of their substance what Saturn needs? Because they have prepared themselves in an earlier system, through seven conditions like those our solar system is now going through. Before a system of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim can be evolved, it must have been a solar system at an earlier stage; which means, that when the Sun has got so far as to be reunited with its planets, it becomes itself a circle — a Zodiacal circle. That which we have come to know in the Zodiac, those great, sublime Beings, are the results that have come over to us from an earlier solar system. That which has formerly evolved within a solar system can now send down its influence out of universal space, and produce a new solar system, created out of itself. The Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are for us the highest Hierarchy among divine Beings, because they have already passed through their solar system evolution and have risen to mighty cosmic deeds of sacrifice.

[ 7 ] Hence it is that these Beings have come into the actual direct vicinity of the highest Godhead of which we can speak at all: the Trinity, the three-fold Divinity. Beyond the Seraphim we have to see that highest Divinity of which we find mention by almost all nations as the threefold Divinity — as Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, as Father, Word, and Holy Ghost. From out [of] this highest Godhead, this most exalted Trinity, stream forth the plans for a new cosmic system. Glancing back at ancient Saturn we say to ourselves: before any of this ancient Saturn came into Being, the plan of it had grown within the divine threefold Unity. But the threefold Unity has need of Beings to execute its plan. These Beings must first prepare themselves for the task. The Beings who, are so to speak, nearest God Himself, who, as is beautifully expressed in Christian Western Esotericism, ‘bask in the light of God's countenance,’ are the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. These take up the plans of a new cosmic system streaming from the divine threefold Unity. This is naturally expressed more figuratively than it really is, for we have to express in human words such sublime activities, for which, in truth, this human language has not been created. No human words exist to express such sublime activity as that, for instance, when the Seraphim, in the beginning of our solar system received the highest plans of the divine Threefold Unity containing the evolution which our solar system has to pass through, namely Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seraphim is a name which for those who understand it in its true sense, even in that of ancient Hebrew Esotericism, has always signified that the task of the Seraphim was to receive from the Trinity the highest ideas and aims for a system of worlds. The Cherubim, the next lower rank of the Hierarchies, had the task of building up in wisdom the aims and ideas which they received from the higher gods. Thus the Cherubim are spirits of highest wisdom, who understood how to transpose into workable plans, the inspirations given to them by the Seraphim. And the Thrones, the third grade of the Hierarchies, counting from above, had the task — naturally very figuratively expressed. — of putting things into action, so that what had been thought out in Wisdom — these lofty cosmic thoughts which the Seraphim had received from the Gods, and which the Cherubim had pondered over, should be transformed into active reality.

[ 8 ] We actually see, if we do but try to see with the soul, how the first realisation of the divine plan occurs with the down-flow of the fire-substance of the Thrones. Thus the Thrones appear to us as those Beings who have the power to transform into a primary reality that which has been first thought out by the Cherubim. This takes place because the Thrones allowed their own substance to flow from them, the substance of the primeval original world-fire, into the space, which had been chosen for the new world-system. If we speak very figuratively we can express it thus: An old solar system disappeared and died away. Within that ancient solar system the ranks of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones had evolved to the highest perfection. They then sought out, according to the inspiration received by them from the highest Threefold Unity, a Sphere within Universal space and said: ‘We will begin here.’ When the Seraphim took up the aims of the new world-system, the Cherubim worked out these aims, and the Thrones poured out of their own Being the primeval fire into that space. Thus we grasp the beginnings of our world-system.

[ 9 ] Other Beings, however, were also present in a certain way, in the former solar system, of which ours is the successor. But these Beings did not rise so high as the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; they stopped on lower Stages, they had come over in a condition when they still had to pass through a certain development, before they could be creatively active, before they could offer sacrifice. These Beings are those of the Second threefold Hierarchy. The First threefold Hierarchy we have just been considering. The Beings of the Second threefold Hierarchy are: the Kyriotetes or Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom; then the so-called Mights, Dynamis (or, as Dionysius, the Areopagite, and after him the Teachers of the West call them, Virtutes, Virtues), or Spirits of Motion, and the Spirits of Form, who are also called by the Teachers of the West — Potentates, which mean Powers.

[ 10 ] We must now ask ourselves: When we glance back at ancient Saturn and see the first threefold Hierarchy surrounding it, where then are the Beings of that second threefold Hierarchy? Where can we search for the Dominions, Mights, and Potentates? We must look for them inside ancient Saturn. If the Thrones have reached, so to speak, to its boundary, we must look for the Dominions, Mights and Potentates, or the Spirits of Wisdom, Motion and Form, inside Saturn. Inside ancient Saturn, within the mass of it, again three ranks of Beings are active, — the Dominions, Mights and Potentates. They are spiritual Beings operating inside the Saturn substance.

[ 11 ] Now we must for once come to an understanding with the extraordinary fantastic modern theory of the origin of the world, and turn our minds again to the Kant-Laplace theory. It has put a mass of fog as a starting point for our solar system, and then has imagined that the whole of this giant mass of gas has begun to revolve. It finds it extraordinarily simple that with the rotation the outer planets gradually split off. At first there are rings. These then contract. The Sun remains in the middle, and the others rotate around it. They picture it quite mechanically. A very nice experiment is shown in the schools to make the thing clearer. It is shown how a solar system is formed in a small way, by taking a vessel full of water, throwing in a large drop of oil, then cutting a piece of paper, representing the equator, and putting a pin into it from above. Then the drop of oil is set into rotation. Small drops of oil split asunder and circle round, and the demonstrator shows it to pupils — sometimes quite old pupils — saying: ‘Now, you have here in small the formation of a world system.’ And the whole thing is made most illuminating. For what can illuminate one more than when one sees with one's own eyes how such a solar system is formed. Why should one not see that there was once upon a time a gigantic cosmic fog which in its rotation loosened the Planets around it, like those little drops, and made the miniature Mercury and Saturn loosen themselves from the large drop of oil. One must marvel at such a naive proceeding. For the man who tries to make the Kant-Laplace System so clear forgets one thing — sometimes it is very good to forget, only in this case it wont do — he forgets himself, he forgets he stood by and made the thing rotate. This is incredibly naive, but the simple-mindedness of modern, materialistic mythology is very great, greater than that of any other mythology. This will be realised in future times. There is someone who starts the whole thing, who makes it rotate. It is necessary if one can think at all, if one has not been forsaken by all the good Spirits of Logic, it is necessary to presume that spiritual powers are occupied out there with the rotation of the universal globes. Apart from the error in placing a primeval gas instead of a primeval fire at the outset, one cannot assume that that mass of gas began to whirl round of itself. One must ask: Where are the forces and powers which put movement into that mass which for us is of primeval fire, so that something begins to happen inside it? We have just enumerated them.

Spiritual forces work from without and from within our system. Those Beings who surround it, and who acquired their faculties in earlier systems, work from outside. Inside are Beings of less maturity, who differentiate the internal mass, who bring about what we had in our minds when we spoke of the shapes of warmth formed inside Saturn. They are Beings of highest intelligence who regulate all that happens there.

[ 12 ] What then is the task of the first Beings of the second threefold Hierarchy? The Spirits of Wisdom or Dominions, or Kyriotetes take that which the Thrones or Spirits of Will bring down out of Universal space, and regulate it so that a harmonious co-relation can come about between the single globe which is originating — between Saturn and the whole Universe. In the interior of Saturn everything has to be so regulated that it corresponds with what is outside. What the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, bring down to Saturn from the hand of God, must be so appointed that within Saturn these commands can be carried out, and these impulses become realities. The Spirits of Wisdom or Kyriotetes receive from the circumference of Saturn that which comes down through the mediation of the highest Hierarchy, so that they may transform it and make it harmonise with what is in the interior of Saturn.

[ 13 ] What is received by the Spirits of Wisdom, is further worked on and elaborated by Mights or the Spirits of Motion. And while the former inside Saturn hold, as it were, the highest command, the latter undertake the carrying out of these directions. Then the Powers or Spirits of Form — later we shall explain this more in detail, now we are characterising it only in a general way — provide that what is being formed according to the intentions of the Universe, should have duration, so long as it is needed, that it should not be destroyed again at once. These Powers or Spirits of Form are the maintainers — the supporters.

Thus the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom are the directors inside Saturn; the Mights or Spirits of Motion are those who execute their directions; and the Powers or Spirits of Form are the supporters, the upholders of that which the Mights have built.

[ 14 ] Today, we shall omit how the third threefold Hierarchy works, (we have spoken of them before) the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels or Fire Spirits and the Angels. We shall turn our attention to-day, with our newly acquired knowledge, to the transition from ancient Saturn to ancient Sun. The most essential proceedings were explained at the last lecture. What happens when ancient Saturn becomes Sun, is that the primeval fire changes into a condition of gas or air, so that the ancient Sun consists of what is called the residue of the primeval fire. The primeval fire is intermingled with, and forms the basis of, what has thickened into gas or smoke. Thus two substances are to be found there: primeval fire and a part of that fire which has condensed to gas or smoke — call it what you will. This is the essential characteristic of the old Sun. We shall see that our Sun has grown into something different, through transitory conditions up to the present day; it has developed into something different, although there are people who imagine that the interior of our Sun to-day is also merely a sort of gas.

[ 15 ] If you enter into all the various theories at which our materialistic natural science arrives, you will, if you think, certainly be astounded. There is, for instance, a popular little book, which is much bought because of its cheapness, which claims that our present Sun has in its centre nothing solid, but only gas. Only, this gas — one could not believe it really, but it stands there in a little popular writing — this gas is as thick as honey or tar. The man who soars to such ideas that gas under conditions of pressure can become like honey or tar, I will willingly allow to wander about in such a sluggish land where the air is of the consistency of honey, but I would not wish him to have to move in an air that is a thick as tar! Materialistic theories have such excrescences as these.

[ 16 ] We are not speaking now of our present Sun, but of that ancient Sun which really consists of primeval fire and of what is called fire-mist or fire-air. You find this expression used in Faust, for Goethe knew it well, and you find the expression fire-mist also used in theosophical literature. We must think of the ancient sun as of a mixture of these two substances. This did not, however, happen of itself. Universal bodies do not condense of themselves; spiritual Beings have to bring about this process of condensation.

Which are the Spiritual Beings who carried over the condensation of the substance of ancient Saturn to the ancient Sun? These Beings whom we call the Dominions, or Spirit of Wisdom. It is they who now press inwards from outside and who originally pressed together the mighty mass of Saturn so that it grew smaller. The Dominions brought pressure to bear upon it, until the ancient Sun became the size of a globe, the mass of which, if you place the Sun in its centre, you must imagine as reaching out to Jupiter. Thus Saturn was a gigantic world-globe, which having our Sun in its centre would have reached as far as to the present Saturn, an enormous globe, as large as our present solar system. The Sun of which we have just spoken was a world-globe which stretched a far as the Jupiter of to-day. This point marks the boundary of the ancient Sun-world. You will do well if you picture those outer planets as boundary marks for the limits of the ancient Worlds. [ 17 ] You see that we are gradually approaching the theory of the planets, being led thereto through the activity of the hierarchies,

Let us go further. We know that the next condition is again one of condensation. The third condition of our World system is that of the Ancient Moon. Those of you who have given attention to the communications from the Akashic Record know that the ancient Moon had come into being because the Sun substance had condensed still more, as far as to the condition of water. The Moon contained no solid earth as yet, but was composed of fire, air and water. It had so coordinated the watery element. Gas or air was condensed in it to the element of water. Who effected this? That Hierarchy of spiritual Beings brought this about, whom we call Mights, Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion. Thus it happened through the Virtutes, that the mass of the ancient Moon contracted to the limits of the orbit of the present Mars. Mars is thus the boundary showing the size of the Moon. If you imagine a globe with the present Sun for its centre, and for its limit the orbit of the present Mars, you have the size of the ancient Moon. [ 18 ] We have reached the point when we must remember that when the ancient Moon was formed out of Saturn and Sun, something quite new took place. A part of the dense substance was now thrown out, and two globes came into being. One of the two took up the finer substances and Beings and became a finer Sun, the second became a denser Moon. This third condition of our planetary system developed in such a way that, for a time, it remained one single planet; then it threw off a planet from itself, which remained in its vicinity. At first, so long as it formed one single body, the Moon extended to the orbit of the present Mars; then the Sun contracted, and was encircled by another body; approximately in the place where the present Mars has its orbit, was more or less the periphery of the original single body.

[ 19 ] Through what did this division take place? Through what influence did a single globe split in two? It happened in the time of the domination of the Spirits of Motion, Mights, or Dynamis. For those who have already followed me in this domain, it is not new to hear that [in] the Cosmos things happen very much in the way they happen in ordinary human life. Where beings are evolving there are some who advance and others who remain behind, as many a father knows, who complains that his son in college lags behind whilst others are making good progress. We are concerned, therefore, with a difference in the ‘tempo’ of development. It is the same in the Cosmos. And through certain causes, which we shall learn later, now that the Mights or Virtutes have entered on their Mission, something came into play which is called in all Esotericism, and in all Mysteries, the ‘fight in Heaven.’ This ‘fight in Heaven’ forms an essential, and integral part of all Mysteries; it contains also the primeval Mystery regarding the origin of Evil. At a certain point of the Moon evolution the Mights or Virtutes had reached very different degrees of maturity. Some of them aspired to rise spiritually as high as possible; others again had remained behind, or at least had progressed normally in their development. Some of the Mights on the ancient Moon had progressed much further than their companions. The result of this was that these two classes of Mights divided. The more advanced ones drew out with the body of the Sun, and the others formed the Moon revolving around it.

We have now given a sketchy description of the fight in Heaven, the rending asunder of the ancient Moon, so that the planet accompanying the ancient Moon comes under the domination of those spirits of Motion or Might or Virtutes which had remained behind, and the ancient Sun under the domination of the advanced Virtutes.

[ 20 ] Something of this fight in Heaven still sounds in the first sentences of the divine Gita, where symbolically at the beginning of the battle can still be heard echoes of that mighty fight of the heavens. O, it was a mighty field of battle! From the time when the Dominions or Kyriotetes brought about the formation of the ancient Sun, up to the time of that of the ancient Moon, when the Mights or Dynamis took up their mission, all was a mighty field of battle; a gigantic fight reigned in Heaven. The Dominions had contracted the whole mass of our solar systems to the boundary of Jupiter, then the Virtutes or Mights contracted it to the boundary of the Mars of to-day. Between these two planetary frontiers in the heavens lies the great battlefield of the fight of Heaven. Look at that heavenly battlefield! Only in the nineteenth century has the physical eye discovered again, so to speak, the devastations produced by the Fight in Heaven. You have a host of small Planetoids scattered in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These are the wreckage of the battlefield of the fight in Heaven which was fought between the two points of Cosmic time when our Solar System was contracted first as far as Jupiter, then to Mars. And when our Astronomers direct their telescopes towards the heavenly spaces and still discover other planetoids, these are still the wreckage of that great battlefield, of that fight in Heaven between the advanced Virtutes and those who were less advanced, and which also brought about the severing of the Moon from the Sun.

[ 21 ] Thus, we see, when we consider the actions of the divine spiritual beings, how external things appear to us as the expression, the outward physiognomy of those divine spiritual beings.

During meditation or after it one could ask oneself: Where is the Christ? Where do I have to look for him?

A man's memory goes back to a time between birth and the change of teeth; that's when ego-consciousness began. The physical body's form is already finished then, it only grows some more. One could ask what things would be like if one's memory only went back to age ten. Suppose that someone who awakened to self-consciousness at 10 asked to be awakened at a certain time. Then on waking he would have the impression that he went to his door himself, knocked, and woke himself up. Or on awaking by himself he would see himself coming in as a light figure, walking towards himself, opening his eyes and awaking himself thereby. He would be able to know: In the realm from which his light form comes to him, there the Christ is also.

Many people will experience this in the near future, even though man's self-consciousness arises already during the first seven years. We're standing at an important turning point, and this must be pointed out. A man will then experience that the light form of his astral body is floating towards him, and he'll know that this light form is consuming his physical body, and that every time it leaves the latter it takes a piece of it along, as it were. And when the apparition takes possession of the physical body again in the morning, the man will see that he's living at the cost of a dying process. This knowledge can make men very sad and melancholic. They'll no longer value their physical body. And whereas men's courage will be tremendously increased by outer culture, air vehicles and other technological attainments, at the same time life will be considered to be of little value. Men will be overcome by deep sadness and melancholy, and the number of suicides will rise sharply. While outer courage is growing in sensory life, inner courage will necessarily decline and give way to a disguised cowardice. Men become ever more materialistic and don't want to know anything about the soul and spirit. Angels inspired Kant to set up his limits to knowledge, so that men could develop outer courage. But just as a compressed rubber ball springs back, so this will produce a reaction in souls, and then men's courage will want to turn to the attainment of knowledge of spiritual worlds again.

Men who don't find their way to the Christ see the figure of death walking beside them. But we know that Christ lives in the earth's aura and that we're always connected with him. If we know this and keep it alive in us, the picture of death takes on Christ's features and he walks beside us like a man, even if we don't see him clairvoyantly. Then we know where to look for the Christ. We can't escape the spirit of the times, it works everywhere. But the knowledge that Christ lives and that we can get to him will keep our souls from desolation, deep melancholy and disdain of life. We'll understand the word in our rosicrucian verse: In Christo morimur. If we let all of this become really alive in our souls in quiet moments it can become a big help to us.

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, in which I took the liberty of characterizing the essence of spiritual science as it is meant in these considerations, I pointed out how this spiritual science did not arise out of the arbitrariness of an individual or a few people in the present, but how it has become a necessity precisely through the emergence of natural science, which has shown such great success; how it must stand alongside this natural science, because this natural has been compelled, in order to arrive at its brilliant results, to develop such methods, such forms of research, such a way of looking at things, which are actually only useful if one wants to survey and recognize the field of external nature, but which prove unsuitable if one wants to get to know the field of spiritual life in its true form, in which it can be accessible to man.

Yesterday I already hinted at how this scientific approach, in a sense, asserts between the lines of its work that only the human urge for knowledge directed towards the sensory world can lead to a true science, and how this scientific approach condemns from the outset what wants to come from other, if not less strict sources of knowledge to a science about the spirit.

Now it can be said, dear assembled guests, that not only does natural science in this respect make it more difficult for spiritual science to come into existence – one can still say today – but also that the particular natural scientific attitude that is generated in this field gives rise to habits of thinking and ways of feeling that are averse to genuine spiritual research. Nevertheless, spiritual research has an aim that cannot be repelled by the human soul. Therefore, just at a time when spiritual research is rejected by recognized science on the one hand, and on the other hand, habits of thought and ways of feeling are developed that make spiritual research unappealing – just at such a time, when one wants to turn to science because of general educational prejudices – at such a time, the need to know something about the spirit must awaken all the more.

And it is awakening even in the circles of natural scientists. But there one is accustomed to devote oneself to such thinking, to such research, which proceeds by the hand of that which external nature offers in the way of facts, of entities, of events, which one can extract from it through experiments. We are accustomed to looking at the things to which the soul's life of research is directed and guided by the external. And so, precisely where even among scientifically minded people the need has arisen to learn something about the eternal, the immortal in human nature, one also wants to explore this area in the same way as one explores the area of nature itself.

Then one can only rely on very specific phenomena, phenomena that, so to speak, do not require the soul itself to be prepared by means of all kinds of exercises, as I discussed yesterday, so that it can conduct research in a particular field. A certain reluctance arises to explore that which, so to speak, must first be summoned up because it is hidden from the ordinary consciousness. One would also like to explore the soul by approaching something that presents itself externally in the same way as natural phenomena present themselves.

Therefore, a certain area that extends into the ordinary consciousness of the human being, so to speak, that mysteriously extends into this consciousness, a certain area of existence has been repeatedly considered in recent times: the broad area of what is summarized today with the rather broad-hearted, one could also say uninformative, expression of the “unconscious”. And since spiritual science is confused with many a subject that is brought into the unconscious, into the category of the unconscious, spiritual science itself is obliged to clarify its own approach to this area of the so-called unconscious. And so I have taken the liberty of announcing a second lecture, a consideration that, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, focuses on the revelations of the so-called unconscious.

Of course, since this is a broad area, I can only consider certain groups of what is considered to be in the realm of the unconscious. And so today we shall consider the phenomenon of a broad and wonderful area that is well known to every human being in its manifestation: the phenomenon of dream life. Then, honored attendees, we shall consider those other phenomena in which so many today seek to gain insight into something that underlies the human being as soul and spirit. We shall consider the phenomena which are summarized under the term somnambulism, which includes everything that is still observed by many people today with such hopes of insight: the phenomena of mediumship and the like.

But then there is a human field of activity in the realm of the unconscious that everyone knows, that is, so to speak, everyone's life companion, but which one is sometimes afraid to look at because one believes that by looking at it one takes away the magic of this realm: I am referring to the field of artistic creation, of which everyone can be convinced by an external observation that it belongs to a certain extent to the field of non-comprehensible, non-fully conscious human activity, but flows from a certain unconscious or subconscious source of human nature.

And finally, these areas of the unconscious include the spiritual activity itself, of which I spoke yesterday as the method of spiritual research. It includes the spiritual activity through which the spiritual researcher wants to prepare his soul to look into the spiritual realm in such a way that one can truly recognize the spiritual world that surrounds man and to which man belongs. Today I would like to subject these groups of unconscious phenomena to a kind of observation before you, although I must limit myself to a strictly spiritual scientific observation.

The realm of dreams is familiar to everyone, and yet, for anyone who begins to delve more intimately into the realm of dream life, it becomes more and more wondrous and wondrous, so to speak. Man's dream life is a field that one only passes by without astonishment when one looks at it superficially. The more intimately one looks at it, the more one senses that there is something in this dream life that announces itself as the higher nature in the human soul, even if it announces itself chaotically in the dream life. Of course, we bring our personal, our selfish interests into every area, including the area of dream life, and so it happened that the most superstitious, the most unscientific interpretations were attached to the dream life, which of course would have to be ruled out if it were a matter of a truly cognitive interpretation of this dream life.

He who believes that he is viewing such experiences from the dream life from a scientific perspective, which relate to all kinds of superstitious hopes, will not be able to come into his own in the face of a scientific consideration of the dream life. But on the other hand, one need only look at this dream life and one will find that the surging dreams of human sleep or half-sleep interpose themselves in a remarkable way into the existence of man, into the entire human life. On the one hand, we see how dreams can be influenced by sensory stimuli that are only partially effective. Everyone is familiar with something like, say, falling asleep near a light. If they were awake, they would see the light near the light. They fall asleep. The light makes an impression on his eye that is not processed in the usual way, and he may dream, as a result of the incomplete impression of the light, of a conflagration, to which he then attaches all kinds of dream images! He can attach a whole inner drama to these sensory stimuli. And one could tell many stories if one wanted to tell all the kinds of dreams that are connected to sensory stimuli.

On the other hand, we have those dreams that arise more from the human bodily mood, from the overall feeling of the person, whether the person is in any overall mood, for example, an overall mood that seems to him like a lukewarm bath in which he is comfortable while lying in bed and dreaming pleasantly. Or if he dreams of a boiling stove and wakes up with a pounding heart, so that the heart has symbolized itself in the stove in the dream. We are dealing here with what is lived out in the dream from inner stimuli of the organism.

And we have, in turn, the other broad area of dreams that connects to memory, to what lies in our memory, from which a particular area is then brought up through the images of the last few days, and is presented to us in a dream with inner drama. But through such, I might say, pedantic classification, that which everyone knows enough about the wonderful world of dream life is evoked. Some peculiarities of dream life, which are also more generally known, are already suitable for leading into that which we then want to observe about the dream of its essence.

Everyone knows that in dreams we are quite different people than in our waking lives. For example, dream images can make us commit crimes that we would never commit in ordinary life. The images show you in a moral condition that would be severely condemned, that you could never get into in ordinary life. The succession of images shows that they do not contain what is called the application of ordinary logic. Logical connection of the dream images is something that rarely occurs in these dream images, and when it does, the logic of the dream is in turn only a dreamt one; we remember something in a dream-like way that we have already thought through logically, and the logical only appears to us as coming from memory. But it is shown to those who can observe dream life that they are not able to apply logic to the dream during the dream itself.

A peculiarity – I just want to emphasize the things that can lead us to understand the essence of dreams from a spiritual scientific point of view – a particular peculiarity of dream life is actually also philosophically in science or otherwise deal with it, far too little appreciated, and we will see that we can appreciate it even more when we consider other phenomena of life that belong to the unconscious realm of life. It is the fact that in our dreams we do not actually emerge from the overall state in which we are during sleep, in relation to the outside world and our own body. I have, however, indicated that dreams occur that arise from external sensory stimuli, and it seems as if we relate to the outside world in our dreams, while we are unaware of it in our dreams.

This is only apparent. We do not perceive the sensory impressions as we do when we are awake, but in a symbolically transformed way. Something must happen to them first, they must be transformed into an image. We cannot absorb the sensory impression itself. We have no relationship to the external world when we dream; we have no relationship to the external world with our senses, we are cut off from the external world in our dreams, even though our dreams ebb and flow, just as we are cut off from the external world in dreamless sleep.

And again, the other area of life in the sense world, the area of action, the area of bodily movement, of activity through bodily movement, is excluded from normal dreams. It is already an abnormal dream when someone goes from dreaming to sleepwalking or the like. In a normal dream, we have the image of doing this or that. But this acting out of an action or an activity is not something we carry out through our locomotor system; we do not establish any kind of relationship to the outside world. All of this remains locked within us, just as we ourselves are locked within us when we are asleep in the dream life. Thus, when we dream, we have a real relationship not to the sense organs, not to our locomotor system, but to our own body. The normal dream is something that draws into the life of sleep, that flows through the life of sleep, but it does not bring the dreamer into any other relationship or state with respect to the outer world than he is in dreamless sleep.

This area, which can be defined as I have now defined it, this area of dream life, must be clearly distinguished – and we will then go into the important differences in the essential consideration of dream life – from everything else that occurs in human life in such a way that, so to speak, the unconscious, not belonging to human consciousness, enters this human life. There are good researchers who believe that the dream image as such, the image of a normal dream, should be considered the same as a hallucination. A hallucination is also something that, like visions and the like, rises from the subconscious into human consciousness; a hallucination is also an image.

But, dear readers, anyone who compares a hallucination to a dream image is very much mistaken. Above all, it must be emphasized that a person who dreams does not fall into a state through dreaming over which he is powerless with his waking consciousness. The hallucination must be characterized by the fact that the person is powerless against it with his waking consciousness. The hallucination intrudes into the ordinary consciousness, and one must become aware that the reason why this is so is a change, albeit a hidden change, in the human body itself; it is some part of the human body that gives rise to the hallucinations.

The soul and spirit of man are initially powerless in the face of changes in the human body. Only from the body can that which man faces powerlessly arise. The dream enters into human life and leaves the bodily constitution, the bodily structure, unchallenged, so that when man returns to waking life, he finds himself in the normal bodily constitution. And then he will be able to have, I would say, the right state of consciousness towards the dream, if he does not place it in ordinary life, which the hallucinator does with this hallucination.

Already the observation of the hallucination clearly shows that one is dealing with something very different from the dream image and that it is connected to the human body. But then one can also clearly see from the hallucination, the obsessions and the like, that they arise without any stimulus from the external world, that they arise, if indeed they arise from the nature of the body, then at least from the inner nature of the human being; and this is what the hallucinations have as their peculiar feature, this is what the visions have as their peculiar feature, the obsessions as their peculiar feature that this physical nature of man works without the organs that bring man into connection with the external world of reality, without the organs that are involved in the way they usually are in waking life, in the production of hallucinations, visions, and obsessions. This is no longer the case when that state of human nature occurs which is designated by the word “somnambulism”.

It can be said that through somnambulism, through mediumship, human nature is incited to transfer the irregular bodily constitution, which is experienced by the healthy person through inner perception, to the relationship of the human being to the external world. The senses, and also, in a sense, the human locomotor system, are infected by the inner irregularity of the bodily organization when a person acts as a somnambulist or medium. This can lead to the somnambulist not perceiving what is experienced in the world in a normal, regular way, but rather, because he does not activate his senses as they are formed by the world, but rather infects them from the nature of the body, so that he perceives the environment in such a way that he does not perceive it through ordinary sensory activity.

This is where we enter a realm that has a sensational effect on people and that is a dangerous and seductive realm. It seduces people into seeking out all kinds of mysteries in order to find answers to anything they want to know that does not present itself in normal life. We can see that even people who think well in terms of natural science, out of their natural scientific view of the world, repeatedly and again and again come to an inner dissatisfaction, that they come to a higher yearning for knowledge in relation to the spiritual and that they then somehow try to satisfy this yearning for knowledge precisely in the field that is now under discussion. It can be seen that great naturalists can be completely taken in by what appears to them as 'wonderful revelations' in this field. Many examples could be cited from history and from present-day life where natural scientists, who are extraordinarily important in their own field when they want to explore the spiritual, repeatedly fall back on the phenomena related to somnambulism in order to find out something about a spiritual realm.

Among the many cases, I will mention only one of the most recent ones, which happened to the English philosopher and scientist Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son at the French front. Even before his son was sent to the front, a friend of his in America had written to him that something would happen to his son, but that when it did, the soul of a person who had already passed through the gates of death, who had died a long time ago, would stand by his son's side and help him. At first, of course, this friendly hint was kept rather vague. One could think that the son would be in danger in the war and that the soul of the long-dead personality would intervene from the spiritual world to protect the son. One could also think quite differently. In short, the son fell on the battlefield.

Now the person who had written to Sir Oliver Lodge from America thought that he could, of course, turn the matter around so that, since the son had died, his soul would now be in the spiritual world and that this soul in the spiritual world would be fetched by the friend's soul that had been there for a long time. At the same time - I can say this after a close study of this case - at the same time, so to speak, mediumistic persons were played into the environment of Sir Oliver Lodge. And Sir Oliver Lodge, who wrote a detailed book about the whole situation, which really comes across as a strictly scientifically written book, like a book written by someone who is not only familiar with the scientific way of thinking, but is also familiar with all the conscientiousness that must be peculiar to a scientific researcher, Sir Oliver Lodge was placed in an environment of mediums. He carefully recorded what these mediums, as a manifestation of the soul of the Son, had revealed from the beyond.

The whole course of the apparitions was such that Sir Oliver Lodge, in observing what was going on, I would say, proceeded like a chemist, with the same conscientiousness. Now much is being enumerated. The following was decisive for Sir Oliver Lodge and for others – because this case has been discussed a lot, caused a lot of sensation, and convinced journalists who, from the outset, were rather unapproachable to such things due to their attitudes – the following was decisive: Through one of the mediums, a message came from the son, supposedly from the spiritual world. This message stated that the son had himself photographed on the battlefield where he fell, with a group of other comrades. It was also said that several pictures had been taken, as is usually the case. It was described which hand position was shown by the son when taking the pictures, in one picture and in another picture, where it was slightly different. The photographs were one thing that the whole of society in London knew nothing about, the photographs were simply not there.

And lo and behold: after two or three weeks – the post takes a long time these days – the photographs themselves arrived, two or three weeks after the experiments had been carried out, and it turned out that the descriptions made by the medium were correct. This was astounding for Sir Oliver Lodge. This was what is called in natural science research an “experimentum crucis”. The medium and all the people who were present could not receive anything by thought transference either. They knew nothing about these photographs, which only arrived later. Nevertheless, the photographs were correctly described by the medium's manifestations. In this particular case, which was certainly close to him due to the death of his son, Sir Oliver Lodge was tempted to look at such a thing with a certain prejudice; on the other hand, however, to have the cross-proof, so to speak, provided by a meaningful experiment, that without any knowledge in the earthly realm, something from the spiritual world came out through a somnambulant person.

I cite this case, which I judge in the same way as the other case I want to discuss today, for the reason that it shows how the longing to recognize the spiritual arises particularly in serious, great and important natural scientists, but how even in a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, who would be far from accepting the path that is described here as the true path of spiritual research, how such a person feels the need to seek something in certain abnormal phenomena of human life, such as somnambulism and mediumship, that provides information about the world of the spiritual.

In the case of somnambulists and mediums, certain phenomena that occur in connection with them are reminiscent of dreams. But, dear attendees, above all, in the case of the somnambulistic personality, the contagion that I have spoken of, which goes from the inside of the body to the senses, can also pass over to the locomotor system. Then, in particular, rhythmic movements easily occur, movements that are difficult to control and through which all kinds of seemingly spiritual connections are carried out by the medium, such as table turning and so on. I can only hint at what I want to discuss here today.

The third area, which you are well acquainted with, is that which flows from artistic creation, and we value it as a manifestation from the other world precisely because we know that when a person devotes himself to abstract concepts and abstract ideas, he almost disturbs his artistic creation and also his artistic enjoyment. Something indeterminate flows in, both into the creative process and into the enjoyment of artistry. And for many who would otherwise not be able to cope with the spiritual, the way in which the artist's work appears will at least be something that teaches them the conviction that a spiritual element extends into human life. For it will take a very stubborn, materialistic mind to say, like Ingersoll, the famous materialist, that Hamlet, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is actually the product of the metabolism in Shakespeare. This saying is well known. But it really does not take much to be able to say: That which projects into human life through artistry is such that it cannot be directly explained from the body, nor can it be derived from ordinary consciousness because it is disturbed by it.

And a fourth area, dear attendees, that is particularly important for this consideration, is the area that I characterized yesterday as the path leading to the path that, in the sense of the spiritual science meant here, leads into the spiritual world. I already hinted yesterday, and you can read about it in the books I also mentioned yesterday, that only by directing his soul life consciously, actively, and willingly in a certain direction can a person elevate this soul life to such a sphere that this soul life itself can encounter the spiritual phenomena of the world as a spiritual being.

Of course, I cannot repeat what I hinted at yesterday, but what I want to say is that it is particularly important, on the one hand, to follow the course of external phenomena through the world of ideas to which one is otherwise accustomed, and to allow oneself to be guided by it, and, on the other hand, to introduce the element of will into it, so that the power of thought, the inner life of thought, is permeated by will. And I have characterized that through this the human being enters into a state of soul through which he stands out from the ordinary life of the body, that through this he encounters a spiritual world as he otherwise encounters the physical world. I have shown that stepping out of the body is promoted by learning to understand and develop self-observation, by learning to develop not just anything as a spiritual activity, but by becoming its spectator at the same time.

Through all these exercises, which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and “The Riddle of the Human Being”, the human soul is able to develop certain dormant powers to such an extent that the soul itself becomes something completely different, and a spiritual world comes face to face with it, just as a sensual world comes face to face with the senses. However paradoxical it may appear to many people, such powers lie in every human soul, and they can be brought forth from every human soul, even if this requires patient and energetic work.

I would like to speak about this area, which I call the area of the seeing consciousness, because if one calls it clairvoyance, as it would have to be called in reality if the term were not misused; but it is very easily confused with what arises from somnambulism and the like, and it is of great importance, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that true spiritual science is not confused with it I would therefore call it, instead of “clairvoyance”, the “visionary consciousness”, as I have called it in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man), in which I have also characterized the field of this visionary consciousness, where the soul has found the spirit in itself, so that man as spirit-soul faces the spiritual-soul of the external world and is able to observe this spiritual-soul.

As I said, with regard to the development of the seeing consciousness, the development of that which I would like to call, in a certain figurative sense, with Goethe's words, the development of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.” The specific description of how one achieves this, I must leave to my books for the special description of how one arrives at this, but before I characterize dream, somnambulism, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment as unconscious human life phenomena, I would like to characterize this field of true clairvoyance, this field of the seeing consciousness itself a little. Because, dear ladies and gentlemen, those phenomena that we have now summarized in certain groups can only be truly observed from the point of view of spiritual research. Therefore, I must first explain what the peculiarity of the mind of the spiritual researcher is.

I said yesterday: What the spiritual researcher can investigate presents itself differently in many respects than one would expect when the spiritual researcher travels the path into the spiritual world. It is precisely through this that objectivity and reality are demonstrated: that one does not allow a fanciful preconception to apply within oneself, but that one is confronted with a spiritual reality. But the fact that things turn out differently is not only evident in what one researches in the spiritual worlds, but even in what one develops as previously hidden powers of knowledge, as the powers of the seeing consciousness in one's soul. The way in which the human soul relates to the spiritual is quite different from what one might initially expect. When one describes the way in which the human soul relates to the spiritual world in a cognitive way, it resembles what the human soul knows from the sense world.

At first this sounds paradoxical! Above all, one thing must be said: a defining moment in all life in the physical world is that one encounters certain events in life, that one lives through them, takes them up into the soul and that one later remembers the events in one's waking consciousness. The events can be recalled from the life of imagination, from memory. The strange thing is that when the soul, which has developed the seeing consciousness within itself, is able to see a spiritual fact, a spiritual being, to observe it, it cannot easily remember this soul experience, although it is usually only perceived as an inner soul experience. It passes. This does not produce memories in the usual sense.

This is how truly spiritual observations, which also only seem to exist in the life of the imagination, differ from the phenomena of ordinary imaginative life: the latter can be remembered in the normal way, but not the spiritual experience. They pass by. Now you will say: Yes, if they pass by and cannot be remembered in later life, then one cannot actually know anything about them! If you are unable to take what you have experienced spiritually and incorporate it into your imagination, as you would an external sensory phenomenon or a being of the senses, if you are unable to transform what you have observed into an idea yourself, into an ordinary idea as you have it on the physical plane, then you cannot remember.

Therefore, to research in the spiritual world, it is necessary to be able not only to experience what you experience spiritually, but also to translate it into ordinary ideas; then you can remember the idea. You can remember not the spiritual experience, but the idea into which you have translated the spiritual experience. In this respect, the spiritual experience has exactly the same peculiarity as a sensual experience. One can remember the idea that one has formed from the sensual experience. But if I have passed a tree and no longer have it in front of me, I cannot see it in reality; I have to go back to see it. So I have to face the spiritual experience again if I want to have it a second time. But it is precisely this that guarantees its reality. When one becomes a spiritual researcher, one gets used to facing spiritual reality as one faces sensual reality.

One peculiarity is that the spiritual experience as such does not evoke any memory. It is a fleeting moment. And another thing that occurs as a peculiarity in the spiritual experience is that the way in which the spiritual experience works is different from the way in which the events and activities of ordinary life work on people. When we perform some task over and over again, we become accustomed to it; we perform it better and better. Otherwise we would not be able to learn anything, to acquire any skill, if it were not the case that we would do what we do with difficulty at first, then habitually.

This is not the case with spiritual experiences. They occur when they are repeatedly sought. Then they occur less and less strongly, and it takes more and more effort to summon them to mind. One does not acquire a habit by merely repeating an experience, but by repeating it one becomes less and less able to acquire it. To their surprise, some who seek the way to the spiritual world have to be convinced of this.

By doing such exercises, some people relatively soon experience certain phenomena that are purely spiritual. They occur after the person has only done such exercises for a short time. But after they have occurred hardly two or three times, or perhaps only once, the person loses the ability to see them again. He is then unhappy. The true spiritual researcher must learn, must learn again through careful exercises, to create new conditions so that he can have the experience again in a renewed form. It cannot be achieved by mere evocation in the old way. This is another way in which the seeing consciousness differs from the ordinary experience of the ordinary consciousness: nothing is produced habitually, but on the contrary, the more often we have an experience, the less habitual it becomes for us to have it.

And a third thing that occurs in this observing consciousness is that the person must acquire the ability to quickly grasp an event – I am, of course, talking about spiritual events. Because what prevents us from looking into the spiritual world is that, when we observe, we are usually so slow in starting the observation that the event has already passed by the time we want to observe it. I would say that the exposure time, the time during which the event occurs before us, is so short that you have to be quick to observe what you can call presence of mind. Therefore, one prepares oneself well if one strives to develop presence of mind in one's physical life, if one tries to overcome what is so characteristic of human nature: that one muddles around until one can make up one's mind.

When you develop the ability to make a decision quickly that is appropriate to the situation when you are faced with something, in short, when you gradually develop presence of mind as an inner quality, then this leads to the fact that you can really develop that presence of mind in your soul as well, which is necessary to really face the spiritual world in its manifestations. The spiritual researcher absolutely must be able to make an observation with the same lightning speed as certain subordinate phenomena occur in the outer life. If a fly tries to alight on your eye, you quickly close your eye, as they say, by reflex action, without thinking about it. If someone had to think as long to close the eye as he usually thinks, he would have already fallen prey to the fly before the eye is closed. The spiritual researcher must develop something that comes as close as possible to this involuntary, unconscious activity. One returns to certain primitive activities of life, only in a spiritual way.

Another peculiarity of this spiritual perception is that in such representations, as one is accustomed to applying in the physical world, the spiritual world cannot appear before the searching soul, but it appears in pictorial representations. And when one describes the spiritual world, what one expresses it with is a translation into ordinary language. When you read my book 'Occult Science', you must not believe that the way in which things are expressed is an immediate reproduction of the vision itself, but it is translated into ordinary language and must be translated into ordinary language. For that which presents itself directly to the spiritual researcher is the same as what he puts into words, into concepts, into ideas, but it appears in a pictorial way. Hence one can also say: Consciousness is not the ordinary logical, rational consciousness, but an imaginative one that arises first. I could still bring out many more characteristics of the seeing consciousness. Above all, however, I must discuss the other phenomena, which I have listed in groups, precisely from the standpoint of this seeing consciousness.

One can discover what a dream is, what somnambulism is, what the other phenomena are, one can discover them from the moment one regards them from the point of view of the seeing consciousness. For just when one regards a dream in intimate beholding, one finds that it becomes ever more wondrous. Above all, it becomes more and more wonderful for the simple reason that one is not in a position to compare what one encounters in a dream with any other experiences. The dream enters into the life of consciousness as something that completely falls outside of this life of consciousness and everything that one can understand in relation to the life of consciousness. Just think of what occurs in the waking consciousness when a dream occurs! It would break through the whole consciousness. If you had to remember the dream, you would have to feel insane. You cannot compare the dream with anything that the waking consciousness understands.

The seeing consciousness is primarily familiar with the pictorial experience of the human being. And so the seeing consciousness can compare the dream with what occurs in the soul when one encounters the spiritual world through the seeing consciousness as a spirit. One can compare the pictorial nature of the dream world with the world that can be grasped in imaginative consciousness. Then one will find that the dream world is indeed fantastic at first, that the imaginative consciousness leads one into spiritual reality, that it differs like fiction from the truth, from the imaginative world, but that on the other hand one has a possibility for comparison. Because one has this, one can, by observing the 'dream, arrive at what this dream actually is.

Dear attendees, you cannot say anything about dreams through research if you cannot observe the dream with a seeing consciousness. But if you can observe the dream with a seeing consciousness, then you can describe its nature and essence through the seeing consciousness. Then one knows, above all, to say about the dream who is really the dreamer, who is actually dreaming. One does not know this in the ordinary waking consciousness, who is actually dreaming, then one has images before oneself. But to live in these images as one otherwise lives as a human being in the experiences of the day – one does not know this in the ordinary waking consciousness. One comes to know it when one can compare the images of the dream world with what one experiences in the seeing consciousness. Then one experiences that what actually dreams in us is really the spirit-filled human soul; that the body as such has nothing to do with the dreaming process in subjective terms, in terms of activity; that it is not the human body that dreams, but the dreamer himself is really the spiritual soul of the human being.

If one learns to recognize through the observing consciousness what the spiritual-soul is, then one can also know through comparison that one acts in dreams as the same as one acts in the observing consciousness. Here again is an important difference. With the seeing consciousness, one sees into a spiritual world that has nothing to do with the ordinary physical world. With the seeing consciousness, one sees with the eternal that is in oneself, into the eternal of the world.

The eternal beholds the eternal. This is different in dreams. In dreams, it is the same spiritual-soul person who dreams. But what he beholds, what he can behold, is not the spiritual world that lies beyond physical experiences, but rather it is pieces, parts, and links of his own personal life. The eternal in him beholds the temporal in him. He looks at what he can inwardly experience between birth and death in any way. But he does not look at it in the way he is otherwise accustomed to looking at the external world with his body, but rather, so to speak, he looks at his transitory human nature from the spiritual-soul point of view.

That is the essence of the dream, that is also what clarifies the dream. In dreams, one sees oneself as an eternal human being. And it is really the case that in the world of dreams, the eternal human being, who goes through births and deaths, places himself in the ordinary human reality, but that the human being is not aware of the eternal world itself, but rather looks back at his temporal world; looks at temporal objects from the eternal point of view. The world of dreams, when observed correctly, gives the certainty that from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the human being is outside of his physical body with his actual being, is outside of his corporeality altogether. Only that which takes place in the body, which cannot be seen at all with the ordinary senses in the ordinary bodily state, that which lies deeper, that which is hidden in the memory, that which expresses itself not in the sense stimuli but in the sensual-supersensory individuality, which has become more involved in the bodily, that is what the human being observes in dreams.

Now the spiritual researcher, simply by being able to see into the spiritual world, knows from his stay in the spiritual world, from his knowledge of the spiritual world, that it is completely wrong to say, for example: Man is a spiritual-soul being, and earthly life is life in a vale of tears, a life of imprisonment perhaps, to which one is condemned, while one is in truth called to a higher spiritual life. Of course one is, but in the cosmic process everything is in its right place, and the spiritual researcher in particular learns to recognize, by getting to know the supersensible life, that the sensory life has its good meaning. If man were to live only in the spiritual and soul world, if he were a human being (it is not the case with other beings as it is with humans), if man were not led into the sensory world through birth or conception, then man would not be able to incorporate into his being that which he, as a human being, can only incorporate into this being in the sensual world.

Above all, there are two things: first, as strange as it sounds, as strangely as it contradicts all possible philosophical worldviews – these philosophical worldviews know nothing about this spiritual world – logical thinking, the ability to link one's thoughts in a logical, conscious way, is only acquired by man by going to his senses in the teaching. In this sense, logical thinking is the least spiritual. It is what we abstract from the sense world. The senses are the teachers of our logical thinking, and if we were not in a sense world, we would not be able to learn logical thinking. That is one thing.

The other is that by being active in the sensory world, we carry out actions and are present with our human nature in these actions, that by living in the sensory world we acquire that which belongs to the realm of morality, the realm of moral judgment of the world. Man must be placed in the sensory world if he is to implant in his nature what is the moral conception of life. Other things that belong to the human being, the human being incorporates or, if I may coin the expression, the human being ensouls himself in the spiritual-soul world when he passes through the gate of death, in the spiritual world. But this life in the physical world has its good significance. The human being, when he stands as a spiritual researcher in the physical world, gets to know the great weight of the physical world; he gets to know that the wise order of the world has, so to speak, placed him in this world so that he can acquire the logical and the moral to the other qualities of his being.

By recognizing the essence of the dream, by knowing that it is the same being that dreams and that he is, by looking into the spiritual world, the spiritual researcher also learns to recognize those qualities of the dream that I have enumerated; that we do not think logically in dreams and that we carry out all sorts of things in dreams that we ourselves morally condemn. Because we are lifted out of the physical-sensual world in which we acquire logic and morality, we cannot develop logic in our dreams, nor morality.

In this way, things reveal themselves that would remain enigmas if we only looked at the phenomena, if we were unable to observe these phenomena from the point of view of spiritual research, if we gained the right insight into them. In purely scientific terms, by numbering all the different parts of the brain under the cerebral cortex, we do not get to know the essence of these things. Now we can also understand why: because only the soul is grasped in dreams, because the human being is removed from the body, he has no relationship to the external sense world in dreams, as to the actions of the body. If the body were involved, it would have to show.

But we must not put forward hypotheses. We must, so to speak, perceive as a mystery why man has no sensory perceptions in relation to the external world and why he has no movements in his dreams. We then experience through the observing consciousness that the person as a dreamer is really in the spiritual world, that is, the sensory world, and has also been transported beyond his own physical body, that he is in the spiritual, in the supersensible. Therefore, he cannot perceive a sensory world, nor can he perform actions in it. Thus, the human being is completely immersed in the soul when he dreams, and does not touch his physical self as such with the events of the dream. Only by the fact that he, I might say, comes up against this physical and also against that which is higher than the physical in the physical body, only by that does resistance present itself to him, only by that is his activity as a spiritual-soul being called upon, and only by that does he observe from the point of view of the eternal that which is temporal in him.

The case of somnambulists is quite different. Of course, spiritual research must also ask: What is it that is active in the somnambulist? What is happening to this person? So the spiritual researcher must also ask: Who is it that actually carries out the actions of the somnambulist? Here one must say: When one learns to recognize what it is in us, when one researches the spiritual world, one can compare it to that which acts on the somnambulist personality that the ordinary consciousness has tuned down. Here one must say: in a sense, it is also the spiritual that is active in the somnambulistic being. But this spiritual does not directly intervene in the soul, as it does in dreams, but rather, as in the case of hallucinations and visions, it directly intervenes in the body.

Now the real, full human life consists in the fact that the spirit in man, even one's own spirit, does not intervene in the physical without this intervention being mediated by the soul, that which I called the true soul yesterday. This is the peculiar thing about somnambulism, that a spiritual being directly intervenes in the physical. The soul is eliminated. The somnambulist thus becomes a physical-spiritual automaton, and as such he appears. In this way he has eliminated from himself that which, although bound to the body between birth and death, has, however, a connection with the forces that draw it out of the body - the connection with the true spiritual world from which man comes, in which he is rooted with one's own eternal being, this connection is interrupted when one becomes somnambulistic, and one has only a spiritual connection with that which exists as a spiritual being in the ordinary physical world; after all, this too is directed by the spirit. Man is indeed a spiritual-soul being, but still an automaton. The spiritual that can emerge in him is a limited spiritual, and is above all not the spiritual in which man is rooted in his own being. His own eternal being, although it is active in the somnambulistic body, remains completely in the twilight darkness of the unconscious, even when the somnambulist is active. The consequence of this, honored attendees, is that the somnambulist cannot enter into a spiritual relationship with the spiritual world.

The true mediator for the human body in the spiritual world is the soul. But because the true soul is excluded and only the soul-like effect of the body occurs in the spiritual-soul automaton, the person only comes into contact with a limited spiritual world as a personality. The consequence of this is that what the somnambulist experiences through this or that revelation, through automatic speaking, automatic writing or the like, are only fragments, scraps of what is spiritually buzzing around in the physical world itself, what is spiritually active there, but that the somnambulist cannot bring down any revelations from the real spiritual world. Everything that comes from somnambulists in the broadest sense, and also from mediums, can never come from the real spiritual world in which the person finds himself when he has passed through the gate of death, or from which he emerges when he enters physical life through the gate of birth or conception.

As long as one does not see through this, one can be the greatest naturalist, one can be a conscientious scientist, one can have the greatest yearning for the eternal, for the supersensible, one can be deceived by the facts themselves. It is characteristic, after all, how the great naturalist Sir Oliver Lodge was deceived by the facts themselves. He was dealing with a medium. He wanted to obtain communications from the spiritual world through the medium. What did he obtain? He obtained a cross experiment. It caused a great stir throughout England, especially in this war time, when so many long for knowledge of the spiritual world as a result of external events, in this war time when so many of our loved ones are passing away. What could be more tempting than a message coming through a medium that gives something completely unknown to society, where it could not be a matter of thought transfer, which one could otherwise assume?

So what was it that was going on? Well, anyone who is familiar with the relevant world of somnambulism knows what it was. And it is nothing short of miraculous that a conscientious natural scientist is open to these things and does not try to learn for himself what can be known in this field. Anyone who knows these things is well aware that through the infection I have described, when the spirit has such an immediate effect on the physical that it turns a person into a spiritual and soul automaton, that a person works under the influence of the world around him as a clock works according to spiritual laws that the clockmaker has implanted in it, everyone knows that the senses are infected, that one can perceive things that the outer senses do not perceive; that one can perceive things in such a way that these perceptions are not bound by the ordinary laws of spatial and temporal perceptions, everyone knows that, without looking into a spiritual world, one can nevertheless see to a certain extent when the senses are infected by the spiritual-soul automaton – that one can see that which is not present but future.

One does not see into a spiritual world, but one simply sees through more refined senses than those through which the ordinary sensory life proceeds, according to different laws. And in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, the medium acted in exactly the same way as a somnambulist in another case, who saw how he would ride once in three weeks and fall off the horse; who thus saw a future event against the ordinary laws of temporal succession, but nothing but that.

Thus, in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, the medium saw nothing other than what actually took place in the future, namely, that photography came before the eyes of society and the family, which arrived later and was not yet there at that time. And in such a case, no proof has been provided that a manifestation has come from the world through the medium, in which the soul of the son was. Of course, it is extremely useful, especially in the scientific sense, to become acquainted with such extraordinary phenomena, and it would be good to thoroughly investigate these phenomena in order to educate oneself about the truly spiritual.

But it must also be clear that the soul does not reveal itself by leaving it inactive and turning man into a physical and mental automaton, but it speaks to the human soul that has awakened the slumbering forces within itself, through which one can come into contact with the spiritual world. There is no other way from the so-called living to the so-called dead, who have passed through the gate of death and live in the time that one spends between death and a new birth, than through the correspondence between the soul itself, in the silent interior, but which becomes inwardly speaking, and the soul that no longer carries a body. That which comes from the concrete spiritual world can already speak into the soul itself, but not in a roundabout way through some physical-mental automaton. This, most honored presence, must be emphasized in relation to somnambulism and mediumship, because it is precisely through the recognition of this pure, true spiritual that it is put in the right light.

And on the other hand, somnambulism also leads to action. It leads them out of their spiritual and mental automatons. Whatever should be done logically, whatever should be done through the body in which the soul dwells, the body of the somnambulist does in an automatic way. When the somnambulist acts, what happens then? He performs actions, be it speaking or something else. He performs actions that, according to the laws of the world, should only be performed by the human body in the sense world. For we have seen that spiritual research shows us that man does not have his sensual existence for nothing. He acquires a moral conscience and moral judgment. That which should be conveyed through the sensual body is realized with the exclusion of the soul.

Thus the somnambule is in the same situation as someone who is given material to distribute among crowds of people; he does not distribute this material, but keeps it for himself to adorn his own existence. This is how the somnambulist acts. What should only take place in a social environment with other people, from human body to human body, what a person should only develop in a human community, the activity here in the physical world, the somnambulist claims as an activity that only originates from his own being. He effectively withdraws what belongs to the commonality of people from this commonality.

As strange as it may sound, this is the reason why – because the somnambulist, in a field where morals apply, automatically acts out of the spirit and does not enter the field where man should acquire morals should acquire morality. The somnambulist, when he habitually indulges in somnambulism, can very easily go astray morally, and it is basically quite rare for mediums not to go astray into fraud. It is very interesting to occupy oneself with the phenomena that arise from a person becoming a mental and physical automaton, but at the same time it must be clear that the spiritual can only be sought and found in a spiritual way, that it cannot be found in this external way that resembles nature.

The third area, which accompanies people like a faithful companion, is artistic creation, artistic feeling and artistic enjoyment. This artistic creation, artistic enjoyment – we know that, in a sense, it flows out of the unconscious. We also know that this artistic feeling, artistic enjoyment and artistic creation comes entirely from the soul. It is also known that insightful people have always considered the process of the great philosopher Plato, the poetic power of man, poetic enjoyment, and the whole artistic process to be akin to dreaming – and rightly so. Why? Because the dream is pictorial, because the dream comes from the spiritual and soul life.

Now the dreamer, as I said, is judged with his entire being, although he is in the eternal, in the temporal, in his personal temporal experiences and possibilities of experience. I would like to say that the artist, the true artist, turns with his soul to the other side. The dreamer stands in the spiritual-soul realm, but is turned towards the side of the body; the artist stands in the body, but looks into the spiritual world. But what he now experiences in the spiritual world does not immediately come to his consciousness. He cannot look into the spiritual world in such a way that he sees the process that takes place in his spiritual environment while his soul and spirit stand face to face with this spiritual environment. The process must already be over before the result of the spiritual experience enters into the ordinary waking consciousness of the day.

Therefore, what the true artist presents, even artistic enjoyment, which is based on similar foundations, rightly gives the impression of the unconscious. It is experienced unconsciously; from the unconscious, after it has happened, it enters into what man can know, what man can experience. Therefore, to those who have a feeling for such things, the manifestations of true art do indeed appear as manifestations from the spiritual world. Therefore, it is right that the artist's creative work appears to be affected when the artist mixes ordinary imagination, ordinary conscious logic, ordinary observation of the physical world into that which is actually supposed to be a message from a spiritual world. The fact that true artistry has such an origin is connected with everything that can be said as a valid judgment about real, genuine art.

The fact that a materialistic time has gone astray through so-called artistic naturalism and wants to bring everything else today as messages from the spiritual world will only be put right in judgment when it is recognized through spiritual science what true artistry is. True artistry is the penetration of a spiritual experience into consciousness, but one that is itself experienced as a spiritual experience in the unconscious. True artistry is, in the truest sense of the word, a revelation of the unconscious. Every time ordinary conscious life forces its way into artistic creation, art is, in a sense, destroyed. That is why Goethe, who was a true artist in this respect, so often compared his work to dreaming, because he could not bring into ordinary consciousness what he had already experienced in his unconscious when he had it in his ordinary consciousness, the experience itself of the spiritual world.

If you take stock of what we have considered, you will say to yourself: True clairvoyance, true insight into the spiritual world, which I have taken the liberty of calling “the observing consciousness”, looks at that in which man, with his own eternal, faces the eternal, with his spiritual-soul nature, the outer spiritual-soul nature. And the spiritual researcher brings into the conscious world from the great realm of the unconscious nothing but what lives in every human being. In every human being who merely walks about on earth, there takes place in the realm of the unconscious what the spiritual researcher attempts to illuminate only with the light of spiritual insight. While the artist, after experiencing something in the spiritual world, still brings a relatively individual experience into consciousness that not everyone can experience, the one who is a spiritual researcher brings from the spiritual world what every soul actually experiences in truth, but only leaves in the unconscious.

Therefore, a true spiritual insight is a true revelation of an unconscious that really lives in every human soul and is really active there. Again and again, I have to say what I have already said here in earlier years: It is important to realize that one does not just glimpse a generally hazy spiritual realm through spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, as one looks into and listens to the physical world through physical eyes and physical ears, but rather that one beholds a concrete spiritual world through spiritual insight.

When you say that, you encounter prejudice. In the physical world, we distinguish four realms, and no one in the physical world would think of saying: Oh, quartz, amethyst and so on, everything is nature! But when it comes to the spiritual, people find it more convenient to speak vaguely of pantheism, to view the general spirit pantheistically, as if one did not look at individual minerals and plants and animals and just always say: nature, nature, nature. Real spiritual research looks into the realms of the spiritual soul, spiritual research looks at those beings who, just like us here as humans, are structured into body, soul and spirit, who do not descend into the physical body but remain spiritual-soul, but belong to higher realms, just as animals, plants and minerals belong to the lower sensual-physical realms.

You can become familiar, dear attendees, through real spiritual vision with those entities that, just as our animal nature here mediates that we can live physically in the physical world, mediate that nature to us that we can acquire when we enter through the gate of death into a spiritual world. Just as we have to acquire the animal nature here, so we have to acquire an essential spiritual nature there, and just as we are surrounded by animal creatures here as subordinate beings, so in the spiritual world there are such beings that stand above man as animals stand among men. As we enter the world of animals, plants and minerals through birth, so we enter the spiritual world into the realm of those beings with whom we are related when we pass through the portal of death.

We enter the realm of those entities of the kingdom to which we belong through having a vegetative nature within us; but we also have the mineral nature within us. We enter the realms of concrete spiritual entities. And while we are here between birth and death with the beings around us from the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, we are there together with the beings to whom we are related, and we experience with them the life between death and a new birth in that world, through which that which is the eternal self passes as it passes through the physical world here.

But then, when we get to know what the concrete, real spiritual world is like – I am not afraid to say it, because I want to give you real results of spiritual research and not just beat around the bush – then the outer nature will also appear to us as the outer body of a spirituality, just as our own body appears to us as an expression of a spirituality. Just as we see through our own body, through its lawful processes, into the spiritual and soul life that reveals itself through the body, so we learn to see through natural phenomena into a spiritual world. Spiritual research thus truly opens up the spiritual world to man, broadening his field of experience. Man is raised above the possibility, which unfortunately otherwise presents itself to him, of regarding the outer world only as material, with the consequence that he must then regard himself as if he arose only as material substance from a material world.

The fact that, over the centuries, humanity has increasingly approached a state in which it does not see the spirit has led to people having a true, genuine longing for the spirit, a true, genuine longing for the spirit - who also have an inkling that external nature is not merely the body, but that it is the body of a spiritual world —, that such people could not find their satisfaction in what has emerged as seemingly true science in recent centuries.

How has this science developed? It is well known – I have emphasized it here several times in previous years – it is well known what is called the Kant-Laplace theory: our whole earth is said to have developed out of mere material fog, which then coalesced into all that is peculiar to us as humans, to animals, to plants; the material is said to have arisen from the material alone. It would be as if we believed that we had developed as material human beings from the material environment, that a spiritual element from the spiritual world had not been involved.

Just as our being descends from a spiritual world, so the whole universe descends from the spirit. How does something like the Kant-Laplace theory develop? It has been calculated how the beings on earth change over time. So one can calculate how they were formed 1000, 2000, millions of years ago, the beings of the earth. This gives us a calculated idea, a truly correctly calculated idea, of what the earth was like millions of years ago. It is as if we calculated from the change of the heart, the stomach, how these changes, [these organs] were two, six, ten years ago, and then draw a conclusion as to how these changes brought about a condition 200 years ago. This is just as scientific as the Kant-Laplace theory. Or the so-called geological changes of the earth can be calculated in this way. You can find out what the human body was like 300 years ago, according to the observed changes, only the person in question had not yet lived. The same mistake is made when developing the Kant-Laplace theory, when geological hypotheses are formulated that are common practice today. One comes back to the state that can be calculated - only the earth did not yet exist at that time, but it went from a spiritual state into the present state much later.

Spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual view with regard to the cosmos. And people who, based on their sense of knowledge, have always felt that a merely materialistic approach is insufficient, could speak as an outstanding man of the nineteenth century spoke about this Kant-Laplace theory. Hermann Grimm says about this theory:

Long ago, in his – Goethe's – youth, the grand Laplace-Kant fantasy of the Earth's origin and former destruction had taken hold. From the rotating nebula – as children learn at school – the central drop of gas forms, which then becomes the Earth, and, as it solidifies into a sphere, it goes through all the phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, , only to finally plunge back into the sun as burnt-out cinders: a long process, but one that is perfectly comprehensible to today's audience, and one that requires no external intervention other than the effort of some external force to maintain the sun at the same temperature. No less fruitless a prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is supposed to be imposed on us today as scientifically necessary in this expectation. A carrion bone that a hungry dog would go around would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this last excrement of creation, as which our earth would finally fall back to the sun, and it is the curiosity with which our generation absorbs it and believes it, a sign of a sick imagination, which the scholars of future epochs will one day spend a lot of ingenuity explaining as a historical phenomenon of the times. Goethe never allowed such bleakness entry.

This is how a healthy soul feels about what must deny the spirit. True spiritual science will lead mankind back to what it must long for in the present: to the knowledge of the spirit. And just as what is presented as spiritual science as a whole has been sensed by people at the height of human education, even though spiritual science can only arise today, so too have the individual parts, the individual links, above all the spiritual-scientific attitude, always been sensed. And in a spirit such as Goethe's, the mood of the human soul has also been recognized, which must always announce itself as a fulfillment of [longing], as Goethe said in his beautiful writing about Winkelmann:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having reached its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Goethe, after all, spoke with a sense of anticipation, as does the intuitive mood of spiritual science. For that which Goethe sensed is a reality in every human soul. The universe exults in the subconscious in the human soul, in that in the depths of the human soul the universe as spiritual encounters the eternal-spiritual in man himself, the universe as spirit confronts the spirit of man, who is able to spiritually contemplate this universe as emerging from his own being and weaving. What Goethe has presented as the exultation of the universe at its goal in the human soul, as something worthy of admiration, is really recognized by spiritual science as the greatest unconscious in the depths of the human soul. And spiritual science is there to bring this, which is directly connected with the human being, with the eternal in human nature, from the realm of the unconscious into the realm of the conscious. Spiritual science wants to be the revelation of this spiritually unconscious greatest secret in human nature.