The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day I wish to speak to you of some fundamental pieces of knowledge of the science of initiation, which will then supply to us a kind of foundation for that which we shall consider tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. To-day we shall first speak of something which lies in the consciousness of every human being, but is not grasped clearly enough in the ordinary course of life. When we speak of such things, we always speak of them from the standpoint of our present time, in the sense and meaning which I have often explained to you: namely, that knowledge is not in any way valid for all time and for every place, but that it is only valid for a certain definite time, indeed, only for a definite region of the earth. Thus, certain standpoints of knowledge would be valid, for instance, for the European civilisation, and other standpoints would be valid—let us say—for the knowledge of the East.

Everybody knows that we live, as it were, between two poles of our knowledge. Everyone feels that, on the one hand, we have the knowledge gained through our senses. A plain, unprejudiced person learns to know the world through his senses, and is even able to sum up what he sees and hears, and, in general, what he perceives through his senses. After all, that which science supplies to us, in the form in which science now exists in the Occident, is merely a summary of that which the senses convey to us.

But everyone can feel that there is also another kind of knowledge, and that it is not possible to be in the full sense of the word a real human being living in the ordinary world, unless another kind of knowledge is added to the one which has just been characterized. And this kind of knowledge is connected with our moral life. We do not only speak of ideas pertaining to the knowledge of Nature, and explaining this or that thing in Nature, we also speak of ethical ideas, ethical ideals. We feel that they are the motives of our actions, and that we allow them to guide us when we ourselves wish to be active in the ordinary world. And every man will undoubtedly feel that this knowledge of the senses, with the resulting intellectual knowledge (for, the intellectual knowledge is merely a result, an appendix of the knowledge transmitted by the senses) is a pole of our cognitive life which cannot reach as far as the ethical ideas. The ethical ideas are there, but when we pursue, for instance, natural science, we cannot find these ethical ideas by contemplating the plant-world, the mineral world, or by following any other branch of modern natural sciences. The tragic element of our time consists, for instance, in trying to discover, upon a natural-scientific basis, ideas which are to be applied to the social sphere. If sound common sense were adopted, this would never be possible. The ethical ideas exist as if on another side of life. And our life is indeed under the influence of these two streams: on the one hand, the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, the ethical knowledge.

From my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will know that the highest ethical ideas required by us as human beings are given to us when we grasp moral intuitions, and that when we begin to gain possession of these ethical ideas, they are the foundation of our human freedom. On the other hand, you may perhaps also know that for certain thinkers there has always been a kind of abyss between that which is given, on the one hand, by the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, by ethical knowledge. The philosophy of Kant is based upon this abyss, which he is unable to bridge completely. For this reason, Kant has written a Critique of Theoretical Reason, of Pure Reason, as he calls it, where he grapples with natural science, and where he says all that he has to say about natural science, or the knowledge of Nature. On the other hand, he has also written a Critique of Practical Reason, where he speaks of ethical ideas. We might say: The whole human life is born for him out of two roots which are completely severed from one another, which he describes in his two chief critical studies.

Of course, it would be unfortunate for the human being if there were no connecting bridge between these two poles of our soul-life. Those who earnestly pursue, on the one hand, spiritual science, and on the other hand, earnestly consider the tasks of our present time, must eagerly ask themselves: Where is the bridge connecting ethical ideas and the ideas of Nature?

To-day we shall adopt the standpoint which I would like to characterize as a historical standpoint, in order to come to a knowledge of this bridge. You already know from the explanations which have recently been given here, that in past times man's soul-constitution was essentially different from that of a later time. The origin of Christianity really forms a deep incision in the whole evolution of humanity. And only if we understand what has really arisen in the evolution of humanity through the birth of Christianity we shall understand human reason.

That which lies behind the rise of Christianity—not to mention Jewish history—is the whole extent of pagan culture. Jewish culture was, after all, a preparation for Christianity. This whole extent of pagan culture is essentially different from our modern Christian culture. The more we go back into time, the more we shall find that this pagan culture had a uniform character. It was principally based upon human wisdom. I know that it is almost offending for a modern man to hear that, as far as wisdom is concerned, the ancients were far more advanced than modern man; nevertheless it was so. In ancient pagan times a wisdom extended over the earth, which was far nearer to the origin of things than our modern knowledge, particularly our modern natural sciences. This ancient, this primeval knowledge, was very concrete, it was a knowledge intensively connected with the spiritual reality of things. Something entered the human soul through man's knowledge of the reality of things. But the special characteristic of this ancient pagan wisdom was the fact that the human beings obtained it in such a way (you know that they obtained it from the Mysteries of the Initiates) that this wisdom contained both a knowledge of Nature, and an ethical knowledge. This extraordinarily significant truth in the history of human evolution, this truth which I have just explained to you, is ignored to-day only because people cannot go back to the truly characteristic times of the ancient pagan wisdom. A historical knowledge does not reach back so far as to enable us to grasp the times when the human beings who looked up to the stars really received from the stars, on the one hand, a wisdom explaining to them in their own way the course of the stars, but on the other hand, it also told them how they were to behave and act here upon the earth. Metaphorically speaking, (yet it is not entirely metaphorical, but quite objective up to a certain degree), we might say, that the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chaldean civilisations were, for instance, of such a kind that men could read the laws of Nature in the course of the stars, but in the star's course they could also read the rules governing that which they were to do upon the earth.

The codices of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs contain, for instance, rules concerning that which was to become law. It was so that for centuries ahead that which would later on become law was foretold prophetically. Everything contained in these codices was read from the course of the stars. In those ancient times there was no astronomy such as we have it now, merely containing mathematical laws of the movements of the stars or of the earth, but there was a knowledge of the cosmos which was at the same time moral knowledge, ethics.

The doubtful element of modern astrology, which does not go beyond the stage of dilettantism, is that people no longer feel that its contents can only be a complete whole if the laws discovered in it are at the same time moral laws for the human beings. This is something extraordinarily significant.

In the course of human evolution, the essence of that primeval science was lost. This lies at the foundation of the fact that certain Secret Schools—but the schools of an earnest character have really ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century—and even certain Secret Schools of the Occident, have again and again pointed back to this lost science, to the lost Word. As a rule, those who came later no longer knew what was meant by the expression “Word”. Nevertheless, this conceals a certain fact. In Saint-Martin's books we may still find an echo showing that up to the end of the 18th century it was very clearly felt that in ancient times men possessed a spiritual wisdom which they obtained simultaneously with their knowledge of Nature. Their spiritual wisdom also contained their moral and ethical wisdom; this had already disappeared in the eight centuries preceding the rise of Christianity. We may even say: Ancient Greek history is, essentially, the gradual loss of primeval wisdom.

If we study the philosophers before Socrates, namely Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, the philosophers of the tragic epoch, as Nietzsche called them—I have dealt with them in my book Riddles of Philosophy, and have tried to give as good as possible a picture, from an external standpoint—if we study these philosophers (but the external writings tell us very little about them), we shall find again and again that the passages which have remained like oases in a desert, re-echo a great, encompassing wisdom and knowledge which existed in the remote past of human evolution. The words of Heraclitus, of Thales, Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, appear to us as if humanity had, as it were, forgotten its primeval wisdom and only remembered occasionally some fragmentary passages. The few passages of Thales, Anaxagoras, of the seven Greek sages, etc., which have been handed down to us traditionally, appear to us like fragmentary recollections.

In Plato we still encounter a kind of clear consciousness of this primeval wisdom; in Aristotle everything has been transformed into human wisdom.

And among the Stoics and Epicureans this gradually disappears. The ancient primeval knowledge only remains like an old legend. This is how matters stood with the Greeks.

The Romans—and they were by Nature a prosaic, matter-of-fact nation—even denied that this primeval knowledge had any meaning at all, and they transformed everything into abstractions. The course which I have just described to you in regard to the primeval knowledge, was necessary for the evolution of humanity. Man would never have reached freedom in the course of his development, had the primeval wisdom, which came to him indirectly through atavistic clairvoyance, remained in its original intensity and significance. Nevertheless, this primeval knowledge was connected with everything which could reach man from divine heights in the form, I might say, of moral impulses. This had to be rescued. The moral impulse had to be rescued for man.

Among the many things which we have already explained in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha we have also explained that the divine principle which descended to the earth trough the man, Jesus of Nazareth, contained the moral power which was little by little dispersed and cleft through the waning and gradual dying out of the ancient primeval wisdom. It is indeed so—although this may seem paradoxical to a modern man—that we can say: Once upon a time there was an old primeval wisdom. Man's moral power and moral wisdom were connected with primeval knowledge; this was contained in it as an integrant. The ancient primeval wisdom then lost its power, it could no longer be the bearer of a moral impulse

This moral impulse had, as it were, to be taken under the wing of the Mystery of Golgotha. And for the civilisation of the Occident, the further continuation was the Christ Impulse which has arisen from the Mystery of Golgotha containing that which had remained as a kind of moral extract from the ancient primeval wisdom.

It is very strange to follow, for instance, that which Occidental civilisation contains in the form of true science, true wisdom, up to the 8th or 9th century after Christ. Try to read the description of Occidental wisdom up to the 8th and 9th century, as contained in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that, after all, this course of development contains nothing of what may be designated as knowledge, in our modern meaning. For this arises towards the middle of the 15th century, at the time of Galilei. Until that time, knowledge has really been handed down traditionally from the primeval wisdom of the past. It is no longer a wisdom gained through inner intuition, no longer a primeval wisdom experienced inwardly, but an external wisdom handed down traditionally. I have often told you the story of Galilei, the story which is not an anecdote, namely, how Galilei had to make a great effort in order to convince a friend of the truth of his statements. Like all the other people of the Middle Ages who pursued wisdom, this friend was accustomed to accept what was contained in the books of Aristotle, or in the other traditional works. Everything which was taught at that time was traditional. That which was contained in the books of Aristotle was handed down traditionally. And the learned friend of Galilei agreed with Aristotle that the nerves go out from the heart. Galilei endeavoured to explain to him that according to the knowledge he had gained by studying a corpse, he was obliged to say something else: namely, that in the human being the nerves go out from the head, or the brain. This Aristotelian thinker could not believe it. Galilei then led him to the corpse, showed him that the nerves in fact go out from the brain and not from the heart, and felt sure that his friend would now have to believe what he saw with his own eyes. But his friend said: “Indeed, this appears to be true; I can see with my own eyes that the nerves proceed from the brain. But Aristotle says the opposite, namely that the nerves proceed from the heart. If I have to choose between the evidence of the senses in Nature and Aristotle's statements, I prefer to believe in Aristotle, and not in Nature!” This is not an anecdote, but a true occurrence. After all, in our time we simply experience the same thing, only the other way round.

You see, at that time all knowledge was traditional. A new knowledge only began with the time of Galilei, Copernicus, and so forth. But throughout these centuries the moral impulse was borne by the Christian impulse. It was essentially connected with the religious element. This was not the case in pagan times. The pagans realised that when they obtained cosmic wisdom, they obtained at the same time a moral impulse.

A new impulse arose towards the middle of the 15th century, an impulse which completely severed the connection with everything that existed in the form of ancient wisdom, even though this merely existed traditionally. It is very interesting to see the passion with which those who brought to the surface this new science—for instance, Giordano Bruno—abuse everything which existed in the form of old traditional wisdom. Bruno almost begins to rave when he rails against the recollections of ancient wisdom. Something entirely new arises. In fact, we shall be far from understanding human evolution if we are unable to look upon this new element which thus arises, as a beginning.

We may say (a drawing is made on the blackboard): If we indicate, here, the Mystery of Golgotha ... the moral impulse will continue from there, but what was that which the Mystery of Golgotha carried from an older into a more recent time? What was it, in reality, while it was being borne in that direction? It was an end. The more we progress, the more the ancient wisdom disappears, even in its traditional form. We may say that it continues to drip like water, in the form of traditional knowledge; but a new element, a beginning, arises with the 15th century.

Indeed, we have not advanced very far in this new direction. The few centuries which have elapsed since the middle of the 15th century have brought us some natural science, but we have not progressed far since that beginning.

What is this new wisdom? You see, it is a wisdom which, to begin with, in the form in which it has appeared, has this peculiarity: Contrary to the ancient pagan wisdom, it does not contain a moral impulse. You may study as much as possible of this new wisdom, of this Galilei wisdom—mineralogy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. etc.,—but you will never be able to draw a moral impulse out of this knowledge of Nature.

If modern people think that they can establish sociology upon the foundation of natural sciences, this is a tremendous illusion. For it is impossible to squeeze out of natural science, such as it exists to-day, that kind of knowledge which can be an ideal for human actions. For natural science is altogether in an elementary stage, and we can only hope that by developing more and more, it will again come to the point of containing, as natural science, moral impulses.

If the knowledge of Nature were to continue only in accordance with its own form, it would not be able to produce moral impulses out of its own nature. A new super-sensible knowledge will have to develop by the side of this knowledge of Nature. This super-sensible knowledge will then contain once more the rays of a moral will. And when the beginning which was made towards the middle of the 15th century will have reached its end at the conclusion of the evolution of the earth, then super-sensible knowledge will flow together with the knowledge of the senses, and a unity will arise out of this.

When the old pagan sage, or the follower of pagan wisdom received pagan wisdom from his initiate in the Mysteries, he received at one and the same time a knowledge of Nature, a cosmic knowledge, an anthropogenesis and a moral science, and this was simultaneously a moral impulse. All this was one.

To-day it is necessary to admit that we obtain on the one hand, a knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, super-sensible knowledge. This knowledge of Nature is, as such, devoid of moral impulses. Moral impulses must be gained through a super-sensible knowledge. Since the social impulses must, after all, be moral impulses, no true social knowledge, and not even a sum of social impulses can be imagined, unless man rises to super-sensible knowledge.

It is important that modern man should realise that he must strike out a new course in regard to social science; he must tread a different path than that of natural science. But I am at the same time obliged to draw your attention to a strange paradox:—I have often explained to you here that the deepest truths of the science of initiation appear strange to the ordinary every-day consciousness, may even appear crazy to an extreme materialist, but in our time it is necessary to grow acquainted with this wisdom which appears so paradoxical to-day. For in our time many things which appear foolish to men are wisdom before God. It would be a good thing if this bible passage were to be considered a little by those who brush aside Anthroposophy with a supercilious smile, or who criticize it in a vile way. They should consider that what they look upon as foolishness may be “wisdom before the Gods”. It would be a very good thing if several people—and by “several” I mean many—particularly those who go to church with their prayer book and revile Anthroposophy, were to insist less upon their proud faith and look more closely into that which is really contained in the Christian faith. In our time it is necessary to become acquainted with several things which appear paradoxical. You see, two things are possible to-day. Someone may become acquainted with the natural science of to-day (I shall now characterize these two things rather sharply), he may, for instance, take up the facts supplied by the science of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. He may study diligently and eagerly the Theory of Evolution which has arisen from the so-called Darwinism. If he studies all this he may become a materialist, as far as his world conception based on knowledge is concerned. Indeed, he will become a materialist; this cannot be denied. Since men, as it were, so quickly arrive at an opinion, they become materialists if they give themselves up wholly to the external knowledge of Nature, according to the intentions of some of their contemporaries. But it is also possible to do something else. In addition to that which physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, geology, biology, offer, in addition to that which these sciences teach, we may also direct our attention to what we do in the physical laboratory, to our behaviour during an experiment; we may watch carefully how we behave in the chemical laboratory and what we do there; we may watch the way in which we investigate plants, animals, and their evolution.

Goethe's knowledge of Nature is chiefly based upon the fact that he has deeply studied the way in which others have come to their knowledge. The greatness of Goethe depends upon this very fact, namely, that he has deeply occupied himself with the way in which others have attained to their knowledge. And it is very, very significant to penetrate really into the essence and spirit of an essay by Goethe, such as “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”. Here we may see how Goethe carefully follows the way in which phenomena of Nature are handled. What we may call the method of investigation, this is something which he has studied with the greatest attention. If you read my Introduction to Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings you will find what great results Goethe has reached by thus pursuing the natural-scientific method.

In a certain way, that which Goethe has done can be developed further for the achievements of the 19th century and up to the 20th century ... but Goethe was no longer able to do this.

I therefore state: Two things are possible. Let us keep to this, to begin with. We remain by the results which natural science supplies, or else we investigate the attitude needed in order to arrive at these natural scientific results. Let us keep to what we have said in regard to the knowledge of Nature; let us now observe the human striving after knowledge from another standpoint.

You know that beside natural science there is also a spiritual knowledge; in the form of Anthroposophy, the knowledge of man, we may pursue cosmology, anthropology, etc., in such a way that they lead to the kind of results described, for instance, in my Occult Science. There, we may find positive knowledge pointing to the spiritual world. Just as we obtain positive knowledge in natural science, in mineralogy, geology, etc., so we have, here, a positive knowledge referring to the spiritual world. In our anthroposophical movement it was particularly important for me to spread also this kind of positive knowledge concerning the spiritual world in the various books which I have written. Now we may also tackle things in such a way that we observe chiefly the way in which these things are done, and do not merely aim at obtaining knowledge. We observe how a person describes something, how he rises from external observation to inner observation; how he arrives to a higher spiritual conception, not through scientific investigations in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the astronomical observatory, but through his inner soul-development, along a mystical path. This would be parallel to the observation of the natural-scientific method, of the handling, of the way in which things are done. Also here we have this twofold element: to watch the results, and to watch the way in which our soul comes to these results.

Let us take hypothetically something which may seem rather paradoxical. Let us suppose that someone were to pursue the natural-scientific methods, like Goethe: he will certainly not become a materialist, but will undoubtedly accept a spiritual world-conception. An infallible way of overcoming materialism in our modern time is to have in insight into the natural-scientific methods of investigation. In the natural-scientific sphere, men become materialists only because they do not observe, because they insufficiently observe the way in which they carry on their investigations. They are satisfied with results, with what the clinic, the laboratory, the observatory supply. They do not progress as far as Goetheanism, i.e. the observation of their manner of research; for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the natural-scientific manner of contemplating the world and of handling things in order to reach knowledge, will at least become idealists, and probably spiritualists, if they only proceed far enough.

If we now try to avoid reaching the positive results of spiritual science, if we find it boring to enter into the details of spiritual science, and only like to hear again and again how man's soul becomes mystical, if we concentrate our chief attention upon the methods leading to the spiritual sphere, this will be the greatest temptation for really becoming materialists. The greatest temptation for becoming materialists is to ignore the concrete results of spiritual science and to emphasize continually the importance of mystical research, mystical soul-concentration, and the methods of entering the spiritual world.

You see this is a paradox. Those who observe natural science, natural research, become spiritualists; those who disdain to reach a real spiritual knowledge and who always speak of mysticism and of how spiritual knowledge is gained, are exposed to the great temptation of becoming more than ever materialistic. This should be known to-day. We cannot do without the knowledge of such things.

To-day we have monistic societies. Those who give themselves the air of leaders in these monistic societies spread a very superficial world-conception. They condense the external materialistic results of natural science to a superficial world-conception. This is so easy for modern men who do not wish to make a great effort, who prefer to go to the “movies” rather than to other places, and consequently prefer to accept a kind of cinema-science—for materialism is nothing else—they prefer this to something which must be worked out inwardly. These leaders of monistic societies therefore supply a superficial materialism. Undoubtedly they are, at least for a time, temporarily noxious creatures, for they spread errors. It is not good if they flourish, for of course they turn the heads of people in a materialistic way. Nevertheless they are the less dangerous elements, for to begin with they are generally honest people, but this honesty does not protect them against this spreading of errors; however, they are for the most part frankly honest and their errors will be overcome. They will only have a temporary significance.

But there are other people who systematically, knowingly, refuse to lead man towards the concrete positive results of spiritual-science. Indeed, they nourish the aversion which exists to-day through a certain love of ease, the aversion of penetrating into the positive concrete results of spiritual science. You know that the things described in my Occult Science must be studied several years if we wish to understand them, they are not comfortable for a modern man, who may indeed send his son to the university, if he is to become a chemical scientist; nevertheless, if he is to recognize and grasp heaven and earth in a spiritual way, he expects him to do this in a twinkle, at least in one evening, and from every lecture on the super-sensible worlds he expects to have the whole sum of cosmic wisdom. Concrete results of a positive spiritual research are uncomfortable for most men, and this aversion is made use of by certain personalities of the present time who persuade men that they do not need these things, that it is not necessary to pursue the positive concrete details of spiritual facts. “What is this talk of the higher hierarchies which must first be known? What is this talk of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan etc.? All this is unnecessary.” They will tell you: “If you concentrate deeply, if your soul becomes quite mystical, you shall reach the God within you”. They will tell you these things, give general indications on the connection of the material and the super-sensible world. They nourish man's aversion to penetrate into the concrete spiritual world. Why do they do this? Because apparently, apparently they wish to spread a spiritual mentality, but in reality they aim at something else: Along this path, more than ever, they seek to produce materialism. For this reason the leaders of the monistic societies are less harmful. But the others who so often spread mysticism to-day, and who always speak of all kinds of mystical things, they are those who truly foster materialism, who foster it in a most refined way. They put into the heads of men that one or the other way leads into the spiritual world, and they avoid speaking about it concretely. They chiefly speak in general phrases and if they remain victorious they will undoubtedly succeed in making the third generation entirely materialistic. To-day, the more certain and also more refined way leading into materialism is to transmit mysticism traditionally, a mysticism which despises to penetrate into positive spiritual-scientific results. Many things which appear to form part of the spiritual literature of to-day foster materialism far more strongly than, for instance, the books of Ernst Häckel.

You see, these things are uncomfortable to hear, because in setting them before men we strongly appeal to their power of discernment, but men do not wish to listen to this appeal to their power of discernment. They are much more satisfied if every kind of mystical nonsense stimulates an inner lust of the soul. This is why there are so many opponents, particularly of those efforts which to-day honestly pursue spiritual life by disdaining to approach men with a shallow mysticism of a general nature. True spiritual science arouses opposition. In the present time there are numerous people and communities who do not in any way wish that a true spiritual regeneration and elevation should take hold of humanity, and who make use of the fact that materialism is undoubtedly festered if they speak to men of mysticism in general terms. They make use of this fact. For this reason they wage war to the knife where they encounter honest paths which are meant to lead into spiritual science.

I have thus characterized an extensive literature which exists to-day. In reality everyone who takes up a mystical book, no matter of what kind, should appeal strongly to his own judgment. This is strictly necessary. For this reason we should not be led astray by the fact that the many pseudo-mystical scribbles of our present time seem to be so easily accessible. Of course, people will easily understand us if we tell them, for instance: “You only need to penetrate deeply into your inner being and God will be within you; your God whom you only find by treading your own path; no one can show you this path because every other man speaks of another God”, or similar stuff. To-day you will find this in many books, and it is described in a most tempting and misleading manner.

I would like you to take to heart these things very deeply. For that which is to be reached through our anthroposophical movement can only be reached through the fact that you are at least a small number of people who strive to cultivate the characterized power of discernment; it would be fatal for humanity if no effort were made to develop this power of discernment. To-day we must try to stand firmly on our feet, if we do not wish to lose our foothold in the midst of the confusion and chaos of the present. We may often ask to-day after the cause of so much confusion in humanity. But we can almost touch these causes. We may find them in insignificant facts, but we must be able to judge these little facts on the right way.

It is uncomfortable to see this immediately, in the many forms in which it exists on all sides. Many grotesque paradoxes can be found not only in rather loathsome places, but also in the modern life of humanity. They undoubtedly exist also in the modern life of humanity. And it is necessary to-day to strive to obtain a clear understanding, an understanding as sharp as a blade, if we wish to gain a firm foothold. This is the essential thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN PURSUANCE of the considerations I placed before you in the lectures of last week I should like today to prepare the ground for what I shall develop in detail tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It will be a matter of calling back to your memory, in a way different from the one heretofore employed, of much that we shall need in order to pursue our present theme.

If we try to make clear to ourselves the way in which Earth evolution unfolded we can do so best by considering and arranging the various events in relation to the central point of Earth evolution; for through such an arrangement we arrive at a certain structure in man's own evolution. This central point, this center of gravity is, as you know, the Mystery of Golgotha through which the whole Earth evolution received its meaning, its true inner content.

If we go back in the evolution of occidental humanity which received the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha from the orient, we must say: approximately in the fifth century before the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha there begins, out of Greek culture, a kind of preparation for this Mystery of Golgotha. This uniform trend is introduced through the figure of Socrates, finds its continuation in Greek culture in its entirety—also in art the same trend is discernible—it is continued by the mighty and outstanding personality of Plato and receives a more scholarly character, as it were, in Aristotle.

You know from various lectures I delivered before you that the Middle Ages, mainly in the time after St. Augustine, were especially bent on using the guidance that could be gained from the Aristotelian mode of thinking in order to comprehend what prepared the Mystery of Golgotha and what followed it. Greek thinking became of such great importance precisely for the Christian evolution of the occident up to the end of the Middle Ages through the fact that it was used for the comprehension of the real nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is well that we should realize what it was that took place in Greece during these last centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What took place in the thinking, feeling and willing of the Greek was the last echo of a primeval culture of mankind no longer appreciated today. Historical considerations can no longer see these things in their proper light, for our historical considerations do not reach back to those times in which a Mystery culture that extended over the civilized earth of that age permeated all human willing and feeling. We must go back into those millennia into which history does not reach, we must go back with the methods which you find indicated in my book, Occult Science, an Outline, (Anthroposophic Press, New York) in order to see what was the nature of this human primeval culture. It had its origin in the ancient Mysteries into which those human beings who were found to be objectively suited for direct initiation were admitted by great leading personalities. The knowledge which was thus imparted to those initiates in the Mysteries flowed, through them, out to other human beings. One cannot understand ancient culture in its entirety if one does not focus one's attention upon the maternal soil of the Mysteries. If one is willing to do so, this maternal soil of the Mysteries can be clearly discerned in the works of Aeschylos. It can be sensed in Plato's philosophy. But the revelations concerning the Divine which mankind received from the Mysteries have been lost historically. Only in the most primitive fashion are they still contained in that which has become historically demonstrable culture. We can best judge what has happened here if we make clear to ourselves what it is that has remained, in the post-Socratean age of Greek civilization, of the primeval Mystery culture in which Greek civilization was rooted. What has remained is a certain mode of thinking, a certain way of visualizing.

As you know, outer history relates how Socrates founded dialectics, how he was the great teacher of thinking, of that thinking which, later on, Aristotle developed in a more scientific way. But this Greek mode of thinking is only the last echo of the Mystery culture, for this culture of the Mysteries was rich in content. Spiritual facts which are the fundamental causes for our cosmic order were adopted into man's entire view of things. These sublime and mighty contents were gradually lost. But the way of thinking developed by the Mystery pupils has remained and has become historical, first, in Greek thinking, then, again, in Medieval thinking, in the thinking of the Christian theologians who acquired this Greek thinking in order to grasp with the thought forms, with the ideas and concepts which were a continuation of Greek thinking, that which has flowed into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. Medieval philosophy, so-called scholasticism, is a confluence of the spiritual truths of the Mystery of Golgotha and Greek thinking. The elaboration, the thought-penetration of the Mystery of Golgotha has been carried out—if I may use the trivial expression—with the tool of Greek thinking, of Greek dialectics. Up to the Mystery of Golgotha, about four and one half centuries elapsed from the time when the content of the Mysteries was lost and the merely formal element, the mere thought element of the ancient Mysteries was retained. We may say, approximately, four and one half centuries. Thus we have to visualize the following: In a pre-historical age, the culture of the Mysteries extends over the civilized earth of that time. In the course of evolution only a distillate of it remains, namely, Greek dialectics, Greek thinking. Then the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. In the occident this is, at the outset, comprehended by means of this Greek dialectics. Anyone who wishes to familiarize himself with the science, let us say, even of the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth century, which still comprises theology, must employ his thinking in a way that is quite different from the present-day natural-scientific mode of thought. Most human beings who today pass an opinion on scholasticism cannot do it justice because they only have a natural-scientific training, and scholasticism requires a training of thought that is different from modern natural-scientific training.

Now, my dear friends, today we live at a point of time in which again four and one half centuries have elapsed since this natural-scientific mode of thinking took hold of mankind. In the middle of the fourteenth century, human beings of the Occident begin to think in the way we find developed, already to the degree of brilliancy, in Galileo or in Giordana Bruno. This, then, is carried over into our age. Indeed, my dear friends, it is, seemingly, the same logic as that of the Greeks; yet, in reality, it is a completely different logic. It is a logic which is gradually derived from the nature processes in the way the Greek logic was derived from that which the Mystery pupils beheld in the Mysteries.

Let us now try to make clear to ourselves the difference that exists between the four and one half centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha in the civilized world of that time, which was almost limited to Greece, and the four and one half centuries in which humanity was trained for natural-scientific thinking. It is easiest for me to describe this to you graphically. Visualize the culture of the Mysteries like a kind of mountain summit of human spiritual culture in very ancient times. This culture of the Mysteries—I shall proceed step by step—then becomes logic in Greece, up to the Mystery of Golgotha. This, then, finds its continuation in the Middle Ages through scholasticism.

During four and one half centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we have the last ramification, the echo of the ancient Mystery culture. With the fifteenth century A.D. a new way of thinking begins which we might call thinking in the style of Galileo. The period of time that elapsed between this starting point and our present day is of the same length as that which elapsed between the appearance of the Greek way of thinking and the Mystery of Golgotha. But while the latter period is a final echo, an evening glow, as it were, the former is a prelude, something that has to be evolved, that has to be brought to a certain height. Greek culture stood at an end. We stand at a beginning.

We shall only gain a complete understanding of this placing, side by side, of an end and a beginning if we observe the evolution of mankind from a certain spiritual-scientific point of view.

I have repeatedly stated that it is not without reason that in the present age the attempt toward self-knowledge of mankind is made, the tools for which are offered by the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. For the large majority of mankind confronts a significant future possibility. In this connection it is important that we take seriously the fact that the evolving historical humanity is an organism that develops continuously. Just as in the case of the single organism we have puberty, and also later epochal transitions, so likewise, in human history, we have epochal transitions. Today, human beings still meet the doctrine of repeated earth lives with the objection that human beings do not remember their previous earth lives.

Anyone who, in a factual manner, conceives of the evolutionary history of mankind as of an organism, as I have just indicated, should not be surprised that human beings do not today, in their ordinary knowledge, remember their former earth lives. For I ask you: what does man remember in ordinary life? That which he first has thought. What he has not thought he cannot remember. Just think how many events of a day remain unobserved by you. You do not remember them because you did not think them in spite of their having taken place in your surroundings. You can only remember what you have thought.

Now, in the former centuries and millennia of mankind's evolution, human beings did not attain to any factual clarity about their own nature. To be sure, since the appearance of Greek thinking the “know thyself” exists like a longing, but this “know thyself” will only be fulfilled through real spiritual cognition. Only through the fact that human beings once employ one life in order to comprehend in thought their own self—and humanity has only become ripe for this in our age—is memory prepared for the next earth life. For we must first have thought about that which we are to remember later. Only those who, in earlier ages, through initiation (which need not have been acquired in the Mysteries) could look factually upon their own self are able in the present age to look back upon former earth lives. And there are not so few human beings who are able to do this. Nevertheless, the situation is such that man, also with respect to his purely bodily evolution, undergoes a transformation. These things cannot be observed externally in physiology, but they can be observed spiritual-scientifically. Mankind today does not have the same bodily constitution it had two thousand years ago, and in two thousand years from today it will again have a different constitution. I have talked to you about this subject repeatedly. Human beings live toward a time in the future in which their brains will be constructed in a way that is quite different from the way their brains are constructed today in an external sense. The brain will have the possibility of remembering former earth lives. But those who have not prepared themselves today through reflection upon their own self will sense this faculty—which will be theirs mechanically—merely as an inner nervousness, if I may use the current expression, as an inner deficiency. They will not find what they are lacking, because mankind in the meantime will have become ripe, in regard to its corporeality, to look back upon its previous earth lives, but if it has not prepared this retrospect, it cannot look back; it then will sense this faculty only as a deficiency. Therefore, proper knowledge of the present-day powers of transformation of mankind indicates by its very nature that human beings are brought to self-knowledge through the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. Now, it is possible, and today I shall only indicate this, it is possible to point out the nature of this special experience which will suggest to human beings to take into account previous earth lives.

Today we live in an age in which those shades of feeling which will become more and more prevalent are indicated only in a few human beings; but still, they are indicated in these few human beings. Not much attention is paid to them yet. I shall describe them to you in the way in which they will appear eventually. Human beings will be born into the world and they will say to themselves: by living with other human beings, I am educated, consciously or unconsciously, for a certain way of thinking. Thoughts arise in me. I am born into and educated for a certain way of thinking, of visualizing. But at the same time I look at my outer surroundings: my thinking, my visualizing does not properly fit this outer surrounding world.—this shade of feeling is already present today in individual human beings. They must think in a direction which makes it appear to them as if outer nature said something entirely different, as if outer nature demanded something completely different from them. Whenever such human beings appeared that have felt this discrepancy between what they must think and what external nature says, they have been ridiculed. Hegel, for instance, is a classical example for this. He has expressed certain thoughts about nature—and not all of Hegel's thoughts are foolish!—and has arranged them systematically. Then the philistines came and said: Well, these are your ideas concerning nature; but just look at this or that process in nature: it does not agree with your ideas. Then Hegel answered: Too bad for nature!

Naturally, this seems paradoxical; nevertheless, subjectively this feeling is well founded. It is absolutely possible that one surrenders, without prejudice, to one's innate thinking and says: if nature were really to correspond to this thinking, she would have to take on a different form. To be sure, after some time one will also become accustomed to that which nature teaches. Most people who find themselves in such a position do not notice that by having acquired nature observation they really bear two souls within themselves, two truths, as it were. Those who do notice it may suffer greatly from this discrepancy brought into their soul life. What I am describing to you here and which is present in some human beings today although they are not aware of it will become ever more present. Human beings will say to themselves more and more: through what I am by birth, my head really forces me to form a picture about nature. But this does not coincide with nature herself. Then, as I become more familiar with life, I also acquire in the course of time what nature herself teaches. I must find a way out of this.

These discordant sensations will arise in our souls when they return again to earth. A source of inner thoughts and sensations will arise in us which will cause us to say: you sense clearly how the world ought to be; it is, however, different. Then, again, we shall familiarize ourselves with this world; we shall learn to know a second kind of law, and we shall have to seek a balance between the two.

Let us assume the human being enters physical existence through birth. He brings with him in his thinking and feeling the result of his previous earth life. While he was not united with the life of the earth, this external earth life has actually undergone a change. He senses a discrepancy between his thinking, the effects of which he brings from his previous life, and the things as they have developed in the period during which he was absent from the earth. His thinking does not harmonize with them. And now gradually he adjusts himself to his new life, but he does by no means completely take up into this consciousness what he may learn from his surroundings. He only takes it up as though through a veil. He elaborates it only after death, and then, again, carries it into his next life. Man will constantly live in this duality of his soul life. He will always become aware of the following: You are bringing with you something in regard to which the world into which you have grown through birth is new. But through your physical being you now receive something from this world which does not completely penetrate your soul, which you will have to work over, however, after death.

The human being of the present day ought to become thoroughly acquainted with the way of experiencing life. For only by familiarizing himself with such a thing does he become aware of the forces which pulse through our existence and which otherwise remain entirely unnoticed. We are drawn into the web of these forces. But if we do not try to penetrate them with our consciousness, they make us to a certain degree sick in our soul. This falling apart the human being will perceive more and more: the falling apart of that which has stayed with him from the previous life and that which is prepared in the present life for the next one. And since man will sense this duality more and more, he will be in need of an inner mediation, a real inner mediation. And the great question will become ever more burning: Where must we look for this inner mediation? We can only find an answer to this question if we consider the following:

I have often told you that we human beings are completely awake only in our thinking in the period between awaking and falling asleep of ordinary life. The life of thought means complete wakefulness. We are not completely awake, even in waking life, in regard to our feelings. Our feelings are at the stage of dream consciousness, even though we are fully awake in our conceptions and thoughts. He who is able to make research in this field knows through direct perception that feelings have no greater vitality than have dreams; only, the conception through which feelings are represented makes it appear differently. But the life of feelings as such arises out of the depths of consciousness like the surging up of dreams. And the actual life of will is asleep in us, even in our waking life; in regard to the will we are asleep. Thus, also in waking life, we carry these three states of consciousness within us. During the day, we walk around with a waking life of thoughts; we deceive ourselves in believing that we are awake also in our will because we have thoughts about that which the will performs. Not the experience of the will itself, but only its mental image is what enters our consciousness. We dream our feelings, we sleep our willing. But if imaginative knowledge raises up what otherwise dreams in the feelings and makes it a matter of complete, clear world cognition, then we become aware of the fact that wisdom is contained not only in our thoughts—let us call it “wisdom” although with many human beings it is “un-wisdom”—but that wisdom is also contained in our feelings, and that it is also contained in our willing. In regard to present-day human existence we can only speak clearly about that which is contained in our thought life. In regard to the world of feelings mankind today entertains thoughts which hardly differ from those it entertains in regard to dream life; and yet, wisdom is also contained in the life of feeling.

My dear friends, the person who earnestly applies to his own soul the exercises which are described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Anthroposophic Press, New York) will come closest to experiencing a certain inner soul-surging which takes its course in a dreamlike manner, as it were. For most human beings it will not contain more regularity than ordinary dreaming; but it is possible, at a comparatively early moment, to bring so much order into this inner experiencing that one becomes aware of the fact that, although this inner experience is not governed by ordinary logic—indeed, it is sometimes governed by a very grotesque logic, and the most varied fragments of thought arrange themselves and occur in a dreamlike fashion—one becomes aware of the fact that something real takes place there. This first inner experience, which is still very primitive, may be recognized by the one who applies, even to some degree, to his own soul life what has been described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. When the human being dives down into this surging of waking dreams, a new reality emerges in contrast to the ordinary reality of external life. Comparatively soon the human being may become aware of this arising of a new reality. And also comparatively soon may he become aware that wisdom is contained in all this, but a wisdom he cannot take hold of, for which he does not feel himself mature enough to become fully conscious of it. It escapes him time and again, and he does not understand it. But he becomes aware, or at least, may become aware of the fact that wisdom does not only flow through the upper stratum of his consciousness which permeates him in ordinary waking day-life, but that below this there lies another stratum of his consciousness which appear illogical to him for the simple reason that he himself calls it that since he cannot yet take hold of its wisdom. We may say: the moment we have completely acquired imaginative cognition, these waking dreams cease to be as grotesque as they appear to ordinary life; they then permeate themselves with a wisdom that points to another content of reality, to a world different from the sense world which we fathom with ordinary wisdom.

You see, my dear friends, in ordinary life only the world of feeling surges up into our every-day consciousness out of this substratum of our consciousness. And out of a still deeper stratum, which lies below the one just mentioned, there surges up the world of will which is also permeated by wisdom. We are connected with this wisdom, but we are not at all aware of it in ordinary consciousness. Thus we may say: We human beings are governed by three strata of consciousness. The first is our conceptual consciousness in which we live every day. The second is an imaginative consciousness. And the third is an inspired consciousness which remains very deeply hidden, which works in us, to be sure, but whose nature we do not recognize in ordinary life. If only modern philosophy were less perplexed in its concepts—I am not referring here to people who have nothing to do with philosophy, but philosophers should grasp such matters, yet they refuse to do so—if only modern philosophy were less confused it would have to notice the great difference that exists between truths that are arrived at purely upon the basis of external observation of nature and the truths that are found in the sciences, such as mathematics and geometry, which are employed in the endeavor to understand external nature.

We are in a sense justified in saying that in regard to the truths which man acquires through external observation—this has so often been stressed in the history of philosophy that a special reference to it ought to be superfluous for the philosopher—in regard to the truths of external observation we can never speak of actual certainty. Kant and Hume have elaborated this especially clearly by their grotesque assertion that, although it is true that we observe that the sun rises, we cannot, however, assert from this observation that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only can conclude from the fact that the sun has risen up to now every day that is will also rise tomorrow. This is the way with all truths which we derive from external observation. But it is not so in the case of mathematical truths. If we have once grasped them we know they are valid for all future times. Whoever knows and is able to prove, out of inner reasons, that the square above the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the two other sides of the right-angled triangle knows that it would be impossible to draw a rectangular triangle for which this law does not hold good.

These mathematical truths are different from the truths we arrive at through external observations; we know the facts, but with the means of present-day research we are unable to grasp the underlying reason. The reason is to be found in the fact that mathematical truths originate deep down in the inner being of man, that they arise on the third level of consciousness, in the lowest stratum and, without his being aware of it, shoot up into man's upper consciousness, where he then perceives them inwardly. We possess mathematical truths through the fact that we ourselves behave mathematically in the world. We walk, we stand, and so forth; we describe certain lines on the earth. Through this will relationship to the external world we actually receive the inner perception of mathematics. Mathematics arises below in the third consciousness and shoots up from there.

Conceptual life: Complete Wakefulness: Wisdom

Feeling: Dreaming: Wisdom

Will: Sleeping: Wisdom

I. Conceptual Life

II. Imaginations

III. Inspirations

Thus, although we are not conscious of its origin, we have very clear concepts of at least one part of this lowest stratum of consciousness: we are aware of the mathematical and geometrical concepts. The middle stratum is of a dreamlike and confused character. And here, “in the upper story,” where the day-waking conceptual life takes place, we are clear again. What plays up from the third stratum of consciousness is also clear in us. What lies between the two reaches most human beings like a confused waking dreaming. It is very significant that we should make this fact clear to ourselves. For, you see, the Greeks, during the four and one half centuries (number one), which they had retained as the remainder of the Mystery culture. And this is a purely Luciferic element. I have described it to you recently: it is the intellectualistic culture. Clarity rules in our head. It is permeated by wisdom, generally valid wisdom. But this is the Luciferic element in us.

And, again, that which exists here below and which is so much beloved by modern scientists and was so much beloved by Kant that he said: in regard to nature, science exists only in as far as it contains mathematics—this is the purely Ahrimanic element, which arises from below through our human nature. It is the Ahrimanic element.

It does not suffice, my dear friends, to know of something that it is correct. We know that the things we comprehend intellectually through our head are correct; but this is a gift of the Luciferic element. And we know that mathematics is correct; but this sovereign correctness of mathematics we owe to Ahriman who sits in us. The most uncertain element is in the middle. It consists of seemingly illogical, billowing dreams.

I will describe to you another symptom so that you may grasp the full significance of this matter. In reality, the whole mathematical conception of the world as it arose with Galileo and Giordano Bruno stems from this deepest stratum of consciousness. Four and one half centuries have elapsed since we have begun to acquire this world conception, since we have begun to introduce this Ahrimanic element into our human thinking and sensing. Whereas in Greek thinking the last echo of the Mystery culture shone into the clearest brightness of consciousness, there arises in our deepest, darkest strata of consciousness that which only in the future will reach its climax. This is beginning to arise down there.

I. Conceptual Life (Lucifer)

II. Imaginations (consciousness)

III. Inspirations (Ahriman)

Our soul life is like a scale beam which has to try to establish equilibrium, on one hand the Luciferic, on the other the Ahrimanic element. The Luciferic element lies in our clear head, the Ahrimanic element below in the wisdom which permeates our will. Between the two, we have to try to establish a state of balance in an element which at first does not seem to be permeated by anything.

How does wisdom enter this middle part of man? Man is placed in the world at present in such a way that his head is supported by Lucifer, his metabolic wisdom, his limb-wisdom by Ahriman. That which we have described as the middle state of consciousness is dependent upon our heart organization and the human rhythmical system (read what I saw concerning this fact in my book, Von Seelenraetseln). This sphere of our existence must gradually become just as ordered as the head wisdom became ordered through logic and the Ahrimanic wisdom through mathematics, geometry, through external rational nature observation. What will bring inner logic, inner wisdom, inner power of orientation into this middle part of our human nature? The Christ impulse, that which passed over into the earth culture through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus you see, we have a spiritual-scientific anatomy which shows us what is culture of the head, what is culture of metabolism, which also shows us the nature and needs of that sphere of our organism which lies between the two. That man permeates himself with the Christ impulse is a requisite part of his nature.

Let us for a moment hypothetically assume that the Mystery of Golgotha had not entered Earth evolution: the human being would have his head wisdom. He also would have what has arisen since the fifteenth century A.D. But in regard to his central being he would be desolate and void. He would feel more and more the disagreement between the two inner spheres mentioned above. He would be unable to bring about the state of equilibrium. We can only bring about this state of equilibrium by permeating ourselves more and more with the Christ impulse which calls forth the state of balance between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element.

From this you will see that we may say: In the pre-Christian four and one half centuries there was bestowed upon the human being, like a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, the last ramification of the ancient Mystery culture, which has settled like a head-memory of this ancient culture. And in our modern age, the human being passed through four and one half centuries of preparation for a new spirit direction, for a new kind of Mystery culture. But in order that these two might be connected in the historical evolution of mankind, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place as an objective fact in mankind's evolution. Internally, however, this evolution takes its course in such a way that human beings grow and develop until, beginning with the fifteenth century A.D. they receive the new impulse which I have characterized as an Ahrimanic impulse, and through which they will feel more and more: we need the possibility of building a bridge between the two periods.

In this way we may inwardly comprehend the threefold human being. And we shall comprehend him still more accurately if we join to what I have said today something which I have repeatedly mentioned. It was impossible for the ancient Greeks who retained the remnants of ancient Mystery culture to be an atheist—although it happened in a few abnormal cases, but not to the degree it occurs today. Atheism has only arisen in more recent times, at least in its radical form. For the Greek who was really imbued with dialectics felt the Divine holding sway in thinking, even in thinking void of content.

If we know this and then look upon the appearance of atheism, upon the complete denial of the Divine, we shall find the reason for this atheism. Only those human beings, my dear friends—naturally, we need the methods of spiritual science in order to recognize this—only those human beings are atheists in whose organism something is organically disturbed. To be sure, this may lie in very delicate structural conditions, but it is a fact that atheism is in reality a disease.

This is the first thing we have to hold fast: atheism is a disease. For, if our organism is completely healthy, the harmonious functioning of its various members will bring it about that we ourselves sense our origin from the Divine—ex deo nascimur.

The second point, to be sure, is something different. Man may sense the Divine but may have no possibility to sense the Christ. In this respect we do not differentiate carefully enough today. We are satisfied with words, also in other spheres. For, if we test today the actual spiritual content of the view of many human beings of the occident and are not influenced by their words—they say they agree with Christian precepts, they believe in the freedom of the will, and so forth—we shall find that the whole configuration of their thinking contradicts what they thus express. Only through their participation in cultural life have they become accustomed to speak of Christ, of freedom, and so forth. In reality, my dear friends, a great number of human beings living among us are nothing but Turks; for the content of their faith is the same as the fatalistic content of faith of the Mohammedans—although this fatalism is often described as a necessity of nature. Mohammedanism is much more prevalent than we think. If we do not focus our attention upon the words but upon the spirit-soul content, we shall find that many Christians are Turks. They call themselves “Christians” even though they cannot find the transition from the God they sense to the Christ.

I only need to draw your attention to the classical example of a modern theologian, Adolf Harnack, who wrote the book, Wesen des Christentums. (Essence of Christianity.) Please, make the following test: scratch out in this book the name of Christ wherever it occurs and replace it by the name of God, this will change nothing in the content of this book. There is no necessity that what this man states should refer to the Christ. What he states refers to the general Father god who lies at the foundation of the world. There is no need at all that he should refer to the Christ with what he states. Wherever he proves something it is externally and internally untrue as he borrows the various communications from the Gospels. In the way he elaborates these communications there can be seen no reason whatsoever for connecting them with the Christ. We must acquire the possibility of conceiving of the Christ in such a way that we do not identify Him with the Father god. Many of the modern evangelical theologians are no longer able to differentiate between the general concept of God and the concept of the Christ. To be unable to find the Christ in life is a different matter from being unable to find the Father God—You know that it is not here a matter of doubting the Divinity of the Christ. It is a matter of clear differentiation, in the sphere of the Divine, between the Father God and the Christ God. This comes to expression in the soul of man. Not to find God the Father is a disease; not to find the Christ is a misfortune. For the human being is so connected with the Christ as to be inwardly dependent upon this connection. He is, however, also dependent upon that which has taken place as a historical event. He must find a connection with the Christ here upon earth, in external life. If he does not find it is a misfortune. Not to find the Father god, to be an atheist, is an illness. Not to find the Son God, the Christ, is a misfortune.

And what does it mean if we do not find the Spirit? To be unable to take hold of one's own spirituality in order to find the connection of one's own spirituality with the spirituality of the world signifies mental debility; not to acknowledge the Spirit is a deficiency of mind, a psychic imbecility.

Please remember these three deficiencies of the human soul constitution. Then we shall be able to continue tomorrow in the right way. Remember what I have told you today about the three kinds of consciousness; remember that it is a disease if we are an atheist, if we do not find the God out of whom we are born and whom we must find if we possess a completely sound organism; that it is a misfortune if we do not find the Christ; that it is a psychic deficiency if we do not find the Spirit.

This is also the way in which the paths that lead man to the Trinity differ from one another. It will become more and more necessary for mankind to enter into these concrete facts of soul life and not to remain stuck in general, nebulous notions. People are specially inclined today toward these nebulous notions. To replace this inclination by the inclination to enter into concrete facts of soul life is an essential task of our age.

When people pay attention to the interests of their soul, then the question to which our today's reflection is dedicated - the question of life and death - is certainly a recognized important and meaningful one, and the answer to this question must meet deep needs of the human soul life. Nevertheless, it is difficult to talk about such things in our present time, because it is difficult to strike a chord in the soul, because the concepts, views and ideas that our time has gained from seemingly established scientific concepts contradict what must be said from spiritual scientific research; and it is difficult to bring an unbiased approach to bear on these scientific concepts.

Now it could be that those who are trying to answer these questions today should be met with an unbiased approach, but one only has to pay attention to what is presented to us in the [contemporary scientific] literature and one will recognize how little healthy thinking, how few healthy concepts there are and have a broad audience.

The concept of “life” - let us take the “physiology” of one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, Huxley: here we have an exemplary book in terms of [contemporary] science, and in this book we find an examination of the concept of life. First, he talks about humans, and it is said that human life depends on the brain, lungs and heart, and if any of these elements do not function properly, then life is endangered. And then a curious transition is made. It is said that if you can, so to speak, deprive a person of his brain but artificially maintain the lungs and heart in operation, then life will continue. From a certain point of view, which is so popular today, this of course makes sense, but from the point of view of a world view that encompasses the whole human being, it does not make the slightest sense, because one would be grateful for a life that is not aware of the things one experiences. The true death occurs where this consciousness ends. Thus, the greatest naturalist of the present day is not at all capable of grasping the concept of “life” in the right way.

[In today's science, it is extremely easy to define life.] It is thought that life is the same in humans, animals and plants – everything is mixed up, while we should be clear about the fact that we have to consider each being in relation to this question at its [own level]. The most essential thing in the world view is ignored, because Huxley has become accustomed to looking at that in man which is most indifferent to human life and nature: the material of the body. And so he quotes Hamlet's saying quite seriously - and it is fitting for Hamlet, in his melancholy mood, to make such a statement and, looking at the material of the body, to pursue this material after the great Caesar has died, and to say:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay.
Might well plug a hole from the raw north;
Oh that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might wall up a wall against wind and weather.

And Huxley points to an [imaginable] “Negro slave Caesar” or a “chained dog Caesar” and says: Even in this slave or in this dog could be the atoms of the great Caesar. In this way, one pursues that which is most indifferent to human life, and is not aware that one should pursue that which shapes the substance in such a way that it conforms to humanity. Physics will soon abandon these fantasies about atoms – radium research has already shown that atoms disintegrate in the hands of man.

So you see: even at the heights of knowledge, one does not form any real concepts about what life and death are. But science is at an important turning point today, and those who do not work from buzzwords, but rather approach scientific knowledge and observations, see that science is already beginning to grasp the spirit.

It cannot grasp the concept, and perhaps it cannot do so because it has no proper concept of life. The biologist Weismann says: Only the experience that death occurs can convince of the same; one cannot grasp it from life itself. There is talk of the immortality of single-celled organisms. It is said that one such organism splits into two, continues to live as two, and this goes on and on. One speaks of a multiplication in number, and these innumerable beings are the same as the first being. One cannot speak of death in this case. But the fact that Weismann sought a definition of death in this way has led to a calamity, which is characteristic of the way it is understood in the present day and which has turned out strangely. He says that the essence of death is that a corpse is present. Contemporary natural science is only able to speak of life when it is no longer there, and wants to recognize the relationship between life and death by the dead, by the corpse. Verworn, Haeckel's student, says that the individual living beings die, but that life persists. They have resorted to all sorts of things to solve the riddle of life and death, but the confusion has only grown.

Spiritual science does not have it so convenient to be able to throw everything together - [end of transcript; continued after second transcript].

First of all, it should be noted that death in plants and animals is quite different from that in humans. It is a characteristic phenomenon of many plants that they die when they produce a new being; at the moment of fertilization, they pass over into a different form of existence. Until that moment, they were permeated by the etheric body. It is not difficult to make fun of such things; however, it has been shown time and again that anyone who is deeply involved in observing life phenomena cannot get by without the assumption of the etheric or life body. The dying off and withering is based on the fact that the plant follows the physical and chemical laws. Through the etheric body, the plant is withdrawn from the effect of the physical and chemical laws. Where does what is taken from the plant go? It passes over into the new plant; it is the stream of life that passes through the ranks of plants. Even more lives in the animal than the etheric body: in order for consciousness to arise in it, it is provided with an astral body, which is the builder of the organs of consciousness. — In humans, the I is added.

The difference between animals and humans can easily be determined; one must not look for the differences where they are not. The desire to completely erase the difference, as materialistic monism is doing now, did not yet exist in the last century. But the difference in the lower jaw was emphasized with pathos - [so] Kant. Goethe did not like this approach because he was able to think spiritually. He studied anatomy and physiology in Jena and proved that it was nonsense to claim this difference. He demonstrated the small ankle bone, [the premaxillary bone], also in humans, and showed that it was only fused. These things will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming booklet on anthroposophy. We should look for the difference in the spiritual realm. In animals, the scope of their abilities is tied to their organs and to what they inherit through birth. In humans, various activities remain open, for which they must first develop the ability. Animals have certain abilities that humans must first acquire through intellectual effort. The monkey has a predetermined equilibrium; humans must first learn to walk and stand. Equilibrium is not innate in them; only the mind gradually works on it. Goethe says:

The ancients said that animals are taught by their organs; I would add that human beings are likewise taught by their organs, but they have the advantage of being able to teach their organs in return.

Today, efforts are being made to trace all human abilities back to heredity, and then the help of far-back ancestors is enlisted. But what interests us about the individual person, what determines his or her particular position, his or her task in the world, cannot be explained by the line of ancestors. The unbiased educator can even recognize a clear boundary between inherited traits and those inner forces of the person that arise from previous lives. The fact that animals can also be trained is not a valid objection for someone who is able to see the essential. We ascribe to animals a group, species or generic soul. It is a fact, however, that we take just as much interest in the individual human being as we do in an entire species of animal. In the case of animals, the spiritual individuality does not come into existence in the individual being, but in the whole species. One can compare the individual feelings of a human being with those of an individual animal and the whole human being with the animal species. The animal lives as long as the group soul has not lost interest in the individual specimen. Weismann cannot find the reason for the death of an animal because he overlooks this fact. In the case of man, something comes into existence through birth that is not found in animals, plants or minerals.

There are thinkers, however, who have overcome the opinion that man is only composed of inherited forces. They recognize that an individuality precedes physical existence and shapes it, but they do not find the solution by assuming repeated lives on earth; see Immanuel Hermann Fichte, “Anthropology”:

Parents are not the producers in the full sense: they provide the organic material, and not only that, but at the same time that middle, sensual-comfortable, which shows itself in temperament, in the peculiar , in a particular specification of the drives, etc., as the common source of which “imagination” has been shown to exist in the broader sense that we have demonstrated. In all these elements of personality, the mixture and peculiar combination of the parents' souls is unmistakable; to explain this as a mere product of procreation is perfectly justified, especially if, as we have to assume, procreation is understood as a real soul process. But the actual, concluding center of the personality is missing here precisely; because with deeper penetrating observation it turns out that even those cozy peculiarities are only a shell and a tool to grasp the actually spiritual, ideal facilities of the human being, suitable to promote them in their development or to take, but not capable of letting them arise from themselves. [...] Each preexists according to its basic spiritual form; for, spiritually considered, no individual resembles another, any more than one animal species resembles any of the others.

Francesco Redi was the first to claim that living things can only arise from living things. Only an inaccurate observation could lead to the belief in earlier times that hornets arise from rotten oxen, bees from horse carcasses and wasps from donkeys. Just as today's natural science protests against such superstition, so the spiritual researcher must protest against the fact that the spiritual soul can be explained by the line of inheritance. Human individuality points back to itself in earlier earthly lives.

A well-known objection to this is: If a person does not remember, then the earlier experiences have no value. But there is also a time between birth and death that is not remembered: the first years after birth – and yet one was there; the sense of self was just not yet strong enough. The point in time at which self-awareness first arises is also the limit for remembering back. Thus this being-in-it of the self forms the possibility of remembering. When a person learns to remember, he will remember. It is not easy to grasp this; only through a very specific mode of perception, absolute equanimity, and no fear of fate: with this, our self makes a leap forward. The theory of inheritance has produced strange results, for example that a genius is at the end of an inheritance line and not at the beginning. This is no more surprising than a man who has fallen into the water being wet when you pull him out. We all know Goethe's joke:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then is
original about the whole creature?

Well, what is original about the “creature” is something that humanity already knows. Our body is built up from the powers that we have acquired from previous embodiments; but the soul abilities that we acquire now in this embodiment create the conditions for the next life. In this body a soul has developed that has greater abilities than in the previous life; and we feel a sense of gratitude that this body dies, because when the senses become dull, the soul is already building itself another body and can discard what is not up to the further development of the soul. Modern natural science is already very close to this assumption. It has already been found that we only tire from activities that involve our consciousness; that is something. A modern naturalist, Thomson, says: The soul is to the body as the rider is to his horse. That is the thought that ancient art expressed with the centaur. There are, of course, people who claim that the ancient peoples of the East saw the wild peoples riding through the mists as if they were one with their horses, and that this inspired their imagination to create the centaur.

The spiritual researcher does not look at the corpse, but at what the corpse leaves behind:

The smallest man on earth
A son of eternity,
Will conquer death in new life
.

Automated Translation

Those who represent spiritual science in the truly scientific sense, as it is meant here, cannot be surprised at the numerous biased judgments and rejections that it still encounters from all sides today. For they are able to see the scope and scope of the scientific results of the present and the recent past, which many people assume contradict this spiritual-scientific world view. On the part of those who believe that they stand on firm ground in the results of present-day research and can form a world picture for themselves that does not take into account the ideas of spiritual science, it is understandable that they do not yet engage in a real examination of what spiritual science has to say about its results. And so it turns out that it can be shown that spiritual science not only harmonizes with all the justified scientific results of the present day, but that these scientific results, when looked at closely, confirm what spiritual science has to say; and yet, one must find opponents, which becomes even more understandable when one considers the methods of scientific research in more concrete, specific things.

Not so long ago, Professor Dewar gave a lecture at the Royal Institution in which he attempted to speak about a future end state of earthly existence based on the view he has gained from the scientific results of the present. Let us consider for a moment what ideas this physicist, whose physical research has my full and unstinting approval, has about a final state of earthly existence, a state in which the human inhabitants of the earth, who now walk this earth, can no longer exist. Professor Dewar tries to utilize the physical ideas that are available to him today and finds, with a certain one-sided justification, that one must assume, according to the processes that can be observed by the physicist, that the earth is cooling down. And he calculates an end state in which the earth will have cooled down to, say, minus 200 degrees Celsius. He suggests that the Earth is evolving towards this final state. He is clear about the fact that everything that is now water in the oceans will of course have long since solidified; that the air that makes up our atmosphere today will be liquid, and that at a height of ten meters the Earth will be covered by this liquid air, in the form of a sea. The cold that will then prevail, he believes, will make much of what is on the earth today appear different. Of course, not only the temperature will change and with it the aggregate states of the individual bodies, but also many other things in the appearance of what will then be found on earth. Thus Professor Dewar, again quite correctly starting from physical ideas, finds that milk, which of course will then be solid, will glow in blue light. I don't know how this solid milk will be produced, but according to physical ideas it will shine in blue light. And there's more: egg white will be so luminous that you can read a newspaper by this light, which you can produce by painting the walls of the room with this egg white. I don't know who will read newspapers then, since I suspect that people will have long since frozen to death, but Dewar still uses this argument to form an idea of the former state of our Earth according to his world view, and many other things. On the liquefied air, which will then be the sea, there will only be very gaseous light bodies, hydrogen, helium, neon, krypton. He describes very nicely how one will feel quite differently then, because of course the resistance of these light gases will not be as strong as the resistance of the air for the present organism.

One can, by following the ideas of today's physics, paint this final state of the earth in great detail, and such a lecture is of course in our present time by the “non-authoritarian” people - one must say that out of courtesy, because today, of course, no one believes in authority - be said, because today, of course, no one believes in authority — is accepted as something extraordinarily significant, which finally shows how the “exact physicist” has to think about a valid world view.

If you recall what I said about the most important conditions necessary for spiritual scientific research, it was that through the inner exercises that the soul has to go through, it gradually comes to what I have called, using Goethe's words, the beholding through the eyes of the soul; that it has to undergo, in particular, a life in conceptions that are modeled on outer moral thinking. Not that it is to be confused with this, but the whole soul mood that the spiritual researcher has to develop within himself must be such that his own self relates to the ideas saturated with reality, which he must strive for, in the same way that a person relates externally to things that he considers morally good and to things that he considers morally bad. Here one is not satisfied with the fact that certain things can be designated as morally good and others as morally bad, but one knows that when one's affect speaks of the good, one must follow the good impulses, and when one's affect speaks of evil, one must suppress it. And when a person's soul is fully developed, he will act accordingly in his outer life. In this way, the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his own conceptual world must become a living one, not just a logical one. And in the life of the idea, of the concept, it happens that one cherishes certain concepts because they are capable of penetrating into reality. While other ideas announce themselves in such a way that they can be compared to what is to be avoided in the realm of moral life; they must, as it were, be pushed away from the horizon of consciousness. In this inner life of the soul, the ascent of the spiritual worlds is revealed, which can then be contemplated.

People like Professor Dewar are led away from such a striving for reality-imbued ideas precisely by their prejudices or, better, “prejudices”. For the spiritual researcher, it then becomes clear where the error actually lies in the structure of such a world view. In the style of this world picture, one could draw a comparison with regard to the final state of the earth if someone, on the basis of quite correct physical, chemical and physiological premises, calculates the development of, let us say, certain metabolic phenomena in man. One could interpret certain metabolic phenomena in the human body and calculate future conditions on the assumption that this metabolic process occurs in time at a constant rate, let us say, between the 30th and 40th year of the person's life. One observes individual processes and then calculates how these must take shape in 150 years according to the very correct assumptions of science. The only objection is that after 150 years people will no longer be alive, that the state will have already been reached where the soul has left the body and the body no longer follows the laws that are imposed on it by being filled with a soul, but instead follows external physical and chemical laws of the earth's environment.

If you say something like that today, you may be accused of saying something quite grotesque, something quite foolish. Nevertheless, anyone who does not thoughtlessly follow the scientific research of the present day, but who engages with the way in which certain assumptions are used to draw conclusions, knows that what I have just mentioned as a comparison is deeply justified. For it is absolutely true that after the time when milk would shine so beautifully in a blue light, when you could paint the walls with egg white so that you could read newspapers while doing so, the earth would be just as absent as the human body is after 150 years.

Today, the opinion is widespread that spiritual science forms lightly-dressed ideas out of thin air. And because of this assumption, the comparison of spiritual science and natural science naturally turns out in such a way that one says: on the one hand there is natural science, which reaches its results in an exact, thorough way; and on the other hand there is spiritual research, which indeed claims to be in full agreement with natural science, but which obtains its concepts through some kind of fantasy! Prejudices of this kind must first be overcome if spiritual science is to be further recognized. And spiritual scientific results are not to be had for nothing. One can study the difficulties that stand in the way of real results in spiritual research by considering people of knowledge who dedicate their lives to the struggle for real knowledge, who do not merely repeat what the course of external research is today, but who, being familiar with all the details of modern research, also strive for knowledge of the spiritual conditions of the world.

Recently, we were reminded of such a personality of knowledge, as the psychologist of the soul, whom I mentioned here recently in a different context, Franz Brentano, died a few days ago. The honored audience, who are here often, know that I rarely speak about myself. But today I would like to make one comment: that I really followed Franz Brentano's, the soul researcher, research path from its beginnings to his later struggles. And with him in particular, one could see very clearly how, for someone striving for knowledge of the spiritual world, it is difficult in the present day to achieve full strength, insofar as this is possible in everyone, even in today's age, due to opposing prejudices. Many obstacles stood in the way of Franz Brentano, which arose precisely from the fact that he did not live in the scientific age, which would have been his good fortune, but in the prejudices of the scientific age. And so it came about that Brentano, after writing some brilliant, profound works on Aristotle, then published a “psychology” in 1874. It was intended as the first volume of a multi-volume work in which he sought to ascend to an understanding of the actual life of the mind and soul. He never got beyond the first volume, and only in smaller writings did Brentano go on to add, I would say, a few splinters of what he had to say.

To be sure, Brentano's outer life was full of changes; and if one regards things only superficially, one could perhaps say that this changing outer life prevented Franz Brentano from finding the composure necessary to complete his “Psychology.” But that is not the case; rather, it turned out that Brentano failed because of the riddles of the life of the soul itself. He began to present them in the first volume of his “Psychology” in such a way that the path would have led him precisely to the point where the spiritual science that is meant here stands. But he could not get through because of his adherence to scientific prejudices. And since he did not want to develop mere concepts, but concepts containing reality, he left the whole matter alone.

Now, even at the time when he wrote his Psychology, Brentano started from the principle that the inner mental life can admittedly be perceived but not observed. It is a saying that seems as well-founded as possible for the simple reason that we ourselves are the mental life that we develop. So one can say: When any representation arises, we must have it; we cannot confront it and observe it. When we observe it, it has already passed, and so it must first be brought up again from memory. These and other difficulties are present. Therefore Brentano thinks that one can perceive the mental life, but not observe it. But he has not seen that if one could observe as he means, namely that this observation would be completely in line with the model of natural science, then one would never arrive at a science of the mental. If one could observe in this way, that is, if one's soul life were at a standstill, one would perceive nothing in this soul life but mirror images, mirror images of a reality. From these mirror images, just as little could be found out about reality as one can grasp the images of a mirror or the like. One cannot observe the soul life at all if one only wants to observe it in the immediate present. That is why I had to say here a few weeks ago: What matters when observing the soul and spirit is not that you, so to speak, place yourself in opposition to this soul and spirit and then observe it like a scientific object, but what matters is that you bring about such inner processes as, for example, this is: one gives oneself, as one says, to a very specific idea in a meditative state, again and again, but one then also observes how this idea works without being present; one hands over, so to speak – there is no need to decide on this from the outset – what one imagines to the objective course of the world. Whether it is pushed down into the so-called subconscious or handed over to some other sphere of the world's existence will become apparent in the further course of the performance. One lets what one has called into consciousness take effect without being present. And if one has then performed the other amplifications of consciousness described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then one does indeed find that one cannot observe this soul-spiritual that reigns in oneself as Brentano wanted, but that one must observe it by considering it in its workings in time. The soul reveals itself only when we observe it in the course of a person's life; not by confronting it in the present, but by seeing how this soul works between birth and death. And this observation of the soul takes place with the same exactitude as external scientific research.

As I said, if I may add a personal note, I may perhaps say that in the last two lectures here I spoke about the relationship of the soul to the nervous human being, to the breathing human being, to the metabolic human being, and I tried, in full harmony with science, to show a result that I believe can be of tremendous importance for understanding the interrelation of the world. I have not formulated what I said in the last two lectures in this way before, but it is now exactly thirty-five years since I, as a very young man in Vienna, began the research that could ultimately lead to expressing what I have in the last two lectures. And I have been unremitting in this research. I have tried to pursue this research as I have also described recently: by handing over the ideas to objectivity, to see what becomes of the ideas themselves when they work spiritually without one being present. One will just realize that spiritual research is just as exact as external scientific research. This may be necessary if the circle of those who see in this spiritual science what is necessary for the future development of humanity is to become larger. It turns out, however, that in the path of this spiritual research, the ideas in the soul do not proceed as abstractly as they do when one does external scientific research, or when one reflects in the way one is accustomed to with regard to the external life. Rather, I would say that on the other side, when we are no longer personally present, the images that are pursued in their own course connect with the spiritual life, with the spiritual events, through their own inner essence, in a way that is different from the way they connect with the external world of the senses. Only in full swing, when one participates, can the spiritual world be observed.

An observation, as I now want to cite it, will, if undertaken without the prerequisite of an inner schooling of spiritual research activity, lead to nothing right, just as when working in a chemical laboratory, for those who cannot handle things, they lead to nothing; only after one has created the inner experimental things does the matter show up in the right light. What appears in its true form is what some thinkers have suspected, although they have hardly progressed beyond mere suspicion. All the soul life that we develop by coming into contact with the outside world, whether inanimate or animate, all this soul life, which usually lies within our consciousness, is accompanied by another soul life. And anyone who has created the inner conditions to observe such things correctly inwardly can become aware of how the soul — Eduard von Hartmann would call it: in the unconscious, but this unconscious, which I mean here, differs from Hartmann's precisely in that it can become conscious — is constantly working in this unconscious. Alongside the currents of the conscious soul life, there is another that constantly flows along, which - if one can direct the soul's gaze at it - is not subject to the laws that govern the external soul life, and which naturally correspond to the course of natural events. This soul life is also subject to laws, but they do not correspond to the laws that prevail in the ordinary conscious soul life. For the spiritual researcher, this subconscious soul life comes to the surface. For ordinary life, it also comes to the surface, but one does not know that it is coming to the surface. For example, one often believes that one has formed a particular idea or thought, and assumes that the whole process lies in the ordinary conscious soul life. It does not, but emerges from the subconscious soul life. The spiritual researcher can now observe how these two currents of soul life work together. And basically, when one speaks of clairvoyance not in a superstitious or theoretically mystical sense, but in an exact sense, this clairvoyance is nothing other than the ability to truly raise this parallel soul life and to be able to convince oneself that it is indeed subject to its laws, but that these laws are different from those of the conscious soul life. He who rises in a healthy way to such observations, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, will not be driven into any kind of morbid or pathological states. On the contrary, what I indicated in the last lecture will happen here: he will make his soul life healthier and healthier if he proceeds correctly. But such a spiritual researcher will acquire a certain ability of the subconscious soul life to interact with the ordinary soul life. And while in ordinary life, for example when one listens when someone reads something to one, one believes that one is now completely absorbed in what is being read to one, as a truly trained spiritual researcher one no longer thinks so. One knows that the subconscious soul life runs away and often goes completely different ways than the ways of the ideas that are being read. And if one has sufficient skill not to become inattentive while listening, then between two words that one hears, things arise from the subconscious that are just as much the product of the soul as the things of the conscious soul life, but that run parallel to the stream of the conscious soul life; things of a completely different soul life. Certain thinkers have sensed this, for example by pointing out that a person not only dreams while sleeping, but that the dream life actually continues throughout the day while awake, only to be overshadowed by the ordinary conscious mental life. This is also true – and yet, again, it is not true. It is only something similar to the dream life. The dream life is only a chaotic shadow of what is going on. In the subconscious, there is a parallel current that is as fleeting for today's ordinary soul life as dreams are, and can therefore be compared to dreams, but which arises from a spiritual reality.

By observing these two currents — the soul-spiritual and the soul bound to external nature — in their interaction, one gradually learns to ascend to a conception that cannot be substantiated in this one lecture in its details, but which is to be presented according to its result. One learns to recognize that the ordinary life of the soul, as it is rightly described by the physiological psychologists of the present day, by the type of Theodor Ziehen, for example, whom I recently quoted, has as its necessary condition the outer physical life of the body. If we now pursue this outer physical life with the means of spiritual research, we find that this outer physical life and with it the soul experiences of ordinary consciousness bound up with it are connected with those effects that take place between Earth and Sun. These effects are only of a refined nature, but they are similar to the effects of the sun's surroundings, say, on the plant world and the like. We learn to recognize the real connection between the tools of our ordinary conscious soul life and the earth and sun, I could also say: of our whole world system, as astronomy or astrophysics speaks of this world system. But we also learn to recognize that the course of the other currents is fundamentally different from the laws that are implanted in the physical and thus also in the soul of the human being through the sun-earth life. In its own laws it is not connected with the laws of the processes of which the human being is conscious in body and soul. On the contrary, it often contradicts them. Whereas in the outer life of the soul the psychologist speaks of association, of the bringing together of ideas, here the inner subconscious life of the soul carries out a separation, and vice versa.

These are only hints at the far-reaching differences between external and internal experience. And if we recognize the connection between the soul and the body to a much greater extent, and again the connection between the human body and the whole solar-earthly existence, then we also get ideas about a final state of the earthly existence itself; ideas whose formation is difficult to describe even in today's language. I can only say: Everyone knows how the astronomer can calculate a future star constellation from a present one, how one can calculate future solar and lunar eclipses. What happens here through calculation happens when one finds the right relationship to what one learns about the two currents that I have indicated, in their relation to the final state of the earth. What is calculated there is seen inwardly here. We are not dealing with vague analogies in the sense intended by Fechner, but with a real inner vision of the final state of the earth. For one learns to recognize that something, which of course cannot be expounded in its details in a lecture, turns out to be a necessary result. I will lead up to this result by way of a comparison.

It is true that the way in which man as a physical being goes through the world is only possible because the soul — I do not want to say permeates him, lest one believe that I am making some kind of hypothesis — proves effective in him. If it can no longer prove itself effective, then this body follows different laws than those it follows between birth and death. It then follows the laws that it must follow because of its relationship to the external physical environment of the earth. It merges completely with its own laws into the surrounding laws of the earth. I would like to compare this with the result that emerges with regard to the life of our earth. Our Earth is progressing in its evolution, but in doing so it is undergoing inner transformations. These transformations cannot be known unless one is aware that the one real factor in the process of our Earth is what all spiritual beings perceive in their subconscious and develop in the manner indicated. Just as one cannot comprehend the development of a plant if one cannot form an idea of how the plant germ of the next year is prepared in the plant of this year in all its growth laws, if one does not see in all the shooting up of the leaves and so on the development of the fruit germ of the next plant, so one cannot comprehend our earth if one only applies the physical laws to it, as the geologist does. For what we experience in our subconscious manifests itself as something germinal in our earthly existence. If I may use an expression that is not quite correct, we will understand each other: it works and lives with us, but it is something that is not at all connected with the relationships of earth and sun. And so it turns out: just as a point in time occurs for the physical human being when his soul experience is separated from the physical, and the physical passes into the outer earthly environment, so a point in time occurs for the earth when the earth-sun effects cease. Just as the soul effects in the body cease from within, so the sun effects on the earth cease from without. Just as the body and soul, when separated, cannot be mixed, but dissolve, so from a certain point in time the Earth will become an impossible body in the universe. And just as the human body merges into its earthly environment, into its physical and chemical laws, so from a certain point in time the Earth will merge into the laws that we now follow in the indicated current.

As you can see, the reverse is the case with the earth and with man. The body of man passes over into the earthly environment. That which is earthly-solar in the earth passes over into the spiritual. Then, when this moment occurs, the lawfulness that we can perceive in the parallel current, which does not at all agree with the external laws of nature, prevails in this earthly body, which will then have died in the way I have described. And here the peculiarity comes to light, which today still looks like a crazy paradox: that the laws that we call natural laws today, are only valid until the end of the earth. And if someone tries, like Professor Dewar, to apply these laws beyond the end of the earth, he makes the same mistake as someone who calculates the laws of metabolism beyond physical death, for 150 years. The Earth will no longer exist at the point in time calculated by Professor Dewar because it will have been transformed into spiritual substance. And all spiritual and soul substance that can be observed in the second current, as I have described it, is absorbed into the spiritual and soul substance of the Earth, and lives within it, towards other formations of the world, towards future formations of the world that cannot be described at this time. But we are looking forward to a future final state of our earth, in which this earth will have gone through its death in such a way that it will have merged with a spiritual realm. Not even solidified milk will glow bluish, and egg white will serve as a candle, but everything that is now on earth under the law of the earth and sun, under what we today call natural laws, will one day live under completely different laws, under spiritual and soul laws, which will arise in the way I have described, from our own inner life. For we are already connected today, in a germinal way, with that which the earth is to become, through which the earth is immortal. Therefore, what lives down there in the soul life seems like a dream. It is precisely the germ of future worlds, and we are immortal because we live with this immortality of the general spirit.

In this way, one comes to a much more concrete view of the spiritual world than if one uses the abstract buzzwords of “mystical pantheism” and so on, which so many people still use so much today. In the spiritual science meant here, one should not seek a vague, nebulous pantheism, but concrete results based on exact spiritual and psychological observation.

The general thinking of our time is still averse to such reality-saturated conceptions, to which the spiritual researcher must advance in order to arrive at a world picture that encompasses all reality that we can attain, not just the outer physical. Anyone who has consciously followed the course of education in recent decades has been able to see how people basically do not love to immerse themselves in reality with their concepts. To grasp the living spiritual life by wanting to come to ideas that themselves live in a spiritual world - without being personally present, but only observing the inner life - is something that people in recent decades have not taken the time to do at all. Hence these numerous people, whom I would like to mention, the 'button counters' of spiritual science. I would like to call them button counters for the following reason: if you have consciously grown up with what many people have been concerned with as important concepts in recent decades, you can certainly understand that it has happened that way, but you also have to grasp it. For several centuries, certain people have repeatedly reflected on the social coexistence of people. Some have come to more individualistic concepts, others to more social concepts. Individualism and socialism have played a role in the most diverse variations in recent times when considering human coexistence, which must be thought of as imbued with the spirit. To those accustomed to concepts saturated with reality, this splashing about among all the socialists and individualists of recent times and down to our days, when one follows the lines of thought by which one became an individualist or a socialist, really does not appear to be based on deeper spiritual grounds, but rather as if one were counting at the buttons: Individualist-Socialist, Individualist-Socialist, and would have counted which button it stops at; only that it is not so noticeable when this button counting happens in thoughts. You splash around in such concepts that are not at all suitable for reaching into true reality, like these conceptual shadows that have been so idolized as individualism and socialism in recent decades.

But there is a very serious background to this, and it is connected with much that is already extraordinarily important for certain conditions in the present. For man does not always need to know how the general world picture, which arises from his ideas, feelings and will impulses, is connected with ordinary daily life, with social life. But he will cause tremendous harm if he, in particular, stands at an important point and proceeds from ideas and feelings that are not steeped in reality. When he theorizes about mere scientific concepts of a world view, as Professor Dewar does, these concepts appear to spiritual science as delusions, which he imposes on his listeners. It is one thing to view a world view from a scientific point of view, but if someone with the same spirit is involved in social work and transfers the same kind of spiritual to this external aspect, then it has a highly destructive effect, and often in life we look for what is actually missing in completely different places than where it should be sought. Because everything that happens on earth is connected. And just as a doctor sometimes has to diagnose an illness as something completely different from what one would initially believe after a superficial examination, so too does the person who has an overview of the situation sometimes have to look for the origins of some illnesses and some devastating effects in completely different places than what appears to be the case after a superficial examination. I would like to give an example of this, but how should I do it in this day and age, when, precisely with regard to this example, I could be seen to be allowing myself to be influenced in my judgment by the events of the times that affect us all so painfully? But precisely with regard to this example, I have a way of avoiding this appearance. In 1913, in Helsingfors, that is before the war, I gave a series of lectures on a completely different subject, but in the course of which, to mention just one example, I had to make an allusion to Wilson, and I will read out what I said about Wilson at the time in a different context. You will also see from what I said at the time that I certainly did not fail to recognize a certain significance, and also a certain spirit, that can be attributed to Wilson, but you will also see that it was not necessary, in order to form an opinion about this man, to first let the events of the last few years or weeks sink in – perhaps even – as was necessary with some people. I said at the time:

“There are some very remarkable essays that have appeared recently by the President of the United States of North America, Woodrow Wilson. There is an essay on the laws of human progress.”

Of course, Woodrow Wilson was already talking about the laws of true human progress back then.

"In it, he explains quite nicely and even ingeniously how people are actually influenced by the prevailing thinking of their age. And he explains very ingeniously how, in the age of Newton, when everything was full of thoughts about gravity, one felt the Newtonian theories, which in reality only applied to the heavenly bodies, to have an effect on social and even state concepts. One feels the after-effects of thoughts about gravity in particular in everything. This is really very ingenious, because one only needs to read up on Newtonism and one will see that words like attraction and repulsion, etc. are used everywhere. Wilson emphasizes this very ingeniously. He says how inadequate it is to apply purely mechanical concepts to human life, to apply concepts of celestial mechanics to human affairs, by showing how human life at that time was virtually embedded in these concepts, how these concepts influenced state and social life everywhere. Wilson rightly criticizes this application of purely mechanical laws in the age in which, so to speak, Newtonism has brought the whole of thought under its yoke. You have to think differently, says Wilson, and now constructs his concept of the state in such a way that, after he has demonstrated this from the age of Newtonism, Darwinism now peeps out everywhere.

What I wanted to say at the time was that Wilson now sees, by looking at a previous age: Newton was included in the concepts of the state, and people now followed that. What does he do? He now includes Darwinism because it is a comrade of the age of Darwin, just as people were contemporaries of Newton at the time. He is doing exactly the same thing, but he is naive enough not to notice it.

If all sorts of people have played with the concepts of individualism and socialism, and they have remained playing, well, that may be so; but if, with such defective thinking, as I wanted to say at the time, an important position is managed, then that has a completely different meaning. If you want to get to know our age, then you will have to get to know how to work with concepts that are divorced from reality, that are only shadows of something, where these concepts are justified, as in Wilson's case these social concepts, how to work with such shadowy, unrealistic concepts. One may still be quite far from such insight; but one will not understand reality and come to no conception of the world that corresponds to this reality, if one is not able to see through what kind of conceptual shells are used today in science and in the social fields. That is why people are least able to gain an insight when it comes to entering the real spiritual world and gaining a world view from it or through it. There are people who, whether through their own inner development or through external circumstances, are seized by the longing to know the spiritual. But where do they often look for it? They cannot bring themselves, because of a certain inner laziness of thought, to seek the spirit where it can really be found: on the path of the spirit itself. This is difficult, although, even if things have taken 35 years, it is entirely possible, when the results come to light, to find them immediately plausible. Above all, it requires that the inner soul be brought into such a mood and state that it is often not appreciated by exact researchers of the present day. This can be seen most clearly when an exact researcher who rightly has a reputation in the field of external natural science delves into the spiritual world.

Among the books that have caused the greatest sensation in the English-speaking world in recent months, apart from war literature, is the one that the naturalist Sir Oliver Lodge has written as his latest book. This book has a special reason. The reason for this is that the son of the naturalist Lodge, Raymond Lodge, was killed on the Western Front in August 1915. Now, Oliver Lodge always had a certain inclination towards the spiritual world. The death of his son added to his desire to penetrate into the spiritual world. And so it came about - I can only tell these things briefly, so some things will be inexplicable, but I still want to tell the case to confirm what is connected with the attracted train of thought - it came about like this: Even before the son fell, Sir Oliver Lodge had been made aware from America that something had happened to this son. When you read what was written to the Lodge family from America, indirectly through a medium – as these personalities are called – then a scientifically minded person – and Oliver Lodge is that, too – or let us say, a spiritually minded person , the impression is: Yes, what has been written to him could mean anything; at best, it can be interpreted to mean that Frederick Myers, the editor of a work on the scientific study of the soul's life, who died long ago, would take care of Sir Oliver Lodge's son. But the matter could be interpreted in one way or another. If Raymond Lodge had not fallen, it could be interpreted that Myers would protect him from death in battle; after death, it could be interpreted that he would be his helper and guide in the hereafter. I do not want to go into what is behind such things; they are not as harmless as one might think. Now Raymond Lodge fell. And Sir Oliver Lodge - who would completely refuse to intrude on the ways into the spiritual world to get to the immortal soul, which is represented in the spiritual science meant here - he came into contact with mediums that were, in his opinion, beyond reproach , and then it soon turned out for him that through these mediums the soul of Raymond Lodge communicated through the mediums, telling all kinds of things: how she was now living, what her wishes were with regard to the father, the family and so on. I would not mention this matter if I only wanted to relate what ordinary spiritualists report, because they lack objectivity; even where Lombroso and Richet are involved, objectivity still prevails. But Oliver Lodge is really a person who knows the exact methods, and who therefore also proceeds exactly in such a matter, so that also someone who has enjoyed an education in the methods of natural science in his scientific thinking and research, and who has learned to to develop real conscientiousness in natural science, which basically the spiritual researcher should also have, could have a certain respect for the exactness with which Oliver Lodge proceeds in describing the things he shares in his thick book. And while in the case of ordinary reports, it is of course always immediately apparent, if one is somehow even a little familiar with the things, where the observers have not seen anything, where the messages are missing about the arrangements and so on, with Sir Oliver Lodge one sees that a person is reporting who really knows how to handle and describe scientific methods.

Now, one thing that Sir Oliver Lodge states has made a particularly great and deep impression. I will not tell the other things, because they are, despite being stated exactly, according to the pattern of other sessions. But the one that made a particularly great impression is this: Sir Oliver Lodge relates that through the impeccable mediums – I can tell all this because you know I do not represent this direction – it has come out that Raymond Lodge had himself photographed with comrades before he was killed on the Western Front. And now Raymond Lodge's soul describes the picture through the medium, and in three photographs, as they are taken one after the other by the photographer, where, when one group is photographed, the same group sits, and only sometimes one, while in one shot he put his hands on his knees, then puts them on the chair or on the shoulder of the neighbor. With great accuracy, this medium describes, let us say, these photographs. While one – Oliver Lodge also admits this – could find some connections in the other things, so that some kind of quiet suggestion, as it usually is with such things, took place, or some other process that every spiritual researcher knows to transfer to the medium, what memories, reminiscences, especially subconscious reminiscences of the deceased Raymond Lodge came to life – while it went with everything else that was there, it did not go with this incident, because nobody could know about these photographs. These photographs were taken in the very last days before Raymond Lodge died, and had not yet arrived in England. Nobody knew anything about them, neither any of the family nor the medium. And indeed, a fortnight or three weeks later, the three photographs arrived, exactly as described by the medium. Now this naturally became an experimentum crucis for him, a proof of the cross, because here it was directly demonstrable: Nobody could know anything about it, it came from a world that is not the world in which Raymond Lodge used to live before he went through the gate of death.

This has not only had a great effect on Sir Oliver Lodge, who had a great affinity for such things, but it has made a great impression on the whole audience interested in such things. Oliver Lodge was indeed completely convinced and was also able to convince his family members who had previously been skeptical; the circle then expanded more and more. It is now strange how satisfying it is, especially today, not to have to face discomfort in order to penetrate into reality, how one can easily form ideas about the spiritual world in a light-hearted way.

The spiritual researcher knows that if something comes out in this way, it is certainly not a manifestation of a truly spiritual world. That is why in the last lecture I called what comes to light in this way the most soulless of all, the thing from which the spirit has been driven out completely, although it can sometimes imitate the spirit. When something comes out in this way, it is related to the spirit as the dead shell of a mussel is to the living oyster, when the oyster is outside. The shell comes out, the most material, the most sensual, the most sensual remnant, which sometimes reproduces the spiritual in its forms. For the spirit must be sought in a spiritual way. But how could Oliver Lodge, one may say this if one is familiar with real spiritual research, how could he yield to such dilettantism? Simply because he lacks the reality-saturated concepts to judge such things. If he had read just a little of the abundant German literature on these matters, which of course is also little considered today, but which is there, especially from the first half of the nineteenth century, is there in great numbers, then he would have known that, admittedly, he is not dealing with anything other than what was relegated to the field of deuteroscopy in German intellectual life in the first half of the nineteenth century. There have been reports of phenomena such as the often-cited case of someone who, through a particular state of mind — even Schopenhauer mentioned it — in a kind of dream consciousness, comes to the conclusion: Then and then you will have an accident here and here. Some somnambulists describe such accidents in the not-too-distant future so precisely that, for example, if they fall off a horse, they describe the scene in great detail. We are not dealing here with something that could expand human insight into the real spiritual world, but with a mere expansion of perception that relates to sensory reality. We are dealing with the transgression of the ordinary perception of space and time, which is entirely possible within certain limits. Now, in the case of Raymond Lodge, there was obviously nothing different than what happens in such cases. What did the medium tell Oliver Lodge? Nothing more than what happened afterwards. Although the photographs had not yet arrived at the time the medium described them, they did come later. Oliver Lodge and his family were waiting for them. There was an event that occurred; just as a somnambulist dreams, in a fortnight he will fall off a horse. So it is not something that would show someone who is truly a spiritual researcher the way into a real spiritual world, but rather something that relates to the real spiritual world as the oyster shell relates to the oyster. It reproduces it. But in what comes to light, can one suspect something, when one takes the things seriously? But because it is more comfortable than the actual entering into the spiritual world, many a person will love to investigate something of the spiritual world in this way. But one has to do with something much more belonging to materiality in a spiritualistic phantom than one has to do with the real bodily human being. This is precisely the peculiar thing about the way in which real spiritual research must become part of people's educational lives, that this spiritual research will deduce from the aberrations to which even great thinkers are exposed, people who are quite familiar with the exact methods of external research into nature.

Now, just as one must say that the laws of nature, as we abstract them from natural phenomena and apply them to the world, are not applicable in the characterized way for the final state of the earth, since the earth will change with all human soul and spiritual life as it has been described, so one can also say that for the initial state. There one must indeed learn how memory - that is, the life of representations that already live in our soul by themselves, so that we are no longer present - actually relates to the bodily life. And if one studies this in the same way as I have indicated for the soul life that one needs for the final state on earth, then one finds that an initial state of the earth cannot be calculated in the same way as current geologists do, who simply take the physical laws and then calculate what the earth might have looked like according to these physical laws so many millions of years ago. You could also take the laws of digestion and calculate what a seven-year-old child might have looked like as a physical being forty years ago. In this case, one would use exactly the same method as the geologist uses when calculating the state of the earth millions of years ago. It is really the case that the calculation is completely correct, and that the physical methods are also correctly applied, when one calculates from the metabolism of a seven-year-old child what that child might have looked like forty years ago – only it was not yet alive at that time. And so it is just not right that for the point in time for which the geologist gives such beautiful things – as I mentioned earlier, that Professor Dewar gives for the final state of the earth – the earth was not yet there. It had not yet emerged from its different life in the sun, it had not yet emerged, it had not yet lifted itself out. And for the initial state of the earth – I can only give a brief description of this – the situation is as follows: As we have to do with the final state of the earth, with the rising of the material earth in the sun-earth-law into a spiritual-soul state, so that we carry our own immortal-supernatural with us through future world cycles, so at the beginning of the earth's development we have to do with a descent - if one wants to use the expression, which is not very beautiful, of a spiritual-soul-like one; but in such a way that it does not become more spiritual, but is taken up, as it were, by what comes from the solar, so that within the material the spiritual-soul-like comes to realization, one can already say: is embodied. Here we have to do with the reverse process: with the origin of a spiritual from a spiritual that surrounds itself, envelops — “wraps,” one might say, in contrast to “develops” — in a material from the world of space, from the world of time. And here again we notice that for the beginning of the evolution of the earth the laws hold good which I have already mentioned for the parallel currents of the subconscious, and that the ordinary laws of mathematics come to an end there. However grotesque it may sound, it is nevertheless true. And I would like to say: Kant grasped a quarter-truth about this, in that he showed in his antinomies how it can be conceived that for certain initial and final conditions, it is possible to think in such and such a way; but just because he found a quarter-truth, the whole thing had more of a paralyzing effect on the world picture of reality than that it could have been beneficial. For Kant would not only have had to believe that space and time are tied to the human faculty of perception, but he would have been able to recognize, if he had penetrated to the real spiritual research, how that which lives in man as spiritual-soul is closely connected with the spiritual spiritual-soul happenings of the entire outer existence, first of all of the earthly existence, and how a thorough study of the spiritual-soul life yields a truly spiritual-scientific picture of the world, so that one can say: our world of space and time is bound to man's intercourse with the earth. Therefore, what we can discern through them is only valid from the beginning of the earth to the end of the earth. And one must get to know the other laws that are in the other current if one wants to talk about the beginning and end of the earth in such a way that a true, real picture of the world emerges. Then one recognizes that the human soul is older than the earth; that the human soul was already present in that spiritual, which has wrapped itself up, involved itself in that law of the earth, which comes about in the intercourse of the earth with the life of the sun.

Spiritual science thus goes beyond the world view that I recently mentioned, which made such a repulsive impression on Herman Grimm, who of course did not know these connections. I have already shared Herman Grimm's words at the time, I have shared them many times before, but they are so interesting that one can always let them affect one's soul again. For in them we have words that prove how a healthy, sensitive soul must relate to such worldviews, as Professor Dewar has presented them to the world in the manner described, and how they are so firmly entrenched in the education of the present that one is naturally still considered a real crank today if one agrees with such words as Herman Grimm has expressed. Herman Grimm was forgiven for that. They would say: oh, he is an art historian, he is – well, he is not generally familiar with the rules of exact natural science and its results; it is of no consequence. That is a good reason. But the serious spiritual scientist will not be forgiven if he cites Grimm's words, which he said in connection with Goethe's world view:

How could the children not believe it, how could they not indulge in this scientific fantasy! It's so easy to show. One need only pose as a teacher, take a 'droplet' formed from a certain substance, take a piece of card and slide it into the equatorial plane of the droplet, stick a needle in at the top, place it on the water; then turn it and show how the little droplets are formed, how the little world systems are formed. How could anything be more conclusive than this, that the great cosmic structure also came into being according to the Kant-Laplace theory? Unfortunately, sometimes it is good to forget oneself, but in this case, when one is conducting scientific experiments, one must not forget oneself – namely, the teacher forgot himself. Because if he had not turned, then none of the world system would have come about. If he wanted to describe this process correctly, he would have to think of a giant professor standing in space.

In short, the fact that today, despite being generally accepted by the scientific community, Herman Grimm can say:

Thus spiritual science provides a different picture of the world, one that can incorporate the spiritual and soul into the beginning and end state of the earth in such a way that this incorporation is truly supported, like any other scientific fact. The only difference is that these things must be investigated from the spiritual-mental side, and cannot be worked out on the basis of what applies only to the material processes of the earth, as long as the earth is this material body that it is.

People today are not even aware of the conceptual shadows in which they actually live. Only sometimes does one think a little more sharply; he then does not come away from these conceptual shadows, but he thinks a little more sharply and sometimes comes to very strange assertions. For example, Eduard von Hartmann, who could not get away from physical ideas, but who could think. Hartmann came to think about physical ideas as well. He thought in terms of these physical ideas and had the courage to express what arose from them. Take a very nice saying:

“That there is a real nature, and that the laws established by physics apply in this real nature, is itself only a hypothesis.”

What is actually behind this? That is to say: physics establishes laws; if you really think about it, the whole of nature is only a hypothesis. It is really only a hypothesis, because with the physical concepts you cannot grasp reality. And if those who form a world picture out of physical concepts do not – thank God – see the real nature illuminated by the sun, it would remain a hypothesis for them. Only external reality counts for them.

In the spiritual realm, one must achieve reality by being fully active in penetrating it. This is not so comfortable. It does not present itself automatically, like external nature. But a saying such as Eduard von Hartmann's shows quite clearly that the concepts prevailing in the physical field are also powerless to reach real nature. For he who can really think, who knows that nature is out there, but what the physicist wants to absorb from it, that only gives a hypothetical nature.

It is a momentous thought that Hartmann expresses, although it is, of course, a completely insane thought. It will come about that spiritual science enters into the educational life of humanity because the conditions for it are present. But some things will have to be understood again that are no longer understood today, that are only taken in by the sound of the words.

I have often referred to the first step of the view that one can arrive at when observing this second current of human soul life, which can become conscious, as imaginative presentation. One must penetrate to this imaginative presentation, which is not a form of self-conceit but a life in spiritual reality, in order to grasp reality at all. We shall have to understand such ideas that can inwardly quicken this penetration into spiritual reality. We shall have to understand not merely the sound of the words, but their deeper inner value, such as can be found by the hundred in the fragments, thrown down just so, of a great spiritual man who died only young: Novalis. And from what has been said today about life, death and immortality in the universe, one will get an idea of the depth that lies, for example, in such a word of Novalis: “We will only become physicists when we make imaginative substances and forces the measure of natural substances and forces.” That is to say, when we can also recognize from the imaginative, when we approach external nature.

Of course, people's attention had to be diverted from the spiritual for a time so that great progress could be made in the external, natural sciences. But man must not cut himself off from the spiritual world. The connection to real spiritual research must be found again.

Now, one should not think that one must break with all reason, with all that is sound, if one does not give in to the ideas that arise from a false interpretation of physics, as given by a man like Professor Dewar. However, the matter also has a moral aspect in a sense. And with regard to much, a different scientific attitude will have to prevail than the one that often dominates scientific people today if one wants to approach the study of the spiritual worlds in the right way in order to find that inner peace of mind that makes it possible to experience the spiritual world in such a way that the spiritual world becomes objective, that the spiritual world is really there before the soul's eye, not as a vague pantheism or mysticism. One will also have to develop certain things with regard to the inner eye of the soul, above all a certain composure and humility with regard to inner experience. I do not mean it in the sentimental sense, as some who call themselves mystics do, because I think nothing of all these stereotyped labels. But one will have to acquire a certain mood. For the tendency of the times has also become similar to those concepts, which only cling to the surface, and people believe that they are developing particular idealism when they use the usual shadow concepts to do a little abstraction from external sensual reality. We shall have to develop a different attitude, for even the attitude of science has surrendered to mere clinging to the outer life, an attitude which I will now summarize in a few words at the end. Not my words, but the words that a sensible German personality used when she translated a spiritual-scientific book — the sensible Matthias Claudius. Let me conclude with his words, in which I would like to show, so to speak, the soul power that must enter into the inner mood as a soul attitude if one is to go beyond such scientific delusions, as I have also characterized them today. Matthias Claudius said on this occasion, when he translated a book from the field of spiritual science - as was appropriate for the time, not as it would be for the present time - he said in his preface:

“... whether a man is vain and foolish about a moustache or about metaphysics and Henriade, or hates and envies a man because of a larger pumpkin” — he means the head “or because of the invention of differential and integral calculus, in short, whether one lets oneself be held and hindered by one's five yoke oxen” – he means the five senses – ‘or by one's polyhistorey’ – that is, by one's external erudition – ‘on the rope, seems basically the same and not different.’

And since inner soul life is really very closely connected with the soul's attitude, it will be necessary to pour out a yearning for an exploration of the spiritual world, as expressed in these beautiful words of Matthias Claudius. For when a person has realized within himself what is implied in these words, then he really does have a relationship with the spiritual world through his feelings. And that is a preparation for clearing away all the mists that arise, especially in the spiritual world, when one allows all the different kinds of arrogance and pride to take effect, which are particularly present in the present state of spiritual development.

We have often spoken of that period of human evolution that has passed since the Atlantean catastrophe. We have dealt with the various epochs of this evolution—the original Indian, original Persian, Egypto-Chaldean and Greco-Latin—and then with our own, the fifth epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation. We have also shown that two further epochs will pass, before the coming of another great catastrophe, so that we have to reckon in all seven such epochs of earthly humanity.

It is comprehensible that these epochs should be described differently. For as men of the present day we desire to find how we stand as regards our own mission, we can only gain some idea of what lies before us in the future when we know how far we have participated in these different epochs in the past.

I have often explained how we can distinguish between the separate human being, the little world, or microcosm, and the great world, or macrocosm; I have shown how man, the little cosmos, is a copy of the great world or macrocosm. Though this is a truth, yet it is a very abstract truth, and as generally stated does not mean very much. You will therefore find it helpful if we go into particulars regarding this, and show how certain things met with in mankind have really to be accepted as a little world, and can be compared with another, a greater world.

The man of the present day really belongs to all seven ages of the post-Atlantean epoch. We have passed through all the earlier ages in former incarnations, and will pass through all the later ages in later ones. In each incarnation we receive what the age in question has to give. Because we receive this we bear within us, in a certain sense, the fruits of former evolutions, and the most intimate things within us are really those we have acquired during the ages mentioned. What each of us has acquired in the course of these ages is more or less within human consciousness to-day; while what we acquired generally in our Atlantean incarnations, when the state of consciousness was very different, has sunk more or less into our sub-consciousness, and no longer reverberates within us as that does which we have acquired in post-Atlantean times. In Atlantean times man was more shielded from having his evolution injured in one way or another, because his consciousness was not then so awake as it was in post-Atlantean times. For this reason all we bear within us as the fruits of our Atlantean evolution is more in accordance with the ordering of the world than is that which had its origin in an age when we were already capable of bringing certain things in us into disorder. Ahrimanic and Luciferic Beings certainly influenced man in Atlantean times, but they then worked quite differently, for man was not then capable of shielding himself from them.

That men grew ever more and more conscious is the most important fact of post-Atlantean culture. In this respect human evolution from the Atlantean catastrophe until the next great catastrophe is macrocosmic. Humanity evolves like one great man throughout the seven post-Atlantean periods; and the most important things that were to arise in human consciousness during these seven periods resemble what a single individual experiences in the seven periods of his individual life.

The different ages in the life of a man have been described as follows:—The first seven years, from birth to the change of teeth, is described as the first age. In it man's physical body receives its form, is endowed with it as a gift. With the coming of the second teeth this form, in all its essentials, is fixed. The man then continues to grow within this form, which has received its essential direction. What is accomplished during the first seven years is the construction of the form. This period has to be understood from all sides. We must, for instance, distinguish the first teeth which the child develops early and which fall out, from the second teeth which replace them. These two kinds of teeth, with respect to the laws of the body, are quite different—the first are inherited, they appear as the fruits of the organisms of the man's ancestors, but the second teeth appear as the outcome of the laws of the man's own physical Being! This has to be realised. It is only when we go into such particulars that we observe this difference. We receive our first teeth, because our ancestors pass them on to us with our organism, we acquire our second teeth because our own physical organism is so constituted that we acquire them through it. In the first period the teeth are directly bequeathed, in the second the physical organism is bequeathed, and it produces the second teeth.

After this we distinguish a second period of life, that from the change of teeth until puberty, to about the 14th or 15th year. What is significant in it is the development of the etheric body. The third period, to about the 21st year, represents the development of the astral body. Then follows the development of the ego, and this progresses from the development of the sentient soul to that of the rational soul and on to the consciousness soul. It is thus we distinguish the different ages in the life of a man. In this life, as you know well, only that period is really ordered and regulated, which falls within the first seven years. This is, and must be so, as regards the man of the present day. Such regular differentiations as we find in the first three periods of a man's life do not occur later; neither is the time they last so clearly defined. If we enquire into the causes of this we have to understand that in the evolution of the world a middle period always comes after the first three of any seven periods.

We are living at present in the post-Atlantean age, we have already within us the fruits of the first three periods, and of the fourth, for we are now in the fifth post-Atlantean age, and are living on towards the sixth.

We are entirely justified in finding a resemblance between the evolution of the various post-Atlantean periods and that of the ages in the life of separate individuals, so that here also it is possible to distinguish between what is macrocosmic and what is microcosmic.

Let us take that which is most characteristic of the first post-Atlantean period, the one we call the Old-Indian; for in this the character of the post-Atlantean evolution was most strongly expressed. In this first period an exalted and most clearly differentiated wisdom existed, a primeval wisdom. What was taught in India by the Seven Holy Rischis was in principle the same as was actually beheld in the spiritual world by natural seers, and also by a large part of the people at that time. This ancient wisdom was present in the first Indian period as an inheritance. It was experienced clairvoyantly in Atlantean times, but now it had become more of an inherited primeval wisdom, preserved and given out again by those who, like the Rischis, had risen to spiritual worlds by initiation. What had entered thus into human consciousness was essentially and absolutely an inheritance. It was therefore entirely different in character from present day wisdom. People make a great mistake when they try to express the important matters given out by the Holy Rischis in the first post-Atlantean period in forms similar to those employed by the science of to-day. This is hardly possible. The scientific forms in use to-day appeared first in the course of post-Atlantean culture. The knowledge of the Ancient Rischis was of a very different kind. Those who communicated it, felt how it worked in them, how it rose within them on the instant. If we are to understand what knowledge was at that time, we must realise that its most marked characteristic was that it did not spring in any way from memory. Memory played no part as yet in knowledge. I pray you to keep this in mind. To-day memory plays a main part in the passing on of knowledge. When a university professor mounts the platform, or a public speaker addresses an audience, he must be careful to consider beforehand what he is to speak about, and retain it in his memory. Certainly, there are people who say they do not require to do this, they follow their genius; but this does not take them very far. At the present day the passing on of knowledge depends really very largely on memory.

We gain a correct perception of how knowledge was communicated in the ancient Indian epoch if we grant that knowledge first rose in the head of him who communicated it at the moment he passed it on to others. In former times knowledge was not prepared before-hand as it is to-day. The Rischis did not prepare what they had to say, so that their memory might retain it. They prepared themselves by attuning themselves to what they were about to communicate. They said:—“This knowledge (Wissen) is not built on memory in any way. Memory has no part in it, my soul must first enter into a holy atmosphere, it must be attuned to piety!” They prepared this atmosphere, this feeling, but not what they were to say. At the moment of communication it resembled rather a reading aloud from an invisible script. Listeners who took down in writing what was said would have been unthinkable at that time. This would have been an impossibility, anything preserved by such means would have been regarded at that time as worthless. Only those things were considered of value which a man preserved within his soul, and which his soul then moved him to reproduce and impart to others in the same way as he had received them. It would have been regarded as desecration to write down these communications. Why? Because in the opinion of that day it was thought that what was written on paper could not be the same as what was communicated by word of mouth.

This tradition endured for a long time, for such things are retained far longer in the feelings than in the understanding of men, and when in the middle ages the art of printing was added to that of writing many people regarded it for long as a black art. The old feeling survived, that what passed in a living way from one soul to another should not be preserved in such a grotesquely profane way as was the case when black printer's ink traced spoken words on a white page, thus changing them into something lifeless, in order that later they might be revived in a way perhaps that was far from edifying. We must therefore regard the direct outpouring (Strömung) from soul to soul as a characteristic feature of the time we are considering. This was an outstanding tendency of the first post-Atlantean epoch, and must be realised if we are to understand, for instance, the old Grecian and Germanic rhapsodists, who moved from place to place reciting their very long poems. If they had employed memory they could never have recited these poems again and again in the same way. It was a soul-force, a soul-attribute far more living than memory, that lay behind these long recitations. To-day if anyone recites a poem he must have learnt it beforehand, but these people experienced what they recited, it was as if newly created at the moment. This was strengthened by the fact that in quite other ways than is the case to-day, the soul-element was then more in evidence. In our day, with some justification, everything of a soul nature is more suppressed. When recitations or lectures are given to-day what matters is the meaning; care is taken as to the meaning of the words. This was not the case when in the middle ages a minstrel recited the Nibelungenlied for example. He had still a certain feeling for the inner rhythm, he even stamped with his foot as he marked its rise and fall. These things were but the echoes of what existed in more ancient times. But you would form no true picture of the Rischis of India and their pupils if you thought they did not communicate the ancient knowledge of Atlantis faithfully. The high school pupil of to-day, even if he wrote out the whole lecture, would not have reproduced what had been said as faithfully as the Indian Rischis reproduced the ancient knowledge in their day.

The characteristic feature of the ages that followed is that Atlantean knowledge had ceased to affect them. Up to the decline of the first period, that of ancient Indian culture, the legacy of knowledge man had received continued. Knowledge continued to increase. This came to an end, however, with the first post-Atlantean period, and afterwards hardly anything new came forth from human nature. Increase in knowledge was therefore only possible in the first period, the early Indian, after that it ceased. In the Persian period among those who were influenced by the teaching of Zarathustra, what we can compare with the second age of development in the life of a man began, and it is best understood when so compared. The first period of Indian culture can well he likened to the first part of the life of a man—that from birth to the seventh year—when everything of the nature of form receives its shape, later there is only growth within the established form. Thus it was with the spirit in the first post-Atlantean epoch. What follows later, how man develops the teaching that comes to him in the second part of his life, can be likened to the first period of ancient Persian development and with the instruction then received, only we must be clear as to who the scholars were and who the teachers. I would like to point out something here. Does it not strike you as strange how very differently Zarathustra, the leader of the second post-Atlantean epoch, comes before us to the way, for instance, the Indian Rischis do? While the Rischis appear like holy initiated persons of a far distant age, into whom all the knowledge of ancient Atlantis had poured, Zarathustra comes before us as the first initiate of post-Atlantean times. Something new enters with him. Zarathustra is actually the first historical personality of post-Atlantean times to be initiated into that form of Mystery-knowledge (truly post-Atlantean) in which knowledge was presented in such a way that it was actually comprehensible to the rational understanding of man. What pupils received in those early days in the schools of Zarathustra was pre-eminently a super-sensible knowledge, but it dawned in them so that for the first time it took the form of human conceptions. While it is not possible to reproduce the knowledge of the ancient Rischis in the forms of modern science, this is possible with the knowledge of Zarathustra. Certainly this is a purely super-sensible knowledge, dealing as it does with the super-sensible worlds, but it is clothed in conceptions similar to the conceptions and ideas of post-Atlantean times. Among the followers of Zarathustra a teaching arose of which we can say:—“It was constructed systematically in accordance with the rational conceptions of man.” This means it sprang from the ancient holy treasures of wisdom which evolved up to the end of the Indian period, and continued from generation to generation; no new thing was later added to this, but the old was elaborated further. The mission of the mysteries of the second post-Atlantean period can be realised through a comparison; we can compare it with the publishing of some occult hook. Any book that is the result of investigations into higher world can be clothed in a logical arrangement, thus bringing it down to the physical plane. It is possible to do this. But if my “Outline of Occult Science” had been treated in this way a hook of fifty volumes would have resulted, each as large as the hook itself. If this had been done, each section would have been presented in strictly logical form, this is in the book, and it might have been treated in this way. But it is also possible to proceed otherwise. One can, for instance, leave something to the reader; leave him to think matters out for himself. People must try to do this to-day otherwise the work of occultism could not progress.

Now, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, with his acquired powers of forming conceptions, it is possible for man to approach occult knowledge and to increase it, but at the time of Zarathustra, thoughts had first to be discovered capable of dealing with these facts. At that time knowledge such as we have to-day did not exist. Something there was that had remained over like an echo from the time of the Rischis, and to this was added what was capable of being clothed in human thoughts. But human conceptions had first to be found, and into them super-sensible facts had to be poured. Different degrees in power to grasp what was super-sensible then first made its appearance. We may say:—The Rischis still spoke absolutely in the way men had always spoken, in a pictorial language, an imaginative language. They passed on the knowledge they possessed from soul to soul when speaking in this vital picture-language which came whenever they had any kind of super-sensible knowledge to transmit. With “cause and effect” and the other ideas we have to-day with logic in any form—men did not concern themselves in the least. All that arose later. Then in the second post-Atlantean period they began to be interested in super-sensible knowledge. They then felt for the first time the opposition, as it were, of the physical plane; they felt the necessity of giving expression to what was super-sensible so that it might assume forms that thought could grasp on the physical plane. This was the essential mission of the first period of Persian civilisation.

Then followed the third period, the period of Egyptian culture. People now had super-sensible ideas. This is difficult for the men of to-day. Try and picture conditions as they were at that time; there was as yet no physical science, but people had ideas that had been gained concerning super-sensible worlds, and they could speak of them in the thought-forms of the physical plane.

In the third epoch people began to direct what they had learnt from super-sensible worlds to the physical world. This can again be compared with the third life-period of a man. While in the second life-period he learns; he then goes on to employ what he has learnt. In the third period of their lives most people feel constrained to direct their learning to the physical plane.

The pupils of the heavenly knowledge were those who, in the second epoch, had been pupils of Zarathustra, but they now began to direct what they had learnt to the physical plane. Put into modern language we can say—men now learnt that all they beheld through super-sensible vision could only be understood if expressed by a triangle; if they used the triangle as an image to express the super-sensible, they learnt that the super-sensible part of human nature which permeates the physical part can be grasped as a triad. Other conceptions had come to man so that he now applied physical things to what was non-physical. Geometry, for example, was first learnt so that it was accepted as symbolic of ideas. Men had this and made use of it—the Egyptians in the art of surveying and agriculture, the Chaldeans in the study of the stars and the founding of astrology and astronomy. What formerly was held to be only super-sensible was now applied to things seen physically. People began to use what had been born in them as super-sensible wisdom on the physical plane. This was first done in the third cultural period.

In the fourth period, the Greco-Latin, this became a fact of outstanding importance. Up to that time men possessed super-sensible knowledge, but did not use it as described. It was not necessary for the Holy Rischis to use it in this way, for knowledge flowed into them directly from the spiritual world. In the time of Zarathustra people had only to ponder over spiritual knowledge, and they knew exactly the form this knowledge would take.

In the Egypto-Chaldean age they clothed conceptions from spiritual worlds in what they had gained in physical existence, and in the fourth period they said:—Is it right that what is acquired from the spiritual world should be applied to physical things? Are the things gained in this way really suited to physical conditions?

These questions were only put by man to himself in the fourth period after he had used this knowledge innocently, and applied it to his physical requirements for a long time. He then became more self-conscious and asked:—“What right have I to apply spiritual knowledge to physical uses?”

Now it always happens that, in an age when any important task has to be carried out, some person appears who can fulfil this task. It was such a person to whom it first occurred to ask the question:—“Have I the right to apply my super-sensible ideas to physical facts?” You can see how what I am trying to indicate developed. You can see, for example, how vital Plato's link still was with the ancient world, how he still used ideas in the ancient form, applying them to physical conditions. It was his pupil, Aristotle, who asked the question—“Ought one to do this?” For this reason he is regarded as the founder of logic.

Those who do not concern themselves in any way with spiritual science might ask:—Why did logic arise first in the fourth epoch? Was there not some reason, seeing that evolution had gone on indefinitely, for man to ask himself this question at a specified time?

When conditions are really studied, important turning points in evolution are seen to occur at certain times. One such important turning point in evolution occurred between the time of Plato and Aristotle. In this age there was still, in a certain sense, something of the old connection with the spiritual world, as this existed in Atlantean times. Living knowledge certainly died in the Indian epoch; but it was replaced by something new that came from above. Man now became critical and asked:—How can I apply what is super-sensible to physical things? This means: he was then first aware that he could himself accomplish something; observing the world around him he realised that he could bring something down into this world. This was a most important age.

We divine (spüren) that conceptions and ideas are super-sensible things when from their nature we begin to perceive in them a guarantee for the super-sensible world. But very few people do perceive this. For most people the fabric of conceptions and ideas is worn very thin and threadbare. Although they may divine that something lives in these which can give them proof of human immortality, conviction is not reached, because the conceptions and ideas concerning the solid reality for which man craves are of such a thin-spun consistency. For most people the fabric they have spun from conceptions and ideas is very thin and worn; though something lives in it which can give them consciousness of immortality, they are incapable of full conviction. But at a time when humanity had sunk to the final—hardly any longer believed in—shreds of that fabric of ideas which it had spun from higher worlds, a mighty new impulse came from the spiritual world and entered into it—this was the Christ-Impulse. The greatest spiritual Reality entered humanity in our post-Atlantean age at a time when man was least spiritually gifted, when all that remained to him was the spiritual gift of ideas.

For anyone who studies human development in a wide sense, it is a most interesting consideration, apart from the fact that it affects the soul so overwhelmingly, it is most interesting (even scientifically), to compare the infinite spirituality of that essence which entered human evolution with the Christ Principle, with that which, like a last thin-spun thread from spiritual realms, caused man to ask shortly before: in what way this thread connected him with spirituality. In other words: when we place Aristotelean logic, this weaving of abstract conceptions to which mankind had at last attained, along-side that great Spiritual Outpouring. We can think of no greater disparity than between the spirituality that came down to the physical plane in the Being of Christ, and that which man had preserved for himself. You can therefore understand that in the early Christian centuries it was quite impossible for men to grasp the spiritual nature of Christ with the thin thread of ideas spun from Aristotelean philosophy. Gradually the endeavour arose to grasp the facts of human and world-events in a way conformable to Aristotelean logic. This was the task that faced the philosophy of the middle ages.

It is important for us now to compare the fourth post-Atlantean epoch with the fourth period in the life of a man—that period in which the ego develops—to see how the “I am” of all humanity entered human evolution at a time when humanity as a whole was really furthest withdrawn from the spiritual world. This is why man was at first quite incapable of comprehending Christ except through faith; why Christianity had at first to be a matter of faith; only later, and by degrees, was it to become a matter of knowledge. It will become a matter of knowledge; but we have only now begun to enter with understanding into the study of the Gospels. For hundreds and hundreds of years Christianity was only a matter of faith, and had to be so, because than had descended furthest from the spiritual world.

As this was man's position in the fourth post-Atlantean period, it was necessary after so deep a descent that he should begin to rise once more. The fourth period brought him furthest on the downward path, but also gave him the first great impulse upwards. Naturally this spiritual impulse could not be understood at first, only in the periods that follow will it be possible for him to understand it. But now we can at least recognise the task before us:—We have to refill our ideas with spirit from within.

The evolution of the world is not simple. When, for instance, a ball starts rolling in one direction its momentum tends to make it continue rolling in the same direction. If this is to be changed another impulse must come to give the thrust necessary to a change of direction.

Pre-Christian culture had the tendency to continue the downward plunge into the physical world, and has continued to do so to our day. The upward tendency is only beginning, hence the need of a constant incentive to this upward direction. We can see this downward tendency more especially in men's thoughts. The greater part of what is called philosophy to-day is nothing more than the continued downward roll of the ball. Aristotle divined something of this; he grasped the fact that there was a spiritual reality in the fabric of human thoughts. But a couple of centuries after his day, men were no longer capable of realising that the content of the human head was connected with reality. The driest, most desiccated ideas of the old philosophy are those of Kant and everything associated with Kantism. Kant's philosophy puts the main question in such a way that he cuts every link between what man evolves as ideas, between perceptions as an inner life, and that which ideas really are. All this is old and dead, and is therefore not fitted to give any vital uplift for the future. You will now no longer wonder that the conclusion of my lectures on psychology had a theosophical background. I explained that in all we strive for, more especially as regards knowledge of the soul, our task must be to allow ourselves to be so stimulated by this knowledge, given to us formerly by the Gods and brought down by us to earth, that we can offer it up again on the altars of the Gods.: We have only to make the ideas that come to us froth the spiritual world, once more our own.

It is not from any want of modesty that I say:—Teaching regarding the soul must of necessity be a scientific teaching, that it must rise again from the frozen state into which it has fallen. There have been many psychologists in the past and there are many still to-day, but the ideas they use are void of spiritual life. It is a significant sign that a man like Franz Brentano be allowed the first volume of his book on Psychology to appear in 1874. Though much it contains is distorted, it is on the whole correct. The second volume was ready, and was to have been published that year, but he was unable to complete it, he stuck in it. He still could give an outline of his teaching, but the spiritual impulse necessary if the work was to be brought to a conclusion was wanting.

Such psychologists as we have to-day, Von Wundt and Lipps for example, are not really psychologists for they work only with preconceived ideas; from the first they were incapable of producing anything. Brentano's psychology was fitted to do this, but it remained incomplete. This is the fate of all knowledge that is dying. Death does not enter the domain of natural science so quickly. Here people can work with ideas, for the facts they have accumulated speak for themselves. In the Science of Spirit this does not happen so easily. The whole substratum is immediately lost if people employ ordinary ideas. The muscles of the heart do not immediately cease to beat even if analysed like a mineral product without any recognition of their true nature; but the soul cannot be analysed in this way.

Thus science dies from above downwards, and men will gradually reach a point where they will certainly be able to appreciate natural laws, but in a way entirely independent of science. The construction of machines, instruments, telephones and the like, is something very different from understanding science in the right way or carrying it a step further. Anyone can make use of an electric apparatus without necessarily understanding it. True science is gradually dying. We have now reached a point where external science must receive new life from spiritual science. Our fifth period of culture is that in which the ball of science rolls slowly downhill.

When it can roll no further its activity will cease, as in the case of Brentano. At the same time the upward progress of humanity must receive ever more life. And it will receive it. This can only happen when efforts are made by which knowledge, even if this has been gained outwardly, becomes fruitful through what occult investigation has to give. Our age, the fifth period, will increasingly assume a character which will show that the ancient Egypto-Chaldean epoch is repeated in it; as yet we have not gone very far with this repetition, it is only beginning. That this is the case can be gathered from what occurred at our annual general meeting. On that occasion Herr Seiler spoke about “Astrology” showing, that as spiritual scientists you were in a position to connect certain conceptions with astrological ideas, whereas this was not possible with the ideas of modern astronomy. Modern astronomy would consider these ideas to be nonsense. This is not because of what astronomical science is in itself, for this science has a better opportunity than any other of being led back to what is spiritual; but because men's thoughts are far removed from any return to spirituality. There is a means, through what astronomy has to offer, by which such a return might easily be made to the fundamental truths of Astrology so undervalued to-day. But some time must elapse before a bridge can he formed between these two. During this time all kinds of theories will be devised, theories by which the movements of the planets, for instance, will be explained in a purely materialistic way. Things will be still more difficult in the domain of chemistry, and in everything connected with life. Here it will he still more difficult to build the bridge. It will he done most easily in the domain of soul-knowledge. To do so it is necessary that people should understand what was stated at the conclusion of my lecture on “Psychology.” There I showed that the stream of soul-life does not only flow from the past towards the future, but also from the future into the past; that we have two time-streams—the etheric part of the life of the soul goes towards the future, the astral part of us on the other hand flows back towards the past. (There is probably no one on the earth to-day who is conscious of this unless he has an impulse towards what is spiritual.) We are first able to form a conception of the life of the soul, when we realise that something comes continually to meet us out of the future. Otherwise this is quite impossible. We must be able to form such a conception, and for this, when speaking of cause and effect, we must break with those ordinary methods of thought which deal mainly with the past. We must not only reckon with the past in such connections, but must speak of the future as something real; something that comes towards us in just as real a way as the past slips from us. But it will be a long time yet before such ideas become prevalent, and till they do there will be no psychology.

The nineteenth century produced a smart idea—“Psychology without souls.” People were very proud of this idea, and with it they declared:—“We simply study the revelations of the human soul, but do not concern ourselves with the soul that is the cause of these!”

A Soul-teaching without Souls! This can be carried further; but what results (to use a common comparison), is nothing else than a meal time without food. Such is psychology! Now people are of course not satisfied when dinner time comes and the plates are empty; but the science of the nineteenth century was strangely satisfied with the psychology put before it, which was in no way concerned with the soul. This began comparatively early, but into every part of it spiritual life must flow.

Therefore we have to record the beginning among us of an entirely new life. The old in a certain sense is finished and a new life must begin. We must feel this. We must feel that a primeval wisdom came to us from ancient Atlantean times, that this gradually declined, and we are now faced with the task of beginning in our present incarnation to gather more and more new wisdom which will be the wisdom of the men of a later day. The coming of the Christ-Impulse made this possible. It will continually develop a living activity, and from it men will perhaps be able best to evolve towards the real, historic Christ, when all tradition concerning Him and all that is outwardly connected with these traditions has died away.

From what has been said you can see how the post-Atlantean evolution can actually be compared with the life of a single man; how it is indeed a kind of macrocosm facing man—the microcosm. But the individual man is in a very strange position. What is left to him for the second half of his life of all he acquired in the first half, which when used up is followed by death?

The spirit alone can conquer death and carry on to a new incarnation that which gradually begins to decay when we have passed the first half of our life. Our evolution advances until our thirty-fifth year, then it begins to decline. But the spirit then first begins truly to rise! What it is unable to develop further in the second half of life within the body, it brings to completion in a succeeding incarnation. Thus we see the body gradually decline, but the spirit blossom more and more.

The macrocosm reveals a picture similar to that of man:—Up to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch we have a youthful upward striving cultural development; from then onwards a real decline; death everywhere as regards the development of human consciousness; but at the same time the dawn of a new spiritual life. The spiritual life of man will be born again in the age following our present one. But he will have to work with full consciousness on what is to be reincarnated. When this happens the other must die, truly die. We gaze prophetically into the future; many sciences have arisen and will arise for the benefit of post-Atlantean civilisation, they, however, belong to what is dying. The life that streamed directly into human life along with the Impulse of Christ will in future rise (ausleben) in man in the same way as Atlantean knowledge rose within the holy Rischis.

What ordinary science knows of Copernicus to-day is but the external part of his knowledge, the part belonging to decline. That which will live on, that will be fruitful, not only the part through which he has already worked for four centuries, this part man must win for himself. The teaching of Copernicus as given to-day is not so very true, its truth will first be revealed by spiritual science.

So it is as regards much that is held to be most true in astronomy, and so it will be with everything else which men value as knowledge to-day. Certainly, what science discovers to-day is profitable. Therein lies its usefulness. In so far as the science of to-day is technical it is justified; but in so far as it has something to con-tribute to human knowledge, it is a dead product. It is useful for trade, but for that no spiritual content is required. In so far as it seeks to discover anything concerning the mysteries of the universe, it belongs to declining civilisation. In order to enrich our knowledge of the secrets of the universe, external science must super-impose on all it has to offer, the wisdom derived from spiritual science.

What I have said to-day can form an introduction to our studies on the Gospel of Mark, which are about to begin. But first I had to speak of the necessity for the entrance into humanity of the greatest Spiritual Impulse of all time at a moment when only the last faint shreds of spirituality remained to it.