The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preliminary note: Eugen Kolisko's lecture was not written down. However, Kolisko later gave further lectures on the same topic during the first college course in the fall of 1920. These were printed in a revised form by him in the anthology “Aenigmatisches aus Kunst und Wissenschaft” (Enigmas from Art and Science), Stuttgart 1922.

First question: How do the various qualities of heat, light, electricity and the different states actually relate to the periodic system and how did the periodic system come about?

Second question: In the alchemical literature, chemical substances are classified in such a way as to indicate how the individual metals are assigned to the planets. How does this sevenfold classification of the assignment of metals to planets relate to that found in the periodic system?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, Dr. Kolisko has spoken very beautifully about important aspects of how we might strive to free chemistry from those habits of thought that led from the outset to this atomistic hypothesis or, let us say, to the building of chemistry out of the atomistic hypothesis. In view of the questions that have been asked, I would like to draw attention to one thing first. To me, the discovery of the periodic system does not appear to be something absolutely new. Of course, it is not possible to go into the great diversity that exists between our chemical interpretation of phenomena and older views of the constitution of matter in a short consideration. What makes the periodic system particularly interesting is the attempt – an attempt that has been made, I believe, on several occasions – to arrange the periodic system in such a way that the seven elements are plotted on a curve, and then the next seven elements are plotted on a curve passing over it, and so on, so that when intermediate states are created, the correct structure is obtained in a spiral. We can draw this: Here, for example, is lithium, sodium is, as it were, above it, and above that would be potassium. The point is that with the old Mercury rod you really have to connect something like the idea of a universal remedy of nature to bring about the facts of nature. If we can imagine that the elements are superimposed in the way I have arranged them in the periodic system, and I then connect these elements with lines that represent a spiral, then the emergence of each element would only be possible under certain force relationships that are related to a certain motion of these states.

Now, in an interesting way, Crookes pointed out in a Cambridge lecture at the Royal Society that if you want to get the superimposed spiral, you would do well to imagine that a progression of the heat condition takes place in the direction of the axis of the spiral, that thus, so to speak, the series of the next seven elements compared to the series of the previous seven elements came about in a similar way to a higher temperature degree compared to a lower temperature degree. But it is not a progression merely in an expansion, but in a genesis. We would have something similar in a complicated natural system, as we have it in the elementary case of a simple expansion through temperature. And now it is, of course, extraordinarily suggestive to think not at all of a spiral that has a straight line axis, but perhaps to think of something that has a circular axis, then we would get a solenoid line. But again, we can think of this as a spiral. Then we would get a triple spiral progressing in space.

While Crookes initially assumes only a decrease in heat as an analogy for the progression here on this axis, we would - by expanding on Crookes's idea - already get a progression in the axis towards light and chemical effects, which are, of course, different from the chemical forces that act in the substances. We would thus, as it were, obtain entities in heat, light and chemical effects, that is, in what underlies chemical activity, which are not present in the individual bodies, but which are present in the inner workings of, for example, our earthly nature or otherwise.

What I am drawing here are only spatial sensualizations; there are no things in space, but the spatial images are spatial sensualizations.

We would be given the opportunity to think that these successive elements and then, as it were, the next potencies of the same and the counter-potencies of the same are connected with a confused interaction of heat, light and precisely chemical effects, so that this triple helical structure of the elements would actually be nothing more than a certain kind of interaction of the various ether potencies. But then we would have to assume that these ether potencies are radically different from each other, that they cannot be transformed into each other in their essential nature, but that they act on each other in their own essential nature and that the results arise, not transformation products.

This is just a brief answer to the first question. This question covers so much that it is not possible to answer it exhaustively in a short time.

Now the second question. Here one would have to go back to very ancient principles. You see, you must be clear about the fact that what is active in any substance today, forming shapes, potassium or sodium for example, does not necessarily have to arise in the universe today. It may be something that originated at some time, may have been active a very long time ago, and has been preserved, so that the original forms, the original crystal forms of our elements - whether they are distinct crystal forms or something else - were formed from the cosmos in prehistoric times, let us assume during the lunar period, and that in these elements the tendency remained to preserve these forms. We must therefore be clear about the following: on the one hand, we are dealing with today's forms, which appear as if in an imprint, having formed in a very early period of cosmic development; on the other hand, we are dealing with the effects of what has now become of the factors located around the earth. We are therefore not dealing directly with our elemental forms, so that we could speak of a cosmic effect.

Here, somewhere, would be the earth, here the planets, and the planets bring about something through their constellation. If, for the sake of argument, we have Venus, Mars and Mercury here, the constellation of Venus, Mars and Mercury will not directly cause a tetrahedrally shaped body to appear today, as they act on the earth through their mutual forces. Instead, Venus, Mars and Mercury will have endowed the tetrahedron during the lunar period, and the reason it appears today is because the moon's effect has been preserved. Whereas when Mercury and so forth act from the cosmos today, they act, as it were, according to the laws of the imponderables; they actually counteract the ponderables. Thus, the formation already has its cosmic origin, but every formation that occurs on earth is, so to speak, deformed by that which today emanates from the same cosmic planets that previously caused the formations; so that, for example, we have to understand a volatilization as a cosmic effect that exists today, but a crystallization as one in which the earlier is again produced against the present. Here we have temporal effects that diverge.

Now, you do not have to think of what I have now presented in a somewhat schematic way, of course, as if there were only a few constellations, but there are many constellations. If you imagine this, you naturally get a complicated system, something like a complicated system of curves that you can imagine in the cosmos and in the earth.

If you summarize the original sites where the metal forms is formed in the earth using curves – these curves must be imagined in the interior of the earth because that is where the center is; the metals do indeed come to the surface in later epochs , but it is actually in the interior of the earth that the forces by which the preservation takes place are located – and outside in the cosmos the forces that lead to the crystal forms. And if you now visualize this, we have a sphere and spherical shells intertwining in the most diverse ways and the resultant that would arise from it if I imagine the difference in strength between what is conserved and what is in the cosmos today. If I now imagine the differences in the forces in these two force systems, I actually get what represents the present state of the cosmic effect on earth. And everything that appears in the periodic system must be contained in this. The periodic system is nothing more than the interaction of a pre-earthly state with a present cosmic state that plays around the earth. These are only hints in answer, but I believe one can understand it.

Eugen Kolisko: So what we assign as metals to the individual planets has nothing to do directly with the substances we have in the periodic system?

Rudolf Steiner: No. Why iron is assigned to Mars, silver to the moon and so on, these are things that can no longer be understood by external science, quite impossible, because this assignment was obtained in a completely different way than is believed today, even by occultists. The older occultism, which was still based on atavistic clairvoyance, knew that our earth itself is internally structured, but only latently structured, and that we have to distinguish seven spheres in the earth sphere as a remnant of the pre-earthly cosmic effect on the earth, which were not quite regular, but different. So here there are seven spheres inside, that is the inner cosmos of the earth, that is the mirror image of the outer cosmos. And earthly iron is associated with this part of the earth, that is the Martian part of the earth, and mercury is associated with the Mercury sphere of the earth, and so on. So these substances of ours, as we have them today, would actually ultimately have to be traced back to the seven metals; they would have to. But we have to imagine that all these substances are actually quite complicated things.

We are talking about the atomic weights of these substances, aren't we? But these atomic weights don't really exist. You have to find the atomic weight of lead: 207. It is true that the atomic weight of lead is 207, but when you look for it, you don't actually find 207 in reality, but you actually find a number: 207 + x in an indeterminate way. What you actually find fluctuates back and forth, and the atomic weight for our elements is such that you can say: If you wanted to capture the state that represents the atomic weight, you would have to show an oscillating movement here, not a point. And we would not be allowed to describe the periodic system as it is, but we would have to have it in quivering movements, in inner quivering movement. It is the case that we cannot say at all that the atomic weight shows that we are now really dealing with solid elements. This idea of a rigid atom - think of what it means, what Dr. Kolisko just said: water is no longer water at a certain temperature. But the atomist of today is obliged to imagine hydrogen and oxygen, which are in the water, when the water is no longer there, unchanged, if he imagines atoms correctly. So one comes to regard such a property of matter as the actual determining factor: this rigidity, which is not present even at the point where the element is created. The element is not yet present, but the element is something that already escapes you when you want to grasp it. Because to determine atomic weights strictly is an absurdity. There is no atomic weight, but there are intermediate states around which the atomic weight varies, and one says: in the intermediate state, the atomic weight is such and such. There are just as few atomic weights as there is a certain size to a grain of wheat. Of course there is a mean size for the wheat grain, but the size fluctuates back and forth. It is the same with the atomic weight; there is only a mean state.

These considerations, which Dr. Kolisko has presented today, are extraordinarily fruitful and should be further developed, especially for chemistry. Then one would see that the course of development is such that in alchemical concepts, including the staff of Mercury, which was particularly cultivated there, certain concepts were generated that were appropriate to reality. We must work our way through to a way of looking at things that is appropriate to reality. But to do that, we need to — and this is what I would like to link to Dr. Kolisko's lecture, namely to answer these two questions very precisely — we need to come to that, and I would like to say this to Mr. Blümel as well, we need to learn to understand the extension as a function of the intensive, and vice versa, the intensive as a function of the extensive, so that these two things, which are so parallel to each other, can really be derived from each other. If it is possible to bring the intensive and the extensive into a functional context, it will also be possible to develop the symbolism needed to fully understand this periodic system, otherwise there will always be an ununderstood remainder.

Please forgive me, but these things are so unclear because they cover such a large area that one can say nothing else but just make out the outlines with the concepts. The concepts cannot be sharply contoured.

Introductory words from Roman Boos: Dear attendees, the appearance of a number of scientifically working personalities is of course not intended to present anything firm, final, or conclusively formulated and to submit it to public discussion. Rather, these lectures are intended to show the direction in which the individual subject areas can be developed what is represented here from the Goetheanum as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what has been presented to the public for some time now in its artistic effects in numerous eurythmy performances and in the construction of the Goetheanum as an architectural work. In all modesty, however, we believe that our lectures, which are only intended as a beginning, can compete with what is represented today in the circles of the academies and universities.

For anyone who has studied in any faculty with a living soul must have become more and more aware in recent times of how the purely material, the purely quantitative, loads a person with a multitude of facts, so that one can no longer stand up to it, not only in a personal sense, but absolutely in a spiritual sense. This means that the human being, with his spiritual powers, is less and less able to really

21 enormous material is brought to him, really to cope with. And because in anthroposophy the view is directed to the human being, and not just to the human being himself, but to the human being as a point within the whole of reality, what lies within the realities themselves can express itself, but in such a way that these realities do not confront him only quantitatively, weighing on him and oppressing him, but so that, by expressing themselves in man himself, the union of man with the spiritual can also take place and thus also with objective reality.

The opportunity will be given here for a debate from within the circle of scientific workers. In the form of debates, questions and so on, the opportunity is offered to further develop one or other of the topics touched upon in the lectures. For anyone approaching scientific movements with the attitude from which the entire anthroposophical movement builds its works will see a major task in cleansing the field of science and social life from the polemical spirit, which in the field of science takes the form of and in the social life as throwing hand grenades and setting machine guns going; he will see the main task as being the necessity to further expand and deepen the problems, as is to be done here.

And we also hope that at the scientific lectures, Dr. Steiner will be able to add some more to what is given by the experts.

We would also like to ask you to initially only raise questions that are related to today's lecture topic, and to come back to special cases in the following scientific lectures.

The topics of the specialist lectures are:

on March 25, 1920: Dr. Carl Unger on “Anthroposophy and the Epistemological Foundations of Natural Science”

March 26, 1920: Dr. Friedrich Husemann on “Weltanschauung, Nervousness and Spiritual Science”

March 27, 1920: Dr. Rudolf Steiner on “The World Picture of Modern Science”

on March 29, 1920: Dr. Walter Johannes Stein on “Anthroposophy and Physiology”,

on March 30, 1920: Dr. Eugen Kolisko on “Anthroposophy and Chemistry”

on 31 March 1920: E.A.Karl Stockmeyer on “Anthroposophy and Physics”

on 1 April 1920: Dr. Oskar Schmiedel on “Anthroposophy and the Theory of Colors”

on April 6, 1920: Dr. Roman Boos on “Anthroposophy and Jurisprudence”

on April 7, 1920: Dr. Rudolf Steiner on “Hygiene as a Social Question”

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees! This lecture today is intended to serve as a kind of introduction to the following eight lectures, which arise in large part from a circle of friends who have gathered here during this time with a very specific scientific goal. Lectures will be given on the most diverse scientific subjects, from the fields of epistemology and physiology; biological questions will be addressed; physics and chemistry will be discussed, and finally, I would like to point out the problem of hygiene as a sociological problem. Today, the outside world often judges, albeit superficially, that in all that is presented here through the spiritual current of which the Goetheanum is a representative, on the one hand it is a sect and on the other a scientific dilettantism. These lectures should at least partly draw attention to the fact that both are very much mistaken about what is presented here. There is neither scientific dilettantism nor religious sectarianism.

Proof of this is that a circle of serious-minded physicians has come together here in these weeks, and that they have been joined by a small circle of such personalities who are inclined to build bridges from medical science to other branches of life. This group has come together here out of the feeling that something like medical life today needs real new impetus; they have come together with the aim of receiving and giving impulses for this new impetus. What is being presented here, I do not want to say as a medical course, but as a course for doctors, that implies that it is about serious striving, about serious willpower in the face of the great tasks of our time. This course follows on from two courses that I have already held in connection with the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, about the necessary new foundation of the physical sciences. All this will be sufficient proof, even for those who, after superficial evaluation, express the opinion just mentioned, that here we are looking at the great, serious tasks of our time, and that we are seeking to determine what is necessary to impact the spiritual culture and thus the whole culture of the present and the near future, based on what these serious, great tasks dictate. If we look at the terrible events of recent years with the aim of ascertaining, through an unprejudiced judgment, how these terrible events are connected with aberrations of the human consciousness, then we will come away from much of what some, I might say light-heartedly, consider to be sufficient for a renewal of life.

For example, how often is the judgment pronounced today that, in the face of what is swirling in time, what is emerging as chaos in time, care must be taken to broaden knowledge, to broaden understanding. And in many circles it is emphasized on all possible occasions that something is missing in our time; on all possible occasions it is emphasized that knowledge must be spread, let us say through adult education centers or similar institutions. The spiritual scientific worldview movement, for which the Goetheanum is the representative here, cannot readily agree with these assessments, which are being made in this direction. For, my dear attendees, in the face of such judgments, the question arises: Do we actually already have a science that is effective in the future, a science that is capable of intervening in life? Do we have something to carry it into the widest circles in adult education centers?

Based on truly profound judgment, those who are the supporters of the spiritual science practiced here are convinced that, before anything else, a renewal of scientific life itself is needed, an infusion of new elements into scientific life, before we can think of spreading knowledge to the widest circles, for example through adult education centers or the like. We are not thinking here merely of a popularization of present-day science, but rather that an anthroposophically oriented worldview must think in terms of a real renewal of these present-day sciences, based on an understanding of the state of these sciences. Naturally, in this introductory lecture, I can only sketch out the task for these evenings. And so I would like to first point out the two main directions of current scientific endeavor, in order to show how these present sciences actually relate to life.

On the one hand, we have everything that can be characterized by saying that it is scientific in the natural scientific sense; we have to refer to everything that occurs in the field of natural science. In speaking about this field here, I must indeed emphasize again and again that I am not starting from a superficial polemic against the current direction of natural science, but that, on the contrary, because I fully recognize everything that natural science has achieved in the course of the 19th century and into our days, because I must admire the great progress of natural science in itself and of the most diverse branches of human technology, it is precisely out of this admiration that I come to think differently about the further course of natural science than it has developed into our days.

On the other hand, we have the historical sciences with all that belongs to them, which also includes, for example, jurisprudence. You know, my dear audience, that natural science has increasingly come to focus on observing external facts and following experiments. They know that there was a strong endeavor, especially in the 19th century, to connect the enormous wealth of facts that have emerged through observation and experimentation with each other through great ideas and to strive towards certain so-called laws of nature. But the one who can really understand this whole scientific life knows that today, in the most diverse fields – in the field of physics, chemistry, biology – we are faced with the most incisive facts and that, with what is commonly known as science, what the facts tell us, we are not in a position to penetrate in any way into the essence of that which obviously must be behind it, yes, that the facts, I would say, stun us, that we cannot keep up with the abundance of facts using scientific methods. The outward course of science actually confirms this.

Even if very few people still pay attention to this today, it must be said that the last twenty years have actually brought about the greatest conceivable revolution in the field of physics. Ideas that were still considered unshakable thirty years ago have now been thoroughly revolutionized. One need only mention the name Einstein or the name Lorentz, the Dutch physicist, and by mentioning these names one can point to a whole range of facts and discussions that have revolutionized and shaken physics as it was just thirty years ago. Of course, I cannot go into the details here. But the fact that physics has been revolutionized, which is well known in certain circles, must be pointed out. Now, however, one can say: While, for example, something as significant as the revolution of the old concept of mass and matter through the newer radiation theory of electricity is at hand, our scientific ways of thinking cannot cope with what has actually been presented to man through the abundance of experiments. From the observation of radiant matter in a glass vacuum, it could be seen that the same properties that were previously attributed to matter, for example a certain speed and acceleration, must now be attributed to radiant electricity; so, so to speak, the concept of matter has been lost. It became clear from the abundance of experiments that nothing could be put in the place of the old concept of matter; and from Einstein's theory of relativity, with its terribly cold abstractions, nothing can be gained that resembles a real conception of what one is actually dealing with in external nature.

All this is said only to point out how the works have come into a flow that has developed in such a way that there is a wealth of observed and experimental material that cannot be mastered by our modes of representation. I would like to say that the development of science has shown that, although we can look at nature on the surface in the modes of perception that have been preserved from the past, we are not able to interpret what nature presents to us today in countless phenomena in the form of rays. A peculiar method has crept into physics in recent times. It is called the statistical method. Whereas in the past it was believed that precisely formulated natural laws could be arrived at by means of exact measurement, observation or experimentation, today we work very much with what is really similar to that statistical method, which resorts to probability calculation, which we find applied when we set up insurance companies, for example. There we also make assumptions, for example, that of the kind that so many of a certain number of people of a certain age have inevitably died after a certain number of years. With these statistical methods – which are based on probability theory and are similar to the methods of modern physics – one can get along quite well if, for example, one has to arrange something like life insurance; everything is correct and one can rely on this method. But the essential defect of the method is that it says nothing about the nature of that for which the method is used – which is clear from the fact that no one will believe that they must really die in the year that was calculated as their year of death using probability calculations and statistical methods. Such methods serve to summarize the facts, and for a certain action based on statistics, but they say nothing for penetrating into any essence. Thus, in the external, scientific field, we are, as it were, condemned to remain on the surface of things.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is most evident when this scientific method is to be applied in the practical treatment of the sick person, when it is to be applied in medicine. And it is precisely because of the dissatisfaction that arises today from the scientific basis of medicine that an arrangement such as the course for doctors that is taking place here in these weeks has been created. When approaching the sick person, one cannot subject him to treatment without really recognizing his nature. The physical and scientific methods must also be put to the test when approaching the human being. And all that can be deplored about medicine and its effects today is connected with the inadequate scientific foundation of our present-day sciences. This is one of the tasks of anthroposophy in relation to the present-day sciences. It has the task of finding real scientific methods through which the abundance of facts that are available to us today can really be seen through in such a way that we can penetrate through these facts into the essence of what surrounds us in the world.

Something very similar is the case with historical science. While at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century we still have attempts to observe human life in such a way that both the natural course of events in the development of the human race and that which comes from within the human being in a soul-spiritual way are taken as a basis – while At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, we have studies such as Herder's “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity”. During the 19th century, what historical science is becomes more and more abstract and abstract, more and more intellectual and intellectual. We see how those who cannot profess a certain materialism in history speak of ideas that are supposed to work in history. As if abstract ideas could be any kind of real agent that carries historical development! As if ideas were not initially something merely passive! Because our modes of thought are incapable of penetrating through observation or the facts provided by experimentation to the basis of nature, we remain, I would say, merely on the surface of what takes place in human life with our modes of thought. We are unable to connect what we grasp through our thoughts of the people acting in history or of the events occurring in history with the great forces that carry history.

We see, and this is particularly interesting, how in the 19th century, for example, such minds as Herman Grimm's appear. He is really very characteristic of the historical method of the 19th century. There is perhaps nothing that speaks about historical phenomena in such a wonderfully, deeply satisfying way as Herman Grimm does in his treatises, for example on Goethe's “Tasso” or on Goethe's “Iphigenia”. There is something there that is already in the realm of human spiritual creation. In this case Herman Grimm can set about something that can be grasped by thought because it has already been raised to the level of thought. But when Herman Grimm wants to go further, when he wants to go into reality, when he does not just want to look at something like Goethe's works “Tasso” or “Iphigenia”, but when he wants to present Goethe himself as a real human personality Herman Grimm also wrote a book about Goethe. One sees that the whole Goethe whom he describes is actually a kind of shadow figure and nowhere is there the possibility of penetrating the full intensity of the real. What Herder still attempted, namely to grasp thoughts that are historical and at the same time embrace nature, was no longer possible with the historical method of the 19th century. These thoughts are too thin to penetrate reality from a historical point of view. And so we have a historical science that cannot get out of thought, remains in thought, and cannot penetrate from thought into reality.

Here again, for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, there is the necessity not only to grasp what the soul experiences in abstract thoughts, but to grasp it in such a way that the forces that really underlie the external reality are seen in these soul experiences. On the one hand, we must try to understand nature in such a way that we can apply our understanding to the human being – so that we can understand the human being, as we do in the art of medicine or in the art of education, and on the other hand, we must try not to get stuck in the abstract not to get stuck in abstract thoughts and ideas of history, but to penetrate to such a living inner soul life that we can truly grasp what has happened historically – an understanding so saturated with reality that it in turn is close to natural occurrence, to natural becoming.

Just as the inadequacy of the natural-scientific basis has become apparent in medicine, so too has the inadequacy of the historical method in social life. What has caused so-called historical materialism, the Marxist view, to begin to be put into practice in our time, to the misery of humanity in this much-tried Europe? What has caused people to arise who declare everything spiritual, everything legal, everything moral, and so on, to be an ideology, and see reality solely and exclusively in the economic production process? What has caused this? It has caused the historical methods of the 19th century to be incapable of grasping this reality. The historians or those who wanted to be historians in any field have remained with abstractions that have nothing to do with reality. And social democracy, meanwhile, has developed for itself what was not offered to it by the leading circles, and it did so according to what it alone knew something about: the economic process. The fact that we have a materialistic foundation of history and today a policy of economic science that is ruining Europe is the original sin of non-existent historical thinking. The facts are serious today, and only those who refuse to see their gravity can deny that it is necessary to strive for greater depth in both the natural and historical sciences and to work towards a new foundation.

This is what should be seen through within the spiritual current, for which this building, the Goetheanum, is the representative, so that - this should be explained here in all modesty - so that a science can arise that can really step out into our elementary schools, that can really flow into life. And one would like that not only the intellectual impulses of people of the present would be seized by these efforts, one would like that above all the hearts of people of the present could be there and feel how deeply connected all the social misery of our time, all the decline, the chaos of our time is with the aberrations present in the striving for knowledge and in the scientific striving of our time, which must be healed.

What I have just characterized should be contrasted with what can be gained from the spiritual scientific method for the natural scientific direction and for the historical direction. And I do not want to speak in abstractions, but I would like to point out two facts, which should only serve as examples of what is being sought here. The first example is taken from the field of natural science. It is intended to show the point where the scientific foundation of our scientific endeavor becomes insufficient when confronted with the concepts of the human being. Today, if you look around you at the scientific endeavor of the present, you can repeatedly find an insight into the human heart. This view of the human heart has been developed directly from the natural scientific basis of life. Just as mechanics, physics, chemistry and biology are today, so is our view of the human heart, because we have a very specific chemistry, physics, biology and so on, because we have a specific natural scientific basis. What is this view of the human heart? Well, you find it characterized everywhere as follows: the human heart is a pump that pumps blood through the human organism in such a way that this blood washes away certain useless substances, exchanging them for others that it carries to certain places in the human organism. If today, even the slightest doubt is expressed to certain people that this human heart could be a very ordinary pump, that the human heart works in the middle and pumps blood out to the various parts of the body, then the people who have adopted scientific views today – I have experienced it – they become downright wild. And yet, my dear audience, here is the point where a recovery of the scientific foundation can bring about a complete reversal.

Here the spiritual scientific world view will have to show that the heart is not a pump, but that the heart in its activity is only the result of the self-regulating currents and interactions that occur in the human organism. Man is a dual being. Everything that, to put it schematically, lies below the heart and everything that lies above it is organized in fundamentally different ways. What drives the development of carbon is fundamentally different from what happens when carbon combines with oxygen to form carbonic acid. But the actual agent, the actual driving force, lies in the forces that interact from the lower human being and from the upper human being - from the upper and the lower. Just as positive and negative electricity want each other when there is an electrical charge, and just as an apparatus that would be connected to this charge of positive and negative electricity would carry out certain activities, so the human heart carries out activities as a result of the currents that are in the human organism. The human heart is not the pump of the human organism. Everything that the human heart does is purely the result of the inner life, of a certain current in the human organism. The opposite of popular belief is the case.

But with that, my dear audience, one points at the same time to a complete reversal of the science of the nature of man. For only by considering this great contrast between the upper and lower human being, in which the activity of the heart is harnessed and, as it were, expressed as mediation, only by considering this, are we able to bring the human being into the right contrast to the whole of the environment, to understand how the lower human being stands in a certain relationship to the outer world of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies, and also to the outer world of thermal phenomena, while everything in the upper human being that contrasts to some extent with the workings of the lower human being must be paralleled with light and with other etheric processes in the earthly and extra-terrestrial realm.

We will only learn to place the human being in the right way in the whole universe when we stop believing that the heart is the pump that pumps blood through the organism. In reality, the blood has an inner life, and in the congestion that occurs between the lower human being and the upper human being, the heart is so involved that the result of this congestion becomes apparent in the movement of the heart. In the movement of the heart, we basically have nothing other than where the upper human being and the lower human being touch and where, in certain unconscious regions, the activity of the lower human being is perceived by the upper human being. The heart is, so to speak, a sense organ within the human being. Just as the sense organs that lie outside are organs for mediating the outer experiences of the human being, so the heart is the organ that mediates the experiences of one's own being, albeit in the subconscious. With these things, I only want to suggest that something as essential as the heart teaching, which is suitable for reforming all medical thought, needs a thorough reform today. But that is only one example – it is an example of how cause and effect are almost confused today, I would say in all areas of nature observation.

My dear attendees! Spiritualists claim that they have photographed spirits. Photographing is an external process, and I do not want to dwell here on whether or not one can photograph spirits. But with no more right than the spiritualists claim that they have photographed ghosts, certain physicists today claim that they have photographed the configuration of atoms. Certainly, one can throw X-rays at crystals, one can make these X-rays reflect, the reflected rays interfere, and then photograph them, and one can claim to photograph the configuration of the atoms. The essential question is only: Are we really photographing the atomistic agents here, or are we photographing certain effects that come from the macrocosm and show up only at the points where we believe the atoms are present? It is essential everywhere to find ways of thinking and imagining that are able to go from appearances to the essence of things in the right way. Because scientific methods are so inadequate, they cannot suffice for application to the human being, whether in the field of medicine or in the social realm.

Thus we see that people who believe they have been trained in natural science are now setting about solving social problems, like Lenin and Trotsky. But the fact is that only a few individuals have studied what natural science establishes from its facts, but this is insufficient as conclusions, as results. As a rule, such people do not allow themselves to be drawn into discovering what one believes to know about things and what one believes to have discovered as laws, and then to actually test them against the individual facts. When someone tells you that he has photographed the configuration of atoms, such people do not think about the value of such a photograph. Of course, it is terribly impressive when one announces to the world in popular presentations: Atoms exist; they have even been photographed. - The layman naturally says: Well, how can anyone who is not a layman deny that atoms exist, which are the agents in all natural effects, when these atoms have even been photographed.

But the point is to have an insight into how something like this comes about. We suffer tremendously in the present from the fact that things are asserted as popular worldviews, monistic or otherwise, that consist in nothing more than in abstract summaries of all kinds of results, without going back to their real foundations. What do people present at monistic gatherings other than what they have read about in books or heard in lectures? Where is the opportunity to actually go into the reality of the things from which such results are actually drawn? Therefore, there is no possibility of a real overview of the implications of the results in this field. We are experiencing in today's science - when it develops into a world view and thereby believes itself to be very exact - that the processes that we experience in history are then used to calculate the processes that are supposed to have taken place on our earth over millions of years or that are supposed to have taken place millions of years ago. These calculations are always correct; for if, for example, one calculates how much debris the Niagara Falls deposited in a certain number of years, then one can, of course, calculate a great deal from such layer formations. But what is the actual method of calculation? The method of calculation is as follows: we observe the processes in the human stomach, say for five years, and then we calculate what these processes were like 10, 20 years ago, 150, 200, 300 years ago. We will get exact results – except that the person with this stomach and its processes obviously did not even exist as a physical human being 300 years ago! In this way, one can also calculate the changes in the human stomach and then the nature of the whole person in 10, 20, 30, 100, 200, 300 years – only then the person has long since died, and the whole calculation – which is completely correct as a calculation – has not the slightest value. The same value attaches to calculations that relate to the state of the earth millions of years ago or millions of years in the future, because they do not take into account whether the earth existed at that time or will still exist then. What use is it to know that after so many millions of years, when we, let us say, paint egg white on the wall and this will glow due to the changes in the earth, when the earth will no longer be there! Today, people still do not understand that some calculation or similar result can be absolutely correct, but that it cannot be applied to reality.

Two things are necessary today if one is to make a judgment: first, that the judgment is built on the basis of a correct logical method – the method of calculation is also a logical method – and second, that the judgment is also built on an appropriate insight into reality. A judgment must be both realistic and logical. The former is usually forgotten today, which is why the only logically correct judgments play such a large role in our ordinary scientific life, but under certain circumstances they have no application to reality. This is the concern of the spiritual current of which this Goetheanum is the representative: not only to have logically correct views, which can then also lead to errors, but to have realistic views, ones that really build a bridge between what lives in man as a world view and what develops outside as reality, for only such realistic views can be used for life. Only such realistic views can help our present life, which is drifting so much into chaos, to recover.

So I have shown you by one example – I could only show the one example today, but it could easily be multiplied – by the example of heart science, how necessary it is to strive for a science that is in line with reality, and how the spiritual current that is cultivated here in particular sets itself the serious task of working towards such a necessary reform of this science. I would also like to give an example of how to work towards the historical sciences. Using this example, I would like to show how a rudimentary scientific method, I would say a stunted scientific method, has simply been applied to the historical being, and how this has led to disastrous errors.

In the field of natural science, I would like to point out the so-called biogenetic law. I do not want to talk about the more or less limited validity of this law, but I want to treat it as a kind of hypothetical natural law. What does this biogenetic law state? It states that every higher animal creature, including man, during embryonic development, that is, during the development from conception to birth, briefly undergoes the forms that have been experienced in the development of the species. For example, the human embryo shows a fish-like form during one particular period, then other forms. These forms, the metamorphoses through which the embryo passes, are reminiscent of what has taken place in the developmental series in the history of the species, so that it has been able to come up to the human being through various forms. - This so-called biogenetic law has a certain limited significance. There is no doubt that ontogeny is a brief repetition of phylogeny, that individual development is a brief repetition of tribal development. But now attempts have been made to apply what has been found in the natural field to the historical field. It was believed that what lives in a later culture must, in a brief repetition, also show what lived in an earlier culture. So when a new people emerges somewhere, in its initial stages it must, as it were, pass through the stages of human development as they have been experienced so far, and then add a new one on top, just as the human being adds the mature life to the embryonic repetition of the tribal history. Not much has come of it if one wanted to apply this law, which was initially formulated purely abstractly for historical development and was modeled on a series of scientific observations, to life. I would like to say that life experiences do not actually confirm this law in the historical field in such a way that one can do anything with it in the face of reality.

On the other hand, the following emerges for the spiritual scientist's sharpened sense of observation. The essential thing is that the inner work that the spiritual scientist has to do in order to arrive at his modes of conception, and then to penetrate into nature in the way I have shown, sharpens his view of reality, his sense of observation for reality. This is how it turns out for this sharpened sense of observation: in the early stages of its development, the human being undergoes certain metamorphoses. One must only have an unbiased sense of what is going on in the early stages of human development. We have an important stage of life in human life: from birth to the change of teeth around the age of seven. The soul life of the human being manifests itself in a very specific way during this period, and with the change of teeth it undergoes a transformation. Until the change of teeth, the human being is in the epoch of his life where he is an imitative being who wants to imitate everything that is done in his environment, down to the movements, down to the formation of speech sounds, and who wants to imitate these things through inner forces. Up to the age of seven, he adapts so well to the human environment that he then, up to the next important stage in life, which is linked to the onset of sexual maturity, has the need to accept, on the basis of authority, that which he is supposed to believe. Then the whole organization of the human being changes again, and so does his soul life. And anyone with enough sense of observation will be able to notice how the human being changes even in his early twenties, or perhaps in his late twenties. Later on, what corresponds to this youthful transformation of the human being can only be observed by the keen sense of observation of the spiritual researcher. When a person has really undergone spiritual training, it becomes apparent that towards old age certain, I would say shadowy, transformations of the soul life occur. They only appear in hints, but one notices quite clearly: in the forties, at the end of the forties, one becomes a different person and at the end of the fifties one becomes yet another person. These metamorphoses occur in a shadowy, rudimentary way, as only hinted changes within, but anyone who can observe them can compare them with the hints that occur in embryonic life and that are repetitions of earlier physical forms that have been passed through in tribal development.

But one cannot simply transfer the scientific biogenetic law to history; instead of looking at the beginning of life, as the natural scientist must do, the historian is compelled to look at the end of life, at these shadowy, rudimentary transformations of the soul life. And just as for the natural man the beginning of life presents itself as a repetition of tribal history, so these rudimentary hints at the end of life turn out to be repetitions of what the human race has gone through on earth as a whole. We learn to understand that what is only rudimentarily present in our aging today was present in a pronounced sense in prehistoric man; we learn to understand that we can go back to a humanity that has undergone such transformations of the organic-mental life into old age as we do during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. And in our aging, we experience a rudimentary repetition of what humanity has gone through in its historical development. This is where it will become clear what the correlate of the biogenetic law is for historical science.

Those who think abstractly are always satisfied when they have found something, they then expand it and build an entire system of worldviews from it; they want to expand the biogenetic law to the historical becoming of humanity. To the real observer – and this is the observable reality for the spiritual researcher – something quite different presents itself. It shows that we are able to see in our own ageing and its rudimentary changes a repetition of what we find in earlier historical stages of human development. We look back to ancient Indian and Persian times and know that even in old age people remained so capable of development that a metamorphosis could be seen in their organism even in the forties and fifties of human life, as can only be observed today during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. You see, here we have the difference between true observation of reality and the abstract desire to transfer, which has arisen precisely through materialism. And we then understand how, in primeval times, the human being lived as a child and young person alongside the old person and said to himself: One experiences something in old age that brings something completely new into life. Let us consider how deeply this true law allows us to see into the inner process of human development, how we can see into a state of humanity in which we understand patriarchal life because young people anticipated old age in such a way that they said to themselves: this old age offers me something completely new. And so we do not look at prehistoric humanity in the same way as today's materialistic anthropologist does. We look at this primitive humanity and understand it, I would say intimately human, and we can also recognize that in its entire element something quite different was present for this primitive humanity than for present-day humanity. But we must take an interest because we are approaching something directly human, for this metamorphosis from primitive man to our present time. And if we have to admit that the human organism has changed, we will also be able to point out other changes in the human organism in the right form.

I will point out just one thing, my dear audience, which is revealed by spiritual science, but which, because it is relatively close to us and can even be proven externally by philological-historical research, is that the Greeks had their culture, which has such a profound effect on us, because they viewed their environment differently than we do today. Spiritual science shows us that what was in the Greeks was still capable of organic development to a much greater age than it is in us. We reach the end of an ascending organic capacity for development at the end of the twenties; the Greeks continued it well into their thirties. This necessitated greater activity in the Greeks, and that meant that the Greeks invested even more activity in their sense organs than we are able to invest. Therefore the

the Greeks were not yet a reflective race. Mankind has only become reflective since the middle of the 15th century. The Greek race was one that still transferred all its inner activity into the world of the senses, still saw the whole world, I might say, more brilliantly, more warmly than we do. We have to imagine that the Greeks had no interest in dark colors, that they had the keenest interest and the greatest sensitivity for bright, warm colors. And we find external confirmation when we discover that the Greeks have a single word for both dark hair color and lapis lazuli, the blue stone used for painting. People have never had blue hair; so if dark hair and lapis lazuli are both referred to by the same word, it is clear that the blue is seen as dark. And the other peculiar thing is that the Greeks had one word for green = chloros, and at the same time they used this word for what we call yellow, honey. And so I could cite many more examples that would prove to us that the Greeks' vision was similar to blue-blind vision. Roman historians tell us that the Greeks painted only in four colors: black, white, red, and yellow.

From this we can see that when we look into history, we do not have to look at the great so-called war events, at the great so-called formations and fallings of states, but we have to look at the intimate, we have to see how the individual human being has developed. In this way we again meet the needs of our present time. The conquests of Alexander the Great interested only those generations who were first oriented towards this interest through school. Today, the broad masses are called upon for education and intellectual life, and they want to be interested in something other than the conquests of Xerxes or Alexander the Great, of Caesar or even later ones; they want to be interested in what emerges in every human being as the truly human. But a science of history arises for our soul's eye that describes how man was different five, six, seven millennia ago, how he was different in Greek times than he is now. A history arises that approaches everything individually human directly, that allows the Greek to arise before our soul's eye, so that the person of the present can compare the Greek with himself spiritually and mentally. What concerns every human being will be of interest to those who, as the broad masses, strive for education today; what concerns not only Alexander the Great or Alcibiades and Caesar, but what concerns every human being, what, so to speak, is in every human being because he himself is a descendant of those who saw the world so completely differently.

Again, it is a serious question, especially in view of the social needs of the present, to strive for a historical science that is closely related to the human being; and such a science, because it touches the innermost part of the human being, will also be able to release the moral and legal impulses in the human being. In the externalized life of the state, we have gradually come to something that is nothing more than a legislative convention. But what lives in our state laws does not reach into the depths of the human soul where the moral impulses arise. How do today's legal measures live in the individual human being? They do not live. The lawyer himself often does not live them until he has looked them up in the law books, because he usually does not know much about them before he has looked up the relevant paragraph. But what has gradually become a mere historical abstraction does not live in people. If we establish another historical science, it will be one that can trigger impulses in life. Such a historical science alone will be able to grasp people and lead them to reasonable social desires – in contrast to the historical materialism that Lenin and Trotsky cultivated. Because people have been offered nothing but abstract, insubstantial ideas, Lenin and Trotsky were able to confront them with what people alone understand: the results of economic life.

Today, the great, serious demands of life raise the question: in what way can natural science and historical science be revitalized? If we want to take life seriously today, we have to think about such a revitalization of the sciences. I can well imagine that those people who today receive their education through everything that such an education achieves today will be shocked by what I am saying here and probably find it radical – while we, after all, must find it absolutely necessary simply because of the seriousness of life. But is it not our time itself that points to the seriousness of life in every moment?

Dear attendees, it can be hypothesized that this hall would be very full today if it were not for the delayed celebration of Carnival – if you can call it a celebration. But it is entirely to my liking that this evening is being held here today, to show that there are still places where people feel that serious matters must be discussed in a time of need, in a time like the one we are living in today. In such a time, there is still much that cannot be reconciled with the seriousness of life that is necessary to think of something like what has been suggested in today's introductory lecture.

But when one expresses something like this, my dear audience, one feels reminded of the saying of someone who, in his time, also felt compelled to speak of the great impulses in contrast to the little interest of human beings: Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke about the destiny of the scholar and gave lectures on the subject. When these lectures were published, he introduced them with just a few words. He said, addressing himself to all those who so well proved from their life practice that ideals cannot be realized after all - he actually did not address these, because they are not teachable, but he spoke with reference to these - he said: That ideals cannot be realized in direct life, we others know that just as well as these so-called life practitioners. But that life must be directly oriented towards them, we must say with all seriousness. And Johann Gottlieb Fichte added that there are people who are unable to see how necessary it is, in the serious hours of world history, to also begin something correspondingly serious, which only proves that these people simply cannot be counted on in the world plan. And so, said Fichte, may they be given by the spirit that guides this world plan “in due time rain and sunshine, wholesome nourishment, and undisturbed circulation of the juices” and - if it is possible - also “wise thoughts”; but otherwise one cannot count on them when talking about the impulses that lie in the great world plan.

But one would like, especially in today's serious world situation, to find a sufficiently large number of people who can feel this seriousness and, out of it, can feel the necessity that not small things, but great things must happen in impulses, and that they must happen precisely in the realm of human consciousness itself, so that we can move forward. It is out of such impulses that I have tried to speak to you today, using individual examples to illustrate the relationship between anthroposophy and contemporary science. I have only been able to sketch what I wanted to say, but if, through this sketch, I could evoke such impulses in a sufficiently large number of people, which could then have a stimulating effect on what must happen - a renewal of our entire scientific life - then I would consider what can actually happen through such impulses to have been fulfilled, at least for the time being.

In our time, science is very proud when it says that it wants pure knowledge. In Greek times, when imagination was closer to life, the word “catharsis” was used for the most important moment in a tragedy, when the hero's fate was decided. In this way, something was introduced into aesthetics that was taken from medicine. For in Greek life, “catharsis” was regarded as a kind of crisis, whereby certain pathological processes in the organism are counterbalanced or paralyzed by other processes. In this healthy Greek age, ideas were transferred from what takes place in nature to the artistic field. Today, we need a science that does not allow a rift to develop between theory and practice; we need a science that is viable and full of life, we need a science that can build up life.

However, only those people who really understand and feel the seriousness of contemporary life will long for such a powerful science. And as for the rest, let me say this at the end, we must, in accordance with the old saying of Fichte, leave them today to a kind cosmic plan, which provides them with food and drink at the right time, which gives them sunshine and rain at the right time, which gives them postponed carnival fun and - if possible - also wise thoughts. It will be difficult!

But what is needed today lies in another area and can be described as follows: spirit-estranged research must find its way back to the spirit. And it is this path back to the spirit that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to find, and to this end it calls on humanity. That is the truth, despite all the prejudices and defamations that are otherwise leveled against this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in the world.

[Lively applause.

Roman Boos: In thanking Dr. Steiner for his lecture, I would like to express the hope that the lectures that will now follow will have the effect in our circle and in the outside world that was indicated in Dr. Steiner's lecture. I would now like to ask that after a short break, those who may still have questions about today's lecture come forward. I would particularly like to ask all our scientifically working friends to take this opportunity, since Dr. Steiner is prepared to add something supplementary in this or that respect.

Eugen Kolisko: In what Dr. Steiner said about research into the reverse biogenetic law, how can it actually be established that we are dealing here with a time that lies so far back that it corresponds to a particular period? How can we determine from the processes observed in the phenomena of old age how far back this lies in earlier times?

Friedrich Husemann: Is the blue blindness of the Greeks something that has only to do with the individual development of this people, or is it perhaps something that occurs in the general course of development of a race or a people, which would therefore correspond to a certain age of this race? What about the Chinese, for example, who have been depicted in blue colors since very early times? Are there other factors at work here?

Walter Johannes Stein: How are changes in sensory perception related to changes in thinking among the Greeks, who, according to the book 'The Riddles of Philosophy', still had a much more pictorial perception?

Roman Boos asks Dr. Steiner to give the closing remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: In the sense of a closing word, I would like to address the questions that have been asked. The first question, ladies and gentlemen, is of course one that would require a very comprehensive explanation in order to answer it.

First of all, I have to mention that a real exploration of these things is only possible by applying the spiritual scientific method, that is, the method that actually teaches us to look at what we are otherwise accustomed to looking at from the outside, now to look at from the inside. You can get an idea of what actually comes into consideration in the following way. When you look at the physical organism, you have to take the present moment as your basis. You have to stick to the configuration and outer activity that the physical organism has in the present moment. If you then move on to observing the soul life, you will not find in this soul life the necessity for restriction to the present moment, but you will find in the soul life - initially in the individual soul life - the expansion back into the sixth, fifth, fourth year of life. The experiences are incorporated into memory, so that when you move from observing the physical person to observing the soul, you move from the present to an individual past. To acquire spiritual scientific methods means to develop certain abilities that go beyond the ordinary soul life. These abilities, which go beyond the ordinary soul life, then also expand that which, during the transition from the physical into the soul, extends over a certain period of time, up to the period of childhood. These spiritual scientific methods expand the observation beyond the individual human being, and what enters is the inner observation of the world process. It is certainly a long path, which you will find described in my books, but it is a path that can certainly become a reality for human development.

Just as the inner experiences are immanent in time in a certain way in the memory-based review of the individual life path, one will - but only through comparative treatment of what one has in one's memory - arrive at the design of the time scheme for what presents itself to inner vision, if one only really knows how to work methodically. In this way one arrives at a truly methodical approach. The person who acquires the observant sense for what I have called the rudimentary soul metamorphoses of old age – but which are also matched by rudimentary bodily metamorphoses – will find that there are certain periods of time in which such metamorphoses take place. There is such a period at the end of the forties, again at the end of the fifties, and in the middle of the fifties, so that one does indeed get certain periods of inner experience for this rudimentary soul metamorphosis. Now, if one really applies inner methodology in the expansion of inner vision to the extra-individual realm and thereby arrives at certain time determinations, one can either rely on them directly, which is entirely the case with a developed spiritual-scientific method, or one can try to corroborate what presents itself in this way by verification from outside. For example, you can say to yourself that today, when you have already sharpened your sense of observation, let's say around the age of 35, you experience a certain life metamorphosis. Now you look for this in what is presented to you in the outer historical life, and you thereby fix a certain historical point in time. One then tries to find another life metamorphosis, for example that which presents itself at the end of the 1920s – one arrives at a later point in time. This provides us with individual epochs for what happens historically and what corresponds to an inner metamorphosis of life. In this way, one can relate these individual, unique life epochs to the past historical development of humanity. Is this indicative of the path? Of course, I can only sketch out this path. If you follow the idea, it will become clear to you that this path is an exact one.

As for the so-called blue blindness of the Greeks, I would ask you to please bear in mind that I really only want to speak of a so-called blue blindness. It is more a sensitivity of the Greeks for the bright, warm colors and a lesser interest in the dark, blue, cold colors. One must be clear about the fact that the process itself that is taking place is much more spiritual for the Greek people than it is for today's partially blue-blind people. It is only an analogy, but it is precisely this mental blue blindness that is so strongly present in the Greeks that we can still prove it in the Greek language. But you have probably already been able to deduce from the lecture that we should not regard this as an individual characteristic of the Greek people, but as something that occurs in a particular period of a people's development. Of course, it must be borne in mind that the relative epochs of the peoples living side by side on earth do not coincide absolutely. It must be realized that the Chinese people, for example, had long since emerged from the period of blue blindness when they entered history. So, to a certain extent, one must perceive the periods of time as layered next to each other, then one will see what I have said in the right light. I have tried to describe the thought process as it manifested itself in the Greeks in my “Riddles of Philosophy”; this thought process of the Greeks was also somewhat different from our present-day thought process. Our thought process is that we are aware of a certain activity of thought with which we accompany external facts. We ascribe the formation of thoughts to this activity of thoughts, of which we are aware, and ascribe only the sensory impression to the objective. The Greeks were different. In the Greeks - you can easily prove this by looking at the Greek philosophers with an unbiased judgment - there was a clear awareness that they saw thoughts in things just as they saw colors in things, that they therefore perceived thoughts. The Greeks experienced the thought as something perceived, not as something actively formed. And that is why the Greeks were not really a reflective people in the sense that we are. People have only really become reflective since the middle of the 15th century. The thinking process has become internalized. It has become internalized at the same time as the course of the sensory process. I would say that the Greeks saw more of the active part of the spectrum, the red, warm side of the spectrum; they only sensed the cold, blue side of the spectrum indistinctly. And today we certainly have a very different perception of the red and warm side of the spectrum; we see it much more shifted towards the green than the Greeks, who were still sensitive to it beyond our outermost red. The Greek spectrum was shifted entirely towards the red side. The Greeks therefore saw the rainbow differently than we do. And by having our sensitivity more on the other side of the spectrum, we are turning our attention to the dark side, and that is something like entering a kind of twilight. It makes you think. If I describe it more figuratively now, don't be offended; it is based on a very real process of human development. With the shift of sensitivity from the warm part of the spectrum to the dark part of the spectrum, something similar occurs in the development of humanity as a whole, as it does in a person when they experience twilight from full brightness, where they begin to rely more on themselves, to follow the inner path of thought, and where they become pensive. I would say that in the twilight, in the dark, thinking is more active than when the sensitivity is directed towards the lively, warm colors, where one lives more in the outer world, experiences more of what is in the outer world. The Greek was more absorbed in the outer world with all his thinking. He therefore also saw his thoughts in the outer world. Modern man, who has shifted the whole spectrum of vision more towards the dark side, cannot see his thoughts in the outer world. Just as one will not claim that what the soul experiences is outwardly visible at night when it is dark all around, but knows that it takes place in the soul, so what what man experiences since the shift of the spectrum view, happens more on the dark side in the soul, and one can say that a shift in thinking has occurred since Greek times.

These are the kinds of things that arise from research in spiritual science. I can only sketch them out here; I hope that some of what has been suggested today can be developed further here in the next few days, and I wish my subsequent speakers good luck in dealing with the most interesting questions possible in the next few days.

Preliminary note: Carl Unger's lecture was not written down. However, he spoke about the subject matter on several occasions, for example in his lectures “On the Epistemological Foundations of Natural Science” (1916) and “On the Path from Natural Science to Spiritual Science” (1917), both of which were published in volume I of his “Writings”, Stuttgart 1964.

Rudolf Steiner: The relationship between supersensible knowledge and the will has been asked about here. Now, if we want to form a clear idea about this, we must first consider the relationship between what we usually call will in our daily lives and what we call idea, and then we have to recognize the further path from the idea to supersensible knowledge.

Today, Dr. Unger has spoken to you about pure thinking. Anyone who wanted to make a substantial distinction between the will and pure thinking would probably proceed as one would if asking: What actual difference is there, say, between a boy born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749 who lived at

63 such-and-such, and the privy councillor who lived in Weimar in 1827? One and the same person, one and the same being: it was Goethe. Seen inwardly, the will as the essentially active element is, of course, quite the same as thinking, for that which is active in pure thinking is will — only that one gains nothing for epistemological discussions by emphasizing the will-character of pure thinking.

In order to characterize thinking epistemologically, one must proceed in the same way as the speaker this evening. I would say that thinking is only essential in a different age than the will. The will, where it has not yet struggled through to pure thinking, is younger, so to speak, still in adolescence. When it has developed further and further, it reaches a certain age – this is, of course, a figurative way of speaking – and then it is able to live as pure thinking, which is a further step. This has been demonstrated quite well to you this evening: pure thinking is meditation. Meditation leads to the life of the supersensible world.

Now meditation, pure thinking in general, truly pure thinking, is not possible without further developing the will. This pure thinking as a human capacity is only possible through a particularly intensive effort, a particularly intensive exercise of the will. But everything that one exercises, one trains, one develops. And it is a very special training of the will when one moves from pure thinking to meditation. It can certainly be said that this entire development of the human being, who initially lives in unclear ideas, towards pure thinking and then towards meditation, this entire effort is essentially a training of the will. Therefore, what is needed to really grasp spiritual knowledge is essentially an effort of the will. And anyone who makes an effort to respond to spiritual knowledge exercises willpower, and in doing so exercises their will in general. Therefore, it can be said that it would be quite good for today's humanity if it would at least respond to spiritual knowledge, because in doing so it would truly develop the will, it would strengthen the will.

It would seem that in modern humanity, the will has basically become something about which one can only entertain illusions – if one is still willing to believe that it exists at all. If we look around today, for example, to see what volitional impulses led to the events of the war in recent years that have so terribly shaken the world, we cannot possibly answer, because the will of human beings was least of all at work in them. There was a kind of determination by powers that had seized control of people's decisions. Almost everywhere we see that in 1914, when decisive resolutions were made, we cannot even begin to hold people responsible. It would be a psychological absurdity to somehow blame Berchtold's diplomatic clumsiness for the Serbian ultimatum or the like. Such things may be part of the campaign of confusion and lies that is sweeping the world today, but they cannot stand up to serious psychological scrutiny. On a large scale, what is expressed on a small scale must be carefully examined.

Analyze what in everyday life is called the will. I call your attention to the fact that most people lie to themselves about what they want. They get up every morning at a certain time. Do you believe that they want to do this in the true sense of the word? If you analyze the whole fact that is expressed in this getting up in the morning, then you come to wanting just as well or just as badly as if you say that the clock strikes 8 o'clock in the morning. That is a complex of facts when the clock strikes 8 o'clock. When a person's legs move out of bed, hands reach for this or that, then that is a different complex of facts. And that in one case we speak of automatism and in the other of will, my dear audience, is based only on an illusion or on a confused psychology. In truth, the human being is only placed in a position to speak of volition when he is approaching pure thinking and then, through pure thinking, rises to the comprehension of supersensible truths. Then the real volition is integrated or, I might say, poured into his organism – the volition that can truly be called volition. And all the impulses that are present in the traditions for a real will are by no means the result of the automatic activity that has almost become the habit of all people today, but rather from older times, when there was still - albeit in an atavistic way, more instinctively - a will that was independent of the usual automatism of life.

That it is not always the thought that must guide the will is best seen from the fact that people, if they are sufficiently emotional, have the greatest influence on their fellow human beings precisely when they have dream-like thoughts, when they have somewhat enigmatic thoughts. As a rule, clear thinkers, who are more inclined to abstractions, have less influence on their fellow men than those who, with a certain inner brutality, are attuned to emotional thoughts.

All this, if properly carried out and followed through to its logical conclusion, will show you that it is precisely the path of development that the human soul takes to pure thinking, to supersensible understanding, that is the path by which the will is at the same time brought out of the depths of the human being, so that one can truly say: The will, which is the actual object of ethics, which is the actual object of moral teaching, this will is cultivated as a reality precisely by the spiritual scientific method.

It is this will that has been virtually lost under materialism. Modern humanity has been seized by the automaton-like. I would like to analyze the will factor, let us say in the case of a current-day philosophy professor who is constantly on the go or in the case of a university professor in general. Yes, my dear attendees, if you disregard what he does in continuous automatization, which has entered into him during his education, what actually remains for his will? What remains for his will is what is contained in the law of appointment, in the decree of appointment; he does what he is driven to do by his being integrated into some state or professorial context or the like. Analyze what actually lies in the element of will in such an activity, that is, in the activity of a quite leading personality, and then try to compare how differently this element of will must be grasped by what spiritual scientific development is in a human being. Then you will get an idea of how this spiritual science is called upon to lead the human being out of the stage of the automaton and to make him truly an individuality.

The fact that today one does not even have an inkling of how to arrive at an understanding of the will proves to you that now even a strange idea has found its way into the newer scientific way of thinking: the strange idea that plants also have something like ensouled will, because there are those among them which, when insects or something like that come near them, fold up their leaves and consume these insects. That means, to summarize a mere external fact, a mere external 'complex of acts, an external complex of phenomena, under the concept of will - but which in this case is only an illusion. I have often said in lectures that I know of another creature that, when small animals come near, also takes the opportunity to get them into its burrow and kill them there, just like the [carnivorous] plant does the insect: namely, a mousetrap. And with exactly the same right with which one thinks of the Venus flytrap as ensouled, one can think of a mousetrap as ensouled.

These things, as they occur today in scientific thinking, are just beginning to prove that there can be no question of an illusion-free conception of will in today's thinking. We will only get a correct idea of the will, of the experience of the will, when the will is actually practised in spiritual science, as it is meant here, in anthroposophy. On the other hand, one could even say that people do not approach this spiritual science because it requires a real inner effort of the will, an exercise of the will, and because the human souls of the present time are actually sleeping souls that are quite happy to surrender to the automatism of thinking and also of willing.

Thus the question as to whether supersensible knowledge has a relation to the will must be answered with a strong yes. For this supersensible knowledge will redeem the sleeping will of present-day humanity, it will awaken the souls, and that is what matters today. The sleeping souls of today will not solve the great tasks of the present time. The will will solve them, and it can be redeemed precisely through devotion to supersensible knowledge.

after the lecture by Friedrich Husemann on “Nervousness, Worldview and Anthroposophy”

Preliminary note: Nothing is known about Friedrich Husemann's lecture because no notes were taken. However, it may be assumed that some of his remarks were also addressed in his lectures on “Questions of Contemporary Psychiatry from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”, which he gave at the first Anthroposophical College in September 1920. A summary of these lectures was published in the collection “Aenigmatisches aus Kunst und Wissenschaft”, volume I, Stuttgart 1922.

After Dr. Husemann's lecture, a question was asked about the possibilities of studying psychiatry in the future.

Rudolf Steiner: It is of course impossible to speak about this subject today, which would require an exhaustive treatment if one wanted to go into it at all, in any other way than with a few hints at most, because the study of psychiatry, especially in our time, certainly requires the most far-reaching reforms. If we consider how it is actually impossible today to formulate the questions that must be asked in psychiatry, we will realize how necessary

70 such a reform of the study of psychiatry is. However, such a reform will not be able to take place – this seemed clear to me from Dr. Husemann's lecture itself – if the individual specialist subjects are not first truly fertilized by spiritual science. For the development that Dr. Husemann has so beautifully described today, which began around the time of Galileo and culminated in the 19th century, has actually driven the whole of human thought life apart into two sharply opposing currents of thought. On the one hand, there are the ideas we have about material things and their processes; on the other hand, there is the life of thought itself, which has increasingly taken on a purely abstract character, so that – since abstractions cannot be forces in the world , and thus cannot be a force in man either that can bring about something - so there is no possibility for man either to understand the material, the physical, from the soul, to build some kind of bridge from the psychic to the material.

Today, at most, man has an idea of a sum of abstractions or even of abstract feelings and the like when he speaks of the soul. This sum of abstractions cannot, of course, set an organism in motion, cannot somehow build a bridge to the organism. Therefore, on the one hand, one cannot speak of being able to influence the external physical, real organism by acting on the soul life, which is, after all, only a sum of abstractions. On the other hand, there is what has been gained through science about the physical organism, because it has been invented that soul phenomena are only parallel phenomena or even effects of the physical organism. What is formed in the way of concrete ideas about this physical organism is not conducive to squeezing anything out of these ideas about the psychic. And so today, regardless of whether one is more or less of a materialist, there coexist an outlook on the soul life that only looks at abstractions, and an outlook on the material life, including the organic life, from which nothing spiritual can be extracted.

It is therefore quite understandable that it is not easy to find a method that can be used for psychiatry. That is why, in recent times, people have stopped talking about the connection between the physical and organic in humans and the psychological, which takes place as a process in consciousness. And since one is in reality constantly in danger of falling on one's face between these two stools, between the physical-material and the abstract-psychological, it is necessary to invent a quite unconscious world, a strange and unconscious world. And that has now been amply done in psychoanalysis, in analytical psychology, a scientific object that is actually extremely interesting. For once there has been a reform of psychiatry, so that we will again have a proper psychiatry, then this scientific object will have to be properly examined from this new psychiatric point of view, because it is actually [itself] an object for psychiatry.

So they tried to imagine an unconscious world so that they would not be completely cut off from the ground between these two chairs. Of course I am not saying anything against the unconscious world, but it must be investigated, it must be really recognized through that which spiritual science introduces as vision; it cannot be fantasized in the way that the Freudians or similar people fantasize it.

Spiritual science will bring about a reform of psychiatry in that it will lead from mere abstract concepts, which have no inner life, to concepts that are in line with reality, to concepts that already live in the world as concepts, that have been gained by immersing oneself in reality with their methods. Then, when one ascends to such spiritual methods, which in turn provide realistic concepts, one will find the transition from such concepts, which are mere abstractions, to that which is now not mere abstraction but reality. That means that it will be possible to build a bridge between the psychic and the physical in man. The psychic and the physical must appear differently in our minds if we seriously desire to have a psychiatry.

The sum of abstractions today, including those that comprise the abstract laws of nature – these laws are becoming more and more filtered – is not capable of being immersed in a real process. Just imagine how, with the abstractions that figure in science today, one could find something like the two important facts — for they are facts — that I mentioned in the first lecture of this series: the spiritual-scientific heart teaching and the spiritual-scientific teaching of the reverse biogenetic law for the historical course of earthly events. From such examples you can see that spiritual scientific methods are capable of finding the way out of the inner life of the soul and into the world of facts, of building a bridge between the so-called spiritual and the so-called physical.

Above all, this is necessary for psychiatry, because only when we are able to properly observe the corresponding facts will we make headway. And the facts of psychiatry are fundamentally even more difficult to observe – because they require greater impartiality – than the facts of the laws of physics. Because in human life, as soon as one moves from the so-called healthy, from the relatively healthy to the relatively sick, there is actually almost no possibility of observing the person in complete isolation. The human being certainly develops into a complete individuality, into an isolated life; he does this precisely through his psyche. But what deviates in the psyche from a linear development, from a linear, so-called normal development, cannot be observed in isolation. I can only hint at this, of course; otherwise one would have to make lengthy explanations if one wanted to prove it in detail. Man is much more of a social being, even in the deeper sense, than is usually thought, and in particular, mental illnesses can actually only rarely be assessed on the basis of the biography of the individual, the isolated individual. That is almost completely impossible.

I would rather use a hypothetical example than theories to suggest what I actually mean. You see, it is possible, for example, that in any community, be it a family or any other community, two people live side by side. After some time, one of them has the misfortune to have an attack, which means that they are transferred to a psychiatric institution. Of course, this person can be treated in isolation. But if you do that, especially if you form an opinion based on an isolated examination of this person, then in many cases you will actually only fall prey to a thought pattern. For the case may be, and in many cases is, that another person, who lives with the person who has become ill, or who has become mentally ill, in a family or in some other community, actually has within himself, let us say, a complex of forces that has led to the mental illness of his fellow human being. So we start with these two people: one person, A, has the attack, from a psychiatric point of view; person B has a complex of forces within him, of a psychically organic nature, which, if you were to look at it in this way, perhaps shows to a much greater extent what is called the cause of the illness in individual A. That is to say, B, who is not mentally ill at all, actually has this cause of mental illness within him to a much greater extent than A, who had to be taken to a sanatorium.

This is something that lies entirely within the realm of reality, not merely of possibility. For it rests on the fact that man A, apart from the complex of forces which is designated as the cause of his mental illness, has a weak constitution and therefore cannot bear this complex of forces. The other, B, who also has the complex of forces within him, perhaps even more strongly, has - apart from this complex of forces - a considerably stronger constitution than the other; it does not harm him. B can bear it, A cannot. But A would not have contracted the disease at all if he had not been continually psychically influenced by B, the person living next to him – an influence that can be extraordinarily significant in this case because B is more robust than A.

There you have an example that is quite common in reality, from which you can see how important the psychiatric approach is if it seriously wants to be based on reality, if it does not play games as it often is in this field today. The point is really not to look at the person in isolation, but to look at them in their entire social environment. Of course, what I mean here will have to be put on a fairly broad basis. After all, it is also the case for the rest of the disease that it makes a big difference whether a weak individual is affected by some complex or a strong, robust individual. Let us assume that two people live next to each other from a certain age onwards and have dealings with each other. One of them still has a robust, rural nature from his youth and background, while the other has been descended from city dwellers for three generations. The person who has a healthy, rural nature and can tolerate some internal damage may carry a much stronger complex, but he can tolerate it and does not become ill. The other, who actually only has it through a psychic infection, through an imitation, through whatever is present from person to person, he does not tolerate the effect.

Here you can see what comes into consideration when you want to talk about psychiatry not from theories and programs, but from reality; you see how, in fact, today one is already turning to the serious that arises from the insight that, basically, especially since the time of Galileo, our scientists have become so one-sided, and you see how necessary it is to take in new ideas in a fruitful way in all fields. Otherwise, human knowledge, especially in those fields that are supposed to lead into practice, into the practice of life, must come to complete decadence. I could say: basically, the same applies to psychiatry as we say about the art of education when we talk about Waldorf schools, namely that one should not just come up with some new formulations of a theoretical nature, but that one should bring the living spiritual science itself into this field. What we have to say about education also applies to psychiatry. We can never approach the matter one-sidedly by saying that this or that can be improved in the field of psychiatry, but we must familiarize ourselves with the idea that Either one accepts the spiritual-scientific basis in the field of knowledge in general, then this spiritual-scientific basis will already transform psychiatry, then it will make something out of psychiatry in particular, which is actually longed for by numerous people today, but which cannot be there at all through the latest natural scientific methods, which have of course been sufficiently explained to you yesterday and today, or... [gap in the transcript].

You see, what must come out of the popularization of spiritual science, to use a trivial word, is that, above all, people will have a much, much better knowledge of human nature than they have today. People today are so out of touch with each other that there can be no question of any knowledge of human nature. People pass each other by, each living only in himself. Spiritual science will open people up to each other. And then, above all, much of what is perhaps still believed today to lie in the field of psychic pathology will be carried over into the field of psychic hygiene. For it is absolutely the case that, I would say, straight lines can be drawn from the symptom complexes of disturbed psychic life to the ideas that are currently widespread in public life and which are not at all considered pathological, but which are generally accepted. And if one were to follow up some of the very generally accepted concepts, one would find that, although more slowly, the same path is taken after all that can be seen in the pursuit of a psychologically abnormal symptom complex, which, however, happens quickly in the case of someone who is found to be mentally abnormal today.

All these things show that ultimately all the talk about details in the reforms of the individual sciences does not lead to much, but that if one decides – although today souls, many souls, are too sleepy – to look for a fertilization of scientific life in the sense of spiritual science, then the most diverse fields of science, but especially that field of science that deals with the various deviations from normal psychic life, psychiatric medicine, will undergo a necessary, I would say self-evident, reform as a result. Even if these cases go as far as the most extreme rebellion, such as raving madness, or feeble-mindedness, and so on – only then will it be found what these psychic aberrations actually mean for normal life in the whole of normal development. And in many respects we shall find that the more and more healthy our world view becomes, the more that will be healed which shines out from public error into the pathological aberrations of the mentally ill.

For it is indeed quite remarkable how difficult it is to draw a correct line between so-called normal life and mentally abnormal life. For example, it is difficult to say whether a person is mentally normal in the case of, say, an event that occurred not too long ago in Basel, not far from here, in which a man left a large sum of money in his will for someone to lock themselves away in complete solitude until such time as they had succeeded in truly proving the immortality of the soul. That is what a man in Basel did in his will, and I don't know what happened to it after that. I believe the heirs objected and tried to decide, not psychiatrically but legally, to what extent it was related to psychiatry or not. But if you now really set out, each and every one of you, to examine whether it should be assessed psychiatrically or whether it is a mental illness or whether it is really an oversized religiosity or whatever, you will hardly be able to manage with complete accuracy.

The point is that our concepts have gradually become weak in the face of reality; they must become strong again. But they will only become strong through spiritual science. And among many other things, psychiatry in particular will feel the effects of this.

My dear friends! The fact that our friends, who are now gathered here, are giving a whole series of lectures is of a certain importance for the course of events here at the Goetheanum. It is an attempt at appropriate collaboration by our friends; and this must indeed be longed for by our movement, that there should be collaboration in our movement from the most diverse points of view of today's life. Only in this way will the first germs be laid, at least, to meet the strong onslaught that is increasingly evident in the present opposition that is being directed against our movement. Therefore, because I also want to point out the full significance of this undertaking by our friends, today's lecture should be a kind of episode in the series of reflections. It arises, so to speak, from the need to continue speaking today in the tone of the principled scientific questions that have been raised here in recent days by our friends, and to resume other anthroposophical reflections only tomorrow.

We have heard a great deal over the past few days from our friends about the fundamental issues in contemporary science, and what we have heard is accurate, important and essential in various ways. We will hear more.

We will hear more. Today, continuing in this fundamental tone, I would like to present some ideas that will also point to the methodology of the current scientific world view, insofar as this methodology shows the actual state of this current scientific world view when it attempts to go into its experimental observation results in more detail. You have heard, particularly from the few comments made yesterday by Dr. Kolisko in response to Dr. Husemann's impressive lecture, what the psychological value of today's scientific view of the world is, so to speak.

Now, however, the following must actually be said: this atomistic-molecular foundation of natural science actually figures within those circles that talk about natural science today and that already mix their fantastic atomic theories into the description of phenomena, as described by Dr. Kolisko yesterday. But this atomistic-molecular foundation of natural science But this atomistic-molecular foundation of natural science appears even more when laymen or semi-laymen speak today about world-view questions in the most diverse monist and similar associations, through which one wants to make popular world-views that are supposed to be based on real science, but which are actually only based on what has long been devalued by the facts of science today. One could say devalued, even if not refuted, because to refute it would require spiritual science, which would first have to be accepted by wider circles. The situation within contemporary spiritual life, which after all ultimately dominates our world, this situation is indeed a rather bleak one.

On the one hand, we have a scientific foundation of the world view that has gradually, I might say, become quite inadequate. And on the other hand, we have all kinds of philosophers who, although much admired, and this is particularly characteristic of our time, do not really arrive at any substantial content for a world view. For it will hardly take long before it is realized that philosophical prattle of the Eucken type or the like cannot be regarded as something truthful or valuable. If we look back a few decades to the development of world views that have emerged from the natural sciences, we find that just a few decades ago, I might say, the glory of atomistic-molecular thinking was still there. It was taken for granted that matter could be conceived of in such a way that atoms and molecules in various configurations and positions in relation to one another were assumed to underlie material substances. And everything that was easily and conveniently available from the fields of physics and chemistry was collected to serve as a kind of corroboration of this atomistic-molecularist thinking.

What existed as a healthy opposition to this thinking, such as the Goethean worldview, was simply not taken into account during this time; it was viewed as a kind of dilettantism. They thought up a world system that was supposed to be composed of the simplest possible elements: space, time, movement, mass – these were the basic concepts that were assumed and from which, basically, an entire world system was then constructed. Such world systems have sprung up like mushrooms, varying in their details but consistent in the main, and they all actually wanted to be based on the most elementary and primitive concepts alone, on concepts such as space, time, movement and mass. The ideal was to trace the complicated form of movement of the cell, from which one then thought of the whole organism as being built, back to space, time, movement and mass, and thereby to imagine everything organic as emerging from mere space, time, movement and mass, which represent matter. This view is, after all, not based on the facts of the world itself, but is thoroughly thought out. Anyone who has experienced what has come about in this way knows how these things were actually all thought-out world views; certain basic assumptions were made and then built on.

In my lectures, I have often related how, as a very young boy, I was already aware of such a world system, which did not go as far as the organic, but at least as far as the chemical. It was put forward by my headmaster at the time, who thought entirely in the spirit of the times and assumed the following as a basis. He said: Let us take the simplest thing, space to begin with, and then distribute matter throughout space, arranged atomistically. He thought of space as infinite and divided space into nothing but space cubes. Space is filled with matter. Now he said: One can think of matter as being distributed in a certain way in these different space cubes. If you try to visualize how matter is distributed in these different space cubes, you can say the following: under certain circumstances, it could be distributed in such a way that the same number of atoms would be present in all of the infinitely many space cubes. But since we have an infinite number of space cubes and no assumption forces us to decide on a certain number of atoms in a space cube, it is just a probability that there are as many atoms in one space as in another. Because there are infinite possibilities, it is likely that there are as many in one space as in the other spaces: One divided by infinity is zero, so there is a different number of atoms in each spatial part. But if you now introduce time, there is no reason to assume that in the next time part the situation would not be the same again: namely that the probability would be zero that there would be the same number of atoms in a particular spatial part as in the previous spatial part. Therefore, the number of atoms in the successive time periods will be different in the spatial parts. That is to say, matter is in motion.

Now we have derived the movement of matter from the probability calculation and from the division of the space cube. But since it is not probable that the atomistic-material particles go through each other - this contradicts what is shown to us in natural phenomena - so one must assume that the material particles are afflicted with resistance against each other, so they are massive. The simplest assumption is that they are rigid masses. And with that we have time, space, movement, mass, and now we can begin to calculate what results from the mutual impacts. And here we soon see something that is highly intriguing for minds like ours, namely, we can now calculate and we can imagine what the calculations show as a correlate, as a representation of what is happening in matter. And indeed, through these computational magic tricks, we can then figure out the processes, as the [school principal] did, right down to the chemical processes. All chemical processes can still be derived by calculation. And if someone is an even greater magician in this field, he will also succeed in deriving and calculating the organic processes in the cell. One gets a whole world view built up from the most primitive ideas of space, time, movement, mass.

This is something that increasingly haunted minds the further 19th-century thinking progressed. And it was only at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century that a breach was made in this whole way of thinking. I have already indicated from a variety of angles how this breach was made. You see, the man I have been talking about here is only representative of this way of thinking; I am using him as a representative because he confronted me as a twelve-year-old boy at the time and I was surprised at the way in which one can conjure up an entire world view out of space, time, movement and mass in a mathematical way. Those who thought likewise all found that one had to do with the matter that causes the appearance of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies, and then with all that one had to ascribe to - as this man said - a much finer world gas that spreads everywhere; others said the ether. So, for their world view, they had the general cosmic ether, through whose movement the light spreads or in whose movement the light should even exist, and in this ether, floating, ponderable matter, matter that has weight and then receives the effects of these ether processes, and also interpenetrates with them, and so on. Of course, there is actually no room in such a world view for the idea of anything spiritual. One can certainly indulge in illusions in this respect; one can say that one adheres to this world view for physics and for chemistry, possibly also for organic chemistry, and in addition, one still assumes a spiritual one. But then one would like to ask how the mediation is actually to take place between this spiritual and what one imagines to be a mere effect of space, time, movement and mass without this spiritual.

Now, however, in addition to these imaginative ideas, which, as already mentioned, had been developed in the most diverse ways, one was also obliged to take into account what the facts of the world of phenomena itself offered. In such a world picture there is really nothing in it that man sees through his senses. Because in it there are moving little particles that have nothing at all of the properties that the sensory world has; there are moving little particles in it, a pushing and shoving, but nothing of what the sensory world presents. It has certainly occurred to individuals, for example to Mach, that something has been thought up there. He therefore went back to the world of pure sense perceptions, and he also wanted to put together the whole physical world picture only from the temporal sequence and the spatial juxtaposition of sense perceptions. However, even in this Machian way one cannot get along, because if one only presents sense perceptions, then these sense perceptions remain, so to speak, neutrally next to each other. If one does not have the ability to see something essential in sensory perceptions, then one can only bring them into a spatial and temporal relationship with each other, not into an intensive and qualitative relationship. In short, one does not get to the rich world of our sensory experiences with one's thinking in the Machian way. But one can say this: such thinking is extraordinarily captivating.

I know, my dear friends, that many of you do not find such thinking enchanting. But that is only because those who do not find it enchanting have not undergone a very strong mathematical culture and therefore cannot feel the enchantment of calculating all the phenomena in the world. There is a kind of magic in transforming the whole world in one's mind, in one's imagination, into a machine that works as finely as it does through such a world view - there is something enchanting about it. And it did not come about out of, I would say, a little devilry or because someone wanted to fool the world - although the world could appear to be fooled by this world view. It really did not arise out of mere cynicism, but it arose because there exists in man an inner urge to deceive himself as much as one can deceive oneself about the phenomena that occur, if one only follows the mathematical fantasies of one's inner soul life. This urge was already present; it was a completely sincere, honest urge that underlay this terribly empty world view, the forming of this terribly empty world view. And today, when we so clearly recognize the necessity of abandoning this world view, abandoning it thoroughly and replacing it with a spiritual-scientific one, today this question must already be asked: Where does the appeal of this mechanistic world view come from?

Perhaps the best way to answer this question of how the mechanistic conception of the world has become so attractive is to take a look at the revolution in this world view that actually only took place in the last two decades of the 19th century and since the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. You see, when people used to think in terms of empty space, and movements in empty space, movements of matter, both heavy matter and ether, there was no limit to certain ideas. What danced from one cube into another in the space cubes could be imagined to have any speed. And it was also imagined to be rigid, even unchangeable. Such a particle was itself thought of as unchanging and was taken as the basis for the calculation as unchanging. One was not bound to anything other than what the invented ideas of space, time, motion and mass imposed.

In particular, many ether theories have been constructed under the influence of these ideas. The ether was sometimes a rigid body that was just not heavy, sometimes a liquid, sometimes a sum of vortices of matter, and so on. All kinds of formations and configurations were seen in this ether. Models were also made of how the ether actually behaves in certain parts of space. In England, in particular, many such ether models were constructed because people there were keen to imagine everything spatially. We in Central Europe could still hear the echoes of these ether model constructions when we met the old theosophists. Theosophists imitated these ether model constructions, and I knew such an old German theosophist who had learned his whole theory from England. He once took me to his attic, and there were all kinds of ether models, huge ether models. There you could see how the coils and movements took place, this way and then that way, intertwining with each other — everything was intertwined. They were terribly complicated but ingeniously devised intertwinings of what was supposed to take place in the ether. The people who thought up such models were sometimes far removed from what actually lives in reality.

But little by little they were compelled to take this reality into consideration, and out of this endeavor something emerged like Einstein's theory, the so-called theory of relativity, the theories of Mie, Nordström, Hilbert and so on; there is a whole rich literature today about this theory of relativity. I would like to present just two ideas of this relativity theory to the soul's eyes, and then we will see where it has led, at least in terms of the attempt to get out of the purely imaginative world view. The first thing that occurred to people under the influence of Lorentz's experiments and Einstein's terribly abstract thinking, but still with some consideration for reality, was to disregard this world view and these beautiful models altogether. To characterize what was arrived at when one wanted to get out of it, I will tell you how one came to regard the speed of light as the original speed, so to speak, as the original speed in space.

Anyone who fantasizes in this way (see Chart 1) does not need to think about any original speed, because these little comrades in there in the space cubes can move at any speed or slowness and, of course, faster than light. You just have to assume that.

But certain phenomena had to be taken into account, which led to the assumption that light - I am not saying that this is correct, but in any case, it was stated and it was finally accepted - light as the speed beyond which there is no increase in speed, so that nothing can be faster than light. So everything else that exists in the world in terms of speed must then be measured against the speed of light.

Now, such an assumption could no longer be reconciled with the assumption of the ether as this previous world view had assumed. Because if one assumed that light had a speed of 186,000 miles per second and compared everything else with the speed of light, then one could not accommodate the whole sum of ideas associated with the ether in this world view. And so it happened that, for example, Einstein completely left out the ether and now no ether was assumed at all. In Einstein's theory of relativity, you have a world view without an ether. So light propagates through empty space with the maximum of all existing velocities. Everything else must be measured by light. If we take this as our point of departure, we arrive at a significant conclusion. It turns out that all that is required is for a solid body to move fast enough. It can increase its velocity continuously, but it cannot exceed the speed of light. So now we are no longer dealing with the movement of a solid body through the ether. Because the ether is no longer considered, we now speak of the movement as such, which is also carried out by solid bodies, and we speak of the fact that the movement is not without influence, for example, on the expansion, let us say, on the length of a solid body. And so Einstein came to the idea that a solid body of a certain length simply becomes shorter by moving, that is, by nothing other than by moving.

Just think about it: insofar as you yourselves are solid bodies - if you were to move through space at a certain speed, you would become thinner and thinner in the direction in which you are moving, and finally you would become as thin as a sheet of paper. So by leaving out the ether, certain changes to the world view became necessary. And the following two sentences play an extraordinarily important role in the theory of physical knowledge today: firstly, that the speed of light is the maximum speed, that nowhere can a greater speed be assumed than that of light, that light is the original speed, and secondly, the assumption that solid bodies change their size simply by moving, that movement itself can be a cause of a change in size, of the expansion of solid bodies.

If you take these two ideas and consider how different they are from everything we humans think about based on our experiences of our environment, you will be able to form an opinion about what Einstein, Mie, Nordström and so on were compelled to do in the physical world view. You see, there is already a physical world view that has been adopted by a whole series of people, which is based on these ideas of the maximum speed of light and of expansion, change through movement itself in solid bodies. This world view has nothing to do with the world view that we were accustomed to in our youth and that still haunts laymen when they talk about world views. This world view has actually revolutionized all old physical concepts. It is interesting that this world view even seeks to revolutionize the old Newtonian view of gravitation, of weight, of the attractive force of mass, so that Newton's law that masses attract each other in inverse proportion to the square of the distance no longer applies. But what asserts itself as a change in mass according to Einstein's theory is basically also only a calculation result. So one should also only calculate the effects that were previously attributed to gravity, gravitation and so on. However, Einstein is obliged to think of a different geometry for his world view. What is this different geometry? That can be said very simply. In our geometry, the Pythagorean theorem applies and it applies that if two straight lines are parallel, they do not intersect even at infinity. In our geometry, the theorem also applies: the three angles of a triangle are 180 degrees. In the geometry that is assumed [by Einstein], such theorems no longer apply. For example, under certain conditions, the three angles of a triangle are greater than 180 degrees, or even less than 180 degrees. But this is only possible if you imagine space in a completely different way than you have usually imagined it, namely that in this world view you imagine space as an empty vacuum.

You see, a kind of compromise has been reached between those who have overcome the old Euclidean geometry and replaced it with another geometry: Lobachevsky, Riemann, Gauss and so on, who have introduced calculations with more than three dimensions. And Einstein can't get along with anything other than introducing the multidimensional manifold. So, simply by introducing multi-dimensional space, one can, as it were, incorporate gravity into this multi-dimensional space. It's actually terribly simple.

You see, if you assume three-dimensional space and calculate in this three-dimensional space, then the effects of gravity are not included. You have to assume something extra for gravity, namely a force emanating from the masses, through which they attract each other or exert pressure or something similar – pressure forces that cause the masses to collide or the like. But if you assume a fourth dimension in addition to these three and know nothing other than what the calculation yields, then you have a good opportunity to accommodate gravity as well. Because as long as you only calculate with three dimensions, you have to assume something extra for gravity; but if you already take into account what you would otherwise have calculated for gravity by adding another dimension, then what you would otherwise have calculated for gravity can also come out for what you would otherwise have assumed for gravity. In any case, however, you can see that something suddenly appears that intervenes quite newly in the old ideas. Suddenly, something arises such as the paradoxical idea that a body can become smaller purely by moving. A mere solid body – I don't even want to say an animal, which one might assume would shrink or something like that through the exertion of force – a mere solid body does not become smaller when it is cooled, but when it is moved. One is compelled to do so. The world view that you have believed to be so certain suddenly changes, and you come to completely opposite ideas. It is very strange, when you look at something with the eyes of a psychologist, as I have described to you.

This idea of space vacuum, of time, which, so to speak, goes from a non-beginning to a non-end, when you compare this rigid world view, which has something terribly rigid about it, with Einstein's, then the Einsteinian world view - I would say it suddenly becomes something slimy. The former is extremely dry, can be attacked and felt everywhere as something extremely dry, and now it suddenly becomes slimy - the bodies cease to retain their expansion, and through the mere movement they become mollusks. Actually, this is a terrible change of the basic physical concept in the last two decades. The world does not yet appreciate this, although it is repeatedly presented to the world from many sides as one of the greatest achievements of modern thinking. Unfortunately, however, it seems to me, my dear friends, as if modern humanity has become too stupid to think at all. Therefore, it does not care about it at all. Even the newspapers are talking today about Einstein's theory, which actually overturns everything that people still think when they live in the popular world view. Well, it makes no impression on people; they read this Einsteinian revolution in physics just as they read that, well, let's say, milk has become 10 centimes more expensive again. There is no longer anything in humanity that would show that these people are still living with what some of them are thinking.

This revolution in physics has already taken place, and the world view that was still firmly established just four decades ago has, so to speak, been turned upside down into a sum of such ideas that are now of a completely different nature. Anyone who today allows the thoughts of Einstein, Mie, Nordström to take effect on them has something completely different to deal with than what the physical theorists presented to us in the universities four decades ago. Of course, the subject could not yet be broken down into the ramifications of the individual sciences, but that is on the way, for we are already finding a kind of bridge to cytology, and that will come: Einstein's theory will also take hold of cytology, then it will enter into organic chemistry and so on.

You see, for anyone who cares about the fate of humanity, such a change in the ideas of a worldview is of the utmost importance, because they must ask themselves: how did something like this come about in the whole development of modern humanity? What does it actually depend on? You see, in the times that preceded the great turning point, this leap in the development of humanity - which took place in the middle of the 15th century, but which was now a natural one - in such times that preceded this turning point, one could have had neither this physical world view nor Einstein's theory of relativity. In those days, before the time of Galileo, people thought in images, in images that are more similar to the forces present in reality. The abstract concepts by which we today also want to grasp the laws of nature are quite unlike the real forces. In the past, people still had certain imaginations in their concepts. They still had the opportunity to enter into relationships with reality. They had this opportunity because something of the after-effects of the prenatal spiritual-soul life, the life between death and a new birth, still resulted for them. That the ideas did not become abstract, but rather concrete, permeated with pictorial structure, is due to the influence of what one had experienced between the last death and this new birth. This ability was lost, and only abstract thinking remained, which, however, actually has real value only if it is still imbued with the resonance of the forces between death and a new birth. This was gradually distilled out completely, and in the 19th century all that remained of this world view was emptied of everything that had previously had a spiritual origin. The forces used to create this world view actually only make sense if they take their content from the spiritual world, otherwise it is an empty formalism. And this formalism was applied to the external sense world, to which it did not fit at all, for which it was not at all adapted. One was subject, I would say, to a terrible fate: that which could have been vividly revived in an inner experience, that was applied to the outer world.

I believe that you can get a sense of what I am actually talking about if you open Novalis and find true hymns in the aphorisms of Novalis, for example to mathematics, to pure mathematics, which he calls a great poem, a wonderful poem, a most wonderful imaginative creation. I don't know how many people today can relate to Novalis in this, but one can relate to him. One can sympathize with him when one knows that Novalis had an inkling of how mathematics suddenly becomes something wonderful when it is not merely applied to the external world of the senses, where it becomes purely formalistic, but when it is carried up into the spiritual world and filled with imaginations of the spiritual world. For if one applies them to the external sense world, then one really dislikes all talk of this sense world. One no longer speaks of this real world at all; one actually speaks of something quite foolish. One cannot, as was remarked yesterday, present such a world view without dishonesty, because it takes no account of what one otherwise really presents in life. You throw everything out as if it weren't there. You can't imagine such a world that is not red and not blue, not warm and not cold, that is not thick and not thin, that is not loud and not silent, you can't imagine it in reality. You can calculate it, but you can't imagine it. You transform the whole world into an empty formalism.

This stops immediately when you carry this mathematics up into the spiritual world. There it becomes manifest, it becomes something great. And now, you see, the world is at a crossroads today. On the one hand, it should stop developing this formalistic world view, because that is nothing more than squeezing a lemon dry, and it should be willing to find spiritual content in a different way, not by inventing atoms and their weaving, but by looking for the spirit in the phenomena that are all around us. We should do this. We should become agile, we should be able to penetrate into the organic.

The day before yesterday, Dr. Unger so beautifully explained to you how it is necessary for scientific thinking to become inwardly agile, to inwardly transform itself, so that this thinking can follow the metamorphosis of organic forms. Yes, humanity should do this. But under the influence of this new world picture, it has become neurasthenic. Under the influence of this rigid, dry world picture, it has become completely neurasthenic with regard to time and movement and space and mass, fidgety, terribly fidgety. And instead of her thinking feeling its way into the metamorphosing organic world, instead of her thinking having a truly organic metamorphosing effect, her thinking becomes mollusc-like. And instead of thinking in terms of Goethe's metamorphosis, she thinks in a neurasthenic way, how the solid body becomes shorter when it merely moves. There you have the way in which thinking has become mobile under the aegis of our concept of time. There you have what is rightly demanded, but which our time fulfills only in a neurasthenic way. There you have, so to speak, first of all what was to come, but it comes in a neurasthenic way.

These things must be borne in mind, my dear friends, if you want to understand the present. Einstein, Mie, Nordström, Hilbert and so on, they are, I might say, under the impression of the approaching spiritual wave. But these are all neurasthenics, world-view neurasthenics, who go against the thinking that must be demanded by the real modern theory of knowledge; they fulfill it in a neurasthenic way. They cannot conceive of the Goethean metamorphosis; but the old, dry, rigid world-picture, which, I might say, makes one cool to the finger-tips when one touches it in its dryness, they make slimy, mollusc-like. Of course, thinking is “flexible” when it can imagine that a person, if they fly fast enough through space, becomes completely flat like a sheet of paper. There you have “flexible” thinking, but flexible thinking in the light of neurasthenics, in the light of neurasthenic world-view. This world-view neurasthenia, which has often been pointed out to you, is very deeply rooted in our world-views. That is what we have to lead to the soul today. Today, our world view is becoming neurasthenic. Spiritual science should heal this neurasthenia. This is also a demand of the time.

Now, tomorrow, after we have gone through this episode, we want to bring some more anthroposophical considerations into it.

Preliminary note: Walter Johannes Stein's lecture was not written down. The questions from the participants were submitted in writing.

Question: How is it that the color perception on the right and left is of different intensities?

Rudolf Steiner: This is connected with the fact that the entire vitality in the human being is different on the left and right. We are not at all organized in such a way that the human being functions the same on both sides - the left-handed person and the right-handed person, if I may say so. That which lives in our consciousness is actually always an intermediate state between that which lives through the left-handed person and that which lives through the right-handed person, and the extreme states, the lopsidedness and so on, are just radical formations of that which is actually already present in every person by nature. The difference in intensity stems from the fact that we, as symmetrical human beings, live and function with the two [dis]symmetrical parts in varying degrees of intensity.

The next question was: What is the significance of the warmth points? To what extent can the warmth points be regarded as organs of warmth perception, of general inner and outer perception?

In general, however, something comes into consideration that would be extremely difficult to explain in brief. I would have to give you a whole lecture about it. What is referred to here as heat points, they do not actually serve like the sense organs, but they serve to spread the sensations of warmth as such throughout our organization, so that we identify ourselves with the warmth within us.

This spreading is actually essentially there to perceive us in the sensation of warmth as a unified being, as we must generally hold that we as human beings are organized in such a way that we also stand out from our animal nature through our sensory organization. Our animal nature is actually organized in the way our sensory physiologists usually describe it. In contrast, our human senses are formed in such a way that the orientation towards the I is already inherent in the individual sensory activities. The I is basically a resultant of the twelve partial effects that come together from our various senses. We should not actually say, if we formulate the facts precisely, that we perceive through the eye. Perception as such is much more rooted in a process that lies further back. What actually takes place through the eye is the activation of the process of perception in our entire ego process – it is the same with the other senses – so that we are distinguished from animals by the fact that our senses are already oriented towards the ego. This can also be demonstrated externally by the fact that the further down the animal scale we go, the more dissimilar, and to some extent more complicated, the senses become in comparison to our human senses.

The next question: How are the biogenetic and phylogenetic processes to be understood?

This will become very clear once we start to properly study embryology and a reasonably conducted embryology will then also lead to a reasonable interpretation of phylogeny. Present-day embryology is actually a very one-sided science; it actually only considers the development of the ovum in its complexity. However, it attaches very little importance to the decadent organs, to that which disappears in the developed embryo, i.e. to what disappears, such as the amniotic sac, the allantois, the chorion and so on. These things regress, while that which then becomes the visible human organs develops forward. The mistake that is made today is that one actually only looks at the evolutionary processes, not the involutionary processes, not that which develops in the opposite sense as a result of the other evolving. If embryology is ever studied in such a way that the organs that develop in the opposite direction, that then fall away, are also considered, then it will be possible to properly observe the transformations of form in phylogeny as well, and then it will become clear that what has been presented to you schematically today can be characterized as the real summary of everything that can be well traced phylogenetically.

Today, the empirical sciences have a wealth of material available, but this rich material is by no means exploited in a rational sense. There is, so to speak, a great deal of chaos in this rich material, and as a result, the facts on which this more schematic presentation is based are still hidden from the observations of comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and comparative biology in general. The relationships that have been indicated here, for example, the transformation, the metamorphosis of the sense of taste into the sense of sight, is something that can already be read today between the lines of the usual physiological descriptions. This can already be proven. Likewise, the process can be observed phylogenetically in the animal series: If we go back to lower-formed eyes, which, however, already have the organization of the eyes of higher animals and humans, we will find that this metamorphosis of the taste organ into the organ of vision can actually be demonstrated if we just want to see impartially.

Another question: What does the kidney actually perceive and what role does the adrenal gland play in this?

Well, the perception we are dealing with here is, of course, very much in the subconscious. When we speak of “renal perception”, we are actually dealing with an analogous use of the word. After all, the point is that we can go into this process of perception without thinking of it in the same crude way as the external senses. The perception in question can be characterized as follows:

Let us say that a person perceives with their sense of hearing. They perceive in the way that has been described to you here today: they perceive outwardly, and this perception takes place in the conscious mind. A perception that we can describe as the opposite pole of auditory perception, we would have to characterize as being conveyed to the region of rhythmic activity. Certain processes that take place in human metabolism have to be conveyed to the region of rhythmic activity, these processes, the metabolic processes, are in a certain way conveyed to the rhythmic processes by something analogous to perception, just as, for example, the external vibrational processes are conveyed to the brain by the perception of sound.

It is only possible to connect a clear concept with these things if one can imagine that inner vitality as it is in the three-part human being. What is in the metabolic human being, for example, must be conveyed for the rhythmic human being. The rhythmic person can only be in harmony with the metabolic person through mediation, and this mediation is provided by kidney activity. The strength of the secretion, the quality of the secretion, forms the mediation, so to speak. In this way, the kidney creates a reagent for the rhythmic person in relation to the metabolic person.

Of course, these things can only be characterized superficially. They lead into such profound things of the human organization that they are hardly suitable for a brief answer to a question.

The question was also asked about the nature of the secretion. What is meant by secretion here?

Surely, one can only use the word “seclusion” in this case if one means the following: when we speak of the sense of warmth, we are dealing with the perception of something in the external world that is present in the same way in ourselves, so that, as it were - as was also mentioned in today's lecture - only the difference in level is actually perceived between the external warmth and the internal warmth. And it is indeed the case that, basically, the same process is taking place as with the thermometer, only externalized.

With sound perceptions, it is the case that we not only penetrate into something that we also carry within us, it is the case that we not only penetrate into something that is, so to speak, a common medium in which we are inside and the object is inside, but in the case of sound perception, we penetrate into something that is inherent in the object. We can certainly say, for example, that every metal has its own sound. So in a sense we penetrate into the interior of an object in a weaker way than we penetrate into the interior of another person when we listen to how he speaks and how he reveals his inner self to us. We do not penetrate into something that is common to both us and him – only the mediations are common, but not the content. Thus we penetrate out of ourselves by penetrating into the object through the perception of sound.

This can be characterized by the fact that, while ascending from the sense of sight to the sense of warmth, we still live in something that is a common medium for what is perceived and for ourselves, but that something separates when we go from the sense of sight to the sense of hearing. There is also an intensification in this, because we not only perceive a sound, but we perceive an inner mental process.

Thus, in the sense of sound, a further differentiation can be perceived. And one cannot arrive at a schematization, if I may say so, or a classification of the senses, other than by considering this activity of the human being from the inside out, this absorption, this ever-increasing absorption in the sense of sound. Only in this way can one arrive at an objective classification of the senses. Precisely because this has not been done, it has been overlooked that one really must proceed from the sense of hearing to the sense of sound, and from the sense of sound in turn to the sense of concept. For it is an absolute nonsense to speak of perceiving, let us say, what the other person puts into language as his soul content, with the sense of hearing. To separate these two senses, the sense of sound and the sense of tone, leads only to a failure to understand anything about these things in the world.

It is therefore a matter of actually setting a boundary where such a boundary is given by the objects, and of seeing this separation, which is not yet present in the sense of warmth. What is actually perceived by the subject himself first occurs in the sense of sound, and then increasingly in the other senses, in the sense of sound and so on, or even in the sense of self. Everything is thrown into confusion. In this theory, which we can hear today, it is actually the case that the perception of the other self should come about through me approaching the other person and seeing a nose, two eyes, hair and so on, and then say to myself through a half-unconscious conclusion: I also have a nose, two eyes, hair; what he has, I also have, therefore what I see will have an I like I have.

This unconscious conclusion is what we see at work today. It is often called “empathy” or something similar, as chattering psychologists, for example Lipps, have said. We find this unconscious conclusion at work everywhere, and we do not notice how direct the process is that lies in the fact that I actually perceive the ego of the other person.

Some people who study such things, such as Scheler, have indeed become aware of how immediate this perception of the self of the other is and how fundamentally, radically different this perception of the self of the other is from all the processes that lead me to the inner experiences, which I then summarize into the overall state of the inner life.

I believe that what has been mentioned is a radical process that proceeds in many ways and intervenes in the inner life, while the human being's perception of the self is on the same level as other sensory perceptions, except that here we are entering the realm for which humanity is not yet predisposed today. I would like to say, to speak of organs in the way we speak here of the organ of the sense of self, that would hardly be easy to understand today in the context of our psychology or physiology - which, as I mentioned earlier, has even led to the development of an analytical psychology, a so-called “psychoanalysis” - that would hardly be easy to understand today in the context of these complexities.

But at least the pure fact must be presented to the world today: that I-perception is something other than the summarizing, the synthetic summarizing of those processes that then lead to the confirmation of the fact of the inner I of the subject.

The next question: what processes are involved in dowsing?

With regard to the divining rod, it must be carefully noted that, when the corresponding phenomena occur, there is an intensified sensory process for which, however, the whole human being is the mediator. We are not dealing with inner mechanical or magnetic processes or the like, but with the intensity of the person, which is then expressed in what is transmitted through the person to the divining rod.

The facts of the matter are such that one can indeed point out how people who really have no inclination to engage in spiritual science are quite seriously forced to deal with such a problem, such as that of the divining rod, both physically and physiologically.

I still remember – although I do not want to speak here in favor or against something in this direction – how a Viennese researcher blew the whistle on Hansen – after all, most of the nonsense that Hansen did with hypnotism at the time – and how this same researcher is now forced to seriously deal with the phenomena of dowsing. I need only recall that in fact experiments in locating springs and the like with the help of the divining rod have even played a certain role during this war, so that in fact here in this field exact research is beginning. But this research does not want to consider the fact that we are not dealing here with processes that have been separated from the human being, but with processes that are based on the fact that the human being is involved in the entire process, so to speak. This is confirmed, for example, by the fact that the movements of the rod vary greatly depending on whether one or the other person is using it. We are dealing with something in whose reactions the intervention of the human being plays a role.

These questions are such that if we wanted to answer them exhaustively, we would need the whole night to do so, and that cannot be expected of us.

Preliminary remark: Eugen Kolisko's lecture was not written down. However, Rudolf Steiner said the following about it the next day in his lecture for physicians (March 31, 1920, in GA 312): “It was very interesting how Dr. Kolisko pointed out in yesterday's evening lecture that the chemistry of the future must actually become something completely different, and how the word 'physiology' was mentioned again and again, which testifies that a bridge should be built between the chemical and the physiological. I was always reminded of various things that, of course, cannot be fully expressed where public lectures are concerned, because the prerequisites for understanding are actually completely lacking. We do, of course, find carbon in nature outside of the human being, in what I would like to call seemingly extra-human nature. For what in nature is actually extra-human? Nothing, really, because everything that is extra-human in the extra-human world around us has been removed from the human being in the course of human development. Man had to enter into stages of development, which he could only enter into by certain processes taking place in the external world, opposite to him, and by which he was given the possibility of taking certain other processes into his inner being, so that there is actually always an opposition and also a relationship between certain outer processes and certain inner processes."

After Eugen Kolisko's lecture, a question was asked about the effects of allopathic and homeopathic remedies. The stenographer did not record the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: It is more or less assumed today - because of atomistic thinking - that the process that takes place within a substance is, to a certain extent, the same process that takes place within the human organization, or I could also say the animal organization. But it is a very naturalistic assumption to indulge in the idea that the substance borrowed from the dead organism, so to speak, shows the same properties as the same substance, say for example blood, when it is still within the living human or animal organism. Once we realize what bundles of completely unscientific assumptions and postulates are in the sciences in use, only then will we truly feel what is necessary to put today's scientific view on a healthy basis. And so this healthy basis is also not available for those processes that are brought about when certain remedies are introduced into the human organism. For example, the question of how any substance that we supply to the human organism in this or that form, allopathic or homeopathic, is now dissolved in this human organism, how it behaves in the human organism itself, has not been investigated. For example, no consideration is given to the question of what the human organism actually does with this substance. And here we find – I can only hint at this, as it would take many hours to explain in full detail – that spiritual science shows that those substances which we supply to the human organism all , are in a sense, homoeopathized by it, if I may use the term. This means that they undergo internally the same process that the homoeopathic pharmacist causes to occur with his substances in his experiments. It is the case that the mode of action of the allopathically administered healing substances is also not based on the properties that are chemically ascribed to them today, but rather on properties that they only acquire as a result of the human organism processing them with the help of its own powers.

The question of allopathy and homeopathy, really considered in relation to the human being, is therefore not whether large or fragmented small amounts have an effect on the human organism when they produce healing effects, because the substances also do that when they are administered in allopathic amounts. The question is not this at all, but the question is whether it is permissible to expose the human organism to the side effects that arise from what is added with the allopathic substance and what is not homeopathized by the human organism itself, that is, is not used for healing. The question is whether this method is really permissible in order not to burden the human organism with what must be left over. Whether one supplies a very large quantity, while the organism needs only a small quantity, and whether the dispersion of the substances has the same effect as remedies that otherwise also have an effect in small quantities – that has been explained by Dr. Kolisko. If substances are dispersed in the human organism itself and only a small quantity is necessary for this, why should large quantities be introduced? It seems to me that the question is therefore not based on what is usually stated [in relation to homeopathic and allopathic remedies], but that something essential is actually [unspoken]; the questions should actually arise in other areas or, let us say, in other forms. For example, it should be clear whether the whole view and way of thinking about the clinical picture is healthier in the field of homeopathy or in that of allopathy. By this I mean whether, for example, those doctors who profess homeopathy or those who profess allopathy are more likely to focus on the complexity of the human organism. And here it must indeed be said that the doctors who work on a homeopathic basis are much more willing – experience simply shows this – to move away from the materialistic, atomistic idea and to adapt to certain views that I would say are more in line with the nature of the human organism.

As I said, I do not want to go into the actual discussion here, because it could be misunderstood if you have to explain it so briefly. I just wanted to suggest how our scientific views usually pose the questions in such a way that they cannot be answered at all as they are posed; the points of view are completely shifted, the questions are completely shifted to the point of view of materialism.

Then I was asked to speak about the relationship between Leadbeater's book and “occult chemistry”. Now, dear attendees, I do not want to dwell on the word “occult” here, because it is so misunderstood; it shocks the public, so to speak, when the word “occult” is used. But one can also stop at the word “spiritual scientific” or the like. You see, the occult is only occult as long as it is not known, and with those who know it, it is no longer occult. There are very many people who have every reason to call mathematics an occult science, and some sciences are occult for some people. So this is actually something that is quite relative in this respect. You will not find such a concoction as this so-called “occult chemistry” justified or recognized by anyone who is truly capable of spiritual thinking. This “occult chemistry” of Leadbeater's is modeled entirely on the usual materialistic atomism in the way it is presented. This “occult chemistry” is the best proof of what certain conceptions calling themselves spiritual have already come to in our materialistic time. I need only remind you that in certain theosophical circles the following idea once even emerged: they thought about what could be present in successive earthly lives so that it would remain from one earthly life to the next, and they came up with the grotesquely foolish idea of the so-called permanent atom. A single atom was supposed to be saved from one life from so many hundred years ago to the next life and thereby maintain the continuity of these two lives. That is, these spiritualists had fortunately managed to think along the lines of the materialistic-atomistic view. And Leadbeater has now put together his “occult chemistry” according to the pattern of ordinary atomistic chemistry, in a completely arbitrary way - but he has stated that it is a product of clairvoyance - but it is a completely arbitrary construction and cannot be recognized by any truly serious spiritual researcher in the world.

This is precisely the best example of how certain atomistic ideas have taken hold of humanity today, that one was able to carry these atomistic ideas into the fields of a certain sectarian theosophical direction. This is something that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is being striven for here. And it is precisely this introduction of the atomistic-materialistic way of thinking into spiritual scientific investigations that shows how deeply the present is corroded by atomistic basic ideas. Consider that particularly in certain circles of English scientific thinkers, where one strives for an external visualization, attempts have been made to construct models for those structures that have been presented to you today, so that one could see outwardly that atoms are arranged in such a way in various complicated forms that it is possible to show so beautifully why there is a left-turning and a right-turning acid. You just need to have the atoms arrange themselves symmetrically and then you can say: Because the atoms always arrange their forces in this way in symmetry, there is a left and a right. It is just not understandable, if you can really think logically, why you should attribute the necessity that the shapes occur symmetrically to a configuration of the smallest parts. Please do not take this as a protest. Because if it is really true that only through the forces of the smallest parts the acid appears as right-polarizing, rotating and the other as left-rotating, then it should also be true that the left hand could fit on the right, because the smallest parts are formed in this direction.

These things have emerged in so-called “occult chemistry”, and these things have now been transferred to the views in so-called occult books. There you will also find quite terrible views and constructions of molecules or atoms. All this has also been imitated in the field of spiritual science; the materialistic theory has even been imitated in the spiritual view. I experienced it once at a congress held by so-called Theosophists, in Paris it was. There they talked about this and that, and afterwards I asked someone what impression this congress had made on him. The person in question said: “Oh, there were such good fluids in the whole hall.” So the person concerned saw nothing of all the concrete thoughts and so on that were expressed there, except for a materialistic translation of what people said to each other into material fluid effects between the individual personalities. You have to look at these things in terms of the way of thinking. You are not a follower of a spiritual world view just because you talk about spiritual beings, but only if you can talk about spiritual qualities. What you find, for example, in the theosophical literature today is that the physical body is described, then the etheric body, which is a bit thinner, possibly more nebulous, but still material, then the astral body, again a bit thinner, but just thinner matter, and so on. This continues up to the highest spiritual realms, Manas, Kama-Manas and so on, and actually everything is nothing but rarefied matter, only that in the end it really becomes very <“homeopathic”>. These are the things that show that it does not matter whether one speaks of the spirit today, but whether one is able to show something that really leads into the spiritual realm.

Question: How can chemistry be further developed in line with anthroposophy?

If we undertake the kind of phenomenology that Dr. Kolisko has in mind, then it must be said that this question is so all-embracing that it can only be answered in the most general terms. Above all, it is necessary to realize that one would first have to arrive at a corresponding phenomenology. A phenomenology is not a compilation of mere phenomena in an arbitrary way, or in the way they are obtained by scientific experiments, but a real phenomenology is a systematization of phenomena, as was attempted by Goethe in his Theory of Colors. It is a tracing back of the complicated to the simple, to the fundamental principles, where the basic elements, the basic phenomena, confront us.

Now, of course, I know very well that very clever people will say: Yes, but if one gains such a list in relation to the connection between qualitative phenomena and archetypal phenomena, then such a structure cannot be compared at all with how, for example, complicated geometric connections can be traced back mathematically to axioms; because the geometric connections are, so to speak, built from pure inner construction. The further development of mathematics, [starting from] these axioms, is in turn experienced as a mathematical process seen in inner necessity, while in the development of phenomena and archetypal phenomena we have to rely on observing the external facts.

But this is not the case, even if it is simply asserted – it is asserted more or less clearly and distinctly in the broadest context. The fact that this is asserted is only the result of an incorrect theory of knowledge, and in particular it is the result of a confused muddling of the concept of experience with other concepts. And this confused muddling of the concept of experience with other concepts leads, for example, to the following.

It is not considered that the way in which experience is present is thoroughly formed in relation to the human subject. I cannot form the concept of experience at all without thinking the relationship from the object to the human subject. And now it is merely a matter of whether there is a fundamental distinction between the way in which, for example, I have a Goethean urphenomenon before me and complicate this urphenomenon into a derived phenomenon, where I seem to be dependent on external experience confirming what I express in judgment? Is there a difference in this whole behavior of the subject in relation to the object with regard to experience, when I state in mathematics that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180°, or when I state the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem? Is there in fact a difference?

That there is no difference in this respect has already been pointed out by quite ingenious mathematicians of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, who, because they saw that ultimately mathematics is also based on an experience - in a sense, as one speaks of experience in the so-called empirical natural sciences - that have constructed, albeit initially only constructed, a non-Euclidean geometry to the Euclidean geometry. And here one must say: Theoretically it is, of course, perfectly possible to think geometrically that the three angles of a triangle are 380°. However, one must assume that space has a different degree of curvature. In our ordinary space we have a regular [Euclidean] measure, which has a curvature of zero. Simply by imagining that space is more curved [that is, that the curvature of space is greater than 1], one arrives at a sentence like: the sum of the three angles of a triangle is greater than 180°.

Interesting experiments have been carried out in relation to this, for example by Oskar Simony, who examined this. These endeavors show that from a certain point of view it was considered necessary to say: what we express as judgments in mathematical or geometric sentences also requires empirical verification in the same way as what we express in phenomenology.

Preliminary remark: A question was asked about the field of electrical forces. The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question about which one should actually give not just one lecture but a whole series — quite apart from the fact that the question is not related to the topic of this evening.

What was presented yesterday [in Mr. Stockmeyer's lecture] tried to point out how we have to distinguish, so to speak, in the field of the imponderable - in contrast to the field of the ponderable: a field of light, a chemical field and a field of life. Descending from the imponderable to the ponderable, we come to the region of heat, which to some extent is common to both, then to the region of air, then to the region of liquid and solid bodies. Within these regions, nothing can be found, especially for those who are able to consider things phenomenologically, that belongs to the region of electrical forces. The question here was only about electrical forces. And to arrive at an answer to this question, which, I would like to say, is not in any way lay, is only possible if one relates the whole field of phenomena, the whole field of what is empirically given to man in his environment, to man himself. I do not want to say that there cannot also be a way of looking at it that, as it were, disregards the human being and only considers what, in natural phenomena, well, to put it bluntly, is not the concern of human beings. But one comes to an understanding from different points of view, and one of the points of view should be characterized here, at least in terms of its significance.

If you consider everything that belongs to the realm of the ponderable, that is, everything solid, liquid, expandable, expandable, gaseous, you will find, starting from this realm, such effects that also have more or less material parallels in the human organism. But the closer you approach the realm of the imponderable, the more you will find that the parallel phenomena, at least initially given for consciousness, can be attributed to the soul. Those who are not satisfied with all kinds of word definitions or coinages, but who want to get to the bottom of things, will find that even the explanation and experience of warmth rises into the soul.

When we then come to the area of light effects, we have first given the light area as our light field, as something that lies in the area of sensory eye perceptions, and with that these take on a character of the soul. Allow me the expression: we have filtered the scope of eye perceptions into a certain sum of ideas.

If we now proceed to the field of the so-called chemical effects, it might seem doubtful or debatable, according to the usual discussions of today's chemistry, to say that we are also dealing with an ascent to the soul when we speak of the effect of the chemical field on the human being. However, one need only look at what the physiological-psychological study of the visual process has already provided today, and one will find that much of the kind that relates to chemical effects is already mixed into it. It has indeed become necessary, and rightly so, to speak of a kind of chemism if one wants to describe the processes that take place inside the eye during the visual process.

Of course, experiments in this area are thoroughly tainted by current material conceptions; but at this point even contemporary science is to a certain extent, I might say, brought to see, at least in a certain area, the very first, most elementary beginnings of the right way. And when we speak of chemistry in our external life, in so far as it relates to our consciousness of ideas through the process of seeing, we actually speak in a similar way to how we speak when we simply look at the shaped body, that is, the mere surface structure and what we make of the surface structure as an inner image of some solid body. Anyone who, as a proper psychologist, can analyze the relationships between the idea of a shaped, solid body and the exterior that gives rise to this idea will find that this analysis must be fairly parallel to that which relates to what goes on below the surface, so to speak, below the shaped surface of the outer body, as a chemical process, and what is then, through the process of seeing, the inner, soul-like property of the human being.

Something very similar applies to the phenomena of life. Thus, advancing from the ponderable to the imponderable, we come to the conclusion that, in the case of parallel experiences within the human being, we have to assume processes of consciousness that are strongly reminiscent of the imaginative. We can therefore say: if we ascend – if we remember yesterday's scheme [of Mr. Stockmeyer] – from the solid to the liquid, to the gaseous, to the heat-loving, light-loving, to the chemical element – if we ascend here, we come to areas that have their correlate in the human being through the imaginative.

[We ascend] from the ponderable to the imponderable in nature and from the processes that take place in the organism inside the human being - which certainly also underlie consciousness, but which do not enter into consciousness as such - up to the conceptual. Now, however, psychology does not yet have an appropriate method for, I would say, really presenting this whole range of a person's inner experience to human attention in an orderly way.

Today, people tend to avoid talking about the actual affects of the soul, about imagination, feeling, will, and so on. Psychology, too, has suffered from the materialistic world view, and it has suffered from this materialistic world view in that it is unable to find any proper ideas about the soul-related. Anyone who wants to find such proper ideas about the soul-related must, of course, completely abandon the ideas of Wundt or the like, which are still regarded as very scientific by so many today. All this talk is basically nothing that even remotely touches the matter. Anyone who studies Wundt's many books will find that it has indeed had a very strong influence, because Wundt came from materialistic physiology into the field of psychology and then even into the field of philosophy. One will find that there is absolutely no possibility of arriving at an appropriate view of the nature of representation and the nature of will. I could mention many other names, not only Wundt's, about whom the same could be said. If one can arrive at such an objective view of the nature of representations, one sees that just as one must raise the correlate of the ponderable to the correlate of the imponderable – see the following diagram – and thereby find the representational in man, so one must go below the correlate of the ponderable in man in order to advance. And there we come to the correlate of something which I would initially like to describe as X. Let us look for it in the human being itself. We find it in the will element of the human being. To deal with what lies between the two and how it lies between the two would be taking things too far today.

We come to the will element of the human being and must then ask: What is the relationship between this will element of the human being and its relationship to external nature? What is this X? What is the correlate of the will, just as the perceptions are the given of the affects in the imponderable? Then one must say to oneself, in spiritual scientific terms: this correlate in nature is the electrical and also the magnetic phenomena – processes, I could say better. And just as in the subjective-objective there is a relationship between the conceptual and the realm of the imponderable, as I called it yesterday, so there is a relationship between the volitional element in man and the electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic realm in non-human nature. If today, when, I would like to say, empiricism is subjugating the reluctant materialistic minds, if today you are again looking for something that can lead you to, well, I would like to say at least make the first step of materialism towards these things, you will find that physics has been forced in recent years to abandon the old concept of matter and to recognize in the electron and ion theory a certain identity between what, if I may express myself trivially, flies through space as free electricity space and what flies through space as electricity bound to so-called matter; in any case, it has been forced to recognize that which flies through space as electricity and represents a certain speed in flying through space. This speed, when expressed in mathematical formulas, now shows exactly the same properties as matter itself. As a result, the concept of matter merged with the concept of electrical effects.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: There is no reason to speak of an electromagnetic or other light theory, but what is present is that when we look at the outside world, where we do not perceive the electrical directly through the senses, we must somehow suspect it in what is now usually called the material. It lies further from us than what is perceptible through the senses; and this more distant element expresses itself precisely by being related to what lies further from the subjective consciousness of the human being than his world of ideas, namely his world of will. When you descend into the region of the human being that I have designated as the middle region, and then descend further, you will find this descent to be very much the same as descending into the nature of the will. You only need to see how man, although he lives with his soul in the world of his ideas, does not have the actual entity of the will present in his consciousness, but rather deeply buried in the unconscious.

In spiritual scientific terms, this would have to be expressed as follows: In the life of ideas we are actually only awake, in the life of the will we sleep, even when we are awake. We only have perceptions in our life of will. But what this element of the will itself is like, when I just stretch out a hand, eludes ordinary consciousness. It eludes us inwardly as a correlate, just as the electrical eludes us outwardly in the material, in the direct perception that one has of it, for example, in relation to color or to what is visible at all.

And so, if we are looking for a path for the fields of luminosity, chemism and so on, we come from the ponderable into the imponderable by moving upwards. But then, by moving downwards, we come to the realm that lies below the ponderable, as it were. And we will then penetrate into the realm of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Anyone who wants to see with open eyes how, for example, the earth itself has a magnetic effect, how the earth as such is the carrier of electrical effects, will see a fruitful path opened up in this observation, which is of course nothing more than a continuation of phenomenology, in order to really penetrate not only the field of [extra-terrestrial] electrical phenomena, but also, let us say, the electrical phenomena bound to the earth's planets. And an immensely fruitful field is opening up for the study of telluric and extratelluric electrical phenomena, so that one can almost, or not only almost, say in all fields: If we do not close the door to the essential nature of things by stating from the outset what may be thought about these phenomena of the external world and their connection with man - for example, what can be expressed mathematically - but if we have the will to enter into the real phenomena, then the phenomena actually begin to speak their own language.

And it is simply a misunderstood Kantianism, which is also a misunderstanding of the world view, when it is constantly being said that one cannot penetrate from the outside world of phenomena into the essence of things. Whoever can somehow logically approach such thoughts, whoever has logic, has knowledge in his soul, so that he can approach such things, he realizes that this talk of phenomena and of what stands behind it as the “thing in itself” means no more than if I say: here I have written down S and O, I do not see the other, I cannot get from the $S and O to the thing in itself, that tells me nothing, that is a theory-appearance. But if I don't just look at the $ and O, but if I am able to read further and to read the phenomena, but here in this case the letters, not just look at them in such a way that I say: there I have the phenomenon; I cannot get behind this phenomenon, I do not enter into the “thing in itself,” but when I look at the phenomena, as they mutually illuminate each other, just as darkness is illuminated, then the reading of the phenomena becomes speech and expresses that which is alive in the essence of things. It is mere verbiage to speak of the opposition of phenomena and of the essence of things; it is like philosophizing about the letter-logic in Goethe's “Faust” and the meaning of Goethe's “Faust”: if one has successively let all the letters that belong to “Faust” speak, then the essence of “Faust” is revealed. In a real phenomenology, phenomena are not such that they are of the same kind or stand side by side; they relate to one another, mutually elucidate one another, and the like. The one who practices real phenomenology comes to the essence of things precisely by practicing real phenomenology.

It would really be a matter of the Kantian inert mind of philosophy finally breaking free from the inertia of accumulating the “opposites in themselves” and the “thing in itself”, which have now confused minds and spirits long enough to really be able to look at the tremendous progress that has also been made in the epistemological relationship through Goetheanism.

This is precisely what is so important for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that attention is drawn to such things and that they can indeed be used to fertilize what in turn leads to an inner relationship between the human being and the spiritual substance in the world - while one has artificially put on, let's say, a suede skin, these forms of all kinds of criticism-of-practical-and-theoretical-reason-blinkers, through which one cannot see through. These are the things that are at stake today.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should certainly not be somehow sectarian; it should certainly not consist merely of explaining to people in some closed circles over tea that the human being consists is composed of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. This, of course, is the kind of stuff that is taught in seance circles over a cup of tea, and it is easy to make fun of those who gain some outer, but also misunderstood, knowledge from such quackery. But spiritual science – one can feel this when one really familiarizes oneself with it – spiritual science is actually capable of stimulating many things anew that really need to be stimulated if we want to make progress. The decadence, the destruction and the social chaos that we are experiencing today have not arisen merely from the sphere of the outer life of our time, but also from the inner human powers of destruction; and these inner human powers of destruction have truly not come from the least of what people have thought through long periods of time.

In this time it is not at all surprising that people arise who find it appropriate to compare Goethe's memories of an old mystic, which he expresses in his saying:

If the eye were not sunlike
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God does not live in us,
How can we be delighted with the divine?

to encounter with the saying: “If the eye were not ink-like, how could we see the writing...”

Indeed, esteemed attendees, I could talk at length about the application of Goethe's saying today, but that would take until tomorrow. So, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what I said about Goetheanism and the present time in something similar to a saying that ties in with what I just mentioned. It is indeed true that the present time, with all that is chaotic in it, could not be as it is if the views of people like Ostwald and similar ones did not haunt it.

If the present world were not so Ostwald-like, how could it see all the external effects of nature so wrongly? If there were not so much of Ostwald's power in present-day people, how could they achieve so much in all kinds of materialistic-physical and similar things, which now truly do not work to a high degree for the true progress of science, but rather against it.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without the codification principle being paralyzed or dying, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we think of this formation of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? Truly in a similar way - it is not intended to express a mere analogy - truly in a similar way as one has to think of the organic threefoldness in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality now wants to describe this human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other in a truly objective way, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already formally present. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken about threefolding in a variety of ways, I was met with the objection that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law can acquire content when it is to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned often today, they understand the law in such a way that they only recognize a kind of formalism on the one hand. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas take care of their own affairs. If we think in real terms – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the spiritual realm already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think in real, practical terms, then in the free spiritual life we do not consider legal impulses at all, but we consider impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living interaction, which will, however, have the peculiarity that these determinations - because life is alive and cannot be constrained by norms - must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child has reached the age of forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. For example, in the case of land, it is not a matter of laying down such codified law, but rather it is a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the other two characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flux, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. This is what needs to be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships. Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary matter when individual personalities act in an anti-social way against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a more practical and realistic way. I must say that the much-vaunted legal science has not even managed to develop a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, “Das Recht in der Strafe” (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction presents a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses, and all the rest. Laistner shows, above all, that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and that is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life by entering his house or his thoughts, for example, and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: “He has entered my sphere of life, and that is why I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or my own thoughts, so I now also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him is conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for him entering my circle. That is the only thing that can be found in legal thinking about the justification of punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, are secondary questions. But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something that constantly prevents us from having really clear-cut concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social conditions that are already full of ambiguities. It presupposes that there is an organism present and that through the organism there is living movement and thus circulation – just as the heart presupposes that other organs are present in order for it to function. The legal institution is, in a sense, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things will unfold; it presupposes that other forces are already present. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that there can be no clearly defined legal system. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for such legal concepts to be formed publicly, which would then be flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was a good thing that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

Roman Boos: Dear attendees! The aim of these lectures was to attempt to show, from the perspective of specialized science, how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science could lead to the fertilization and further development of the individual specialized scientific fields. The visitors will have had the thoroughly consistent impression throughout the whole event that something is not being hatched in a narrow circle, but that from a central point a real spiritual fertilization into the individual subject areas can take place. Even if not everyone was able to recognize this at the very beginning of their efforts, surely everyone who looked, as it were, at the driving forces present here, who looked at the fertilizing forces that radiate out and not on the value of the first formulated formulations, could be convinced that here is something in relation to our spiritual life, which deserves attention and, as far as possible, also cooperation and goodwill from wide circles – especially here in Switzerland. This is so because it is precisely here that a spiritual force is struggling to the light that can actually claim to have a spiritually fertilizing effect on the social community.

There will be an opportunity for discussion following Dr. Steiner's lecture on “Hygiene as a Social Question.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! That the social question is one of the most pressing issues of our time is not doubted in the broadest circles. And wherever there is even a modicum of concern for the issues arising from the development of human history in the present day, wherever there are threatening or unresolved impulses for the future, all of this can be summarized under the heading of the social question. But we must admit that the consideration and treatment of this social question in the present suffers from the fundamental defect that afflicts so much of our intellectual and moral life, and indeed of our whole civilized life, namely, the intellectualism of our time. It suffers from the fact that its problems are so often viewed only from the standpoint of an intellectualistic consideration. The social question is discussed more from the point of view of the right or the left. The intellectualism of these discussions is shown by the fact that they start from certain theories, from the assumption that this or that must be so or so, that this or that must be abolished. In doing so, little consideration is given to the human being himself. One treats people as if there were something general like “the human being”, as if there were not something that is individually developed in a particular way in each person. One does not turn one's attention to the uniqueness and peculiarity of the individual human being. Therefore, our whole consideration of the social question also takes on something abstract, something that today so rarely translates into social feelings, into the attitudes that play between person and person. The defect in our social thinking is most clearly seen when we focus on a specific area, one that is perhaps more suitable than many others for social reflection, for example, the area of hygiene, insofar as hygiene is a public matter that concerns not the individual but the human community.

Of course, we are not lacking in hygienic instructions, treatises and writings on health care as a public matter. But one must ask: how do these instructions, these considerations of hygiene, fit into social life? And here one must say: they are so introduced that individual discussions about proper health care are published as the result of medical, physiological, and scientific knowledge, whereby the trust that one has in a field whose inner essence one is not able to test is supposed to form the basis for the acceptance of such rules. On the basis of authority alone, the broadest sections of the population can accept the rules on hygiene that emerge from the study chambers and examination rooms, the medical laboratories, and are then made public.

If one is convinced, however, that in the course of modern history, in the course of the last four centuries, a yearning for a democratic order in all matters has arisen in humanity, then, even if it seems grotesque to many today, one is confronted with the undemocratic nature of the pure belief in authority that is demanded in the field of hygiene. The undemocratic nature of this blind faith in authority is juxtaposed with the yearning for democracy, as it has often - albeit, one might say, in a very paradoxical way - culminated in the present day.

I know very well that the sentence I have just uttered is perceived by many as paradoxical, because one simply does not combine the way someone receives health care-related information with the democratic demand that the community of emancipated people should judge public affairs that concern every emancipated person, whether directly or through their representatives. Of course it must be said that something like a hygienic view, a hygienic cultivation of public life, cannot be fully realized in a democratic way, because it depends on the judgment of the person seeking knowledge in a particular field. But on the other hand, the question must arise: should we not be striving for a greater democratization in such a field as this, which concerns every single person and thus the human community as closely, as infinitely closely as public health care does? Today, we are certainly told a great deal about the way in which man should live in terms of air and light, in terms of nutrition, in terms of the disposal of waste products produced either by man himself or by his environment, and so on and so forth. But the rules governing these things that are thrown upon humanity are mostly unworkable for the people to whom they are supposed to apply.

Now I do not wish to be misunderstood; I do not wish to be misunderstood as taking a particular stand on anything in this lecture, which is supposed to be dedicated to the topic “Hygiene as a social issue”. I do not wish to deal one-sidedly with what today tends to be treated one-sidedly from the point of view of a party or of a certain scientific conviction. I would like – perhaps you will permit this small apparent departure from the role in the introduction – I would like neither to take any party for the old superstition that devils and demons go around and move in and out of people as diseases, nor would I like to take sides for the modern superstition that the bacilli and bacteria move in and out of people and cause the diseases. Whether one is dealing with a spiritualist, spiritual superstition of old or with a materialistic superstition, that may concern us less today. But I would like to touch on something that permeates our entire education, especially insofar as this education depends on the fundamental scientific beliefs of our time.

Even if it is asserted from many sides today that scientifically materialism, as it asserted itself in the middle and still in the last third of the 19th century, has been overcome, this assertion cannot apply to the one who really sees through the essence of materialism and its opposite , because this materialism has been overcome at most for some people who see that today's scientific facts no longer allow us to declare in a sweeping way that everything that exists is just some mechanical, physical or chemical process taking place in the material world. It is not enough that, forced by the power of facts, some people have come to this conviction. For in the face of this conviction stands the other fact that now, despite this conviction, those who have it - and the others even more so - when it comes to explaining something specifically, to forming an opinion about something specific, then they do include the materialistic direction in their way of thinking. It is also said that atoms and molecules are harmless accounting coins, of which one does not want to claim anything other than that they are thought-things. But the consideration has therefore remained an atomistic, a molecularistic one. We explain the phenomena of the world in terms of the behavior and the mutual relationship of atoms or molecular processes, and it does not matter whether we now imagine that any thought, feeling or other process is only related to the material processes of atoms and molecules, but rather it depends on the direction of our entire state of mind, the direction of our spirit, when it takes as a basis for its explanations only what is thought in terms of atoms, what emerges from the smallest, the contrived smallest. What matters is not whether one has the conviction, literally or mentally, that there is something other than atomistic effects, than material atomic effects, but what matters is whether one has the possibility of making other explanations of the world the guiding principle of one's mind than deriving phenomena from the atomic. It is not what we believe, but how we explain, how we behave in our souls, that matters. And here, at this point, it must be stated with conviction that only genuine spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can help us to overcome the evil that can be characterized in this way, as I have just done.

I would like to prove that this can now be the case in concrete terms. There is hardly anything that confronts us with more confusion than the differences that are often asserted today between the human body and the human soul or the human spirit, between what are physical illnesses and what are so-called mental or spiritual illnesses. It is precisely the appropriate distinction and the appropriate interrelationship of such facts of human life as those of the sick body or the seemingly sick soul that suffer in terms of understanding under the materialistic-atomistic way of thinking. For what, then, is actually the essence of the materialism that has gradually emerged as the newer world view of many people and that has by no means been overcome, but is in fact in its heyday today? What is its essence? The essence of materialism is not that one looks at material processes, that one looks at the material processes that take place in the human body and that one devotedly studies the miracle-working and miracle-working of the human nervous system and the other human organs or the nervous system of animals or the organs of other living beings; it is not that studying these things makes one a materialist, but it is abandoning the spirit in the study of material processes that makes one a materialist, that one looks into the world of matter and sees only matter and material processes.

But this is what spiritual science must assert - today I can only speak about this point in summary - that wherever material processes appear to us externally for the senses, those processes which today's science alone wants to accept as observable and exact, that wherever these material processes are only the external appearance, the external manifestation of spiritual forces and powers at work behind and within them. It is not the hallmark of spiritual science to look at a person and say: Oh, there is the body; this body is a sum of material processes, but within it the person cannot exist alone, he has his immortal soul independently of it ; and the fact that one is now beginning to develop all kinds of abstract theories and views about this immortal soul, which is independent of the body, in a rather mystical way, does not characterize a spiritual worldview at all. One can certainly say: Man has, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, an immortal soul that is taken to some spiritual realm after death. One is therefore not yet a spiritual scientist in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

One is only a spiritual scientist when one realizes that this material body with its material processes is a creature of the soul, when one understands in detail how the soul, which was there before birth or, let us say, before conception of the human being, works, how this soul forms, how it sculpts the structure, indeed the substantiation of the human body. If we can truly see the direct unity of this body and the soul everywhere, and if we can see how the soul's activity in the body wears out this body as such, how this body partially dies every minute, and how then, in the moment of death, I would say, the radical realization of what what happens to the body every moment through the influence of the soul and spirit, if one sees through this living interplay, this constant working of the soul in the body, in the individual concrete case, if one strives to say: the soul breaks down into very concrete processes, then it passes over into the processes of liver activity, then it passes over into the processes of breathing, then into the processes of heart activity, then into the processes of brain activity – in short, if one is able to present the physical body as the result of a spiritual one when describing the material in the human being, then one is a spiritual scientist. Spiritual science comes to a true appreciation of the material precisely because it does not see only what today's science sees in the individual concrete material process, what the eye ascertains or what is then recorded as the result of external observation in abstract terms. Rather, spiritual science is spiritual science solely because it shows everywhere how the spirit works in the material, how it looks devotedly at the material effects of the spirit.

That is the one thing that matters. On the other hand, it is important that one is thereby saved from all the abstract, chatty talk about a soul independent of the [physical] human being, about which, as far as life between birth and death is concerned, one can only fantasize. For between birth and death, with the exception of sleep, the soul and spirit are so devoted to the bodily effects that they live in them, through them, and present themselves in them. One must come to the point of being able to study the soul and spirit outside of the human life cycle and to accept the human life cycle between birth and death as a result of the soul and spirit. Then one looks at the real, concrete unity of the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily. Then one does anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because then one has the prospect that this human being, with all his individual structures, stands before one as a result of the spiritual-soul, also for knowledge. The mystical theosophical view, which puts forward beautiful theories about all kinds of body-free spiritualities, cannot serve the concrete sciences of life, it cannot serve life at all, it can only serve intellectualistic or soul-based lust, which wants to get rid of life, of the outer life, as quickly as possible and then, in order to have an inner satisfaction, to be able to indulge in an inner lust, weaves all kinds of fantasies about the spiritual and soul.

Here in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, it is a matter of working very seriously, of cultivating a spiritual science that is able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology and anthropology, so that it is not a matter of stating religiously or philosophically on the one hand that the human being an immortal soul, and then to pursue anthropology, biology, physics and chemistry as if one were only dealing with material processes, but rather it is a matter here of applying what can be gained in knowledge about the soul and spirit to the details of life, of looking into the miracle of the body itself. It may well be said, even if it sounds paradoxical to some: there are those who want to be good mystics or good theosophists and want to talk about everything under the sun, how the human being consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body, I and so on, but they don't even have a clue about what expression of the soul it is when you sneeze, for example. It depends on seeing matter, not as matter, but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then one also receives sound, content-filled views about the spirit, but then one also receives a spiritual science that can be fruitful for the science of life.

But something else is also achieved with this. It achieves the ability to overcome what, in recent times, precisely because of the materialization of scientific knowledge, has driven us into specialization. I certainly do not want to deliver a diatribe against specialization, because I am well aware of its justification. I know that certain things today must be practiced by specialists simply because a specialized technique is needed for them. But the point is that if someone clings to the material, he can never become a specialist and gain a world view that can be applied in life, because material processes are an infinite field. They are an infinite field out in nature, and they are an infinite field within the human being. If you just study the human nervous system based on what is currently known, you can spend a long time on it, at least as much time as specialists are usually willing to spend on their studies. But if one has only what the material processes are in what happens in the nervous system, only what is expressed in the abstract terms that are the subject of science today, then nothing leads one to anything universal that can become the basis of a worldview. The moment you begin to observe spiritually, let us say, the human nervous system, you cannot observe this nervous system without what you find active in it as spirit leading you immediately to what underlies the muscular system, the bone system, the sense of the nervous system as something spiritual, because the spiritual is not something that can be broken down into individual parts like the material. Rather, the spiritual is something that – and this is only the most basic way of characterizing it – spreads out like a limb or an organism. And just as I cannot look at a person by merely looking at his five fingers and otherwise covering him, so too in spiritual science I cannot look at a single detail without what I perceive in this detail as spiritual-soul leading me to a totality. If we are led to such a totality — even if it is perhaps only a specialist in brain or nerve research — then we will be able to get an overall picture of the human being from the observation of this individual link in the human organism; then we will be led into the position to arrive at something truly universal for a world view, and then the peculiar thing is that we can begin to speak of something that can be understood by all people who have common sense and sound understanding.

That is the great difference between how spiritual science can speak about man and how specialized, materialistic science must speak about man. You see, let us take the simple case of how specialized, materialistic science is presented to you in any of the textbooks in use today. If you, as an ordinary person who has not learned much about the nervous system, take a manual about the nervous system in your hand – well, you will probably soon stop reading or, in any case, you will not gain very much that can give you a basis for looking at the human being as a real human being in his value, in his dignity. But if we listen to what spiritual science has to say about the human nervous system, then what leads to the whole human being follows everywhere. It provides such enlightenment about the whole human being that the idea that arises in one's mind presents something of the value, essence and dignity of the human being with whom one is dealing. And this applies even more when we look at the human being not just in terms of one of his or her many parts, but it applies especially when we look at the sick person, this sick person with his or her many deviations from the so-called normal, especially when we are able to look at the whole person, when he or she is under the influence of this or that disease. What nature presents to our soul in the sick person is apt to lead us deep into the world's interconnections, to show us how this person is organized and how, because of his organization, the atmospheric and even extraterrestrial influences can affect this person, how this human organization is connected to these or those substances of nature, which then turn out to be healing agents, and so on.

We are led into broad contexts, and it may be said that if we supplement what can be recognized in this way about the healthy human being with what can be recognized through the sick human being, then a deep insight into the whole context and the deeper meaning of life will open up. But everything that comes to light in this way is the basis for a knowledge of human nature, and can be expressed in such a way that it can be spoken to all people. Of course, we have not yet reached this point, because spiritual science, in the sense in which it is meant here, has only been working for a short time. Therefore, as Dr. Boos said in his introductory words just now, the lectures given here can often only be seen as a beginning. But the tendency of this spiritual science is to work out what is present in the individual sciences in such a way that what every human being should know about the human being can actually be brought to every human being.

And now imagine if spiritual science first has such a transforming effect on science and if spiritual science then succeeds in developing forms of knowledge for the healthy and sick human being that can be made accessible to general human consciousness If this succeeds, how different human beings will be in social life, how differently understanding one person will be confronted with another than today, when everyone passes by the other and has no understanding for the special individuality of this other person. The social question will only be taken out of its intellectualism when it will emerge from the most diverse areas of life based on factual knowledge, when it is based on the concrete experiences of life. This is particularly evident in the field of health care. Just imagine the social impact of fostering an understanding of what is healthy and what is sick in other people; just imagine what it means when health care is taken into the hands of all of humanity with understanding. Of course, the aim is not to cultivate scientific or medical dilettantism – that must be avoided – but imagine, it simply awakens sympathy, not just feeling, but understanding for the healthy and the sick in our fellow human beings, understanding based on an insight into the human being. Imagine the social effect of such a thing, and you will have to say to yourself: There you can see that social reform, the social reconstruction, must arise out of specialized knowledge in the individual fields, not out of general theories, whether they be Marxist, be they Oppenheim theories, be they theories of any kind that look beyond the human being and want to shape the world out of abstract concepts. Salvation cannot come from this, but from the dedicated study of the individual fields. And health care, hygiene, is such a very special field, because it leads us, I would say, closest to everything that our fellow human being experiences in terms of joy through his healthy, normal way of life or in terms of pain and suffering, of restrictions due to what lies within him as more or less sick.

This is something that immediately points us to the special social way in which spiritual science can achieve results in the field of hygiene. For if in such a way the cultivator of the knowledge of humanity, the cultivator of the knowledge of the healthy and the sick human being, is also the one who specializes as a doctor, with such knowledge in human society, then he will be able to create enlightenment within this human society, because he will be understood. And not only will the doctor develop a relationship with the community in which, if they are not a friend or relative, they will send for the doctor when they have a pain or have broken a leg, but the relationship with the doctor will develop in such a way that the doctor is the constant teacher and instructor of prophylactic health care, that in fact a constant intervention of the doctor is available not only to heal the person when the illness goes so far that he notices it, but also to keep people healthy as far as possible. A lively social activity will take place between the physician and all the rest of humanity. But then health itself will radiate from such knowledge, for it is precisely because materialism has extended to the medical view of life that we have truly come up against strange conceptions.

On the one hand, we have physical illnesses. They are studied by finding degenerations of the organs or whatever else is supposed to be physically perceptible or physically imagined within the human body's skin, and attention is drawn to the fact that any damage found can be repaired. In this direction, thoughts now turn quite materialistically to the physical body of the human being in its normal and abnormal states. Alongside this, the so-called soul or spiritual illnesses arise. These soul or spiritual illnesses have now been reduced, on the one hand, to mere brain illnesses or to illnesses of the nervous system because of materialistic thinking, and the foundations for this have also been sought in the other organ systems of the human being. But because they did not develop any kind of conception about the way in which spirit and soul work in the human body, they could not gain any conception of the relationship between mental illnesses, the so-called mental illnesses, and what the human being otherwise is. And so, I would like to say, mental illnesses stand on one side, even today they are grasped by a strange hybrid science, psychoanalysis, which thinks in a materialistic way but does not understand the materialistic at all; they stand there, these mental and soul illnesses, without being able to be brought together in any reasonable way with what actually happens in the human organism.

Spiritual science can now show – and I have drawn attention to this – that what I am saying here is not just a program, but that it is being pursued in detail – precisely on the occasion of the course for physicians that has been taking place here during these weeks. Spiritual science can indeed show in detail how all so-called mental and soul diseases are based on organ disorders, on organ degeneration, organ enlargement, organ reduction in the human organism. Somewhere in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, something is not right if at the same time or later something occurs that is a so-called mental illness. A spiritual science that penetrates to recognize the spirit in the normal heart in its effectiveness is also capable of - and need not be ashamed of - seeking a cause for the so-called sick mind or soul in the degeneration of the heart, in the failings of the heart.

The main mistake of materialism is not that it denies the spirit - in which case religion could still ensure that the spirit is recognized - the main mistake of materialism is that it does not recognize matter, because it only observes its exterior. This is precisely the defect of materialism, that it gains no insight into matter, for example in the purely psychoanalytic treatment, in the mere observation of something that has taken place in the soul, which psychoanalysis calls islands of the soul, and thus an abstraction. Rather, one must follow how certain impressions of the soul, which a person receives at this or that time in his life and which are normally bound to the normal organism, impinge on defective organs - instead of, for example, on a healthy liver, on a diseased one; such an impingement may perhaps show itself at a completely different time than when the defect has become organically noticeable.

Spiritual science need not shy away from showing how so-called mental or psychological illnesses are always connected with something in the human body. Spiritual science must strictly point out that if one merely studies the soul, the psychological complex, the deviations of the soul from the so-called normal psychological life, one has at most a one-sided diagnosis. Therefore, psychoanalysis can never be anything more than diagnostic; it can never lead to real therapy in this field. For this reason, because therapy for mental illnesses must begin with the physical examination, we must know the ramifications of the spiritual in matter down to the individual parts if we want to know where to start in the material body – which is, however, spiritualized – to cure that which only shows symptoms in abnormal mental conditions. Spiritual science must most decidedly emphasize that the so-called mental and soul diseases must be traced back to the organology of the human being. However, one can only see into the abnormal organology of the human being if one can follow the spirit into the smallest parts of matter.

And the other way around: what appear to be merely soul phenomena or phenomena that act in the soul, let us say what emerges in the temperaments and in the activity of the human temperaments , in the whole way in which a person plays as a small child, how he walks, what he does, all this, which today is only understood in a mental-spiritual sense, also has its physical side. And a failure in relation to some aspects of a child's education can appear later in a very ordinary physical illness. Indeed, in certain cases, when one is dealing with mental illnesses, one is led to look at the physical aspects in order to explore what is important, and in the case of physical illnesses, to look at the spiritual aspects and explore what is important. For that is the essential thing in spiritual science, that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous spiritual, as mystics and one-sided theosophists do, but that it follows the spirit into its material effects, that it nowhere grasps the material as as it is grasped by today's external science, but everywhere, in the contemplation of the material, it penetrates to the spirit and can thus also observe where an abnormal soul life must express itself in that an abnormal bodily life is present, even if it is perhaps hidden externally.

In the broadest circles today, people have completely false ideas about seriously anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – perhaps sometimes rightly so, when one hears those who do not truly want to go into what it is actually about, and only talk about abstract theories, that man consists of this and that, and that there are repeated earth lives and so on. These things are, of course, extremely important and very nice. But when it comes to working very seriously in this spiritual-scientific movement, then the individual chapters, the individual areas of this life, must be dealt with. And in the broadest sense, this in turn leads to a socially minded gathering of people. For when one sees how the soul, appearing sick, radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be sick - feel with understanding - and when, on the other hand, one knows how the institutions of life also affect the physical human being's physical health, how the spiritual, which apparently only exists externally in social institutions, has an effect on the physical health of the human being, if one has an overview of all this, then one is involved in human society in a completely different way. You begin to gain a real understanding of people, and you treat others quite differently; you pursue their character quite differently. You know that certain qualities are connected to this or that, you know how to behave towards these qualities, you know how to place people's temperaments in human society in the right way, and especially how to develop them in the right way, especially when you have associated tasks with them.

One social area in particular will need to be intensively influenced in terms of hygiene by a knowledge of human nature gained in this way: the area of education. Without really knowing people very well, it is impossible to appreciate what it means when children sit in school with stooped backs, causing their breathing to become irregular, or when they are not encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly, clearly vocalizing and clearly consonanting. The whole of later life depends essentially on whether the child breathes correctly at school and whether he is encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly and with articulation.

In such matters – I am only giving examples here, as the same could be said for other areas – the specialization of overall hygiene in the school system is evident, and this in particular shows the full social significance of hygiene. It also shows, however, how life demands that we do not further specialize, but that we bring together the specialized into an overall view. We need not only the knowledge that enables a teacher to educate a child in a particular way according to certain pedagogical norms, but we also need the knowledge that enables a teacher to judge what it means when he or that sentence of the child's clearly articulated utterances or when he lets the child, after saying half a sentence, lets out another breath and so on and does not ensure that the air is used up while the sentence is being spoken. Of course, there are many clues and rules about this too, but the right way of mutual recognition and the right application of these things only enter our hearts when we grasp the full significance for human life and for social health, for only then does the matter become a social impulse.

These considerations were the basis for the pedagogical-didactic course I gave to the teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which was the starting point for the founding of the school. Teachers are needed who can work from the full depth of a humanistic worldview for the education and teaching of children. Everything that has been incorporated into the sentences that have been expressed as a pedagogical-didactic art strives to turn the children who are being educated and taught into people who, later on, by being encouraged to perform the functions of life in the right way as a child, will have lungs and liver and heart and stomach in order because the soul has been worked on in the right way.

This world view will never interpret the old saying, “A healthy soul lives in a healthy body,” in a materialistic way.

A materialistic interpretation would say that if you have a healthy body, if you have made it healthy with all possible physical means, then it will automatically become the bearer of a healthy soul. That is nonsense. It makes sense if you proceed in the following way, that is, if you say to yourself: “There is a healthy body in front of me, which shows me that the power of a healthy soul has built it up, shaped it, and made it healthy.” I recognize from this body that an autonomous healthy soul has worked in it. That is the meaning of the saying. But only in this way can this saying also be the basis for healthy hygiene. In other words, we do not need a school doctor who visits the school once a fortnight, if that, and doesn't know what to do with himself, in addition to teachers who only work from an abstract pedagogical science. No, we need a living connection between medical science and the art of teaching. We need a pedagogical art that educates and teaches children in a hygienically correct way in all its measures. That is what makes hygiene a social issue, because the social issue is essentially an educational issue, and the educational issue is essentially a medical issue, but only a question of that medicine that is spiritually fruitful, of a hygiene that is spiritually fruitful.

These things then point to something else that is extraordinarily significant, especially with regard to the topic of “hygiene as a social question”. Because, my dear attendees, when spiritual science is cultivated and when spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then he knows that in what he receives in spiritual science there is something that differs from what he receives in mere intellectualism and in the natural science of the present, too, is mere intellectualism. He knows that what he has in mere intellectualism or in the merely intellectualistically developed natural science or in the merely intellectualistically developed history or jurisprudence of today is different from what he has in mere intellectualism. All of today's sciences are intellectualistic; if they claim to be empirical sciences, it is only because they interpret the empirically observed results of experience in an intellectualistic way. What is given in the humanities differs quite essentially from these natural science or other results interpreted in an intellectualistic way. It would even be quite sad if that which lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely an image, but a real power that has a deeper effect on people. Anything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is meant to be very comprehensive.

Those who pursue spiritual science only intellectually, that is, who only make notes: there is a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, an ego, repeated earthly lives, karma, and so on and who notes these down in the same way as in natural science or in today's social science, is not seriously engaged in spiritual science, for he merely transfers the way of thinking he otherwise has to what confronts him in spiritual science. But the essential thing about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, and experienced in a very different way than the intellectualistic way. Therefore spiritual science is something that, through its very nature, maintains a living relationship to the healthy and the sick person, albeit in a somewhat different way than one might often dream of. People will surely have become sufficiently convinced of how powerless one is with what one, whether as admonishment or as encouragement, begins in the purely intellectualistic culture in relation to the so-called mentally ill. The mentally ill person claims that voices are speaking to him; you tell him all kinds of things that you find based on your intellectual reason – in vain, because he has all kinds of objections for you. This alone could indicate that we are not dealing with an illness of the conscious or even the subconscious soul life, but with an illness of the organism. Spiritual science teaches us to recognize that one cannot, however, use such methods, which are supposed to be so-called spiritual ones, in which, for example, one resorts to hypnosis and suggestion, to treat so-called mental or soul diseases, but that one must treat them in so-called physical ways, that is, by healing the organs, for which, however, one really needs spiritual knowledge of the human being. Spiritual knowledge knows that it should not actually intervene at all in the field of so-called mental illnesses with mere spiritual or psychological procedures, because the mental illness consists precisely in the fact that the spiritual element of the human being is suppressed, as it is otherwise only in sleep, and is weak in this suppression, but that one must cure the organ so that it in turn takes back the soul and the spirit in a healthy way. On the other hand, that which does not arise from the intellect, from the head, but from the whole human being as a spiritual-scientific result, when it appears as imagination, inspiration, intuition, and when it is taken up by the human being, engages the whole organism. It really engages the physical organization of the human being in a healing way, which is what spiritual science really is.

On the other hand, there is no proof that some spiritual scientists feel ill within spiritual science or show the opposite of what I have just said. There are so many who are not spiritual scientists, but who are intellectualistic collectors of notes on spiritual-scientific results. But to spread spiritual science in its true substance is itself a social hygiene, for it affects the whole human being, it normalizes his organology when it threatens to develop this or that tendency towards deviation into the abnormal after dreams or after another side. This is the tremendous difference between what is given in spiritual science and what occurs in mere intellectual science: that the concepts emerging in the field of intellectualism are much too weak because they are merely pictorial to intervene in the human being, to be able to have a healing effect on him. The concepts of spiritual science, on the other hand, are such that they are drawn from the whole human being. In the formation of spiritual-scientific concepts, it is truly not only the brain that has been involved, but also the lungs and liver and heart and the whole human being. And if one imbues oneself with these spiritual-scientific concepts, if one assimilates them through healthy human understanding, they in turn have a hygienic effect on the whole human being. This is what, starting from spiritual science, can intervene in a directive way in hygiene as a social matter.

But in many other ways too — I can only give a few examples — spiritual science will intervene in a guiding way in the whole of humanity's health life, when this spiritual science really takes root among humanity in its full seriousness. I will point out just one example. The relationship between the awake human being and the sleeping human being is one of the chapters that must be studied again and again through spiritual science. The same applies to the enormous difference that exists between the human organization in waking and in sleeping. How spirit and soul behave when we are awake, when the physical and spiritual and soul aspects of the human being interpenetrate each other, and how they behave when they are temporarily separated from each other, as in sleep – this is carefully studied through spiritual science.

Now I can only give a certain sentence, but it is a very certain result of spiritual science. We see so-called epidemic diseases occur in life, diseases that affect whole crowds of people, which are therefore also a social matter at the same time. Ordinary materialistic science studies them in terms of the human physical organism. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance for epidemics and for the predispositions for epidemic diseases that lies in the abnormal behavior of humans in terms of waking and sleeping. What happens in the human organism during sleep is something that, when it happens in abundance, for example, predisposes to a high degree for so-called epidemic diseases. People who, by sleeping too long, set processes in motion in the human organism that should not be there because sleep should not interrupt waking life for so long are predisposed to epidemic diseases in a completely different way and they also engage with epidemics in a completely different way.

Now you can see for yourself what it means to educate people about the correct distribution of sleep and wakefulness. You cannot do that by means of regulations. At best you can order people not to send their children to school when they have scarlet fever; you cannot give lectures when there is an outbreak of influenza: people do not respond to that - because today man tends towards freedom, I mean, because the sense of authority is not as great as in former times - people do not respond to that. I am not saying that they are not right to do so, I am not saying anything against what happens in this way, but you cannot possibly tell people in the same way: you must sleep seven hours. Nevertheless, it is more important than the other rules that people who need it sleep seven hours, the others who do not need it may sleep much shorter and so on. But such things, which are so intimately connected with the most personal aspects of a person's life, have a social effect in a magnificent way. It actually depends on the most intimate aspects of a person how the social effects occur, whether, for example, a larger or smaller number of people are withdrawn from this or that occupation or not, which may have an effect in a completely different place under certain circumstances. Hygiene really does have a tremendous impact on social life. Quite apart from what one thinks about contagion or non-contagion, this element intervenes in social life during epidemics. You cannot work through external regulations, you can only work if you bring a lay audience into human society, but one that has an understanding of people that stands in contrast to the physician's educational prophylaxis, wherever a lively interaction between the expert physician and the layman can occur to maintain health.

If we take all these things into consideration, we can say: Here we have described one side of hygiene as a social question, which in the most eminent sense depends on our having a free spiritual life, on our actually having a spiritual life in which, within the spiritual realm, those who are engaged in the cultivation of the spiritual life, including its practical aspects such as hygiene, are completely independent of everything else that does not give pure knowledge, that does not cultivate the spiritual life itself. What each individual can do for the good of his fellow human beings must arise entirely from his abilities. There must be no state standards for this, nor must there be any dependence on economic powers. This must be placed in the personal sphere of dependence of the individual human being and must continue to be placed in the understanding trust that others who need the application of his abilities can place in the capable person.

What is needed is a spiritual life that is completely independent of all authority, of the state and of the economy, and that works purely from within its own spiritual forces in an expert manner.

If you think about what hygiene can really achieve, which is closely connected with insightful human knowledge and insightful social behavior, and if you look at the individual branch of hygiene with expert insight , then you will come to the conclusion - and this is precisely what the individual, concrete subject area demands, and it could be demonstrated for other areas as well as for hygiene - that the spirit must be taken into administration by those who are involved in its cultivation. No matter what abstract theories may say against the independent position of intellectual life, the individual concrete subject demands that the administrators of intellectual life are not merely experts who work for the ministries, but that those who are active in intellectual life must also be the administrators of that intellectual life, and indeed the sole administrators of that intellectual life. Then, when social insight arising out of a free spiritual life has created a hygiene that really exists as a social institution, it will be possible to work economically for this hygiene in a completely different way, precisely in an independent economic life, in an economic life that is structured as I have described in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, as it has been repeatedly described in the journals that serve this idea of the threefold social organism, for example in the Swiss “Social Future”, which is published by Dr. Boos.

If the forces for the cultivation of hygiene that lie dormant in the bosom of human society are received by society with understanding, if this is accepted with human understanding by society, if this becomes general order, then everything that can be carried out of this independent economic life, without regard to any dependence on impulses of gain or state impulses, everything that can be worked out of this independent economic life purely, can be carried into economic life, into independent economic life, everything that can work purely out of this independent economic life, without any consideration of any dependence on profit impulses or on state impulses, can be carried into economic life, and that which must be cultivated in the service of genuine, true hygiene. But then, and only then, will it be possible for that high spirit to enter into economic life, which is necessary in order for hygiene to be cultivated in human life. If the mere acquisitiveness of our economic life is dominant, which has an ever-increasing tendency to be incorporated into the unified state, and if the general opinion is that one must produce that which earns the most, then the self-contained impulses of a free spiritual life cultivated in this field of hygiene cannot assert themselves; then this spiritual life becomes dependent on the extra-spiritual, on the state or economic, then the economic becomes master over the spiritual. The economic must not become master over the spiritual. This is best seen when one is to produce what is required by the spirit in economic life, when one is to serve a genuine, true hygiene.

The forces of economic life, of free economic life, will be added in the threefold social organism to the insight that becomes a public matter and to the understanding of the human being that becomes a public matter. And when, on the one hand, people are immersed in a free spiritual life in which a hygiene truly based on objective ground can be cultivated, and when, on the other hand, people develop that high spirit through which everyone in economic life will in turn approach production with understanding – but with such understanding does not arise merely from the sense of acquisition, but from the insights that arise in free spiritual activity - then, once this insightful social understanding of people will be there, then people will be able to come together democratically in parliaments or otherwise, because then the insight into the necessity of hygiene as a social phenomenon will be shaped from the free spiritual life. And what is necessary for the maintenance of hygiene will be shaped by the economic life, which is based on practical and professional considerations, through the high spirit that will be developed in it. Then people, having come of age, will be able to negotiate on the basis of the legal system, on the one hand from their insight and understanding of human nature, and on the other hand from their relations with the economic system that serves hygiene. Then people will be able to negotiate as equals on the basis of state or legal life about the measures that can be taken with regard to hygiene and public health care. Then, of course, it will not be laymen, dilettantes, who will be healing, but the person who has come of age will face the expert as an equal with understanding when the expert tells him this or that. But the layman's understanding of human nature makes it possible for him, in the context of what is cultivated together with the physician in social life, to approach specialized knowledge with understanding in such a way that he can say “yes” in a democratically conceived parliament not merely on the basis of authority but on the basis of a certain understanding. If we take a close look at such a specialized field and see how the three members of the social organism interact, then, my dear audience, we find the full justification of this idea of the threefold social organism. One can only fight this idea of the threefold social organism if one has first grasped it only in the abstract.

Today, I could not give you more than a sketchy indication of what follows from the threefold social order in a specific area, the area of hygiene, if one thinks correctly about it. But if the paths I have only been able to hint at today are pursued further, it will be seen that although those who approach the impulse of the threefold social organism with a few abstract concepts may, to a certain extent, oppose it – as a rule, they present reasons that one has long since accepted as objections oneself. But anyone who approaches the individual areas of life with full inner understanding and the living out of these individual areas with all that they bring into human life - that is what social life is about - anyone who really understands something in a specific area of life, who makes an effort to understand something of true life practice in any field, will be led more and more into the direction indicated by the idea of the threefold social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a reverie, out of abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of the present and the near future precisely from the concrete, appropriate consideration of the individual areas of life. And again, when one penetrates these individual areas of life with what emerges from the impulse of the threefold social organism, then one finds for all these areas that which, it seems to me, is needed for them today. And I just wanted to give you a few brief indications this evening of how the field in which blind submission to authority is still accepted today, can be enriched by the spiritual science that follows from the threefold social organism. For this reason it may be said here: Through this enrichment, which the field of hygiene can receive from a spiritually expanded medicine, hygiene can become a social, a truly social matter, and it can also be cultivated in the most genuine sense in a highly democratic way as a general matter of the people.

Following his lecture, Rudolf Steiner answers a series of questions submitted in writing.

Dear attendees! With regard to the matters discussed today, it is important to first address the whole spirit of what has been said. It is sometimes difficult to answer questions that are formulated from the present way of thinking and feeling without reformulating them or at least without explaining them properly. This first question, which probably seems terribly simple to you or many of you, so that it could be answered in a few sentences or with one sentence, is:

How do you get rid of sleeping too long?

Well, to answer this question, I would have to give an even longer lecture than the one I have already given, because I would first have to gather the various elements in order to answer this question properly. But perhaps the following can be said: Today, there is an intellectualistic state of mind in almost all people. Those who believe that they judge or live from their feelings, or who believe that they are not intellectualistic because of some other reason, are intellectualistic all the more. Now the basic character of intellectualistic soul life is that our instincts are ruined by it. Man's right instincts are ruined. It is actually the case that if you want to point to instincts that have not been completely ruined, you either have to point to primitive man or even to the animal kingdom.

For you see, on another occasion these days I was able to point to an example that says a great deal. There are birds that, out of their greed, eat insects, for example, cross spiders. But they fall into convulsions, into spasms, from eating these cross spiders, which are poisonous to them; they must die miserably very soon after swallowing the cross spider. But if henbane is nearby, the bird flies to it, sucks out the healing juice and saves its life with it. Now think about how something has developed that in us humans has shrunk to the few reflex instincts we have. For example, when a fly lands on our nose, we make a movement to get rid of it without first pondering the situation. A defensive instinct takes effect on the insult stimulus. In the bird that eats the cross spider, the effect that the cross spider has on its organism is followed by such an instinctive defense that it drives it to do something quite reasonable. We can still find such instincts in people who lived in the dim and distant past, if we understand their history correctly. But in our time, we have different experiences. I have always found it extremely painful when I came to someone who sat down at the lunch table and had a scale next to their plate. A scale, you really do experience something like that – I was otherwise accustomed to knife and fork and similar implements lying next to the plate – a scale, and with that he weighed the piece of meat, because only then did he know how much meat he should eat according to his organism, when he had weighed it. Just imagine how far removed from all real, original instincts a humanity has now become, to which something like this has to be prescribed.

It is therefore important not to stop at intellectualism, but to ascend to spiritual-scientific knowledge. You will now believe that I speak pro domo, even if it is pro domo of this great house, but I do not speak pro domo, but I actually express what I believe to have recognized as truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. One can see that if one penetrates not only into the merely intellectual, but into that which is to be grasped spiritually, and which therefore comes before humanity more in a pictorial sense, one you realize that by grasping such knowledge, which is not accessible to the mere intellect, you are led back to healthy instincts, not in individual cases, but more in the things that lie in the depths of life. He who spends at least some time, even if it be ever so little, on developing the quite different frame of mind that is needed to really understand spiritual science, will be led back to sound instincts in such matters as, for instance, the need for sleep. The animal does not sleep too much in normal living conditions. Primitive man did not sleep too much either. One need only educate oneself to healthy instincts, which are being unlearned in today's so intellectualized culture, so that one can say: A really effective way to get rid of sleeping too long is to be able to absorb spiritual truths without falling asleep in the process. If you fall asleep at once when you hear spiritual truths, then you will indeed not be able to get rid of sleeping too long. But if you succeed in really taking an inner human interest in the spiritual truths you are learning, then this inner human interest is activated in such a way that you can actually find out what bedtime is for your organism.

On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to give intellectualized rules, for example, to say that a person who has this or that about his liver or kidneys, which does not exactly make him ill in the usual sense, but which is there nonetheless, must sleep for such and such a length of time. As a rule, this does not lead to anything special. And artificially inducing sleep is not the same as when the body, out of its need for sleep, only denies the mind entry for as long as it needs to. So one can say: Proper hygiene, which follows directly from spiritual science, will also lead people to measure their sleep in the right way. Therefore, the other question that has been asked here cannot be answered so easily:

How can you know how much sleep you need?

I would like to say that you don't need to know this through discursive thought, it's not necessary at all, but you do need to acquire such instincts, which you acquire not by collecting notes from the humanities, but by the way you understand humanities when you take it in with full participation. Once you have developed this instinct, you can then measure the right amount of sleep for you individually. That is what is usually said about it. As I said, I can only give you a guide to answering this question, not what is perhaps expected. But what is expected is not always the right thing.

Is sleeping with the window open healthy?

It is not always possible to give a general answer to such questions. It is quite possible that for one person sleeping with the window open is very healthy, depending on the particular structure of their respiratory organs, but that for another person, for example, a room that is well ventilated before sleeping but then has the windows closed while they sleep is better. It is actually a matter of gaining an understanding of the relationship between the human being and the extra-human environment, in order to be able to judge in individual cases on the basis of this understanding.

How do you explain the occurrence of mental disorders caused by crimes committed from a spiritual point of view, that is, how can the physical illness that underlies the mental disorders be recognized here?

Well, here it would be necessary to go into the whole criminal and, basically, psychiatric anthropology if the question is to be dealt with exhaustively. I would just like to say the following: Firstly, when considering such things, it is important to assume that there are abnormalities among the organ dispositions of a person who becomes a criminal. You only have to follow the studies of Moriz Benedikt, the first important criminal anthropologist, who was really quite objective in his research in this direction, and you will see how, through pathological examination, the forms of individual human organs can indeed be linked to a disposition to commit crimes. So there is an abnormality inherent in it, although, of course, materialistic thinkers like Moriz Benedikt draw false conclusions from it, because someone who shows such signs in this direction is by no means a born criminal from the outset. The point is that one can work on the existing defects in the organism - these are organ defects, not the already existing mental illness - precisely through education and later through appropriate spiritual means, that is, in a spiritual-mental way, if only the facts are examined in a spiritual-scientific way. So the conclusions that Benedikt draws from the pathological investigations are not correct. One can indeed point to such organ defects, but then one must be clear about the fact that in ordinary human life, those things that are not intellectual but are emotional or affective do have an effect. These have an effect, to be sure, first on the glandular activity or the like, on the secretory activity, but in turn also on the organs. In this regard, I advise you to read, for example, an interesting booklet written by a Danish physician about the mechanics of emotional movements. There are many useful things in it in this regard. And now imagine the bodily disposition that can be traced in every person who comes into question as a criminal, and add to this everything that follows for the caught criminal in terms of emotional upheaval and what as a continuation of these mental shocks now in turn affects the organs, then you have the way to look for the defective organs for what produced a mental illness as a consequence, which can occur when a crime is committed. In this way, one must gain an understanding of such connections.

How does Theosophy relate to Anthroposophy? Is the former Theosophy no longer fully recognized here?

In answer to this I would simply say: Nothing but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has ever been advocated here, and what is advocated here today has always been advocated here, and if this has been identified with what is advocated on many sides as so-called Theosophy, then that is simply due to a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding will also remain a misunderstanding because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has, within certain limits, been within the framework of the Theosophical Society for some time; but even within the framework of this Theosophical Society, the representatives of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at that time advocated nothing other than what I advocate here today. They just watched for a long time, as long as it didn't look too heretical. But when they realized that anthroposophy is something quite different from the abstract mysticism that often claims to be theosophy, they threw out the anthroposophists. This procedure has been adopted from the other side, while what is represented here has never had any other form than the one it has today.

Of course, those who deal with things only superficially or who have gained their knowledge only from those members of the Society who themselves have only dealt with it superficially – for one does not always have to stand outside in order to have a superficial understanding of anthroposophy or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy, one can also stand inside with it in society - those who only acquire knowledge in the way of such superficially grasped activity come to such confusions. But here that is represented, which I have today characterized for a particular area, and never has anything else been represented here, even if, of course, work is constantly being done and certain things today can be characterized more precisely, more fully, more intensely than they could have been fifteen, ten or five years ago. That is precisely the nature of the work: that one progresses, that one progresses in particular in the formulation of making oneself understood in something as difficult as spiritual science. One really need not concern oneself with those people who, out of ill will, have twisted the fact that what was previously expressed in an imperfect way is later expressed more perfectly, and who derive all kinds of transformations of world views from it. For spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead, and the one who believes that it cannot progress, who wants to nail it down to where it once stood, in a way that often happens, does not believe in the living, but wants to make it into something dead.

Would you please explain how an epidemic like the flu or scarlet fever comes about if not through the transmission of germs. For many diseases, the pathogen has been scientifically identified. What is your position on this?

Well, if I were to discuss this question, which I have indicated that I do not want to take sides on, then I would have to give a whole lecture. However, I would like to draw attention to the following. The person who, through his knowledge, is compelled to point out that for illnesses accompanied by the appearance of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes as primary causes than just the appearance of the bacilli, does not yet claim that the bacilli are not there. It is quite another thing to claim that the bacilli are there and that they appear in the wake of the illness than to look for the primary cause in the bacilli. What needs to be said in this regard has just been developed in detail in this course for physicians, which is now being held. But it takes time. This also applies to certain elements that need to be dealt with first. This cannot be quickly settled in a question and answer session. Nevertheless, I would like to point out the following. The human constitution is not as simple as one often imagines. Man is a many-sided being. In my book 'Riddles of the Soul' I show at the beginning that man is a threefold being, a being that can be called, firstly, the nerve-sense human being, secondly, the rhythmic human being, and thirdly, the metabolic human being. That is what man is. And these three aspects of human nature interact with each other; and if the human being is to be healthy, they must not interact in any other way than that there is a certain degree of separation between the areas. For example, the nerve-sense human being, who is more than what today's physiology imagines, cannot simply transfer his effects on the metabolic human being in a different way than that these effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulation and breathing processes, which extend to the outermost periphery of the organism. But this interaction can be interrupted in a certain way.

Now, this interaction brings about something very specific. For example, when such questions are asked, you will forgive me for having to answer them appropriately. I will be as discreet as possible, but it is necessary to say some words that have to be heard appropriately. For example, it is quite true that processes take place in the human abdomen that are integrated into the whole organism. If they are integrated into the whole organism, then they work in the right way. If they are either directly increased in the abdomen, so that they become more active there, or if the corresponding processes in the human head or in the human lungs become less intense, then something very peculiar occurs. Then it becomes apparent that the human organism, in order to live normally, must develop processes within itself that are only allowed to develop to a certain extent so that they take up the whole person. If the process is increased, then it localizes itself, and then, for example, a process occurs in the human abdomen whereby what takes place in the human head or in the lungs and what corresponds to certain processes in the abdomen is not properly separated. The processes always correspond in such a way that they run parallel to each other. But as a result, what may only be present in man to a certain extent in order to maintain his vitality, the vitality carried by spirit and soul, is, so to speak, raised above a certain level. Then, I would say, it becomes the atmosphere for all kinds of lower organisms, for all kinds of small organisms, and these small organisms can then develop there. That which is the creative element of the small organisms is always present in the human being, it is only extended throughout the whole organism. When it is concentrated, it provides a breeding ground for small organisms, microbes; they find a home in it. But the reason why they can thrive there is to be found in extremely fine processes in the organism, which then turn out to be the primary ones.

I am not speaking out of antipathy to the germ theory; I fully understand the reasons that people have for believing in germs. Believe me, if I did not have to speak as I am speaking now for factual reasons, I would recognize these reasons, but here it is the realization that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else and that then forces one to say it. [For example, I can say:] I see a certain landscape, there are many extraordinarily beautiful cattle, well cared for. I now ask: Why are these living conditions in the area? They come from the beautiful cattle. I explain the living conditions of this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere; they have spread there. I will not do that, but I will examine the primary causes, the diligence and understanding of the people, and that will explain to me why these beautiful cattle are developing on this land. But I would be making a superficial explanation if I just said: It's beautiful here, life is good here because beautiful cattle have moved in.

The same logic basically applies if I find the typhoid bacillus and then declare that one has typhoid fever because the typhoid bacillus has moved in. Much more is needed to explain typhoid fever than simply to refer to the typhoid bacillus. But one is misled in a completely different way if one succumbs to such false logic. Certainly, the primary processes, which provide the typhoid bacillus with the basis for its existence, are in turn the basis for all kinds of other things that are not primary. And it is very easy to either completely confuse or conflate what is secondary with the actual original clinical picture. These are the things that lead to the right point here, or show how what is justified in a certain sense can be shown to have its limits.

Perhaps you can see from the way I have given this answer – although I can only sketch it out and am therefore easily misunderstood – that this is really not about the all-too-popular ranting against the germ theory, but that it is really about examining things very seriously.

Could you give us some examples of how physical organic disorders can cause mental and spiritual suffering?

Well, if it were to be answered in detail, that too would, of course, be taking us much too far today. But I would like to point out just one thing. You see, the development of medical thought in the history of medicine is not as it is presented today, with Hippocrates as the beginning of medicine and Hippocraticism as its further development. As far as we can trace it, we know that Hippocrates was much more the last outpost of an old instinct-based medicine than merely the beginning of today's intellectual medicine. But we find something else as well. You see, in this old instinctive medicine, as long as it was still in force, people did not speak, for example, of a certain kind of mental depression, which is a very abstract way of expressing it, but rather of hypochondria - abdominal cartilaginousness. So they knew that hypochondria is a disorder of the abdomen, a hardening of the abdomen. We cannot say that the ancients were more mystical than we are.

Likewise, it is easy to show how certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense in people. And so we could point out all sorts of things, quite apart from the fact that – again, in line with a correct instinct – the ancients definitely pointed to something organic when it came to the temperaments. They derived the choleric temperament from bile, from white bile, the melancholic from black bile and all that black bile causes in the abdomen. They then derived the sanguine temperament from blood and the phlegmatic temperament from what they called mucus. But then, when they saw degenerations of the temperaments, they were absolutely things that indicated the degenerations of the organic matter concerned. How this was done in instinctive medicine and in instinctive hygiene can certainly be taken up in a strictly scientific way into the state of mind and, from the point of view of our present knowledge, cultivated.

Here is a question that could lead to further misunderstanding: Do you recognize eye diagnosis? Do you accept it as a science?

Now, it is generally true that in the case of an organism, and especially in the case of the complicated human organism, if you look at it in the right way, you can draw conclusions about the whole from all the possible individual parts. And again, the way these individual parts are arranged in the human organism has a great significance. In a sense, what the eye diagnostician examines in the iris is, on the one hand, so very isolated from the rest of the human organism, and on the other hand, it is so peculiarly integrated into the rest of the organism that it is indeed an expressive organ. But precisely with such things, one must not schematize; and the mistake with such things is that one does just that. For example, it is quite true that people of a different mental and physical constitution show different characteristics in their irises than other people. If one wants to apply something like this, one needs such intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that, if one has this intimate knowledge, one actually no longer needs to search from a single organ. And if you are instructed to adhere to some intellectualized rules and to do such things schematically, then not much of value will come of it.

What relation do diseases have to the progress of world history, especially the newly emerging diseases?

A chapter of an entire cultural history! Well, I will just note the following. When studying history, one must have a sense for practicing symptomatology, that is, to understand much of what is taken as history today only as a symptom for much that lies much deeper behind it, which is really the spiritual current that only carries these symptoms. And so that which is in the depths of human development does indeed appear symptomatically in these or those diseases of the time. It is interesting to study the relationships between what prevails in the depths of human development and what takes place in the symptoms of this or that disease. One can also conclude from the presence of certain diseases that impulses are at work in historical development that cannot escape a symptomatology of this kind. But the question could then also point to something else that is not insignificant when pursuing the historical development of humanity. This is this: Diseases, whether they occur in individual human beings or take the form of an epidemic in human society, are often also reactions to other degenerations, which may be regarded as less serious from a health point of view, but which must nevertheless be regarded as very serious from a moral or spiritual point of view. What is said here must not be applied to medicine or hygiene – that would be quite wrong. Diseases must be cured. In hygiene, one must work to benefit people. One cannot say, “First I will check whether it is perhaps your karma to have this illness; then I will let you have it, if not, I can cure you.” These views do not apply when it comes to healing. But what does not apply to us humans in our intervention in nature does, therefore, objectively apply in the outside world. And there one must say that, for example, many things that exist as a predisposition to moral excesses are so deeply ingrained in the human organization that reactions occur which then appear in certain illnesses, and that the illness is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the case of the individual, it is not even of such great importance to follow these things, because they should be left to one's individual destiny and one should not interfere in them any more than one interferes with the secrecy of other people's letters - unless one is guided by the view that is so prevalent at the moment: “opened by the authorities under the laws of war”. Just as little as one should interfere with a person's letter secrets, so little should one interfere with his individual karma. But in world history, that is again something else. There it is important because in world history, the individual human being plays only a, I would say statistical role in its laws. It must always be pointed out that statistics provide a good basis for life insurance companies to assess mortality rates, on which their premiums are based. The matter is quite accurate and the calculation is quite correct, it is all quite scientific. But now – one does not have to die at the very moment that has been calculated by the life insurance statistics, nor does one have to live as long as has been calculated. When the individual comes into consideration, other things occur. But when groups of people or even the whole development of humanity comes into consideration, then it may very well be that one is not a superstitious person, but very much a scientific person, when one examines the extent to which symptoms of illness, illnesses that occur are corrective of other excesses, so that one can indeed see a certain reaction of the disease or at least a disease caused by something that, if the disease had not come, would have developed in a completely different form. These are just a few points on how what is touched upon by this question can be considered.

But now our time is so far advanced that we too will now follow the others who have already left in such large numbers.